Hal Elrod | SAVERS: The Ritual That Changed Millions

Miracle morning. I created that when I was not a morning person, but I needed. You know, it was the 2008 recession and I had lost over half of my clients, half of my income, and I was. My house was foreclosed on. I was at a really low point in my life. And so I went, okay, I've got to change something. I've got to do something different. And what I determined was I've got to dedicate time every day to personal development, but not haphazardly. I've got to be extraordinarily intentional. And in fact, it was this Jim Rohn quote, your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development.

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Mola and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness and life optimization. This is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change, helping you find alignment with the person you were always meant to be. Let's get started. Foreign.

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What if the way you start your morning could transform your entire life? In this episode, I sit down with bestselling author and inspirational force Hal Elrod, creator of the Miracle Morning. Hal's not just a thought leader, he's a living example of resilience. Having survived a near fatal car crash, beat cancer and come out the other side. With a mission to elevate humanity, we explore how his savior's practice, silence, affirmations, visualization exercise, reading and scribing became a global movement. But this conversation goes deeper. How opens us up to what it means to serve others by healing our own wounds, how to cultivate emotional resilience and why balancing family, business, and a greater mission isn't just possible, it's necessary. Whether you're an early riser or still hitting the snooze button, then this episode offers something vital, a clear path to waking up with purpose. Let's dive in.

My name is Dr. Fleet Mall, your co host for this session, and I'm thrilled to be here today with Hal Elrod. Welcome.

Halet. It is so good to see you, as always.

Yeah, it's great to see you. And we've gotten to do this before and I always enjoy our conversations and I'm a big believer. I've been doing a morning routine for a long time, and your savior's program has influenced and changed my morning routine a bit. I've added some elements to it, but I'm a real faithful, dedicated practitioner of the Sabers. So thank you very much for that and we're going to explore that in our interview today. I would like to start off a little bit because your work really has come out of the adversities that you've overcome. And so I'm just wondering if you could talk about a little bit of how these experiences of overcoming a car crash where the doctor said you're likely to never walk again, and you ended up running some marathons, I believe, and then a very serious cancer and also having your business fall apart during an economic recession. How did overcoming these adversities create who you are today and what you bring to the world?

Yeah, you know, I learned this from my mom and my dad. When I was eight years old, I woke up to my mother screaming across the hallway. And that morning, my baby sister died in her arms with just me and my mom and my sister at home. And it was devastating for our family, especially my mom and dad. And within under a year, my mother was leading a support group of other parents who had lost young children. And my father was leading a fundraiser for the hospital that attempted to save my sister's life and was caring for other kids. And I learned from my mom and dad that you take your adversity and you turn to it into an opportunity to grow yourself personally and then to help other people. And so for me, when I came out of the coma, six days in a coma. I found out I had 11 broken bones, I had permanent brain damage. They said I would never walk again. I told my dad, dad, if I'm in a wheelchair the rest of my life, I've decided I'll be the happiest, most grateful person you've ever seen in a wheelchair. Because I'm in a wheelchair either way. But more importantly, Dad, I said I've wanted to be a motivational speaker for the last year and a half, since I was in sales and speaking at conferences. I said, but my life's been relatively easy. You know, I was bullied growing up. Normal stuff, but pretty easy. I didn't have much to talk about. I said, maybe that's why I was hit head on by the drunk driver. And that's why I'm in this situation I'm in now because it's my responsibility to overcome my adversity so that I can help other people overcome theirs. And when I was diagnosed with cancer and given a 20% chance of surviving, it was the same thing. It was like, oh, wow, okay, another one. I don't know what I'm supposed to learn from this, but something. And so I think that's the biggest thing for entrepreneurs, and most entrepreneurs, right, you're best suited to serve who you once were. So whatever you've overcome in your life and the bigger the adversity, I think it's the bigger the opportunity, the bigger the opportunity to grow, to evolve and for a better version of us on the other side. And then we get to turn back and reach out our hand and help the people that have come before us. And whether that's you've achieved economic success, you've overcome the mental health challenges, or for me, it's overcoming these physical challenges and then being help other people, help them overcome their obstacles so they can achieve what it is that they want in their lives.

Well, you shared a real nugget with us there. I want to memorialize that you're best suited to serve those who you once were the previous you.

Right.

That's who we're best to serve and support on their journey. That's really great. As entrepreneurs, we're all going to face a lot of challenges and, you know, we may crash and burn a few times before we succeed. So what for you is the most critical mindset shift? I mean, you kind of shared it in terms of how your parents influenced you and then how you. But it almost sounds when I hear you say this, it almost sounds. This is too good to be true. I mean, could this guy really have had that positive of an attitude as he's laying there in that hospital bed and they're telling him he's never gonna walk again? And then facing cancer and then, you know, facing your business falling apart, you know, what's the secret sauce underneath being able to. Cause I'm sure you've had down moments. I'm sure you've had moments of despair, moments of wanting to give. So what's the secret sauce to develop that mindset so that we don't give up and we keep finding our way back into the saddle and moving forward?

