How to Break the Negativity Bias | Rewire Your Mind for Success in 67 Minutes

If you think about what makes up who we are, so obviously there's genetics and that makes up a percentage of how we see the world and how we show up. But then the rest of it, we're trained on to see the world a certain way. So there are certain people that have something called a negativity bias, and a negativity bias is nothing more than they see the negative first. It's not that they don't see the positive, but they see the negative first. There's other people who see positive first. They have a positivity bias, then they see that first. And the truth is, in almost every situation, in every circumstance, there's both. You can train somebody to recognize that there's always both, just like every inside has an outside, every one side of a coin has another side of a coin, every up has a down. If the way you naturally are is negativity bias first, great, be aware of that. Then flip over— we call it flip the switch. So if one side of your brain is going negativity first, great, learn to flip the switch. Go, great, what's the positive side of that? That's a skill you can learn, no differently than playing tennis or chess or music.

You can choose at any moment positivity. You can choose at any moment gratitude. You can choose at any moment service. You can choose to change your mindset in, in an instant if you wanted to. The challenge is we're so living in our subconscious mode that we don't— we don't catch it soon enough, we don't take the action that we're proud of, and then we regret it. You know, we regret it later on. This morning I woke up really early. I'm very tired. I woke up at 3:45 AM for some reason, don't know why. Look at my watch like, 3:45 AM, what? Oh man, okay, whew. Try to go back to sleep, toss turn for about an hour, and then I got up. I was like, okay, you know what, it's 4:45, it's almost 5, you know, let's get up. And I got to work and started doing things. And then the crash hit me. The crash hit me. Just not enough sleep. And everything inside me wanted to shut down. You know, I wanted to just take a complete break. Not do my walk in the morning. Not take the dogs out. Well, the dogs have to go out. But not do my routine. Not do any of my usual stuff. Not record videos. Today's a Tuesday when I record. It's video recording day. And it's in these moments, those trying times, that you have to decide who you want to be. You have to decide if you want to choose to be positive, choose to live in gratitude, choose to live in productivity, choose to live in service or not. What would the future you think of your actions right now? And I think 95% of the time the answer is to push a little harder, move the brake line forward, right? Where, Where you would normally take a break, move that forward just a little bit. Move the brake line forward a touch. And 5% of the time you have to be more gentle on yourself. When my family dog passed away, when I broke my neck, when, you know, all sorts of things have happened to me, just like they've happened to you. Sometimes the answer is to give yourself a little more grace. To recognize how far you've come, everything that you've done with the limited amount of resources and time that you have. But I think if we default to that, then we default to staying stuck and staying small because life is going to throw so many different challenges at you. So I think 95% of the time, that's the 5%, right? 5% of time you give yourself more grace, you let yourself off the hook, you take the day off, you do whatever you need, especially if you're struggling with grief. If you're struggling with grief, I think you just have to work your way through it. You have to give yourself a lot of grace and a lot of time, and it will get better. And just please don't go through it alone. But almost everything else, usually the answer is to keep going because it'll make you more proud, because you're teaching yourself that you stand up to obstacles and you overcome. So this morning I woke up, I got out of bed, I was instantly productive, like, okay, I'm wired for whatever reason. Here we go, let's go. Answering my Discord messages. If you're not on Discord, EvanCarmichael.biz, I'm there every morning. It's super fun answering questions. It's such a great community. So I did my Discord, uh, looked at, uh, responding to my emails and Twitter, and, um, I got all my work done super early. Then the crash hits. And then Nina wakes up and it's time to make videos, and I don't want to make videos. You know, I'm tired. I feel like I'm gonna let myself down, and I feel like I'm gonna let you down, is the honest answer. Not that I don't want to make videos because I don't enjoy them. I feel like it won't be at my best, and then I won't, I won't create something that I'm proud of, and I'm gonna let you guys down. That's really the internal narrative. You know, I'm gonna create a subpar product and people who watch are going to be disappointed because I take it as a big responsibility that, you know, some of you start your day every day with one of my videos. That means a lot to me. It's not a burden, but a responsibility that I take. And I want to make something that I'm proud of and that helps you improve your life today, at least gives you a little kickstart, you know, like, let's go, let's have a great day. I want to be able to bring that energy and, and I I was worried that this morning I wouldn't be able to do it. But you know what? That's not a good enough reason. It's not a good enough reason. Like, as long as you believe those reasons, you will never create anything great. Because if you wait to have the right energy, the perfect timing, the right amount of sleep, the, the perfect cell phone or video camera with the perfect microphone, and, you know, just it will never happen. You will never create anything great. And so I had to remind myself of that, because you can choose positivity at any moment. You can choose service. You can choose gratitude. You can choose productivity at any moment. You can choose it if you want to. If you really want to, you can, instead of defaulting to the negative patterns. And so Nina got up. I told her I was tired, told her I had a rough night. She said she slept super well. It's like, oh, that's really, that's really bad, but I slept so well. Great. Well, I'm very happy for you, but I'm very tired right now. And, um, right away then asked, okay, so when are, when are we going out? Because Nina's shopping at Costco. I mean, I'm in the Costco parking lot. I think you can't make content like I'm sitting here in the Costco parking lot filming videos for you guys. And I asked her, when are we going out? When are you gonna— when do you want to go shopping? Because I'm gonna get my phone ready and I'm gonna make some videos. And in that instant, I decided, and then committing to her made it happen. And here I am in the car making the videos happen, and hopefully there's, there's something good and I'm not disappointing you guys, but I'm making myself proud at the very least. When you show up when the world's against you, or when you've had a rough day, or when you don't feel like it, or when you got a nasty comment, or you're in a weird mood for whatever reason, you still show up. Like, when it's hard, when it's hard and you still show up, that's when you build the most self-love and self-belief, self-confidence. That's where