Peter Sage | Are You Living By Default or Design?

Why do smokers smoke? Because they're smokers. If you have a smoker who's quit and you say a smoker, you go oh, do you want a cigarette? Oh no, I've quit. And they have the identity of a smoker who's quit, there is a 90% plus chance that they will be smoking again within X amount of weeks or months. Why? Because their identity is I am a smoker who's engaging in the behavior of quitting, which is counter to my identity as a smoker. An identity will win over behavior every time. Quite. Whereas if you change your identity to I'm a non smoker and somebody offers you a cigarette, it's effortless. Why? Because I don't smoke.

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Mahl 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.

Hey friends, it's Fleet. Real quick here before we dive in. If fear or anxiety has been running the show in your life lately like it has for a lot of us, you gotta check out the Rewiring Fear and Anxiety Summit. I've teamed up with over 55 leading experts and to give you real practical tools to break free from stress and take back control. It's free, it's powerful and it could change your life. Head to rewiring fear anxiety.com and sign up now. All right, let's get into the show. What if the biggest limits on your success aren't external, but the beliefs you've unconsciously adopted? Peter Sage, serial entrepreneur, bestselling author and world renowned expert in human behavior, joins me for a profound conversation about on the power of Belief Systems, Identity and Self Mastery. We explore how neuroplasticity shapes our success, why questioning our deepest assumptions is the key to transformation, and how shifting your self image can elevate your performance in every area of life. Peter shares insights from decades of experience working with governments, members of royalty, Google and NASA, breaking down how our financial, professional and personal limitations are are often self imposed. Whether you're an entrepreneur, leader or someone looking to break through to your next level, this episode is packed with game changing wisdom. This conversation will challenge you, inspire you, and if you're willing, completely rewire how you see yourself in the world let's dive in. My name is Dr. Fleet Mall, your co host for this session and very happy to be here today with Peter sage. Welcome, Peter.

Dr. Moll, what an absolute pleasure. Really glad to be here. Thank you for the invite.

Today we're focused on rewiring your beliefs or rewiring our beliefs for performance and success. So you've spoken often about the intersection of neuroplasticity, belief systems and shaping our success. And so I wonder if you could delve into how rewiring our neural pathways and neuroplasticity allows us to do that directly influences our capacity for high performance and success in our personal and professional lives.

No, absolutely. And I think one of the first things to understand is to actually just revisit what the term belief actually is. Because, you know, if we're going to start walking down a corridor, let's make sure we're all in the same corridor.

Right.