I think that, yeah, and I want to comment on what you said, which is how was I so positive at 19 years old being told I'm never going to walk again? And it was a year and a half prior I had started a career in sales. I was hired by Cutco Cutlery. And on my second day of my Cutco sales training, I learned something called the five minute rule, which says it's okay to be negative when something goes wrong, but don't dwell on it for more than five minutes. And the time is arbitrary. You might need to. I think after my car accident, I needed five days. To be honest, it wasn't five minutes. But the point is this. I was taught to set a timer for five minutes. When the timer goes off, you say, can't change it, and acknowledge I can't change what happened in the past, whether it was five minutes or five months or five years or five decades. The only logical choice we have when we face adversity is to process it, feel our emotions, but then say, can't change it, acknowledge I can't change the past. So the only logical choice I have is to be at peace with what I can't change, be at peace with the past, and focus my energy on what I can change. That was the application that I, you know, I applied that to the car accident, to the cancer, and I learned it when I was in sales. If I had to identify though the number one mindset shift for an entrepreneur to be successful, it's if another human being has ever overcome or accomplished something that is evidence of what is possible for every single one of us. And I trace that back to Cutco. My second day of Cutco training, we learned about the Fast Start contest. It was the most anyone had ever sold in the first 10 days in a 50 year company. Right? So for in 50 years, the most anyone had sold in their first 10 days. And I was mediocre my whole life up until that point, I, you know, I was a C and D student. I was always getting in trouble in school. I never accomplished, I wasn't a star athlete, none of that. And something inside me, this belief that I just shared, developed. I went, wait a minute. If another human being has ever sold X amount of Cutco in their first 10 days, that means that it's possible for me. That's evidence of what's possible for me. And I think that one of the biggest problems with human beings in general, but especially entrepreneurs, is we create separation between who we are and where we are on our journey and other people that we deem to be more qualified, more successful further along. I know I'm guilty of this. I look at people in my industry and whether it's authors or speakers or entrepreneurs, and I go, man, they're so much more, you know, charismatic or they're so much more detail oriented or they're so much further along or they have such a bigger network and they've sold so many more books than me. Whatever it is, we create a separation. And what we need to do is we need to create a connection. We need to create, we need to look for the similarity of, oh, they're a human being that started at square one, right? And everybody started as a baby learning to walk and then evolved. And so I think that's the biggest thing in entrepreneurship. If you're facing a challenge, somebody else has overcome that challenge and that means you can too. If you aspire to achieve something that you at this point seems so far out there. For me, it was to change 1 million lives 1 morning at a time was to sell a million copies of the Miracle Morning. And as a self published author, I had no idea where to begin. But I look, I studied. There are other people that have done what I'm trying to do. That means it's possible for me. So that's where you start with the belief that it's possible. And then you go learn from them and figure out what they did. Like this event that you're putting on now is doing for people, right? Learning from others. And that was it. You model what they do and then you can get the same results that they got, if not greater.

That's an incredibly powerful distinction once again because, you know, I study everything, everyone I can, and I'm guilty of that too.

Sometimes I like, oh, they're so far.

Along, they've done so much, they're so accomplished, you know, and you can start to feel small or something, right? Or get intimidated, but that shift you're talking about they're a human being. It's funny, you know, when you. Sometimes we idolize all kinds of people, and then sometimes we have the opportunity to meet them in person. And they may be incredible in person, but they're still just a human being, Right? You know, they're ordinary human beings, and if they can do it, we can do it too. So that's really a critical mindset shift. And you know what I hear you saying around both those things in terms of overcoming adversities, as you've done, and then that mindset shift, you know, it's a relationship between logic and emotion. So those distinctions you made are very logical, if you were to think about. They make a lot of sense. They're very logical. And yet entrepreneurs are often very emotional and driven by emotion. And there's a. We can use emotions positively. I mean, emotions can really debilitate us, but they can be used as positive energy. So I wonder how that's worked for you in terms of that balance between logic and emotion. Or are you just naturally kind of Dr. Spock, you know, I mean, in.