it comes from, doing difficult things. And what it does is it reinforces that as your identity. That this is who you become. So the next time something comes up, you can handle it and a little bit more because they're moving the brake line forward. It's a really slippery slope to fall down. Every time you come up against something difficult, you don't do it. Even if other people are telling you how great you are, that you can do it, if you tell yourself that you can't do it, then the next time it comes up, you reinforce that you can't do it, and you can't do it, and you can't I can't do it. And what you've built is an automatic pattern of you don't follow through, that you can't do it, that when you set a goal, you're not going to follow through on it. You know, you're going to start and then you're going to stop. That when something gets hard, you know, you're going to give up on it or that you're going to quit in a couple of days because that's the pattern that you've built for yourself. And the pattern becomes the identity, right? If you want to switch your identity, it's totally possible. You could, you could be the person who always follows through. You could be the person who always steps up. You could be the person who always delivers. You could be the person who always brings their best. You could be that person. You may not believe that yet, but you can be that person. So how do you get there? How does that become your new identity? There are two things that really matter. First is to be around other people who are like that. One of the reasons why I was able to get up and do this today was because I watch John Assaraf. Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey and these people every day. Now, I happen to know John Assaraf. He's become a friend. I don't know Steve Jobs or Oprah Winfrey. I don't know Oprah yet, so we'll see. Steve, I've missed my chance. But hanging around them, even if it's virtually, even if you don't know who John— you don't— you can't call him up and ask him a question, or you can't call up Oprah, great. You can still learn from them. You can and still be around them. And the more that you see other people doing things, the more you want to go do it yourself. Have you ever been to a movie and you got inspired and you see somebody win the race? Like, yeah, the underdog. You like— I love the underdog stories. You ever see an underdog go off and win, and then it makes you want to go not run a race but do your thing? Like, you ever been inspired by somebody else's overcoming of obstacles story? Right? So it's the same thing. If you're around successful people and you see how they're doing it and you see how they rise up against the obstacles in their, in their life, it gives you encouragement and hope and belief that you can too. Where most of the people that we're surrounded by are already giving up, they gave— they're not even trying. They gave up years ago, right? And so when we're at our weakest moments when we're around people or consuming content that reinforces our negative beliefs, the people say, okay, yeah, yeah, just take a break. Yeah, don't do this. You weren't meant to do this anyway. Like, why did you think you could ever do this? Just go and play a computer game, or just go and watch some, you know, trash TV, right? Just go and get distracted for the day. Pretend like you're doing stuff, but you know you're not doing anything that's going to make you proud, right? Just scroll through Instagram all day like everybody else, right? When you're around that, then it's so easy for you to fall down that rabbit hole when you're not at your A-game. So you can, you can manufacture it by being around the people. Again, if you don't know them personally, then just in your environment, from the videos you watch. It's why, it's why I make this content, that I can introduce you to people and, and keep bringing you ideas and belief that hopefully inspires you daily to lift you up when, when you might be having a rough day. So that's step 1. Step 2 is you have to then do something. People say motivation doesn't last. Well, that's true, but the point of motivation isn't for it to last. The point of motivation is to give you the courage to go do the thing. So I'm, I'm waking up this morning early, right? Nina's still sleeping. She wakes up, but before she wakes up, while I'm doing my work while I'm hanging out on Discord. First, the Discord's super fun, I'm connecting with entrepreneurs, and so it's, it's already getting me in, in a good mood. And then I started watching videos from my own Top 10 channel. So as I'm working, I've got— who did I listen to today? Um, I had Bill Gates on, uh, or had Jeff Bezos on, uh, I had an old Richard Branson one on, and Their voices are in my head as I'm working. And so then when Nina gets up, it's like, okay, let's go, let's go to work because I had Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates in my ear this morning, right? And I don't know any of them personally. And so you could do that too, right? But the whole point of that motivation is then to give you the courage to go act. So by listening to them in the morning, listening to them is not enough. Right? That's not enough. You got all inspired and motivated to not do anything. Listen to them, then gave me the boldness to say, Evan, you need to make videos today. You said you're gonna do it. Let's go do it. I know you're afraid of disappointing people. You're gonna make it the best you can. Let's go. Because I imagine, what would Bill Gates tell me? What would Jeff Bezos tell me? What would Richard Branson tell me? They tell me something like that, I think. I hope. I don't think they're going to say, you know what, just quit. Probably not, right? And then that got me to go out and now I'm here and I'm making the content. I'm doing the thing. So it's the motivation that you need to inject into yourself plus the action. And when you do that enough, you start to build the new habit. So instead of the pattern being, I don't follow through, I always quit, I always get up. You start to build a new pattern that says, "I rise to the occasion. I overcome these obstacles. I defeat that little voice inside my head." I call it the little man. I beat the little man. When you do that consistently, then that becomes your new default pattern. That the next challenge that comes in, you say, "Okay, let's go. What's next? I'm ready. I want the next mountain. Let's go climbing." Right? So it's totally possible, but it starts with the belief that at any point you can choose positivity. At any point you can choose gratitude. At any point you can choose service. No matter what's going on in your life right now, there are millions of people who have it way worse than you, and you can choose the light, and you can choose to help, and you can choose to inspire. And doing that will not only serve the world, but make you a lot more proud of yourself too. Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight all of the lessons learned in this video, as well as pull out our 3 favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there.

We have to understand that our beliefs drive our behavior.

Our habits drive our behavior. Well, what if we switched? Our beliefs? What if we switched our habits? What if we upgraded the knowledge and skill required to match the income that we want? So there is something I'm going to leave you with, right?