And so a belief is essentially a feeling of certainty that you have about something to be true, or a feeling of certainty about something you know not to be true. But it is a fit, essentially a feeling of certainty. And when you realize there are many different types of beliefs, you can have global beliefs where you completely use your beliefs to whitewash a category of people, like all people from this country are fill in the blank, Rich people are fill in the blank. Or you can have local beliefs. And most common for most people that are looking to rewire their beliefs, especially around performance, it's not so much the external beliefs, it's the internal beliefs. And saying, I mean, what do I believe about myself? Because that's a whole rabbit hole. Most people don't like to go down or they start to avoid or get lost. And when you realize that we all star in a particular movie called the movie of our life, and I know that you know, for example, you star in that movie called the movie of your life. And I know that for certainty because you're the only person that's in every single scene of that movie. There are no co stars in the movie of your life. And so if we start to realize that our entire experience of life, whether we choose to be the star, create the script that we want to act out, take the Oscar at the end of the performance, or whether we just bomb and get the raspberry doesn't have hardly anything to do with what most people ascribe, which is the externals. It's got everything to do with your belief as an actor in that movie. Your self worth, your self belief, your self validation. Your confidence, your value structure, so many different things, but it's all an internal game. So if we're talking about performance, most people get trapped in the externals around performance. Oh, I've got to do better. In terms of, against that benchmark, the only benchmark you want to be concerned with is the one in the mirror. Your biggest obstacles lie there. Famous Henry Ford quote. You believe you can, you believe you can't. You're right. So when it comes to understanding, the first belief that I invite people to question is the one they're most certain about. Why is that? Because once something is locked in, it operates in the background. You know what separates human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom? We can't run faster, we don't have sharper teeth, we don't have claws, we can't out smell. How do we rise to the top of the food chain? Well, it's because we have something called a prefrontal cortex, which essentially allows us to outthink our competitors, not outrun them. And so when you look at the evolution of the crowning achievement of human biology, that front part of the brain, it's pretty valuable real estate, meaning that when we are able to use critical thinking and reasoning, something that animals can't do, certainly not to the extent that we can and you are forming through those deductions, that reasoning certain conclusions that we then adopt as what we call beliefs. Now, because that front real estate of the brain is so valuable, it's also the slowest form of thinking, by the way. That's why martial artists who are unconsciously competent do well versus people that know what to do. But they've got to think about it because it's slow. Now, when somebody throws a tennis ball at you, you're not expecting, you don't think about which hand to catch the ball with. Instinct takes over. And that's kind of where we're heading here, because that front part of the brain needs to be kept clear for critical tasks. So if we are supposedly intelligent and we make the same reasoning, the same deductions over and over again, there's no need to hand it to the front part of the brain. So it hands it to the midbrain and it becomes what we call a habit. And habits are based upon a lot of the beliefs that are now unquestioned. They are adopted. You've no longer pulling the rug up to look what's underneath, to question if what you put under there is still viable for you. In this day and age, most people are running around with Belief systems that they had when they were teenagers and that, yeah, let's call it close to our age. So you'd look pretty silly if you were wearing the same clothes you had as a teenager or as a 10 year old or a 12 year old walking around in your 50s, 60s, 70s. So why do people do it with beliefs? Because they're trained. Condition would be a better term to no longer question it. And it forms part of who we are in the autonomic process. And we have a label for that now. We call it our personality. But you can change beliefs very quickly. The problem is when most people's beliefs are ingrained, the only thing that tends to change them is, are what we call a significant emotional event. Now, if you're an athlete looking to get better performance, if you're a CEO looking to dominate in industry, you can't afford to wait for a significant emotional event. You have to be able to have a process in within yourself that says, okay, I accept that I have a definition, an identity, a sense of self, but what part of that am I still taking for granted? I'm a great believer that one of the most useful skills a person can develop is the ability to ask quality questions. Why? Questions are the steering wheel of the mind. Questions, direct focus. Your brain is like a faithful Labrador when it comes to questions. You throw the stick, it's gonna go fetch it. And a lot of people are trained to throw lousy sticks. God, why does this happen to me? Why does my life suck? Why did I screw up again? Now you throw the stick. Your brain doesn't care what kind of stick it is, it's a Labrador. It's going to bound off and bring you back the stick. And it's going to say, oh, because you're a schmuck, because your teacher said you'd never amount to anything, because your elder brother got all of the attention. Because, because, because. And you will eat that and you will resonate to that level of awareness. And the Labrador gets this moldy, soggy stick out of the puddle and drops it on your clean white carpet and you feel miserable. So the first thing when it comes to beliefs or changing beliefs is to learn how to question beliefs. And most people aren't willing to do that because they're too busy being addicted to their own sense of self. And the one area that I see this impact people more than any others as a great example. And this cascades down into all areas of life, specifically high performance. But if we use this as an example, because I think a lot of people relate to it. Even if you're not an athlete or a high performance person, let's talk money. Most people's beliefs around money are massively counterproductive. And why is that? If you ask somebody, what are your beliefs around money? What do you believe about money? You will get out of a hundred people a hundred different answers. There'll be some very common things you have to work hard for. It doesn't grow on trees. Only rich people have it. I'm not smart enough, or I'm unlucky, or, you know, I make it, but I can't keep it. Or all of these affirmations, these beliefs just around the topic of money. And if you ask people quality questions or if you invite them to ask themselves a quality question, where did that belief come from? Now, you can parallel this to all sorts of high performance, but let's take money because it's a universal. Where did that belief come from? Because you weren't born with it. Money is not innate to the human experience. I did an experiment recently on social media where I got €5,000 in cash with a big thick elastic band and I put it on a plate and I took a $3 ribeye and I put it on the other plate and I tried to convince my dog that the money was worth more than the ribeye. Guess which one he went for?

Right?