Two words, it's emotional intelligence, right? I mean, that's. Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and self regulate your emotional state. I think it's the ultimate superpower. Because think about that. If you can identify what causes your emotions and then you can regulate your emotional state to the point where you literally go, what do I need to feel today to be at my best? And I know we're going to talk about the miracle morning today, but I'll get ahead of us a little bit. One of the practices that I do in my miracle morning, and I'll even say the miracle morning in general, I view it as, this is a daily practice that enables me to choose, consciously choose, what is the optimal state that I need to be in today to be at my best to achieve everything I want in my life. And then I use a practice I call emotional optimization meditation, where not just following my breath and clearing my mind, but I actually ask that question. Then I identify, you know what? Today I really. I've got this big presentation or I've got this meteoric fleet. I need to be really connected to my purpose. I need to be really present and open and enthusiastic and confident. So I identify the emotional state or states that I want to be in, and then I write them down and I close my eyes and I get myself into that state. Now, to do that, I might ask myself, when was the last time that I showed up for something like this in the way that I need to today. And I'll remember, I'll go, that's right, and I'll recall that state and I'll go back to that state. And once I feel like I've got a hold of it, I'll set my timer and I'll meditate, or I almost like the word marinate in that state. And what happens, I'm literally when you do this, you're hardwiring your nervous system, you're reprogramming your subconscious mind, you are acclimating, activating, and then your programming, if you will, that state so that you can access it at will. And so for me, emotions, I believe that we don't have to be at the mercy of our circumstances or outside forces. Human beings, most of us, assume that our emotions are dictated by external forces. If you meet someone and they're upset, you go, why are you upset? They rarely take responsibility for the emotional state that they're in, and they always have someone or something to blame. Of course I'm upset. Didn't you hear what he said to me? Or of course I'm sad. Don't you know what I lost? And for me, there's value in all emotions. That five minute rule that I talked about earlier, that was the idea of that, hey, you set your timer for five minutes when something goes wrong and you allow yourselves to fully feel, authentically feel whatever emotion comes up for you. Cry, vent, scream, whatever it is. But understand that once you express the emotion and you feel it, you then get to choose whether you continue to dwell in that state and if it's not productive, why would you do that? It's only a lack of awareness. It's unconscious emotional experience where you would dwell in a state that doesn't serve you, that's detrimental to you. And that's why the five minute rule is where you set the timer, it goes off after five minutes and it reminds you, okay, wait, you've been dwelling on this for five minutes. You've been allowing yourself to fully express and experience those emotions. And then you consciously go, now you're conscious, and you go, okay, do these emotions serve me? Do I maybe need another five minutes? Or maybe I need the day. Maybe I need to take a day to just feel. That's fine. But the point is that you are living a conscious life and you're going, okay, at some point, whether it's five minutes or five, whatever, you set the timer, you go, I'm done. I can't change what happened. Now, what emotion would best Serve me. Where do I want to go from here? And what mental and emotional state is most congruent and aligned with where I want to go? Great. How do I get in that state? And on day one, that might feel foreign. You're like, well, this is weird. Normally I get upset and I stay upset, but with practice of this five minute rule, you eventually take control of your emotional state. And when I was diagnosed with cancer, the day that I was diagnosed, I. I didn't even set the timer for five minutes. I've done this for so long, I went, I can't change it. I have cancer. I've been given a 20 to 30% chance of surviving. What is the best course of action and what state should I be in? And I told my wife the day I was diagnosed, sweetheart, I know this is hard for you, and I am so sorry that our family has to go through this, but I want you to know I've decided I will be the happiest and the most grateful I have ever been while I endure the most difficult time in my life. And I want to invite everyone to consider again, these aren't mutually exclusive. It isn't just bad things happen to me, so I have to feel bad. It's. No matter what happens to me, I have the power to consciously choose how I feel, what I think, and how I show up to any experience that I'm facing in my life.

This is so, so incredibly liberating and empowering. And it just really touches me to hear you share this and the power with which you share, because it is so absolutely liberating. And you know when you're preparing yourself in your morning routine, and you know you have this or that activity, an interview, what to do later that day, a presentation, and you know you want access to that state, so you're cultivating or as you said, marinating in it. So to give yourself ready access to it. That is an emotional state, but it's a consciously chosen emotional state that will support what it is you want to accomplish.

Yeah. And now I want to say this to give a little bit of context, or broader context, let's say my wife and I got in an argument the night before. So this is not business at all, right? We had an argument the night before. Now you're supposed to make up before bed. Sometimes it doesn't go that way, right? And then when I wake up from a miracle morning and I'm remember, oh, man, she frustrated me. And I know she's frustrated. I know that that emotional state of being in A state of anger or frustration or resentment that does not serve our marriage. That does not serve what I'm ultimately after, which is a harmonious marriage for myself, for my wife, for our kids. And so I will use that meditation as well as the other Savers practices that I know we'll go into later. But I'll get in a state of forgiveness, love, empathy. I'll remember what do. I'll even journal what I love about my wife, what I appreciate about her. I'll think about the last time that I felt connected and in love with her. And I'll get in the state and I'll. Then I'll visualize her coming out of the bedroom and me greeting her with eyes of love and forgiveness and empathy. So this is just an example how you can use this meditation, this intentional choosing of your optimal emotional state in any, from personal to professional circumstances every day of your life.

I've often, in a lot of programs I've taught over the years, I've talked about the idea of a life by design and different, similar ideas of this. And you know, sometimes people resist. No, that, that feels too structured too. I just going to let my life be what it is. Okay, well, good luck with that because we're putting ourselves at the mercy of all the circumstances. Right. And how everyone else deals with those circumstances. So let's talk about. So we're going to talk about the Savers miracle morning regimen in a moment, but let's talk about this morning thing to begin with. I mean, a lot of us have heard as entrepreneurs that most billionaires get up at 5am and you know, that whole idea. And you know, some of us may go, I don't know how to every day. I'm really more of a 6am, 6:30am kind of guy because to get up at 5am I'd have to go to bed so early it would cut off time I have with my wife in the evening. But I know you make the point that it doesn't have to be a particular time of the morning. The thing is that you create a routine you do in the morning. So I wonder if you could just talk about. Let's disabuse anybody's resistance around the morning thing to begin with.