And that is this: in order to achieve 2 or 3 or 4 times more income and get your brain unlocked, you have to create an identity to match that destiny. You have to create an identity to match that destiny of the income and the lifestyle and the feelings that you want.

If you think about what makes up who we are, so obviously there's genetics, there's our genetic makeup, so our predisposition, our propensities, and that makes up a percentage of how we see the world and how we show up. But then the rest of it we're trained on So we're trained to see the world a certain way. So there are certain people that have something called a negativity bias, and a negativity bias is nothing more than they see the negative first. It's not that they don't see the positive, but they see the negative first. There's other people who see positive first. They have a positivity bias, then they see that first. And the truth is, in almost every situation, in every circumstance, There's both. You can train somebody to recognize that there's always both, just like every inside has an outside, every one side of a coin has another side of a coin, every up has a down. That's called the law of polarity. And in the universe that we live in, there is that law of polarity. And so you can teach somebody, say, okay, if your propensity, if the way you naturally are is negativity bias first, great, be aware of that, then flip over. We call it flip the switch. So if one side of your brain is going negativity first, great, learn to flip the switch. Go, great, what's the positive side of that? That's a skill you can learn, no differently than playing tennis or chess or music.

When you sit down to meditate, do you come with an intention then each time?

No, I, I, um, when once I sit down Then I ask my intuition, "Hey, what is it that you want to be doing today? What is it that you need today?" So we all have this intuition, which is different than our instinct. But this intuition, right, it's what we know before we think. And so when I sit down, I say, "Okay, hey, what's the intention for today?" And sometimes the intention is to just let go and see what happens. Sometimes the intention is I'm searching for, you know, for an answer. Sometimes the intention is, well, today focus, you know, today let go, today just breathe. So I just listen.

I just—

it's just—

it's the art and the subtle science of paying attention.

Back in 1987, when I bought the franchising rights for RE/MAX of Indiana, I had no idea how to build a company. I was, you know, 26 years old and, but I had another mentor who I invested $75,000 to become his partner to have the opportunity to learn from this man who at the time was worth probably $100 million. And so, I was very, very keen on learning and I didn't know how to build a business. I didn't know anything other than how to sell real estate. And I set a goal to generate $1 billion a year in sales and I set the goal for 5 years in the future. Not knowing a billion-dollar goal is like mind-boggling big for me. And there was an interview the second week I was in Indianapolis. I moved from Toronto to Indianapolis for this opportunity. And I was interviewed by the Indianapolis Business Journal and I said in the interview that I had a goal for a billion dollars and the reporter said, are you aware that there's two companies that have been in the state of Indiana for 80 years, one, 100 years the other one, and they haven't hit a billion dollars in real estate sales in all of these years. And I said, yeah, I know, it's Graves and Tucker, and you can let them know that I'll be the first. Right? And as I said that, I almost felt like I put my foot right in my mouth because I didn't know how I was gonna do it.

Right.

Long story short, 5 years later, we sold enough franchise, recruited enough agents, we did $1.2 billion, and we were, we were stuck, which is a great place to be stuck. And I was asking myself, how is it possible that I'm training these agents with strategies, with tactics, with selling skills, marketing skills? We were like the gurus of here's the books, here's the cassettes, here's the trainers, here's like out of the deep end. And the agents who, for example, would make $30,000 a year kept making $30,000 a year. The agents who made $50,000 kept making $50,000. They made $100,000, kept making $100,000. And so I realized that they weren't missing the skills or the knowledge. There was something else at play. And what helped me from the age of 19 to 27, 28, 30 was every single day, and I still do I'll share this with, with you in just a little bit. Every single day I was priming my brain with the beliefs and the self-image required to achieve the goals that I want.

When we talk about reprogramming, I think the, the important thing to understand is 99.9% of what we think, what we feel, and what we do, although most people think I'm in control, I'm the one doing it. It's really non-conscious patterns that are repeating themselves over and over again. So let me explain. When you and I were born, the only neural networks that we had were for survival, right? We didn't have any beliefs of are we good enough, are we smart enough, are we worthy. We didn't have any experiences to show us that that's a scary situation, that one's not. Snakes are safe, or snakes are dangerous, or spiders, or heights, or whatever the case is. So over the course of the first 7 to 10 years of our life, our brain's plasticity switch, our brain's switch that connects all of these neurons and creates the neural map in our brain, is, is being created in the form of millions of connections per second. By the time we're 10 or 12 years old, that switch basically goes off, and now there's more selective, okay, creation of neural patterns based on what we like, what we dislike, what we experience, what our parents tell us, what our teachers tell us. Up until that time, we're just an empty, open nest where everything's being formulated. And so what happens is after, you know, 10, 12 years old, we're pretty much running on autopilot, and we become conditioned or trained to see the world a certain way, to feel certain things, to behave in certain ways. And so most of our life we're working on autopilot because the non-conscious processing parts of our brain is working at, you know, 400 billion bits of information per second and trillions of electrical and chemical reactions per second happening without our thinking about it. And so for adults, you know, 25 25, 35, 45, 50, we have these patterns that we have to revamp, almost like a remodeling of our own brains. If you think about, you know, when you're driving in a town that you know, whether you're at home or in your city that you know, and all of a sudden you see a detour. If you take a detour and then you start driving down that new detour for a day, 7 days, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks, that detour becomes becomes the new easy road to take, even though you're used to going a certain way. The brain works the exact same way. So if you've got these patterns that are easy for you, your brain wants to take those patterns that are easy for you. Easy thinking patterns, easy emotional patterns, easy behavioral patterns.

Why?

