Mindset Motivation: The Perception Principle | If You Don’t Change This, Reality Will Never Change

Good morning, Believe Nation. Today we're going to talk about how you can improve your mindset. The key to success is not simply effort or focus or resilience, but it is the growth mindset that creates them. The mindset itself is critical. Research shows that when we directly try to build grit or persistence, it is not nearly as effective as addressing the mindset that underlies them. How many of us think of ourselves as not math people, or creative, or sociable, or athletic? Or conversely, that we're naturals? If we're to fulfill our potential, we have to start thinking differently. We have to realize that we're not chained to our current capabilities. Neuroscience shows that the brain is very malleable and we can change our own ability to think and perform. In fact, many of the most accomplished people of our era were thought by experts to have no future—people like Charles Darwin, Lucille Ball, Marcel Proust, and many others—but they, along with all great achievers from Mozart to Einstein, built their abilities.

Number 1 is to recognize when you're not doing well. Not being positive and recognize what's happening on a vibrational level. Esther Hicks talks about this, right? In Abraham, she talks about how when we're in a negative cycle, our vibration level comes down and we're operating on a different disc. You're going to start attracting things into your life that match that frequency, almost like an antenna. So other negative situations, other negative circumstances, and I've seen this happen so much in my life, like this continuum, this vicious cycle when I'm in a negative state that constantly brings up more negative stuff. So the earlier you figure out that you are in this position, you can transcend it even if it's really hard to do. Like you're searching for everything in the depths of your soul, in the bottom of your heart to really pull some goodness out of what's happening in your life in this moment. It's going to have a cascade effect, I promise you my friend, where maybe it's one thing you're grateful for and it leads to another thing, something bigger, right? Something brighter opens you up, your mindset starts to peak a little bit and then something bigger on top of that. Sure enough, you're operating on a different disc, and as you go up the ladder, as she talks about in her book called The Vortex, you start to accumulate more positivity and you live in this state of goodness where people, places, things, circumstances come in on a continual basis to you because you're operating like this. So it's recognizing the difference. Get out of the negative zone as quick as possible. Something negative happens, brush it off, recognize you're not the experience, you're not the emotion from it, and move away from it as soon as possible.

Starting when I was 17, I started doing incantations, not affirmations. Affirmation, you go, "I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy." What's the problem? You haven't changed your what? Your what? Physiology. If you don't change your physiology, you won't get anything. So an incantation is not only you speak it, but you embody what you're saying with all the intensity you can, and you do it with enough repetitions that it sticks in your head. Like "It's a Small World," now the conversation in your head is always the same and it gives you what you want. So use your body and your voice. So 17 years ago, I started doing things. I was working for Jim Rohn, this speaker, and I was 17 years old. I had long hair, minestrone soup acne on my face, and I was trying to call on Bear Stearns type of people and convince them why they should go to this man's seminar and be more successful. I was driving a 1968 Volkswagen. That I had earned at $40 a week as a janitor. The only way I did it was park far from the building and then go in. And I love people, and I believe, but I put myself in state, and I was able to influence people that were far more successful than I was at the time. I would do something that I still do backstage and have done for 23 years, because I don't hope I'm going to be in a good state. I demand it. So I do an incantation using my whole body. I'd say, "I now command my subconscious mind to direct me in helping as many people as possible today to to better their lives by giving me the strength, the emotion, the persuasion, the humor, the brevity, whatever it takes to show these people and get these people to change their lives now. I would do that literally driving in my Volkswagen to a meeting in LA on the freeway for 40 minutes. People were looking at me. I'm screaming at the top of my lungs. They're going, "I know he's a serial killer. I know he is." But by the time I entered that room, when two people meet, if there's rapport, The person who's most certain will always influence the other person. And I was totally certain, and they were trying to get revved up to certainty. Do you agree with this? Yes or no? I do another one. Because I was poor, I changed my mindset. I kept doing things, but I never got beyond it. I'd say, God's wealth is circulating in my life. His wealth flows to me in avalanches of abundance. All my needs, desires, and goals are met instantaneously by infinite intelligence. I'm one with God and God is everything. And I would imagine the abundance in my life and I would feel so grateful. And a year later, I went from making $38,000 a year to making $1 million a year in one year. Because successful people do what failures won't. You follow me on this?