Yeah. So miracle morning. I created that when I was not a morning person, but I needed, you know, it was the 2008 recession and I had lost over half of my clients, half of my income, and I was, my house was foreclosed on. I was at a really low point in my life and so I went, okay, I've got to change something. I've got to do something different. And what I determined was I've got to dedicate time every day to personal development, but not haphazardly. I've got to be extraordinarily intentional. And in fact, it was this Jim Rohn quote, your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development. And in my head, I quantified that. Well, I want level 10 success in every area of my life. I want to be as happy as I possibly can and as healthy and as financially abundant and secure. And you name it, I want level 10 success and fulfillment. If Jim Rohn is saying my level of success will seldom exceed my level of personal development, then in my mind I thought, I've got to create a level 10 personal development routine that enables me to become the level 10 version of myself in terms of my knowledge and my beliefs and, and my mindset and my habits and my capabilities so that I become the person that I need to be who's capable of creating the success I want in my life. Okay, so then I studied what are the world's most successful people do for personal development? And I was looking for one practice, and I ended up with a list of the six most timeless proven personal development practices. And I thought, well, I can't do all of these. And then right when I said that, I went, what if I did all of these, what if instead of choosing one, what if I did all six of these timeless practices? And then the question of, well, I'm busy. Like, I don't. I wake up and I work until I go to bed. At that time, I didn't have kids or anything. And I go, when am I going to fit this in? And so I'm looking at my schedule, I'm looking through my calendar. I'm going, okay, well, in the evening, I'm exhausted. I was thinking maybe after work. I go, my brain is fried. There's no way I'm going to be in a great state. State to do my personal development. So then I'm looking maybe like middle of the day, and I'm going, there's no time. And then I'm looking at the morning. And again, if you're listening to this and you're not a morning person, I'm like, I already, I think I woke up at the time that, yeah, I already woke up at 6am to get ready for work. So I go, what am I going to do? Wake up at 5am and at that time I hadn't discovered Robin Sharma and the 5am club and all that. I don't know if that existed yet, but I went, this was 2008, by the way. I go, what if I Woke up at 5am and I dedicated the first hour of the day to six most timeless, proven personal development practices in the history of humanity, I would become a level 10 version of myself very quickly. And now, for anyone listening, by the way, I want to be clear. You do not have to wake up at 5am to do the miracle morning. You don't have to do it for an hour. You can do it as little as six minutes. So it's very flexible, right? But for me, I'm like, I'm all in. I'm going to wake up an hour earlier. I'm going to do all six practices. After my very first miracle morning, it was a complete shift in my consciousness, in my paradigm. I went, if I start every day like this because for six months I had been this downward spiral into financial ruin and depression. And my very first miracle morning, I went, wait a minute. If I start every day with this much clarity and energy and motivation and I'm gaining the knowledge and I'm articulating my priorities, I mean, all of the things I'm doing in this miracle morning, I thought, it's only a matter of time before I become the person I need to be to change my life. And it happened in less than two months. In less than two months, at the height of the Great Recession, I more than doubled my income and everything turned around. And it turned around so fast, I told my wife it felt like a miracle. And she named the mirror. She goes, it's your miracle morning. And I didn't know it'd be a book idea or any of that, but, well, I share this part because I was not a morning person. But my very first been. Here's why most of us, if you think about it, when we were growing up and our brains were forming as children, very few of us got out of bed on our own accord. We got out of bed when our parents forced us to get out of bed and go to school. And so it's only natural that as our brain was developing and forming as children through our teenage years, we developed a resistance and this limiting belief that says, I'm not a morning person. Why aren't you a morning person? Why? Hey, waking up in the morning. My parents made me wake up and I sleep in every chance I get. If it's the weekend, I get to sleep in. So as children, we develop this limiting belief that says I'm not a morning person. And then it carries into our childhood and for many people, the rest of their lives. But you have to step back and go, wait a minute, why am I not a morning person? When you understand, oh, it's because I was forced to wake up against my will for the first 18 years of my life. No wonder I'm not a morning person. Can I become a morning person? And then you go, you ask the question I asked earlier when you asked me, what's the number one mindset shift for an entrepreneur to be successful? If another human being has done something, there's evidence you can do it too. There are now millions of people around the world that do the miracle morning. We survey them regularly. Fleet 72% of them said they had never in their entire life believed they could become a morning person. So if those 72% of the million plus people have never thought they could become a morning person, and they did, you can too. And I'll just say this without I'm not trying to sell the book, but that was a big. When I wrote the Miracle Morning, that was my fear. How am I going to hold someone's hand from I'm not a morning person and I've never been one and I've tried and it doesn't work for me. Two, I'm waking up doing the miracle morning every day and it's a lifelong habit. So the entire book holds someone's hand, psychologically speaking, through that journey from not a morning person, don't even want to be one to the miracle morning is changing my life. And this is going to be a lifelong habit.

I absolutely grew up that way. I didn't want to go to bed at night and I didn't want to get up in the morning.

That's all. Yeah, me too.

I ended up struggling with becoming a morning person. But I am today. And that's pretty good evidence. You got 720,000 out of a million who were not morning people and now they're doing the miracle morning. So that's pretty good evidence. I mean, the idea if only one person could do it means we could all do it. But if you got 720,000 people who have done it, that's pretty darn good evidence. Well, let's go through each of the savers a little bit. We'll have to limit the amount of detail because. But let's touch on all six of them.

