Overcome The Cycle of Negative Thinking - Hal Elrod

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Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Overcome the Cycle of Negative Thinking with Hal Arod. Get access to the Resilient Mind journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy.

So I was 20 when I had the car accident. And a year and a half before that, I had started a career in direct sales. And I learned something in my training from my manager called the five minute rule. And he said that when you're out there in the field, you're gonna have disappointment, you're gonna have rejection, you're gonna set a goal for the week. You're not gonna hit it. You're gonna hit it and then have the order cancel. Like, he's like, you're gonna deal with a lot of stuff. It's a microcosm for life. And he taught us what he calls the five minute Rule. He said, so when things go wrong, we have a rule. It's okay to be negative, but not for more than five minutes. Give yourself five minutes. Set your timer on your phone. You would literally teach us. At the timer, you get five minutes to bitch, moan, complain, cry, vent, punch a wall, whatever. And after five minutes, you take a deep breath and say three really powerful words. Can't change it. And it's simply an acknowledgement that I can't change what's already happened. So there's no value in wishing it were different. And essentially, I learned through reading Eckhart Tollean things through years after that every negative emotion that we have is self created by the degree of resistance that we have to our reality, whether it's past reality, whether it's happening right now, or whether it's even a projected future reality that we're afraid of. And so in the span of five minutes, I woke up, I was told I would never walk again. You know, I had 11 broken bones, permanent brain damage. And I went, well, can't change it. And the doctors thought I was delusional because I was so happy. And I told my dad, I said, dad, there's two possibilities. Number one, the doctors are right, and I'll never walk again. And I said, and I've already decided. I've imagined that possibility. Okay, I'm in a wheelchair the rest of my life. I promised dad because my parents were concerned, the doctors were concerned. I said, I promise I'll be the happiest person you've ever seen in a wheelchair. Cause I'm in a wheelchair. Either way, I'll be happy, I'll be grateful. Why be miserable just because that's my unchangeable circumstance? And I said, the possibility number two is I will walk again. And I don't even know if it's possible, but I do know that that's what I want. So I've accepted the worst case scenario. I'm at peace with it, and all of my energy is going into walking again. I think about it every day. I visualize it, I pray about it, I talk about it. Imagine it. And a week later, the doctors came in with routine X rays. And they said, we don't know how to explain this, but your body is healing so quickly, we're gonna let you take your first step tomorrow. And that was three weeks after the accident. It went from, like, never walking again. And I'm thinking maybe like, in a year, not in three weeks. And then I took my first step the next day. So I share that kind of backstory. Because every adversity that I've had since then, I'm able to leverage the lesson of, hey, if I can't change it, the only intelligent choice I have if I want to be happy is. Is to accept it. 2008 was hard. It was actually harder for me to deal with in the car accident. And I think the reason is the car accident was the worst thing I'd imagined happening to me. Happen. And then it could only really get better from there. Like, I was in the hospital. I woke up from a coma. It's like, okay, I'm gonna heal over time, right? With the economy when it crashed, it's like, I lost a couple clients. I'm delusional. First of all, there's a fine line between optimism and delusion. You probably cross it too sometimes, right? But people would be like, you worried about the economy. I go, psst. I create my own economy. I don't watch the news, I don't pay attention to, right? And I guess I'm losing client after client after client after client. Cause they were affected by the economy and they couldn't pay me. And after I lost my first client, I went, oh, man, can't change it. Five minute rule. All right. That's a bummer, man. I've never lost a client. And then within a matter of weeks, I lost. Or about a month, I lost half of my client, half of my income, couldn't pay the mortgage. And so I got really scared and really depressed. Like, the can't change it thing wasn't work. Cause it just kept getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. Like this downward spiral. So, yeah, and that's when I did some Google searching. I was just simply trying to figure out, what are the world's most successful people doing that I'm not doing. And I kept coming across morning rituals and morning routines. But I went, I'm not a morning person. Like, what else do they do? Like, where's the night owl? Like, success plan, right? And I finally saw one. I don't remember the headline, but it caught my attention. And I went, I gotta read this. And I dove in, and this was 2007. So morning rituals now are. Everybody talks about them, they're all over the place. They weren't quite as prevalent. And I realized that it was the one thing that most of the world's most successful people had in common. And then I went, okay, I'm gonna wake up an hour earlier tomorrow and start a morning ritual. Then the question was, what am I gonna do during that hour to really maximize it? I want it to be the ultimate morning ritual. So I ended up continuing down my Google searching and came up with six. It was meditation, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading and journaling. And I went, which of these is the one thing I should do? Which is the best? Which is going to change my life the fastest? And the epiphany happened when I went, what if I did all of these? What if I woke up tomorrow? I did the six most timeless, scientifically proven personal development practices in the history of the world that, you know, for centuries they've been working for people. And the next morning I woke up, even though I wasn't a morning person, did all six. And. And I went from being depressed and scared to, like, my mental and emotional. I was at a peak. I went, wow, if I start every day like this, it's only a matter of time. And it was less than two months that I doubled my income, decided to run that ultra marathon that you'd mentioned. And it felt like a miracle. I told my wife, I said, sweetie, this is like a miracle. She's like, it's like your miracle morning I go, yeah, it's my miracle morning. So I started writing my schedule as my miracle morning. It was never a book idea. And the light bulb went off that I went, well, if this is changing my life and I wasn't a morning person and it's changing all of my clients lives and none of them were morning people. This could change the world. Like, I have a responsibility to get this message out there. Yeah. And you mentioned how do I talk about that or teach it? Right. Like when I'm brought in, I'm brought in. Every keynote that I give is the miracle morning. It's always like a CEO that read the book and he's like, you gotta come teach our sales team or our staff or whatever. Right. So that's why I'm brought in for 10 years as a keynote speaker. I was telling my accident story and teaching this lesson of the power of accepting what you can't change and giving yourself the gift of emotional. What I call, I called emotional invincibility. Right. And it's where you're invincible from any emotions controlling you and you're in control of your emotions. And so I talked about how. Yeah, what you said, the duality where the more we want something, usually the more disappointed we are when we don't get it right, or devastating. Right. The more we want it right. It's that spectrum of if you really are like you want it more than anything in the world, then if you don't get it, you're devastated, you're suicidal. I mean, you're right. And so I think that for me.