Number 1, because it's less energy that the brain needs to use. So law of best use of energy. In the brain is where it goes first. So the way you retrain your brain using, for example, the 4R process is you recognize my patterns of thought, my patterns of emotion, my patterns of behaviors, and you ask yourself, are these going to help me achieve the goal that I want to achieve? Whatever the goal is, it's just yes or no. If they are, great. If they're not, then what you want to be doing is saying, okay, how do I change that path? How do I change my thinking?

I'm learning that I could be still. I'm learning that I could be aware of my thoughts but then let them go, and I come back to focus on a sound wave in this particular meditation. And then what happens is, over a period of practice, you realize that you're basically— your body disappears. You're no longer in this physical thing. You're no longer having these waves of thought after thought after thought after thought after thought after idea, positive, negative, and everything in between. And in that space of recognizing that I'm not my physical body, I have a physical body, I'm not my thoughts, I have thoughts, I'm not my emotions, I have them— when you start to train yourself to use your brain better, more efficiently, more productively, you realize that, A, I am one with this, you know, incredible universe. So what's the big deal about that? Well, the big deal is that if I am one with this universe, with this energy, with everyone and everything, and that's where everything percolates from, is it possible that all my answers are right here, right now? Right now anyway? And the answer is yeah. And so meditation is about practicing, and we know that we have different brain waves. So right now, as people are watching or listening, you know, they're in this beta brain wave frequency where their brain is oscillating at a certain frequency, and there's 50 different brain waves going on at any given time. But what happens is when I move into— from beta to alpha to theta, delta, or gamma, I'm actually accessing and activating different parts of my brain, which now gives me this deeper, greater sense of awareness of a much bigger onion than I'm used to seeing. So I'm living on a layer of an onion, and what if I could see like 10 layers up and 10 layers down? All of a sudden it's like, wow, look at who I am, what I am, who you are, what you are. And in that realization, in that awareness, I can now start to have different choice— choices made. And so meditation is a practice of awareness. It's a practice of going internal instead of external, which is where most people live their lives every day.

So the key is to really understand, first and foremost, that You have a brain, you're not your brain. The whole idea with inner size, right, is to create a pathway for you to be able to say, okay, here's how my brain works, simply as I've put it today. And here's what I could do about it to move out of a state of chaos and dissonance and into a state of coherence an alignment. So when you were born, were you born with any beliefs?

No.

Were you born with any habits?

No.

Were you born with any fears?

No.

No. So from a neuroscience and neuropsychology perspective, a belief is nothing more than this. Imagine that you're born and your brain's made up of 100 billion marbles, and every time you have an experience or somebody says something to you, you read something or you watch something, these marbles make these connections. And the connections that are reinforced go from conscious connections to subconscious connections. And once these subconscious connections are made and reinforced, they run the show 98% of the time. So a belief is nothing more than a reinforced pattern in the brain. And our conscious brain can choose what we want when we're in that part of our brain, but our subconscious mind can't choose It's programmed from the age of 0 to 3 in the imprinting years, 3 to about 7 or 8, the modeling years, and then 8 on, it's the experiential years. And so if you have these powerful beliefs that you're good enough, you're smart enough, you're worthy to achieve the goals that you have, if you have these powerful beliefs, you are able to achieve any amount of income you choose, no matter what the amount is, you just need to learn how. So if you have these empowering beliefs, you have brain coherence between conscious and subconscious.

We're in a society that just goes, goes, goes, goes, goes, goes, goes. Texts, emails, phone calls, Facebook, Twitter, Vine. All these things are keeping us on this perpetual hamster wheel of do, do, do, do, do that very few people stop and say, what am I doing? What am I not doing? What am I thinking? What am I feeling? So the first part First part is stop. Second part is to reframe. It's called the 4R process. Recognize is first. Reframe is the way I'm looking at something. And because we are monofocused, the brain cannot focus consciously on more than one thing at a time. All right? It can get distracted to that thing, then this thing, then that thing, then this thing. The art of multitasking is actually one of the worst things that you can do from a neurological perspective. Highly successful people are able to mono-focus on the right things. So when you learn to reframe your brain's ability to look at this, then look at this, then look at this, but stay focused on what it is that you're looking at, you see different perspectives of it. The next part is to release the emotional stress that most people's brains are under. How do we get into this emotional stress? Well, when we have fears— there's 50 different types of fears: fear of success, fear of failure, fear of disappointment, fear of being embarrassed, fear of being ashamed, fear of being ridiculed, fear of fill in the blank. When our brain goes on these automatic fear circuit drives, then we're in a state of fight or flight. In a state of fight or flight, over a course of a day, a week, a month, our ability to actually use our thinking center, the left prefrontal cortex of our brain, actually diminishes. Our brain gets hijacked into this fight or flight response system over and over and over and over and over again. And that response system is actually pretty healthy initially to get you going and out of the gate. But if you are always in this fight-or-flight response mechanism, you're on this hamster wheel, you actually start to get burnt out and you can't think. You can't use the genius part of your brain. You can't really activate the part of you that connects to the entire universe of intelligence within you and outside of you. And so you look learn to release that tension to be able to put the foot back on the gas, change the gear. If you think about what happens when you're driving a stick shift car, you put your foot on the gas in first gear and the car just goes. But if you keep your foot on the gas in first gear, you're going to burn out the engine. So what happens in the release part of using your brain is you go from first gear, pause, second gear, pause, third gear, pause, you're able to use the engine more efficiently to go faster. Exact same thing with our brains. If we learn how to release the tension and switch gears, release the tension, switch gears, that's the art of release and go. And that causes the fourth R, and that's we retrain our brain to operate at higher levels of our intelligence genius and abilities.