So originally, these six practices, it was meditation, affirmation. Well, it doesn't matter what they were. But when I was writing the book, I was frustrated because I didn't have a way to organize them into a cohesive way to remember them. And my wife said, why don't you get a thesaurus and see if you can swap any of the words with synonyms and then form it into an acronym. And I kind of scratched my head and I go, that might be brilliant, right? And meditation became silence. The first S in savers, and journaling became scribing, which is the final S in savers. And the rest remained the same. So the first S is silence. That's your meditation or your prayer. It's about quieting your mind, calming your nervous system, creating mental space for mental clarity. And There are over 1400 scientific studies now that prove the psychological, so the mental emotional benefits and even physical benefits, lowering your cortisol levels of meditation. It could also be prayer. It could also be breath work. It's about starting your day though, calming the nervous system and creating an optimal mental and emotional state of peace and space to move through the rest of your day. The A in Savage is for affirmations. And this one's really important. I think it's the anchor of your miracle morning because you get to articulate in writing. These aren't the goofy old affirmations that where you just tell yourself something that's not true. Like I'm wealthy even if you're not, you know, or I'm a money magnet. Money flows to me effortlessly. Like these are kind of goofy affirmations that I think give affirmations a bad rap. The way that I teach, affirmations are practical, actionable, rooted in truth and results oriented. So here's a quick three part formula. Step one, affirm what you're committed to. So every area of your life, in your health, I am committed to blank no matter what. There's no other option. In terms of your finances, I am committed to blank no matter what. There's no other option. Now the blank could be an outcome like I'm committed to earning a hundred thousand dollars this year no matter what. There's another option. It could be a habit. I'm committed to making 20 prospecting calls a day no matter what. There's no other option. That is. Step one, affirm what you're committed to. Step two, affirm why it's a must for you. Write down the reasons underneath the commitment as to why are you willing to do whatever it takes? And when you read these every single day, you are programming your subconscious mind to be committed and reminding yourself why you're willing to take the actions, do the things you need to do, whether you feel like it or not. And the number three third step is affirm which actions you will take and when. This is where the rubber meets the road. Once you're clarified your commitment and why it's a must for you, get clear on, okay, what are you going to do and when are you going to do it? And if you're committed to losing 20 pounds this year and this is a must because you want to get healthy and have more energy, well, what are you going to do? So the third step is affirm which actions you'll take and win. So I will go for a run Monday through Friday at 7am Right. Like, you get clear. And now this affirmations formula is the anchor. It's the foundation of everything you want for your life. Because if you follow those three steps in each category of your life as a parent, as an entrepreneur, in your health, et cetera, now it's just a matter of reading those every day and living with integrity, living in alignment with what you're affirming every single day.

So I believe you have templates for these affirmations for this structure on your website or that accompany your book. Right?

Yeah. So in the new edition, the Miracle Morning Updated and expanded edition has 70 new pages of content. That's one of the things I did, is we have resources on the website, but I put a bunch of them in the book so you could actually go through and brainstorm and then write out your affirmations while you're reading the book. So, yeah, I'm glad you asked.

And we were talking before about emotional intelligence and the positive power of emotions. So when you're doing these affirmations, is it important to sort of feel them as you're doing them?