People often who have negative recurring thoughts and feelings in their life, the reason those keep coming up all the time is because they, at some point in their life or continually, are giving those thoughts, the negative ones, more attention than necessarily any other thoughts. In other words, the relative weight that they give those thoughts is quite high, and they give a lot of importance to that. So those thoughts are very important to me right now, and they're durational, they last over a period of time. They keep thinking about those thoughts, thinking about those thoughts, thinking about those thoughts, and it's all that repetition that seals it in the back of their head, and now their head says, oh, this is an easy thing, I know this one, and it pulls it forward. So that simple repetition, because they made it important and they thought about it a lot, it keeps coming up for them over and over and over again. So there's two negative, there's a good, a negative thing about that and a positive thing. The negative is if you keep obsessing about negative things, your mind will be automatically conditioned to bring it up more and more and more often without your control, just automatically. The positive aspect is we can use that same skill set the same rule to apply positive thoughts into our own life. We can give positive thinking, positive questions, positive approaches to life a lot of importance in our life and a lot of focus and focus on them and give a lot of duration to them over a period of time and they get sealed in the brain as well. And now the brain says, well, that's easy, automatically thinks about it. So for me personally, I've done this so much in my life that I just have, I automatically think about the best possible outcomes almost everything I do. I used to think about the negative outcomes. I thought, that's not supporting me. So how did I do that? Well, leveraging RWID, it helped. And let me break it down for you a little bit about how you could do this, because the first thing you have to do in order to improve your mind is take total control of your attention and notice where are your thoughts right now. At a very continual basis, you have to think, where are my thoughts right now? Are they supporting me? Or are they automatically coming up negative and self-protective in ways that are not advancing my life? Just to be aware, to be conscious of what's going on in your body, in your sense of feeling and emotion, and the sense of the thoughts you're actually having. Just start paying attention. You know, for a lot of people, because they've never done this before and it's hard to remind them to do it, it's like simple. Here's what I want you to do. Just start paying attention to your thoughts. Anytime you're in line, anytime you're in line from now on, if you're in line at Starbucks, just say, "I'm in line at Starbucks, Brendon said think about my thoughts. What are my thoughts saying right now?" Just checking in. You're in line in traffic waiting for the next car, just sit and think, "What are my thoughts right now?" And just notice what you've been thinking about. The more that we notice what we've been thinking about, the more we can interrupt what we've been thinking about. See, if we just allow that feeling to keep coming up and you don't pay attention to it, our life can be very frazzled and very highly anxious. But once we say, what's my mind on right now? And we redirect it, that is where personal power comes from. First awareness, right, and understanding and the consciousness to what's going on. But then the ability now to be self-directed, to choose what we want to focus on. So first we're attentive to it, and then redirect it. If it's negative, it's not supporting you, redirect it. How do you redirect it? First and foremost, you just say, "What would be the opposite of this negative thing?" Then you think about the positive thing and you focus on that and you repeat it to yourself. For many people, that might include closing their eyes, just visualizing a more positive outcome, thinking about the more positive outcome, thinking about the more positive outcome, thinking about the more positive outcome, focusing on it with their eyes closed. And that visualization of a more positive outcome of how things could turn out well or how the situation could be better, or even just what are the next steps I should take. Visualizing that and assigning a high amount of importance and duration to it, meaning making that thing important to us by making it— how do you make something important? You give it a sensation. You feel that thing. You sense it. You sense what your next step would be. You sense how it would feel if the outcome would be better. How would it feel emotionally, psychologically, spiritually for that thing to be up? Allow it to have a lot of emotion to it. Pay attention to it. Your eyes closed, you see that thing, you feel it, you sense a different step, you know what you're gonna do, you pay attention to it and you keep focusing on that just over a period of minutes. Keep focusing and keep focusing, focusing. When your mind automatically wants to go back to the easy, which might be negative, you go, no, no, no, no, I don't want it. I don't want— I'm not into easy right now. I'm into conditioning my mind. Focus, focus, focus, focus. Give attention, duration, and sensation to it. Attention, duration, sensation. Attention, duration, sensation. Visualization, visualization, visualization. It's repetition of that positive alternative to a negative impulse that comes up that gives us personal power. Let me say that again. It's that attention to that positive alternative over attention to repeating that negative impulse or thought that gives us personal power.