Animals don't understand money, neither does anybody else. Right? It's a man made construct. And so you weren't born with beliefs about money. You were born with beliefs and preferences about food and, and your body will remind you of those if you go without it for too long. But money's a great example because the only place in the universe money means anything is in the mind of a human. Nobody else has beliefs around it. And you can scream at my dog all you want, take the cash, because you can buy a lot more ribeye. Not happening. So if you ask the question, why do you believe that? And more often than not, there is a pattern of when we're growing up, we have an experience, let's call it a emotional event. And as a typical example, we see mum and dad arguing over money, which is the second leading cause. If you go to the American Marriage Counseling association, arguments over money is the number two cause. Number one is infidelity. Number three is irreconcilable differences, whatever the hell that means. But when it comes to arguments over money, a lot of kids, their first impression of money is seeing mom and dad argue over how scarce it is. So if you ask Somebody, do you still believe that or is that belief still true for you? That's the first point. Most people's intersection with questioning belief starts to arise. Like, whoa, hang on a minute. Well, no, it was, it may have been true for mom and dad, but. And then a great follow up question. What other beliefs would you have to buy into in order to support that false belief? Well, I'd have to believe that, you know, opportunities only exist for other people. I'd have to believe that you still have to work 40 hours a week in a factory to get barely along by. I'd have to believe that I'm not smart enough to figure out how to generate wealth in other areas. I'd have. And now you start pulling the cards away from this deck of this house of cards and things start to topple. All because you learned the skill of how to question the limiting beliefs that are holding you back. And most people just don't do that.

Let me follow up with a couple things there, Peter. So I'm getting. The process of changing our beliefs, transforming our beliefs, and in the process rewiring the brain begins with questioning them to begin with. Right. And you're alluding to how we got them in the first place. Often emotional experiences in our childhood, the download we get from our parents and other authority figures and the culture in our family and so forth. So before we go on further with how to change all that, it seems to me one of the, and you kind of referenced this, one of the real obstacles to changing our beliefs is a sense of self identity that's wrapped around those beliefs. Well, that's just the way I am. I've always been that way. I hear that continually from people like, well, I want to change, I'd like to do this, but that's just who I am. I don't expect that to change. Right. They don't have this sense of how malleable our beliefs are, that they're narratives, that they're changeable. And the other one, it's great that you used money as an example because I've often heard it said that we all have a set of beliefs around money or a blueprint of a kind of internalized blueprint around money. And even though we may be trying to improve our financial situation, when we start hitting the ceiling of that belief of how much we're supposed to be able to have, how well we're supposed to be able to do, we'll unconsciously sort of undermine ourselves to get back down in that bandwidth that fits in with our beliefs. Now, if we get too low, we may do something to get busy and get ourselves back to a certain standard. But we're kind of locked into there by our belief structures. So I'm wondering if that resonates with you and then we can sort of continue talking about how we begin the process of changing these beliefs.