I believe that feeling that is crucial with everything that you do. Right. We are emotional creatures. And in order to be in, you know, if you're reading your affirmations in a lazy, tired, lethargic state. Right. Imagine if you go, I am committed to achieving my financial goals. Right. It's important because. Right. That's not going to get you where you want to go. So, yeah, reading them with conviction within. I'll give you a quick example. When I was given a 30, 20 to 30% chance of surviving cancer, I was scared, I was optimistic, but I couldn't help but think of, okay, well, I'm a father and I could die. I can't pretend that that's not a possibility. Like, I'm Gonna put my faith in it, but I have to make sure that my affairs are in order for my kids and my wife. So it was this really hard mindset, Clint, where I had to maintain unwavering faith. I was gonna survive while I planned for my death. Very difficult to do, but I had to do it. So I realized that dwelling in fear, as I said earlier, that was not productive. So I followed this formula. Number one, I am committed to beating cancer and living to be 100 plus years old alongside Ursula and the kids. No matter what. There is no other option. I read that every day with such conviction fleet, that it became my mental and emotional reality. Number two, I had four reasons why it was a must for me. I was committed to beat cancer for my wife, for my kids, for my parents, for myself, and for humanity. There were five reasons and I elaborated on each of those in my affirmations. Why I was doing it for my wife, why for my kids. Then the third step. What actions will I take? And when I clarified every holistic protocol that I would do in addition to chemotherapy to survive cancer. So I read those affirmations with such emotion and conviction every day that I truly believe they saved my life. Like they were my anchor to optimize my mindset and design and influence my behaviors so that I knew what I wanted, I knew why I wanted it, what I was committed to, and I was clear on what I was going to do in order to achieve it. The V is for visualization, and I won't. We'll go through the rest of these quicker. Affirmations is my favorite to spend time on because I think it's so important. Visualization, all you have to think about is that visualization, it's been taught, I think wrong in a lot of ways. But think about how athletes visualize. And here's what I mean. We've been taught to create a vision board, visualize the end result. Now, there's value in that. When you visualize yourself crossing the finish line, achieving the goal, and you do so with emotion, you generate the compelling emotions of what it's going to feel like to achieve your goals. That compels you to move forward. But it's the least important part of visualization, in my opinion. The second part is the most important part. This is what athletes do. Yes, they visualize the championship. That gets them motivated. But the second part is you mentally rehearse yourself taking the actions today that will ensure you get to the goal down the road. So you mentally rehearse yourself. For me, when I was training for a marathon. I would mentally rehearse myself like a movie, getting dressed in my running clothes, going to the front door, opening my front door, seeing the sidewalk. I'd recite my affirmations one more time of why I was committed to go on that marathon, what I was going to do. And so what happens is when you mentally rehearse the actions in a peak state, then when it's time to actually take those actions, you are infinitely more compelled and motivated and driven to do the things that you mentally rehearsed while being in a peak state during the morning. That's visualization, the exercise, not rocket science. Here it's not about going to the gym, it's moving your body first thing in the morning. I go to the gym in the afternoon, but I move my body for five minutes in the morning. I do jumping jacks, I do stretching, and as little as 60 seconds of jumping jacks will take your mental alertness from a two in the morning to like an eight. I mean you're. Because the point of morning exercise, it's not about building muscle in the morning, it's about, it's about getting the blood and oxygen to flow through your body, including up to your brain, right? When you do jumping jacks or whatever. Go for a brisk walk. Now you're going, okay, I'm awake, right? You're breathing heavy. Now you're awake. Now you're alert. And now you have far more energy that you've generated through exercise and mental clarity to be effective throughout the morning and throughout the rest of the day. The R is for reading. Again, there's no rocket science here. But whatever you want to achieve in your life, you want to improve your marriage, there's a book for that. You want to make more money, there's a book for that. And it's simply starting your morning by doing a little bit of reading. And if you do some math, let's say you read 10 pages in the morning. Now if you're a decent reader, that's like, you know, 10 minutes. If you're a slow reader, that's 20 minutes. And. But let's say 10 pages a day, that's 3650 pages a year. That's the equivalent of 18200 page self help books or books on achieving the things you want to achieve. Can you imagine Fleet if anyone listening? If you read 18 books or cut it in half, five pages a day, that's nine books, just under a book a month on an area of your life that you want to improve that means in one year you can master, you could learn how to master your health, your wealth, your relationships, your fitness, you name it, right? We're one book away. And the final essence average is for scribing, which is a fancy word for writing or journaling. And that the power of taking the 60,000 thoughts that go through your head every day and clarifying the ones that are of the most value in writing every morning. And for me, there's two things I write in the morning, minimum. Number one, what am I grateful for? And I take it from my head and I put my hand on my heart and I close my eyes and I picture the thing I wrote down. And I take it from intellectual gratitude that's up in my head like a checklist to heartfelt, soulful gratitude that enhances my mental and emotional well being. I picture my kids and I smile and I think about how much I love them and how grateful I am for them. Or my wife, or the roof over my head, or my business or my clients. You name it. And the second thing I do is I look at my to do list for the day. It's usually got 10, 15, 20 things on it. And I ask myself, what's the one thing, what's the number one thing on my to do list that will move the needle the most? Because that's usually the thing that we avoid. Human nature is to gravitate toward the easiest thing with the least scary consequence, check it off and trick ourselves into thinking we're being productive when we're really just being busy. So I use scribing to transition from the miracle morning into and it close it out with gratitude. Then I'm looking at the to do list and I'm going, okay, what's the number one thing that I'm committed to do today to earn the right to work on? And then I look at what's the number two most important thing to get done, and then number three, and so on. And that's how I optimize my productivity. Every single day is using the final essence Savers, the scribing practice, to transition into the workday.

And this is a proven formula. You've done it and you've created incredible success with it. And at least a million people around the world are doing, if not more. And I can tell you I'm doing it every morning and it's made a huge difference in my life. How do we set ourselves up for success? Because if I end up staying up late or eating a lot late at night, or there are other things where I'm not sleeping well, it's going to be tough or it's going to get easy to get wake up in the morning, God, I don't feel good enough today. I'm going to skip that. I can't do it. So how do we set ourselves up for. I know in your newest iteration of your book, you talk about the miracle evening, how you set yourself up for success.

Yeah, I've always said, ever since the original Miracle Morning published over a decade ago, that a miracle morning starts the night before with your preparation. But I always had a very minimal preparation. It was basically I had written a set of evening affirmations based on the premise that what you think about before bed becomes your first thought in the morning. And I'll use a couple examples. Like when I was a kid, Christmas Eve, falling asleep, all I could think, oh my gosh, Santa's coming in the morning, I'm getting presents in the, oh my God, it's Christmas tomorrow. I went to bed and thinking about Christmas, excited. As soon as my eyes opened in the morning, what was my first thought? It was the last thought I had before bed. And I had the same level of energy and enthusiasm that I fell asleep with, that I was excited when I woke up. Now, on a side note, that to me, was the miracle morning when I started practicing. And I realized I can recreate that state of excitement every night before bed. But here's the problem. For most people, they don't go to bed peaceful, grateful or excited for the morning. They go to bed stressful, worried, anticipating the morning, not with excitement, with anxiety. And so if we go to bed, not only does it affect our quality of sleep, we can't fall asleep, we can't stay asleep. But we go to bed thinking, oh my God, I got to wake up in the morning. I've got so much on my to do list. I'm so stressed, the world's a crazy place. And then as soon as our eyes open, it's the opposite of that Christmas morning description I gave. And now we hit our before our feet hit the floor, we're anxious, we're stressed, and we're overwhelmed. And so for me, the simplest form was I'm going to create bedtime affirmations that so I'm intentional about what I think, what I focus on, what I tell my subconscious every night before I fall asleep so that I go to bed at peace. I go to bed feeling grateful, and I go to bed excited to wake up tomorrow, do my miracle morning, and have the best start to the day. And I was able to recreate that Christmas Eve, Christmas morning, you know, feeling every single day. So that's the short of it. In the new edition of the book, it's a 20 plus page chapter on the miracle evening. And you mentioned, what if I eat a lot. I cover seven different steps before bed to create a ritual to land the plane, if you will. Right. So that you go to bed. And I call it it's a miracle evening is your strategy for blissful bedtime and better sleep. And what inspired me to actually write that chapter in the new edition is in 2020, I went through a six month period where I was suffering after going through chemotherapy for over 800 hours, over three years. And I was suffering from extraordinary insomnia and sleep deprivation where I was sleeping two to four hours a night. I was suicidal. It was the worst time in my life, worse than anything else that I've gone through before that. And I figured out how to get through it. And then I started asking my audiences at this I speak all the time and I'd be speaking every company I spoke for, I raised my hand or I said, raise your hand if you struggle to fall asleep or stay asleep. And it was always roughly half of the audience that raised their hand. And I thought, okay, I've figured out how to get through this and go from horrific sleep to sleeping like a baby. And so I put all of this into that miracle evening chapter.