What happens if at the subconscious level— okay, so you have conscious goal, conscious vision, conscious reasons why I want to achieve it. What happens if at the subconscious level, let's say for weight, you've tried to lose weight before and maybe you have, but then you've gained it back? What if you've done that 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 times Is that pattern, okay, the memory, the pattern locked in the subconscious mind of all those experiences?

Is it there?

So here's how the brain works. You set a goal using the left prefrontal cortex of your brain, your imagination, and then right after you set the goal and you're excited because you're, you're making some progress, your brain says, hey, um, last time you did this, uh, you gained all the weight back. Why even try? Last time you did this and your friends saw that you did this, and then you gained all the weight back. Next time you saw them, you were embarrassed, you were a little ashamed of yourself. Last time you did this, or the 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 times before that, You gained all the weight back and you disappointed yourself and your significant other because they said you looked really great and then you gained all the weight back. So you disappointed them and yourself and you were embarrassed or ashamed. And so that pattern is there, right? Do you all agree with me so far? The pattern is there. And so if you have— and think about your imagination and your, your choice to set a goal is one pattern that you formulate. But if underneath there's a sub— there's a subconscious pattern of embarrassment, shame, failure, guilt, disappointment, etc., if that pattern is also there, then you have two opposing patterns. You have one pattern that says, let's go and do this, but you have another pattern that says, but last time you did this, you failed, or you've seen your sister or brother or mother or father or friend do this, and guess what? They gained all the weight back anyway. So why even try? I'm going to keep you safe in your comfort zone. I'm going to conserve energy, and, uh, that way I'm going to save you some time and money and energy. Does that make sense to you? That is called cognitive dissonance. That is another way of saying— that's called chaos in the brain. And a brain in chaos will do what? It'll just stick around doing the things that it's comfortable doing where it's known.

Something that I learned that I think people will benefit from is an anxiety attack, stress, panic, ulcerative colitis— all of these things are effects, right?

So they're effects.

So the question is What's the cause?

Yes.

Right?

So most people are focusing on either suppressing the effects, depressing the effects, masking the effects. They're doing everything but going, what's causing this?

Yep.

And if we look at the world of cause, whether it's in our physical body, whether it's our relationship, whether it's our bank account, whether it's our business, whatever the result is, every result in the physical world is an effect. So the question is, what causes the results? And one of the greatest laws in the universe is the law of cause and effect, and it states that for every effect there's a cause, and for every cause there's an effect. And so I got really inquisitive and curious curious early on with, can I control more of the cause of my results? And that required responsibility. And when I was younger, it was like I was more into the blame game.

It's because of him, because of her, because of it, because of the market, because of where I live, because of my mother, my father, how old I am or how young I am, how Asian or Caucasian I am.

It doesn't make a difference. So a lot of my upbringing caused me to look outside of myself. And when I looked inside myself and took the, I guess, the prerequisite of responsibility, I own it.

Yes.

I can change it.

So important.

That transformed my life. That really started to to put things into perspective. So when we talk about the word fear, right? So let me start off with another little premise here is most people are highly ignorant in understanding what fear is. Now, I want to make sure people heard me correctly. Ignorance doesn't mean you are stupid. Ignorance means you just don't know.

We're all ignorant.

We don't know what we don't know.

Well, we don't know what we don't know, and even the things that we do know may not be accurate. So when we talk about fear, there are 50 different types of fear. All fear, all fear is processed in the subconscious mind. The automatic neurochemistry that is created as a result of the meaning that we give certain things that cause us to either be in a state of fear or a state of courageousness is all being processed in our subconscious mind. So what causes fear for you doesn't cause fear for me or for somebody else or may cause fear in other people. So whether we're standing at the top of a building that's 100 stories high, some people look over and don't have fear and other people people do have fear. Whether there's a giant 10-foot boa constrictor in front of you may cause fear in you.

That doesn't cause fear in another person.

So it's never the thing that is causing the fear. It's the subconscious interpretation that we've been conditioned to believe. The meaning that we learn to give something determines determines whether the neurochemistry of fear is activated that causes us to feel a certain way. So the feeling, okay, of being scared, the feeling of being uncertain, this feeling of having self-doubt, the feeling of having too much stress in our life, that is an effect, not a cause. So, feelings are conscious, our ability to be aware of this stuff that's going on in our body that we either know or don't know how to handle or do anything with. So, feeling is conscious. Fear is subconscious. And so, if, for example, we have, you know, one of the examples I use is, and you don't have this, obviously, but So if I ask 100 people, you know, do you have a fear of public speaking?

I was just going to say that.

I was just going to say that.

I'm reading your mind.

I'm reading your mind.

Well, it's not your fear.

And that's what I'm going to say.

So the actual fear is of being embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, or judged. So if we're afraid of being embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, or judged, that has nothing nothing to do with the actual public speaking. It has to do with our self-image and self-esteem and what we think of ourselves and what we believe others will say or think about us, which will affect our own self-image or self-esteem. So fear is triggered based on subconscious patterns and feelings of certainty about something that may or may not be right. And so I never treat, you know, If you like animals and you like fish, for example, if the fish is sick, you never treat the fish, you treat the water.

Yeah. Ooh, that's good. I like that one.

You treat the water. Yeah. Because it's the water that's causing the fish to be sick.

And so whenever we're dealing with fear, fear is a signal. So if we're driving our car together, okay, we're driving down the street and all of a sudden there's a light that pops up on your dash. You're going to go, go, "Oh my God, the light came on!" No, it's a signal.

There's either something—

maybe the trunk opened, maybe you're low on air, maybe there's a leak in your oil, maybe your coolant in your engine needs topping up. The light is just a signal that something in the engine is going on. So when we have this emotion that's triggered at the subconscious level that gives us this feeling that we don't like or we don't know how to deal with, the light goes on in our brain.