You can get a lot of little tricks out there that will help you to think positively, to be more optimistic. But I think if you want to really cultivate positive thinking within yourself, you have to start to take on this idea that there's something deeper going on in life, and that it's not quite so simple to figure out exactly what it is. If you think about all the really challenging, the really hard times you've had in your own life, all the really unfortunate times, the ones that we would obviously label as unfortunate, and then you trace back the ripple effects from that through the rest of your life and into the present. You trace that back and you take a look. A lot of times what you find is you find your greatest gifts there. You find your greatest strengths there. You have— you find your greatest growth there. You find your biggest lessons in life You find your biggest successes stemming from that, being born from it. So those really challenging times, a lot of times, they are the seeds for our ultimate success. So don't be so quick to dismiss those as being bad. And that is what you're doing most of the time. Most of the time, when you're thinking negatively, when you're worrying, when you're afraid, when you're really angry, or you're feeling hurt, I mean, it feels real, and it is real. I mean, it hurts, it gets you mad, it gets you anxious. But if you start to become more of a positive thinker, you really start to buy into this deeper philosophy, you start to realize that that's not necessary. And then in fact, a lot of times you're worrying about the things that are really good for you, the things that are really gonna make you grow, the things that are really gonna make you successful. There's something to this idea that there can be no problem that is not an opportunity in your life. And I think this is what the core of positive thinking is, is understanding that every problem, every challenge that you have is ultimately an opportunity. And this is not just some wishful thinking. This is not said lightly. This is something that takes some study. This takes some study and some contemplation to understand. It takes wisdom to really understand this. You have to have some life experience to start to see the truth of this, the depth of it. Because there's like a surface-level understanding and then a much deeper layer of understanding. That's why you have to kind of go back and look at your own history, just try to prove it to yourself, to prove to yourself that this is true. Because right now I tell you this, but you're probably saying, yes, this sounds nice, and sure, it can probably work for many problems in my life. I can see that somehow I'm catastrophizing them, exaggerating them. A lot of times they don't come true. But you know, there's just this one problem I've got right now. I've got this one problem that's just pure hell. It's pure hell. It's pure evil. There's no possible way that this problem I've got right here, there's no possible way that this could have any opportunity in it. There's no opportunity here. There's no lesson to be learned here. There's nothing positive. This is just pure negative. If I could remove it from my life, my life would be happy. I would be better. I just know it. Well, that's exactly what I'm trying to tell you, is that that's not positive thinking. And I mean, I understand where you're coming from. A lot of times I get triggered like that too, and I was especially like that a lot in the past, and I'm still a bit like that today. But you gotta understand that this is the mode of thinking that you've been coming from for most of your life, and that, that mode of thinking has gotten you to where you are right now in your life. So that's gotten you to where you are, but that's only gotten you to where you are. And I'm willing to bet that you can do better than where you are right now. And if you really want to go to that next level, then what you have to do is you have to start to think in a different way. Sometimes you have to start thinking in a radically different way, a way that seems uncomfortable, a way that seems wishful thinking at first, a way that, that seems unrealistic, that seems idealistic, that seems Fantastical. Yet, there is something to this idea that nothing can happen to you that is not positive.