And when I read that story, I mean, all the adversity you've done with. And it's so compelling and so powerful, these stories. And that one really hit me. The level of insomnia you were dealing with was really extreme and took you all the way into suicidality and, and you found your way to work through it by basically, you know, a lot of what we're talking about. We're talking about mindset, we're talking about intention, we're talking about these practices we can do to manage our emotions and manage our thought processes. And so we're really talking about in some ways becoming the architects of our own brain, our own neural architecture, designing, programming, and, you know, we're talking about this maybe more in psychological terms, but there's a whole neural landscape underlying this. And there's what we now know about neuroplasticity. We can literally reprogram our own brains. We can completely shift our neural architecture to create the life we want. And deeper than that, if you get into that stuff, there's the whole quantum theory level and everything. I mean, this is an Amazing phenomena, the human being. And we can literally become the captains of our own ship. And it's kind of limitless. And that's what you're pointing us in a direction of.

Well, and you said something really important, that a lot of this is about mindset. And then you also mentioned it's also about practices. And I really want to highlight practices because practices are what cultivate the mindset and make it sustainable. If anybody's ever gone to a, an event, like a Tony Robbins event, which I've been to, love Tony, been to his events. But if you've ever gone to an event where it shifted your mindset, you're there and you're like, oh my gosh, all these possibilities. I see my potential, I see what's possible. But if you didn't integrate practices into your life, then when you went home, you went back into the same practices, none of which core cultivating the mindset that you were introduced to at the event. And then nothing in your life changes. And I've been there, I've done that. We can all relate to that, the practices. That's what makes the Miracle Morning. People have asked me as an author, they go like hal, I wrote a book, why is the miracle morning so like sticky? How is it this, you know, word of mouth phenomenon? Like how are you doing this? And I've had to reverse engineer and I go, you know what it is? Most books shift your mindset. But it short lived because when people get to the end of the book, they don't do anything differently. They put the book away, they go, wow, that was amazing. But all they do is start reading another book and now they have a different mindset shift. The Miracle Morning inherently is about integrating daily practices that enable you to keep cultivating that mindset and indefinitely. So yeah, it's very important. The mindset is important. The practices are what cultivate the mindset. And if you have a short term mindset shift but you don't support it with practices, it's likely going to fade away.

And a really powerful insight is to realize that we're always practicing. The question is, what are we practicing? Right? And our old practices, our old habits will take us right back into the old way of being unless we put in these new practices. And for example, maybe we have a gratitude practice. We're cultivating gratitude in our affirmation or in our savior's routine. Well, how do we go from having a gratitude practice to becoming a grateful person? We do the practice a lot, right? States become traits and we repeat it again and again and again. And pretty soon, we've changed our brain, and we actually find that to be our baseline. We've changed our baseline, and it's completely possible. And it reads in such a powerful model of that. I'd like to talk a little bit about here. I know life balance is really important, too. You have young kids now, and you're really structuring your business life so you can really spend time with kids, your kids, so you don't lose that. And so you're really about succeeding in business and succeeding in life. And so I talk about that a little bit, but then also about making it even bigger than just my own success or my own kids, because you really. You have a goal to really shift humanity's consciousness. You have a vision that's really keeping you moving forward and inspiring you to make it more than just about your own success. So I wonder if you could talk about both balancing our life so our personal life and our business life aren't at odds, and then making it about something bigger as well.