A, it takes practice. Now we say this to the audience. I go, how many of you think this is really a powerful idea? It makes a lot of sense, but it's easier said than done. And everybody's hand goes up like, yeah, this is crazy. Right? Yeah, I get it. But I can't do that. And it's because we're not addicted, but we're simply. We've programmed ourselves over our entire lives. The way we respond to adversity is the way we respond to adversity. Right. So, for example, traffic is usually a low level of adversity. If you're running late and you leave late because you woke up late or kids were getting whatever it was, you hit traffic, what's the response normally? Frustration. I'm stressed, I'm frustrated. Right. And we literally spend the entire drive. So let's say it's normally a 30 minute drive to work and it takes us 45 or whatever because of traffic. You live in LA. You know it better than anybody, but we spend that entire 45 minutes literally killing ourselves, right? Being that we're stressed out, we're tense, we're frustrated, we're riding the car in front of us. Like, does that work? That doesn't move them, right? You know, And I realized that. So people think, well, I'm upset because of this thing. We always have something to point to. Of course I'm angry. Look at what she did. Of course I'm sad. Look at what I lost. Of course I'm frustrated. I need to be at work in a half an hour and this is going to take me 45 minutes, right? We think it's the thing. We always point at the thing. And when I realize it's never the thing, it's our resistance to the thing. So when I was like anybody, I hit traffic and I'd be frustrated or upset or, you know, mad at myself that I left late or mad at the person that made me late or whatever. And then I went, wait a minute. I actually used to have these wristbands that said, can't change it, that I used to give out to high school students after my speeches. And I'd be driving and I would go, I'd see my wristband, I'd go, oh, yeah, wait, this applies. I can't change traffic.

I would take a deep breath and I would just go.