We conducted another experiment. This time we told participants about the current governor of an important state who was running for reelection against his opponent. We again had two groups of participants, and we described the current governor's track record to them in one of two ways. We said that when the current governor took office, statewide budget cuts were expected to affect about 10,000 jobs. And then half the participants read that under the current governor's leadership, 40% of these jobs had been saved. And they like the current governor. They think he's doing a great job. The rest of the participants read that under the current governor's leadership, 60% of these jobs had been lost. And they don't like the current governor. They think he's doing a terrible job. But then, once more, we added a twist. For participants in the first group, we reframed the information in terms of losses. And now they didn't like the current governor anymore. And for participants in the second group, we reframed the information in terms of gains. But just like in the first study, this didn't seem to matter. People in this group still didn't like the current governor. So notice what this means. Once the loss frame gets in there, it sticks. People can't go back to thinking about jobs saved once they've thought about jobs lost. So in both of these scenarios, actually, the current governor gets ousted in favor of his opponent. Well, at this point, we were getting curious. Why does this happen? Could it be that it's actually mentally harder for people to convert from losses to gains than it is for them to go from gains to losses? So we conducted a third study to test how easily people could convert from one frame to another. This time we told participants, imagine there's been an outbreak of an unusual disease and 600 lives are at stake. And we asked participants in one group, if 100 lives are saved, how many will be lost? And we asked participants in the other group, if 100 lives are lost, how many will be saved? So everyone just has to calculate 600 minus 100 and come up with the answer of 500. But whereas people in one group have to convert from gains to losses in order to do that, people in the second group have to convert from losses to gains. We timed how long it took them to solve this simple math problem. And what we found was that when people had to convert from gains to losses, they could solve the problem quite quickly. Took them about 7 seconds on average. But when they had to convert from losses to gains, well, now it took them far longer, almost 11 seconds. So this suggests that once we think about something as a loss, that way of thinking about it tends to stick in our heads and to resist our attempts to change it. What I take away from this research and from related research is that our view of the world has a fundamental tendency tendency to tilt toward the negative. It's pretty easy to go from good to bad, but far harder to shift from bad to good. We literally have to work harder to see the upside of things. And this matters. So think about the economy. Here's economic well-being from 2007 to 2010. And you can see it tanked, just like we all remember, and then by late 2010, it had recovered by most objective measures. But here's consumer confidence over the same time period. You can see it tanks right along with the economy, but then it seems to get stuck. Instead of rebounding with the economy itself, consumers seem to be psychologically stuck back there in the recession. So oddly then, it may take more effort to change our minds about how the economy is doing than to change the economy itself. On a more personal level, what this research means to me is that you have to work to see the upside. Literally, this takes work, this takes effort. And you can practice this, you can train your mind to do this better. There is research out of UC Davis showing that just writing for a few minutes each day about things that you're grateful for can dramatically boost your happiness and well-being and even your health. We can also rehearse good news and share it with others. We tend to think, right, that misery loves company, that venting will help get rid of our negative emotions, that we'll feel better if we just talk about how terrible our day was. And so we talk, and we talk, and we talk about the boss who's driving us crazy, and the friend who never called us back, and the meeting at work where every little thing that could what could go wrong did. But we forget to talk about the good stuff. And yet, that's exactly where our minds need the most practice. So my husband, who has this disconcerting habit of listening to what I say other people should do and then pointing out that, technically speaking, I'm a person too, has taken to listening to me for about 2 minutes on days when I come home all grumpy and complaining about everything. And he listens, and he says, "OK, but what happened today that was good?" And so I tell him about the student who came up to me after class with this really interesting, insightful question. And I tell him about the friend who emailed me out of the blue this morning, to say hello. And somewhere in the telling, I start to smile, and I start to think that maybe my day was pretty decent after all. I think we can also work in our communities to focus on the upside. We can be more aware that bad tends to stick. One mean comment can stick with somebody all day, all week even. And bad tends to propagate itself, right? So somebody snaps at you, and you snap back, and you snap at the next guy too. But what if the next time somebody snapped at you, you forgave them? What if the next time you had a really grumpy waitress, you left her an extra-large tip? Our minds may be built to look for negative information and to hold on to it, but we can also retrain our minds if we put some effort into it and start to see that the glass maybe a little more full than we initially thought.