Absolutely. I call it the financial thermostat. You have a certain financial temperature that you are comfortable with, but you also have a thermostat in the brain that if it gets too hot, then the air conditioning kicks in. Now you're lazy, you're not motivated to follow upon the opportunities that are presented. You are making excuses, you're self sabotaging or it gets too cold. You know, you're a $50,000 a year person. All of a sudden you're now earning 20,000 a year. You're going to get off your butt, you're going to start hustling, you're going to start being proactive, you're going to start making money. Because that range, that temperature range is where you're comfortable. Now the question is, who gave you the range of other new. And you may have taken some cues, you may have adopted that at some level, but ultimately you're not born with abandoning. I don't care what your parents were doing, you still have the ability, as you say, to change that. They are very malleable. And it's a point where you talk about, it's just who I am, it's what I do. Well, that's like saying, oh, I'm overweight, it's just who I am. Or no, you eat too much and you haven't mastered your relationship to food. It's not who you are, it's a lack of a discipline or skill or a even if you have the desire, you may not have a strategy. So if we peel that back again to certain again, childhood is a great example because prior to 7 years old, your critical thinking function isn't operating. Your brain will not operate a beta brave wing length which is required for critical thinking until you're about seven years old. Which is why Aristotle said, give me the child for seven years and I'll give you the man. Prior to that, you operate predominantly in alpha and theta. Theta is hypnosis. It's where we dream. When we dream, we don't have critical thinking. That's why you can dream and be like, hang on, there's Uncle Fred. He died five years ago. What's he doing here? Oh, it must be a dream. We don't have that conversation, we just talk to Uncle Fred. Because that critical thinking isn't operating anywhere from four to seven cycles per second or four to seven hertz when it comes to our brain waves. And if you look at evolution, it makes sense because a child doesn't have enough experience until they're about seven to start making judgments of their own. Which is why we have mirror neurons to learn from our environment, from people that hopefully know what they're doing right. Good old mom and dad. Didn't always work out. But let's do a school example. Let's say it's geography class. I just got back from Egypt two days ago. 10 day trip, amazing trip. Let's say you got little Johnny and he's in class now, six years old, he's in geography. And the teacher says, hey, Johnny, where's Egypt? All right. And Johnny's all excited because he knows the answer. And he opens the geography. He says, I know exactly where Egypt is. It's on page 47 of the geography book. Teacher's like, wise guy, I'll see you after class, idiot. Now, at that point, a lot of things are happening inside Johnny's brain. Very quickly. He just felt the emotion of stupid. Not good enough. Embarrassed emotions that most people do almost anything to avoid having to feel, especially at that age. And very quick connections are being made. And based upon his relationship to those connections will set the template for who he thinks he is for the rest of his life. And then 40 years later, sits in a session with you and just says, oh, it's just who I am. So let's look at what are the options. Johnny noticed the rest of the class laughed at him. So he decides that he's going to become the class clown. Because he gets his significance now from throwing the spitballs and being the wise guy, because that got him some sort of sense of validation. But raising his hand in an academic sense didn't cut it. Or he may feel so emotionally bottled up about all of the people laughing at him, he didn't think they were laughing because it was funny. He thought they were laughing at him because the teacher made him look stupid. So what happens? He lashes out and they back down. And now little Johnny links and anger to the restoration of significance. And Mr. Angry is born. And 25 years later, his poor wife is making excuses for him at dinner parties. Oh, he's got a temper. It's okay, just don't. Yeah, he gets triggered really easily. No, he doesn't get triggered. He's running a pattern that he developed at 6 years old that he's never had the emotional maturity to grow out of. Or maybe that was so painful that Johnny says, I'm never going to be subject to not being smart enough again. So he decides to double down, takes every class he can, goes on to be an A student, gets every single degree on the wall. All to cover up the internal insecurity of the fear that he's not enough. And here's the challenge. No amount of PhDs, no amount of doctorates, no amount of yeah MBAs are ever going to fulfill the internal validation that he needs using an external yeah stuff to paper over the cracks of the broken self image. So the only way Johnny can actually get through that experience and grow from it is to do the one thing he will refuse to do. And that is to risk raising his hand again to answer another question. To be vulnerable enough to be stupid. Most people run their entire life away from that. And you hear it in ways, oh, I. I can't get up to sing karaoke. I Can't sing. I Can't Sing is a classic because that's like saying dogs can't bark. For thousands of generations, you were taught through songs around the campfire because 98% of the world was illiterate. What you're saying is, oh, I don't want to risk myself being judged by others. It's the classic shy. Anyone that's trying. For anyone listening here, that's shy. I don't want to burst your bubble, but I'm going to burst your bubbles. There is no such thing as shy. Shy is a softener to cover up a pattern of what's really going on, which is please don't let you discover me. Because I'm scared of what you'll see and I'm scared you'll judge me for it. That's shy. Get over it. Put your hand up again. Get in the game. Or perfectionists. You could become a Johnny perfectionist. And what's a perfectionist? There is no perfectionism. Perfectionism is another softener to make you feel good or altruistic about running the pattern, which is really called I'm scared of screwing up.