I'm going to enjoy the ride. And I would turn the radio on and enjoy. And so all of a sudden, traffic had zero control over my emotional state. And so whether it's traffic or it's being in a horrific car accident, we are completely in control of our emotional state. And the key that unlocks the door to emotional invincibility, if you will, is acceptance. It's accepting it. And so let me wrap this up. Answering your question of how do you get there? For me, it was logic. I went, okay, I can't change that. I was in a car accident. It's kind of like what I said with the wheelchair thing, right? So if I'm in a wheelchair the rest of my life, I could either be miserable in a wheelchair and blame the wheelchair and the drunk driver and the car accident and all that. That's why I'm miserable, right? That the victim mentality, I thought, that's no quality of life. And so I think for any of us, we go, well, yeah, I don't want to be stressed out in traffic. So virtually the only choice we have if we don't be stressed out or.

Depressed or you Know, and I'm not talking clinical depression, that's a different state. But. Right. Is to accept our circumstances unconditionally. That's what I call it emotional invincibility. That's where when you get to that point of where you've accepted everything that's ever going to happen to you and you've made peace with it before it even happens, when it happens, you're like, oh, okay, this sucks. Worst thing that I could ever imagine. But I can't change it, so I'm not going to. Like, problems are difficult enough to move through and overcome. Why add emotional turmoil to those problems? It doesn't help you get through the problem. In fact, it simply makes it harder, it takes longer, or it prevents you from solving the problem altogether because you're so emotionally engaged in it, you can't see, you know, the sunshine through the clouds. If you go to the age old adage, everything happens for a reason, I believe that's true, but not the way that we've been taught or conditioned to think. Right. Usually most people that's used in a circumstance where something terrible happens, right. You lose something or write everything happens for a reason, it's gonna be okay. You know, you're like, screw you and your reason. So to me it's like, cause people think it's predetermined, right? Or they look up to the heavens and they're like, why did this? What did I do to deserve this? Like, they're searching for a reason outside of themselves and it's really just perpetuating the victim mindset versus I believe that everything happens for a reason. But it's 100% our responsibility to choose the reason. And so I think that if you can go into any endeavor pursuing it knowing that if I fail at this. And on a side note, you know the book Failing Forward by John Maxwell, I don't know if you've read that. Right. But that was a huge game changer for me where I went. You know, almost every successful person failed at something that they really worked hard for, that they were striving for, they might have committed their entire life to. And then they failed. And then they learned and grew from it if they chose to do so, and then they achieved something even better. Right. You know, every relationship that ends creates a space for a new relationship. Right? Every venture that comes to a screeching halt creates space for a new venture. So I'm not saying that it's easy and you might need the five minute rule, or if you need five days and by the way, I don't think negative emotions, like call them negative, I don't think they're negative. Meaning there's value in all emotions. You know, if I were to lose a loved one, I would grieve. And I think it's healthy to grieve. Right? If a man accosted my wife, I'd probably pull anger out of my pocket and right. Get a little. Right, you know, I mean, so, so there's definitely value. I believe in all emotions, but the difference is, is whether the emotions are controlling the person, right? Because they think they don't understand, they think it's the thing, thing that's causing the anger. And because of the thing that's out of their control, the anger's out of their control, right? So I think that once you take full responsibility for your emotional state, no matter what's going on around you, it's always about what's going on inside of you. You had, if I remember right, read a book about how to eat for anti cancer benefits and had been doing that for years. When you were diagnosed with cancer, why didn't you say, why is this happening to me? I mean, I definitely said that, but with a smile on my face like, God, what in the heck am I supposed to learn? Like, I already died. I had like, I had my big life altering thing. What could I possibly learn from another one? And a lot, you know, ended up being the thing. But I will tell you this. Yeah, there was no emotional pain. In fact, so I was diagnosed because you had accepted life before it happened. Exactly, yes.