For me, improving my mindset comes down to two things. The first is about having goals that are inspiring, feeling like you're doing work that is exciting, that you're challenging yourself, that you're growing. It's really hard, at least for me, to have a positive mindset when I'm working on things that I'm not excited about. If I'm just working on stuff that is boring and unexciting, I'm not going to wake up super excited and ready to do it. Where if I feel like there's a challenge that I'm going after, that I'm pushing myself, that I'm learning something new, then it's a lot easier for me to have that positive mindset. So I think as entrepreneurs, we always need to have growth goals that we're working towards to keep us motivated and excited. The second thing for me is about the environment. And once you have that big goal that you're shooting towards, creating that environment to keep you motivated and keep the mindset positive, I find for me it's almost a daily refresh. So I need to start my day and whatever mindset I had yesterday, it's poof, gone. I need to start over today. And so having habits and routine and a schedule in the morning that sets you up for success, that you're surrounding yourself with people that make you want to go off and do something bigger, that you're around resources and ideas that stretch you to have a more positive mindset. That's why I created the Enespresso series, so you start every day with something to hopefully boost you out of your comfort zone to go and do something greater. Those two things I find super helpful. So having goals that are— that make you excited and have an environment that supports you doing something great, do that and you'll have an amazing mindset to continue to grow. So thank you so much for watching this episode of Believe Life. We made this topic because Basedrop Beats asked me to. So if there's a topic you want us to cover in the next edition of Believe Life, Leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of the clips that you saw today had the biggest impact on you and why. Leave it in the comments and I'll join the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.

The first thing, if you're having negative recurring thoughts and feelings that are coming up, Those are really, they're easy. And here's what I mean by that. You know, we kind of have two systems of thought psychologists like to say now. We have the System 1 theories in which the System 1 is your automatic, just unconscious, immediate thoughts and impulses that come up from your body that usually your brain is just saying, hey dude, we've thought through this before. Or hey dude, we're trying to protect you. So it's running at a very baseline, easy energetic level, your brain loves to optimize itself. It doesn't like to have to do a whole lot of thinking. It just likes to say, what do we already know, how can we apply it to this situation? So if you had fears in the past and a similar situation is here, your body just generates those fears and says, hey man, run away again. You know? If you had challenges in the past and you want to protect yourself, your brain just says, hey, protect yourself right now, we're worried about this. But sometimes those are not not helpful thoughts. They're automatic, but they're not actually helpful. It's just your brain saying, "This is the easiest route we know." And part of becoming a more mature, conscious, enlightened person is to better take control of our System 2, which is our sort of conscious dashboard on our mind, our ability to more directly work, control, generate, and create our own thoughts. And behaviors in the moment, not relying too much on just the things that come up for us. Now, of course, we're always going to— most of our lives is very system 1 driven, very unconscious, automatic. We're just going through the motions. But the people who achieve the peak amounts of success, the highest performers in the world, have said, you know what, I need to discipline my mind to support me even when it comes up with an automatic, immediate immediate thoughts, I want those to be positive and buoyant and confident and strong, something that leads me to healthy decisions for my life, not just things that protect me. And so I think that we have to learn how to do that.