We start experiencing those emotions.

We start experiencing those emotions. And so when we get into— so why is that relevant? And it's relevant because the number one priority of the brain above all else, above sex, above eating, above Glute above all else is survival and safety first. So when that fear signal is activated in the brain, your brake goes on, your motivation stops, your thinking brain deactivates, and you're either going to fight it, you're going to freeze, you're going to run away, or you're going to faint. Those are the 4 Fs of fear, of what happens when that response happens. And to the untrained person, it controls them. To the trained person, like a Navy SEAL, like a firefighter has to learn how to feel fear and go into a burning building, like an astronaut, she has to learn how to step out of the space station and go work with a robotic arm knowing that she might be blown away into space. She has fears as well. He has fears as well. And so Fear is just a signal. It's not a stop sign, it's not a go sign, it's a be aware sign.

If you think about visualization is simulation. Now here is the difference. Whoa, whoa, that's good. Okay, go ahead. So visualization is simulation. So when we close our eyes or even if our eyes are open and we start to use our Einstein brain, the imagination, we now have just activated one of the biggest centers of our brain, the occipital lobe, that's connected to the motor cortex. It's connected to the motivational circuit, the nucleus accumbens that releases that dopamine that makes you feel good, that makes you want to take action. So if you visualize yourself achieving the goal, if you visualize yourself behaving in ways that match the new belief, if you even visualize the words, or you take the words on a sheet of paper and you read them run your right finger across it, run your left finger across it, close your eyes, see it and feel it. Your brain is creating a mental movie with the words. And as it creates a mental movie with the words, that's happening in your subconscious mind. And when you give the subconscious these instructions, a couple things happen because of the way the brain hierarchy works. Number 1 is survival, but then number 2 is safety, And then number 3 is energy conservation. Now, when you do something 20, 30, 40, 50 times, it takes about 66 days to 365 days of repetition to override an old habitual circuit. Not 10 days, not 21 days, 66 to 365. So if you visualize yourself achieving the goal, feeling the success that you want to feel, seeing the belief on the screen of your mind you are actually creating a neural network through the science of neuroplasticity, and the networks that you reinforce become the most dominant networks. And since your brain wants to conserve energy, if you do this on a consistent basis, your brain says, okay, you're doing this so often, let me just make this automatic. Let me set aside the old beliefs. Let me replace it with the new beliefs. And now you've deliberately and consciously evolved yourself.

One of the things that is really interesting, I mean, just based on what you said, there is something in business, whether it's for salespeople on the phones or salespeople in person. On the phone, it's called call reluctance, and in person, it's called contact reluctance. And so if you think about what does that mean? So I have a call reluctance, I have a reluctance to call somebody that I don't know. And so when some people think about calling somebody they don't know when they're prospecting or meeting somebody they don't know. If you think about what is it that is actually happening that causes them to feel that. So as soon as they have the thought, their neurochemistry kicks in because the meaning that they have is if I call somebody that I don't know and they hang up on me, they yell at me, they say something nasty to me, then they are attacking my identity. And in most cases, they have associated the attack on their identity in a negative way, such as, well, maybe it's true that I'm not good enough, maybe it's true that I'm not smart enough, maybe it's true that I'm not worthy. So they have a negative association with somebody's response that they don't even know about who they are. So the first thing we work on is let's focus on your self-esteem, because it's the self-esteem that's being attacked. My self-esteem and self-worth is being attacked. So when my self-esteem and self-worth is being attacked in a negative way or unpleasant way, I'm going to process that as danger in my brain. Now, when you understand the brain's number Number one responsibility is to move you away from danger or pain. That's number one on its hierarchy of how it behaves. So if there is real or imagined pain or discomfort, your brain says, stop, put the brakes on, go the other way. That's what's happening. So the first thing we do is we teach people, number one, let's change the meaning that you have around around what somebody else's response is around who you are or what you're doing or what you're offering them. So the first thing we work on is change the meaning, you change the feeling.

For the people who think that the law of attraction is, you know, think, believe, and you'll achieve, first I'm going to tell you that's— so let's call it— I love this man. I love it. But I want you to think of your brain just a little bit differently and think of it this way. Let's say you love rock and roll. And let's say rock and roll's on station 95.5. If you're on station 92.1, that might be classical. If you're on station 98.7, that might be punk rock. But at 92.5, that's rock and roll. So imagine coherence just means locking your electromagnetic spectrum of your brain, lock it and load it on exactly what you want. So what's the vision? What's the goal? What are the beliefs? What are the emotions that create coherence so you're locked and loaded to the frequency of the universe that is matching that goal? Part 1. Part 2 is when you get locked and loaded, you've actually activated the Einstein brain connected to the motor cortex, connected to the dopamine release in your body. And when that happens Okay, now you're in coherence, but there's another part that happens in this Einstein part of the brain. That's actually what the latest neuroscientists, psychologists are thinking is connected to this GPS part of our brain, to the frequency of where all of the tools, resources, people are that resonate with that frequency. So we've been evolving for, what, 2.5 million years since Homo erectus to now 108 billion humans on Earth with a brain that's been changing and growing. And my belief is we're just scratching the proverbial surface. So we talk about, you know, a little quantum mechanics or quantum physics with entanglement, how we're all connected, we're all tuning into the frequencies that are us and within us and all around us. Now when we learn to use our brain better, it's just mind-boggling how we can achieve goals and dreams that we thought were impossible to achieve before. This is the fun part now.