And to be fair, like, I have a new book coming out and I talk about this a lot. There's a whole chapter called Emotional Invincibility. And I talk about this and I say, look, I had an unfair advantage in that. I had like for a major. The cancer thing where because I was able to look back and go, the car accident was the best thing that ever happened to me because of who I became by overcoming it, right? By moving through it with a positive attitude and all of that. And also it became my life's work. Here's an important piece of this is when it comes to accepting all things that you can't change, death is one of those things. So I made peace with death a long time ago. And I think that death is a big fear for all of us. And to me, I've gotten to the point where I realized it doesn't even make sense for that to be a fear for anything that's inevitable or that you can't change, Right. There's no point in resisting it and wishing it weren't going to happen. And the way that I look at death is it's the other side of birth and we don't fear birth, right? But birth and death are both just as inevitable and they're two sides of the same coin. That is life. Yeah, so that was the hardest thing, like I said, because I've made peace with death. I was imagining my wife and my kids losing me, especially my kids. Like, the most important thing in my world, in my life is that I can influence my children in a positive way to set them up for. For a great life, right. And so that I might not have that opportunity was the hardest thing to deal with. I think that part of it is I didn't spend a lot of time on thinking about that. Right? So that's the thing is people that have a lot of fear, you're thinking about the things that you're afraid of, right? You don't have the fear of unless you're not thinking, right. If you're not thinking about the thing you're afraid of. But as soon as you think about it, the fear comes up. So for me, I use affirmations a lot too. That's one of the miracle morning practices is affirmations. And affirmations, I think, have a kind of a bad rap, you know, like Stuart Smalley, you know, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and people like me. And then they're taught by like a lot of self help Pioneers is like, lie to yourself. If you want to be a millionaire, just say I am a millionaire over and over and over until you believe it, right? But.

If we know the truth, you're like, I'm a millionaire. You know, your brain's like, dude, no you're not, right? You're like, shut up. I'm doing my affirmations, right? So anyway, the point is, the way that I view affirmations is they simply direct your focus on wherever you want, your focus directed. So you can literally, like a computer program, you can go, okay, what are the beliefs that I want to focus on? So they expand inside of me. Even the thoughts that I want to focus on. What are my values? What are the behaviors that I need to embody, right? So you read these affirmations every day and you're programming yourself to live in alignment with that program that you've designed, right? So I had these, my anti cancer affirmations, which I still have. I use those to manage my mindset. Right. So if I have a fear, I will look at what's the opposite of the fear, what's possible. So I could die? Yes. Does focusing on that I might die and dwelling on that. Right. And thinking about that and going down that rabbit hole. And most people live, they live with their fear. That's where their focus is. So they're consumed by fear. Right. For me, I go, oh yeah, this could happen. And that's not what I want to happen. So I'm gonna accept it, make peace with it, and then I'm gonna put all of my energy into what I want. And affirmations to me are the best way to do that. Because if we leave our brain up to whatever it's up to, dude, it's like a pinball bouncing around. It's like negative thought, negative thought, negative thought, negative, positive thought, negative thought, negative. Right. And so we can't trust our brain until we've conditioned it. Right. But so if someone's consumed with fear, utilizing affirmations every day that you combat the fear for people battling cancer, I want to share what I did that's different than most. So like you said, I had watched a documentary called Healing Cancer from the Inside out. Like, I don't know, five or 10 years before I got cancer. And I lived an anti cancer lifestyle. See, I was like, how am I getting cancer? I eat like a plant based diet. I don't understand. So I went to my oncologist when I was diagnosed and my lungs was collapsed, my kidneys were failing, and my heart was on the verge of failing when I went to my oncologist and that was like, what happened from healthy to a week or two later. And I said, hey, I, I'm not big on chemo. I view it as, you know, it's poison, it's very toxic. I would like to, you know, heal my cancer holistically. And I've been doing a lot of research on that. Can you support me in that? And he said, hal, I appreciate that you want to do that, but he said, you're, you don't have a cancer that you don't have that luxury. You've got about a week to live. If you don't start chemo, maybe a few days. He said, look, a week ago you were healthy. Now your heart, lung and kidney is all on the verge of failing. He said, this is one of the most aggressive, fast acting cancers and you literally have a few days, maybe a week. And I thought it was a scare tactic, right? I was like, you know, like in my Head, like, kind of middle finger. Like, I don't. You know, I said, give me 24 hours. Let me go home, and I'll find out the truth from Google. And So I consulted Dr. Google, right? And basically found out that, oh, he wasn't exaggerating. So I found out that was true. So I basically, almost against my will, like, everything, my values, my beliefs, I had to go get chemo. It's the most intensive chemotherapy regimen to my knowledge that there is. And so that even made it harder. And it's a 20 to 30% survival rate. So I go, so you're gonna put this poison in me? And I have a 20 to 30% chance of surviving. And the side effects on one of the chemos in particular. So I had acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The side effect was may cause leukemia. And so what I ended up doing, because I felt like my hand was kind of, you know, arm was forced, I had to do the chemo. So here's what I did, though. And I think this is what not only saved my life. I mean, in the chemo, I believe definitely saved my life, but my symptoms. And it was hard, but I had less. I had an easier time than a lot of people that were getting one hour of chemo a month when I was getting 70 or 80 or 100, whatever it was. And what I did is I did everything holistically that I would do if I weren't doing chemotherapy.