A positive mental attitude can clear away all obstacles which stand between you and your major purpose in life. Because of the importance of the subject of our visit, I shall not only tell you that a positive mental attitude heads the entire list of the 12 great riches in life. But I am going to give you explicit instructions as to what you must do to keep your mind positive. In all the success books I have written, I have never suggested to my readers what they should do without clearly telling them how to do it. Are you ready? If you are ready, this visit may bring the most important change in your life you have ever experienced. 1. Learn to adjust yourself to other people's state of mind and difficulties so as to get along peacefully with them and to refrain from taking notice of trivial circumstances in your relations with other people by refusing to allow them to become controversial incidents. Great people always avoid small incidents of controversy when possible. 2. Establish for yourself a definite fixed system of conditioning your mind at the beginning of each day so you will keep it positive under all circumstances. 3. Learn the art of selling yourself to other people by indirection, such as asking leading questions which will bring out the sort of reactions from others which you desire. And do not permit yourself to be drawn into argument over unimportant subjects. 4. Adopt the habit of having a good-hearted laugh every time you become irritated or angry. And it will help you if you begin each day with 1 minute of hearty laughing. This will change the chemistry of your brain and start you out with a positive mental attitude. However, you had better get out of sight when you take your laughing exercise. 5. Start each day with an expression of gratitude for all the adversities, defeats, failures you have experienced in the past. And search for the seed of an equivalent benefit these have yielded you through the passing of time. Then give thanks for the blessings you expect to receive during the day. 6. Learn to concentrate your attention on the can-do portion of all of your problems and desires and start action where you stand in carrying out this portion. No matter what may be your problem or your desire, there is always something you can you can do right now that will help you. Find out what this something is and do it. 7. Learn to transmute all unpleasant circumstances into immediate action which calls for a positive mental attitude. And make this a fixed habit. For example, when you are angry, switch your mind to some sort of action in connection with your hobby or your major purpose in life. And keep it busy with that subject for 5 minutes. 8. Recognize that every circumstance which influences your life, whether it is a pleasant or unpleasant circumstance, is grist for your mill of life, and so use it to make it pay you dividends in one form or another, remembering meanwhile that your strength grows out of your struggles. Follow this instruction and you will soon learn that there is no such thing as an profitable experience. 9. Look upon your life as a continuous process of education, of learning from all your experiences, good and bad, and to be always on the alert for gains of wisdom which come to you a little at a time in both your pleasant and unpleasant experiences. 10. Make the world over to fit your own pattern if you choose, but begin with yourself in some sort of self-improvement which will make you more open-minded, patient, and generous in your relations with others. 11. Express gratitude twice daily for your recognition of the fact that you have been given complete control over your own mind, and ask for guidance in order that you may use this profound gift wisely in all your thoughts and acts. 12. Go out of your way daily to comment enthusiastically on the good the qualities of those with whom you live and work, but do not mention their negative qualities. Then observe with benefit to yourself how quickly others will begin to concentrate on your good qualities. Remember, I'm still talking about how to keep your mind positive. And 13: Accept all criticism of yourself as an occasion for self-examination to determine how much of it is justified, and you will be sure to make startling discoveries about yourself which will help you the remainder of your life. 14. Do not accept from life or anyone else anything you do not desire. And remember that Mahatma Gandhi proved himself to be more powerful than the great British military forces by this simple method of passive resistance. 15. Remember always that there are two kinds of circumstances which cause you to worry: those you can do something about and those you can do nothing about. Nothing, that is, except to use passive resistance and refuse to permit them to worry you. 16. Keep your mind eternally engaged in thinking of that which you desire most, your major purpose in life, so no time will be left for you to waste on thinking of that which you do not want. And let me digress here while I tell you we are now rubbing elbows with the great master key of success this very moment. And 17: If you should ever be so unfortunate as to feel sorry for yourself, look around until you find someone who is worse off than yourself and start where you stand to give him help. Make this procedure a habit. And you will witness one of the great miracles of life, because that which you do to or for another, you do to or for yourself. And 18: Choose some person whom you consider to be the sort of person you would like to be. Then go to work and emulate that person in every way possible. Great people have always been hero worshipers. But they pick the right sort of people to emulate. 19. Cultivate your tone of voice so that your words have a pleasing, musical sound. And remember that the sound of your voice is an open window through which other people look into your very soul. It will be a profitable investment if you will get a tape recording machine and record samples of your voice daily while you practice the art of expressing yourself through a friendly sounding voice. If you are engaged in selling, this practice will quickly pay off in monetary dividends. 20. Last but by no means the least, write out this sentence and paste it in a prominent place where you work and on a mirror where you see yourself in your home: Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve. Remember also that you are the only person who can provide you with a positive mental attitude. What are you going to do about it? On your answer to this question rests your entire future.