Once we recognize, Peter, that we have inherited and or developed these beliefs, these self limiting beliefs and we're running various emotional patterns and we realize we have some emotional patterns and beliefs and habits and behaviors that are getting in our way that are no longer serving us and we would really like to begin to change that. You mentioned questioning our beliefs. What else can we do? I know you talk a lot about and you just mentioned it there, the process of emotional maturity, which I think would have something to do with having a greater awareness around how we function emotionally and behaviorally, but then be able to get more into the driver's seat. But there's a kind of reprogramming that's necessary there. And one, questioning beliefs, possibly deconstructing beliefs, looking at the underlying assumptions they're based on, all of that kind of work. You also mentioned in dream states and some other brainwave states, the critical mind is not so present. So there's the whole world of trying to program in new beliefs using affirmations and so forth, when we're in states that are, you know, more open or more receptive. So I'm just curious about what you think is some of the ideal strategies, especially oriented around our performance, professional performance, and our success in life, of beginning to develop a set of beliefs that are more in support of our aspirations rather than constantly fighting against these old ones from our childhood?

Well, one of the first things to look at is a phrase I learned from Tony Robbins, and I worked alongside Tony as an experienced trainer for 15 years. And Tony says something very profound. He said that the strongest force in the human personality is the need to remain consistent with how you define yourself. In other words, your identity. Now, once you have an identity that you buy into, it governs a lot of automatic behaviors. Like if you have the identity of as a parent, when your kids are around and you have that identity, you're going to act as a parent when your kids are no longer around and you're there with your lover, you're not acting like a parent, you're acting like a partner. And that's down to the identity that you're moving into or out of at that time. There's many different levels of identity, but when it comes to performance, I'll address briefly the letting go of the old, because it's not about fighting it. The reason most people can't get rid of old beliefs is because they make the fundamental mistake, the kind of the rookie error of thinking they are their beliefs. They attach their identity to the belief. And the first step to letting go, to unscrewing the rust on the screws, is to realize it's not me, it's just my beliefs. Do you create a separation from that label? A great example is in the medical profession. If you say, oh, I am a diabetic, I'm like, no, you're not. I am. I went to my doctor and my, you know, A1C is through the Roof and yeah, I need to inject you. I'm a diabetic. No. Your body is currently suffering from a condition that they call diabetes. So now you're separating the disease from self, which creates a gap that allows you to then look objectively at how you want to treat the disease. But if you say I am a after that, you're screwed. Nowhere to go. I just do what that I am as a diabetic. I take insulin. Why? That's what diabetics do. So you undo the label and realize that you know, I've got cancer. No, you don't. What do you mean? I do. I've just come back from my oncologist. No, your body has cancer. Your sense of identity, what makes you you is invisible. It's the most incredible part of being a human being when you realize the two words human relates to physical body. Being is non physical. You can't put being in a bottle. And what makes you you is the invisible. It's your hopes, dreams, values, goals, personality, your beliefs. If you take all of that out of you and put it into somebody else, it's you with a different body. So the human being is the perfect encapsulation of physical and non physical in one encapsulation. And if you combine that the non physical beliefs with the physical body, you've got nowhere to go. So just say, it's not me, it's just the beliefs that I have now. You can start to open a gap. Now, as an athlete, if you talk about high performance, you can start to say, okay, what kind of identity would best serve me as the person I most want to become? Are you an employee with hopes of one day starting your own business? Or are you a dynamic undercover entrepreneur in waiting two different identities, that is, one's going to spot opportunities a lot faster than the other. Are you a track athlete? Or let's take Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods a great example. What made Tiger woods different? Yes, his dad gave him the initial impetus, but if you read any of the autobiographies, became clear why he was going to become who we know him to be. On the course. Yeah, talking about off the course. But yeah, he could have chosen any identity. He could have chosen, like some of his friends, that he wanted to be a golf professional. He could have chose the identity, I want to be a PGA Tour winner. But he didn't. He chose a different identity. He said, no, I'm going to become the greatest golfer of all time. Now with that level of identity, when his friends that want to be professionals Quit hitting balls for the day. What do you think Tiger's still doing? So the first thing to look at when you want to do performance is what do you believe about who you are? And rather than look back over your shoulder at all the failures that you keep citing to try to put yourself down, ask, okay, what kind of identity would best serve me in terms of where I want to go? And a great example here to see the power of this is smoking. Why does smokers smoke? Because they're smokers. Now if you have a smoker who's quit and you say smoker, oh, you want a cigarette? Oh no, I've quit. And they have the identity of a smoker who's quit, there is a 90% plus chance that they will be smoking again within X amount of weeks or months. Why? Because their identity is I am a smoker who's engaging in the behavior of quitting, which is counter to my identity as a smoker. And identity will win over behavior every time. Whereas if you change your identity to I'm a non smoker and somebody offers you a cigarette, it's effortless. Why? Because I don't smoke. Whereas, oh, do you want a cigarette? I've quit. And you've got this push pulling willpower going on. So just by shifting your identity in relation to that old habit, you can increase your chances of winning exponentially. How does that apply in business? How does that apply as an athlete? How does that apply as a high performance parent? You get the idea.