And I had never found anyone that really had done that. It was usually either or, but so I did coffee enemas, right? There's nothing, no effort, more extraordinary than sticking a tube in your butt. I took, like, 70 supplements a day. I did. You know, my diet was. It was already on point, so I just kind of, you know, kept added juicing and some other things. I did ozone saunas. I did acupuncture. I mean, you name it, right? I did everything I could, and I combined the two. And like, when I asked my oncologist, hey, chemo is really toxic to your liver. And some people get a lot of disease from that. We what should I do to detox? And he'd be like, we give you a saline flush. It's fine. So the medical community, they don't learn anything except what's in the textbook that they go to school for. And so for me, I Googled how to detox your liver. So I was taking milk thistle to detox my liver and the coffee enemas to detox my liver and all of these things. So I Just wanted to share that because like you said, people watching might have cancer or know someone that does. So here's what's interesting, is when we.

I experience negative emotions, right? And the difference is, what do you do with that emotion? Right? So the emotion isn't the problem, it's what do you do with it? And so one thing that I've learned, and it's really powerful, and I didn't. I learned this probably just in the last few years. In fact, maybe it was a cancer lesson, I don't know. But it was that when I have a negative emotion, you know, you wake up and you feel depressed. And I'm like, what? Like, I feel just horrible. I feel. I have no confidence today and I don't know why, right? Like hormones or something's going on, right? And what I realized is that it's not that emotional state that's the biggest problem for most people, myself included. It's what we do with that state. And we usually judge it. And we get afraid. Why do I feel this way? And the problem is human beings, we're not good at creating, understanding, like, what's the word? Spatial awareness in terms of time. We think the way we feel is just how life is, right? It's this all encompassing. Oh, my God, this is how I'm gonna feel the rest of my life. Like, we don't understand. No, this is temporary. It might last a day. It might last five minutes. Don't make a big deal out of it. That's the most simple way I could put it. Don't make a big deal out of it. So when I had negative emotions with cancer, I just didn't make a big deal out of it. I go, this is temporary. So when you feel in a negative state, simply just remind yourself it's temporary. And even just smile and go, man, this sucks. Hopefully it's not too long that I feel like this. Cause I don't enjoy it. But don't give it a lot of importance. Don't give that temporary emotional state a significant amount of significance, right? Just go, this is temporary. I accept it, you know, whatever. And so, yeah, so, I mean, there were a lot of hard day and there were days where, you know, I mean, I had this infection where my entire face swollen like the elephant man. My eye was completely shut. I had horrific migraines. You know, when you're in physical pain, you know, I mean, I'm like, anybody. I wasn't super positive. I was like. But I was as positive as, like, it's always be as positive as you can possibly be even when you're going through the most difficult time in your life. And that was the thing with cancer, with the car accident. And that's the lesson for everybody, is that we can choose to be, consciously choose to be. First you accept what you can't change and then you go, what emotion would best serve me? And I think more often than not it's gratitude and happiness for the most part. Or optimism, you know, is an emotion. But we can be the happiest and the most grateful we've ever been while we are going through the most difficult, painful, scary time in our lives. And it doesn't. And here's the thing, it just makes it that much easier. It doesn't mean that it doesn't suck, but it means that you're not letting the fact that it sucks completely control your emotional well being. You're going, this sucks, you know, but I'm gonna make the best of it.

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