I have a philosophy that every moment, every precious nanosecond and moment is perfect. And so when I connect to the perfection of that moment, there's really nothing to do. It's to be aware and to allow, to surrender, but not to give up surrender, but to understand that as we are talking right now, The oceans don't need any instruction what to do. The planets that are moving in their elliptical orbits around the sun don't need yours or my intervention. The universe, the Milky Way galaxy that's flowing through the universe at 1.5 million miles per hour, doesn't need yours and my instruction. So that means that every moment is perfect. So I want to connect to the perfection. Perfection of every single moment. Be aware of that every single moment and realize that many things are not to my taste, many things I don't understand, but that doesn't mean that the moment isn't perfect.

Every human being has a relationship with money, and money is something that envelops people's brains about what they buy, what they don't buy, whether they buy, you know, a business class or first class or regular economy seats, whether they're always looking for the cheapest or the most expensive, the nicest, or average, how much they will tip, how much they won't. We all have a money story that we've developed mostly from our parents and the people that we live near. And we develop this relationship around money and our beliefs around money. Are we good enough to earn that amount? Are we worthy enough to earn that amount? Is it, is it worth it or not? And so one of the things that Mary Morrissey says that we should do, she says for 7 days write down the thoughts you have about money and notice when you're thinking, and notice what you are thinking, and notice that the money story you're telling yourself, is it positive, negative? Is it abundance thinking or limited thinking? Is it scarcity thinking Or is it what? Fill in the blank. And so once you know your money story, and this is also something that one of our psychiatrists who works with us, Dr. David Kruger, says, once you know the story, the money story, that's when you can start to be aware of it and go, wow, where did I get these limiting beliefs about money, about my value? Where did I get these limiting beliefs of what I can afford? What I can't, where I get these limiting beliefs around how I behave with money. Let's say you have a car, which I imagine most people who are watching have a car. Imagine you're driving your car and a light comes on the dash. It's like, oh, I wonder what that light is. And you look a little bit closer and it says there's a little— you're low on oil. In the engine. Okay, so you're aware of that and the light stays on. And then 2 seconds later, another light comes on and you go, what's going on? And it says that the rear tire is low on air. You go, ah, what the hell is going on? And so you keep driving. You say, at the next gas station, I'm going to stop and I'll fill up the air and I'll put some oil in the, in the engine. So that I top everything up. Now, why am I using that example? When we have an emotion— all emotions, everybody pay close attention— you have emotions, you are not your emotions. Emotions are different than feelings. Emotions happen as an automatic subconscious trigger When your brain is evaluating something you want to do or something that you are doing against the memory that's in there that's causing this old emotion of how you felt or what you did or what you were thinking or what you were experiencing at the time that the memory was created. So all emotions are processed at the subconscious level, and whatever pattern is associated with that behavior that you're doing right now, or the incoming stimuli from the outside world is going to trigger this emotion, which then sends a neurochemical release that you feel as guilt and has the thought patterns of guilt or the emotions of being embarrassed. The feeling is the conscious awareness of the cocktail of neurochemicals that have been released But the emotion is subconscious. So is it possible to recalibrate a neurological pattern in the brain? Is it possible if a pattern is nothing more than neurons that have been coalesced or connected? Can you interrupt a pattern from the past? Is it possible to interrupt a pattern from the past? So answer that question. Is it possible to interrupt a pattern from the past? Right. So is it possible?

Is it possible?

Of course it's possible. Any pattern that exists in the brain is nothing more than a group of neurons, brain cells, that in many cases have 10,000 connections. At the end of each neuron that formulate this connectedness between the neurons. So you can interrupt a pattern just like you can interrupt and create a new habit. You can interrupt an emotional pattern, a behavioral pattern, a feeling pattern, and you can interrupt it using a variety of methodologies. You can take a pattern and you can visualize it getting smaller You can accentuate it with colors, with animal images, with visualization, with meditation, with mindfulness, with affirmation, with subliminal programming. You can interrupt patterns. And even more important than that, based on the latest research on neuroplasticity, you can create a new pattern. And that becomes the new default pattern.

The parts of the brain that register an experience versus the part of the brain that can imagine an experience are not different. So if I imagine doing a bicep curl in my mind, I see my arm moving and I'm doing a bicep curl in my mind, I'm accessing the occipital lobe part of my brain. It is no different than me going to the gym gym and doing a bicep curl. So when you do both, you solidify the experience even more. Now I want to just talk about what you just said about your partner who brings in meditation. When most people are asked to do something that they're fearful of, the sympathetic nervous system in the brain kicks in in nanoseconds— not in minutes, in nanoseconds. That's has the fight or flight response system in the brain. So they want to run away or they freeze and they can't do anything. But if you take that same experience that you want them to do and you have them do it in their mind first in a calm state— so first, if you have them visualize doing that and they feel nervous, but you just have them do one little thing 6 breaths. Why 6 breaths? We know from the research now that if you imagine in your mind doing something that you're fearful of and you allow the parasympathetic nervous system to rule, that means that you're going to be shallow breathing, you're going to raise your blood pressure, you're going to activate your sweat glands, and you're going to activate all of the fight or fear response mechanism, the fight-or-flight response mechanisms, and that is a very tense situation to be in. What if you could take somebody and have them imagine that exact same thing, but before they take the action, they see themselves? They just take 6 deep breaths. 1, see yourself doing it. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. What happens is because you're breathing deep deeply in and out, your parasympathetic nervous system, okay, kicks in. Why? Because that is the relax response mechanism in the brain. So if you consciously activate your relaxation response mechanism with something that would normally be stressful for you, you actually deactivate the fear center in the brain, the amygdala, and you actually open up your thinking center of your brain, the genius part of your brain that can actually override the fear center of the brain. It's a small little mechanism that you can just learn how to do. So I say you do both, not one or. Learn both. Goes back to upgrade your knowledge and skills of saying, why am I afraid? Which system of mine, you know, is operating? Operating right now. So think about this. When we walk into a room, we could flip the switch and turn on the light because we want more light. Well, why not flip your own genius switch? Why not flip off the switch of fear and anxiety and stress and flip on the switch of calmness, certainty, and creativity? It's your switch. We just haven't been taught how to turn one switch off and turn one switch on.