I can attest to that one because I was able to finally stop smoking 40 years ago. And after struggling for a number of years, it was when I shifted my identity to becoming a non smoker. And at that point it became absolutely effortless. And I've never smoked again. So that's absolutely true. And I love you talking about identity because this is such an efficient use of our time and energy, our available energy, mental, physical, emotional energy and willpower and so forth. Because we could try to change every little belief, every little behavior piecemeal. But when we focus on the identity, that brings a whole set of beliefs and behaviors along with it. So just like we talked about that money blueprint before, rather than struggling again, it's easier just go in and change the blueprint, you know, then your system is cooperating with you to stay in that new blueprint here with identity, if we take on that identity, it's going to shift things. So in terms of identities, you know, in the world of affirmations, sometimes people will say, you know, like I'M a successful entrepreneur, I'm a success. You keep repeating that and that that may have, you know, some impact. But what if they say one of the distinction between that kind of affirmation, the kind of information would where someone would say to themselves repeatedly on a regular BAS morning or something, I'm absolutely committed to doing everything I need to do to train myself to become the successful entrepreneur I know I can be something like that. Or there's a commitment involved. And I wonder if there's a distinction between the power of kind of programming our mind in those different ways.

Great topic. And one of the first things that I will say is that affirmations rarely work for the majority of people, and sometimes they work by others. Kind of like what they call the law of attraction. People can't figure it out, so it's hazard, so they give up. But when you start to look at what's really going on, you have, I'm going to simplify things tremendously. Now, I'm a simple guy. You have a thinking center, let's call it the head, and you have a feeling center, let's call it the heart. And for an affirmation to have power, the heart and mind have to be united. You can say, I'm a successful entrepreneur, right? And you say that with your head and your heart's feeling like, yeah, but have you seen your bank balance? And the last two ideas I tried bond. There's no congruency. So you've got to create something that the statement means that your heart and mind can buy into. And doing your best to become something that's easy because you're not fighting past or current references that run counter to what you're trying to say. Now you stand in front of the room and say, oh, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy. And yep, someone comes and takes your furniture. You're deluding yourself. You stand in front of the mirror and say, yeah, I was born with the ability to generate abundance. I know that abundance is my birthright, and I'm going to do everything I can to attune myself into that frequency and live life at a level where I finally deserve what it is that I get. Now that's a different. You can buy into that. It's not saying, oh, I'm a millionaire. And you credit card debts through the roof because then there's no congruency. So, yeah, having an alignment, having an affirmation that is aspirational rather than counterfactual is a big part of that. As long as you can buy in, set yourself up to win. You don't say, I'm an athlete and you say, oh, I'm an Olympic gold. If you're not willing to go to be Olympic gold, that's not going to work. And speaking back to identity there.

Yeah.