Yeah. The early experiences that I had. But my choice is or my belief is that my purpose. And I think this could be true for all of us. It could be a universal purpose for anyone. But my purpose is to. It used to be to fulfill my potential so that I can help other people fulfill theirs. Now, that was my first purpose that I ever wrote down, and it is still one of my purposes. Yes, you can have more than one. That's one thing I've realized is it's not one life purpose. It's, hey, what? I have more than one purpose. Just like, right in your work, you might have more than one purpose. So one of my purposes is to fulfill my potential to help other people fulfill theirs. But now my purpose is to serve like it is to serve to be of service to others. And so. And that's aligned with that first purpose, because the first purpose is fulfill my potential in service of others. But it starts with my family. And what I realized, that's what my cancer journey taught me, is I was a workaholic. And I did not realize it. I was so ambitious, and I was so. I had such big. A big purpose of I want to change the world and help all these people. And my family would take a back burner. Hey, sorry. I tell my wife, sweet, I got to work again. I got this big thing, and I'm changing lives, and I'm making us money, and da da da da da da da. The cancer journey taught me is I was valuing Quantity over quality. I was valuing changing the world over being fully present and engaged with the three people who mattered most to me. And I found this is true with far too many entrepreneurs. Again, when I'm giving a speech, I'll say, how many of you have families? Raise your hand and keep your hands up. If families your number one priority, all the hands that go up, every single one of them stays up. I said, okay, put your hands back down. I want you to put your hands back up. If I were to look at your schedule right now, those of you that said family's your number one priority, if I were to look at your schedule, would that be obvious? And very few hands go back up. And so. And that was me. And so for me now, I have arranged my life, my schedule, my work, to only work when my kids are not in school. So as soon as I wake my kids up in the morning with my. And then I get them ready, and then I drive my daughter to school, and my workday starts at nine, because that's when I get back from taking my daughter to school. Well, I have to leave at 3 o'.

Clock.

In fact, as soon as we're done in five minutes, fleet, I'm getting in the car and I'm going to pick up my son from school, and then I'm taking him to the ymca. So my whole world revolves around my family. And I'll tell you, that was not an overnight thing. That took years for me to be able to shift my schedule. And. And it was like I would try it and then I would fall back. And so I want to, like, encourage anyone. Give yourself grace, but make that a North Star. If you are an entrepreneur, whether it's your family or it's your health, put what matters most first. And it is not money. At the very least, it's healthy. And. And it's beyond that, it's relationships. I was just doing research for a podcast on how to be happier in 2025, and a Harvard study, very recent study, proved that the number one predictor of happiness is the quality of our relationships. And how often we sacrifice our relationship because we gotta work late and we gotta achieve this goal and that goal. So keep in mind that I believe that the number one and number two priorities in every human being's life. I'm projecting here, but health, relationships, and consider. I know for me, I used to value productivity above health all the time because I would take Adderall that the doctor prescribed. That wasn't healthy for me, but, boy, could I focus for Hours and hours on end. As soon as I got cancer, I stopped taking that. I stopped putting anything synthetic in my body, even if it helped me more productive. So anyway, that's around the family piece and then around the world piece. And why don't I give you a second or I want to turn it back to you. Philippe, how did you phrase that question? Around beyond family, how did you phrase the question?

Just that you have a vision bigger than just the benefit of your own success and your family's wellbeing, that there's something about really contributing to the larger sphere of human consciousness in life.

Yeah. The Miracle Morning mission is to elevate the consciousness of humanity one morning at a time. And I came to that by realizing that, well, what does it mean to elevate your consciousness? And that's what the Miracle Morning does, is when you do the miracle morning, you're doing these daily practices. You're elevating your consciousness, which means to elevate your awareness of your thoughts, words and actions and how they impact you and other people. So you're able to be more intentional and to choose to shape your thoughts, words, actions, and as we talked about earlier, your emotions. Right. So when you're doing the Miracle Morning and you're in silence and you're. You're doing contemplative meditation and you're being aware of the thoughts that you're thinking, you're aware of the emotions that you're feeling, and then you're able to, from that place of awareness, be more intentional about crafting, choosing, designing, cultivating the optimal states, thoughts, behaviors. So when you do your miracle morning, you elevate your consciousness. Consciousness is. It's the ultimate superpower. If you have a low level of consciousness and you're not very aware and you're not very intentional, then life's going to happen to you. When you elevate your consciousness, you become the creator of your life, and you design the life. You create the life that you want on your terms from a place of awareness and intention. So my mission, and it goes back to the car accident, all these experiences, I believe my responsibility, and we could all take this on, is that it's my responsibility to help as many people as I possibly can. That's what my life is about for the rest of my life. And that the neat thing about this, Clint, is I can't fail. See, a lot of us set these goals where there are these black and white goals. And it's a paradigm of if I achieve the goal, I succeed, succeed. Like I want to earn $100,000 or a million dollars or sell a million books or whatever. If I achieve the goal, and I have set goals like this, and I still do from time to time, but if I achieve the goal, I succeed. And if I don't achieve it, I fail. But if you wake up and you just go. My mission is to make the biggest impact I can make every single day in every person's life that I come in contact with, from, you know, the waitress or the waiter at the restaurant to the, you know, every human being, starting with the people that are closest to you. So for me it starts with the my inner circle. And then once I've served my family for the day and the kids are off at school, well, now I've got, what, six hours to serve humanity to the best of my abilities.

Wow.

I think that's a really powerful place to bring our conversation to an end. I'd love to keep exploring some of these things, but I want to make sure you're on time to pick up your screen. And so this has been really enjoyable and so powerful. There's so many powerful distinctions here and I really encourage all of our audience to get more involved with your work. And there's links right down below where you can find your way into Hal's world and explore the miracle morning and how this could make a dramatic difference in your own life as an entrepreneur. So, Hal Elrod, thank you so much.

Thank you, Fleet. Appreciate you.

Thank you for joining me on the radical responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we come. Commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present and stay true to you. Take care.

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