What if you said, okay, I want to make, let's just say $100,000 a year or a million, it doesn't make a difference. And I asked you, what do you need to believe about yourself to achieve this? So I need to believe I'm smart enough. Good. Write down, I am smart enough. What else do you need to believe? I need to believe that I am worthy. I need to believe that I deserve this. I need to believe that it's possible. I need to believe— you write down 5 or 6 or 7 beliefs that are just words on a sheet of paper. Now let me stop for just a moment. I'm going to tell a story and come back to this. I want you to imagine that somebody tapped you on the shoulder sometime today and say, hey, I work with Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks in Hollywood, and we have this new script, okay, that if you get really good at this script where you could read it in front of a camera without the script, we'll pay you $10 million. Now, I want you to imagine you've never seen the script, you don't know how to act, but they said to you, we're going to give you an acting coach, we're going to give you everything you need to memorize the script, we'll give you everything you need to act it perfectly. What would you do to take that script that's on a piece of paper that you've never seen before? What would you do to take that script to make it yours, for you to own it? And the answer is you probably read it like, what, once? Would you read it maybe 100 times, 200 times, 500 times? Do you think you might role-play with somebody while you're holding the script in your hand? Do you think you might research the role? Do you think you might take a camera and practice it? And do you think that if you practice it one time, 50 times, 100 times, 500 times, you can finally put the script down and you can get in front of the camera and go, boom, here is the script? Do you think you could do that? Well, guess what? A script that's on a piece of paper that you don't believe, with practice you start to believe. So what happens if you take a belief system and you start to imprint it into your subconscious mind initially through conscious repetition, but there are ways to access the subconscious mind that we know today that are faster and easier than just doing it consciously. And so you take a vision of you achieving your goals and dreams. You take the beliefs you need. You learn how to manage your emotions a little bit better, and then you develop the habits, which again are nothing more than neural patterns in the brain that been reinforced, and when you learn how to deactivate the destructive ones and activate constructive ones through spaced repetition and reinforcement, now you are resetting your default way of being. So a belief is nothing more than a reinforced pattern that if you learn how to deactivate it and create a new one, it's like a software upgrade for your brain.

All we have, which everybody talks about, is this moment, this precious second right now. So the more I could be here right now, the more I'm living the life that I want to live. I don't want to be focusing too much about the future, too much about the past. I can use those as something to hope for in the future, as a guiding post for the the past. But right now is the moment that every one of us has.

So if you take any event that's occurred in the past, if you just merely think of that event that's occurred in the past, chances are you're firing off the neural network of that pattern, right? So you can take the idea of eating your favorite dessert What do you think is happening in your brain when you pretend you're eating that favorite dessert of yours and your mouth starts to water and you start to feel, oh, that's such a great dessert? That's neurons in your brain firing and the neurochemistry that is associated with that memory firing. Now, let's say that you have a disempowering pattern of being embarrassed or ashamed or ridiculed But instead of just thinking about the pattern, "Ooh, I don't like it," as soon as you think about the pattern and it has a, I'm gonna say a disempowering or negative emotion, chances are that means that the stress center in the brain has been activated. That means that your heartbeat's gonna go up. That means that your sweat glands are gonna be activated. That means you're gonna breathe a little bit less deeply, you're gonna be more shallowly. And that is the fear or stress response. Now, what if, instead of allowing that to continue, you just stopped? And you had this intention? I'm going to dissolve the effectiveness or the strength of this pattern. How do you do that? Well, first and foremost, you stop, you sit, and you start with inner size number 1 that actually I guide you through in the book. All right, and inner size number 1 is called Take 6, calm the circuits. So you want to move from your stress and react system to your relax and respond system. You have parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, okay, that are triggered within the body. So what happens when you sit quietly and you take 6 deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth like you're blowing out through a straw? When you do it 6 times in 10-second rhythmic breaths And you focus on the air that you're blowing out through your mouth like you're blowing out through a straw. That simple inner size is inner size number 1. Take 6, calm the circuits. It actually deactivates the stress, fear, embarrassment, shame, guilt circuit. And in a quiet, relaxed state, that same memory does not have the same power. But if you don't do it in that state, you do it in a tense, stressful state, you're actually reinforcing that pattern versus thinking about bringing up that old memory and doing this repetitively 10 times, 20 times, 30 times, 40 times until the neurons really don't fire that strength. At that strength level.

If somebody has, you know, a fear, like, where is that fear? You know, if I have a fear of spiders and you don't, then that means that it's not the spider, okay, that's the issue. It's the meaning, the pattern that I have, and the associations I have with, let's say, spiders that's the issue. Well, where is that pattern? Well, it's in my non-conscious brain. It's in my brain. Well, what if I can disrupt that pattern using technology? What if I can disrupt that pattern using a variety of evidence-based methodologies, whether it's cognitive behavior therapies that you listen to and you participate in? Well, that is what we're doing. We're just helping people access the parts of their brain where the patterns exist, disrupt the pattern, help them create a new pattern so that the fear goes away. The emotion of fear is an effect, right? It's, it's a feeling. So if we disrupt the pattern, we disrupt the unpleasant feeling that we call fear. So we've learned a variety of different ways that are all based in neuroscience and neuropsychology to disrupt patterns, create new patterns faster than ever before, so that people start to feel better about themselves and about anything that they want to achieve in their life.

If you want another amazing Jon Ashraf clip, check it out right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.