You've got what I teach once a year, a health and vitality retreat. It's something I'm passionate about. Health and fitness is something I love. I'm 52 years old. I'm about to go and row across the Atlantic in a couple of months for raising money for mental health, all that kind of stuff. So I keep in shape, you know, health and not so much health. Health is just inherent as part of the body programming. But vitality is different. You know, that spark, that dynamism, that bounce out of bed early, stay up lately, effervescence of life. So I teach this health and vitality. And one of the things that I teach on the retreat, we do a couple of days physical mastery and we do mental emotional mastery and finally energetic, more spiritual side. But the biggest jump in strength increase and we benchmark, we take blood work. It's like, you know, this isn't woo woo. It's all is when I get to the emotional mastery day and people are confronted with the fact that the mind is either your best or your worst training pun. And it's not about the new fangled yeah. Ab exerciser that you saw at 3am on the infomercial. It's not about the new latest fangle spangle diet. Yeah. Plan or super pill. The biggest differentiator in the results that you get is who is walking in the gym. What is the identity you have as you go through that door. And we teach people how to build the gym identity because out of the archetypes of human personality, you don't want the lover sitting on the leg press. All right? Nor do you want the magician that's going to talk you out of why. Okay, it hurts and I'll do more tomorrow. No, you want the warrior. You want somebody that's showing up for the fight. Somebody that loves the taste of blood off his own sword. Right. If you pardon the metaphor. Right. Someone's going to walk up to that machine, that bench press and say, I'm back. Who walks in the gym. The identity you have going in is going to create your personal bests or is going to sell you out on it Was a waste of time showing up. Same gym, same training program, same body, same everything, different identity of who you consciously choose to enter the gym, as.

You'Ve spoken about, a flaw in the personal growth personal evolution industry. It's an acronym, I guess. G O, O P. I don't know if you call it goop. I wonder if you could talk about that and how. Because there's so many ways, you know, I mean, I think we all have a longing to improve ourselves and be our best selves and. But there's so many things that can get in our way. We undermine ourselves. We self sabotage ourselves. There's a constant world of distraction. There's a lot of misunderstanding and mistaken beliefs about personal growth. So understanding some of the pitfalls I think can be very helpful. So I'd love to hear about this one called goop.

So. Well, it ties into what I mentioned and what you referenced earlier about the difference between physical and emotional maturity. See, we don't get to choose whether we mature physically. It's part of the rule set. And you can take whatever vitamins you want and put on whatever fancy creams you want. I'm pretty sure that you and I look different now to what we did 30 years ago. Right? And we'll look a little different 30 years from now. That's just part of the rule set. But emotional maturity is a choice. And this where we come back to beliefs. There are a few key beliefs that if you were to just shift, it would transform your entire experience of who you are and your relationship to life and group forms a part of that. I'll give you an example. One of the greatest days in a human being's life, in my perception, my belief on the journey to emotional maturity is the day that you finally become okay not being liked. As opposed to how most people spend a lot of their life running around looking for somewhere else to reattach their umbilical cord. So when I say be okay not being liked, I don't mean purposely be disliked. I mean you're not driven by this really nasty, disgusting, debilitating disease that so many people suffer from called goop or a good opinion of other people. And to get out of goop, I'll take you through an awareness, I alluded right at the beginning of our conversation today that we star in a movie called the Movie of Our Life and nobody else stars in our movie. Even if you're a Siamese twin, you're going to dream differently. You're going to be in different scenes to each other. But if you are the star of the movie of your life, by definition that means everybody else only plays one of two roles. You will have A handful of supporting cast, which is a spouse, a sibling, a best friend, a coworker, or what have you. People that appear regularly in scenes in your life. But the vast majority of people and people that you suffer from goop, from nothing more than film extras in your movie, that's not being. Yeah, belittling. Let me give you the definition of film extra. A film extra is somebody who you're no longer thinking about when they're not in your current scene, person that serves you at Starbucks, person that put gas in your car, the person walking down the street when you walk past them. And we're all thinking, and here's the challenge, because we're the star of our movie, we think that everybody sees us as the star of our movie, but they don't because they're not starring in our movie. They're starring in a different movie, their own. Which means by definition, we only ever play one of two roles in everybody else's movie. At best, a handful of people, supporting cast, but 99.9% of people you meet in your movie throughout your. The entire length of your lifetime, your movie are nothing more. You are nothing more than a film extra in their movie. Which means that most people don't care enough about you to even bother to give an opinion. Do you know why? Because they're too busy being worried about what they think you're thinking of them. So everybody's walking around in this bubble of self importance thinking, oh, I wonder what people are thinking of me in my bubble of self importance. Not realizing that everybody else is walking around in their bubble of self importance thinking, I wonder what people are thinking of me in my bubble of self importance. Boom. You pop that bubble, you have freedom, social freedom, goop freedom. You no longer. Yeah, oh, I can't go to the supermarket without putting on my lipstick or my makeup. Why? Oh, because I'll get judged. People don't care. They're too busy starring in their own movie, being worried about you judging them for their shade of lipstick. So goop is a. When you wake up and realize it, I'm finally okay not being liked because I realize it's somebody else's projection from their movie. It's not a reflection of how I'm showing up in mine. That's an empowering belief to have. There's probably one other in the time we have that I'd give people to look at. And this is a game changer. When you finally come to terms the fact that life is a growth centric experience, not a comfort centric. Experience, you'll stop fighting the lessons and challenges that this loving universe is trying to give you under the guise of what you're labeling as problems you're running away from. And when you finally come to terms with that, you know, if life is growth centric, go to nature. You take any mammal, last time I checked, we were in that category. Mammals, if they perceive an external situation as a threat, it can lose up to 30% of their muscle strength. If that same mammal perceives the same external situation as a challenge, it can gain up to 30% of its muscle strength. Cortisol will flood the muscles and it will stand there and get stronger rather than flee. And then if it's attacked, it's got nothing to fight back with. So what's it trying to teach us? So if we realize that if I see life as a growth centric experience, let's go to the athlete in the gym. Let's just say that you're an athlete, but nobody ever told you you were an athlete. And you show up at this gym you've been forced to go to and there's this psychopath called a personal trainer that's trying to make you do push ups until you throw up, run on the treadmill till you can't breathe. And your mindset is, how can I do as little as possible to tick the right boxes so I can get out of there? But let's just say that you knew you were an athlete and your mission was, no, I am going for Olympic gold. How do you show up in the gym? I'll tell you, if you're not throwing up in 30 minutes, you want your money back. You've got a whole different perspective on the challenge in front of you because of the identity and the mission that you know you're here now. You were born an athlete into the gym of life. And most people bitch about the fact they don't like the workout and then wonder why the person train is chasing around trying to force them on the treadmill. You could chunk it down one more level. Let's go to the body of that athlete. Now, when you're doing your barbell curls and you get to that last burning rep, what is the muscle fiber doing from its perspective? It's sending messages to the brain. Pain. Stop. What are you doing? I'm being broken down. You're destroying me here. I can't handle anymore. They're the messages that you're getting. And if you take the perspective of the muscle fiber, you're going to sell out. But if you set the perspective of the athlete, you're proud you just busted out not one, but two more reps with everything you got and you can't lift your arms for the next 10 minutes you're walking around with a smile. The question that I invite everybody to look at is which perspective do you want to live from? Perspective that life is a growth centric experience, in which case you will be rewarded. Or the perspective of still thinking that we live under the illusion that life is a comfort centric experience, in which case you're going to run from your problems and get chased by them even faster. Now don't get me wrong, a growth centric experience, not every single day is the last burning rep. But if you don't know how to take that on from the perspective of the athlete, you're in for a sorry movie.

Absolutely. And I think that's really a major distinction in life is to really understand how many levels we're a little bit hardwired to be comfort seeking creatures. And that's counterproductive to anything we want to do in life and having that focus on growth that we're also hardwired for growth. And something I know you talk about leading a heart centric life and you mentioned before the importance of connecting the head and the heart. Even if we really want to create affirmations that'll really change our beliefs. And you also mentioned Tony Robbins before that you worked with him. And one of the things that Tony often says, I don't know if he originated, but I always really resonated with this, he says what really leads to lasting sense of fulfillment, life satisfaction, happiness, the genuine, lasting kind is the deeply felt sense that we're growing, that we're growing, that we know we're growing, we deeply feel we're growing, we're changing, we're growing, we're challenging ourselves, we're growing. And the other is the deeply felt sense that we're contributing. So I wonder if you could talk about that part of it for a moment that would really complete the cycle of a change in identity, a change of how we're being to get into this flow that would really lead to optimizing performance and success. When we bring in the contribution factor.

Absolutely. And it's a symbiotic relationship. We have to grow first. You cannot give that which you don't have. You can't give from empty. We call that the martyr pattern. And it's really a self protection mechanism against the fear of being judged or rejected or the fear that you're not enough. So I will keep giving and giving and giving until there's nothing left, hoping that you'll be my friend, that you won't reject me, that you'll think good of me, that you'll be nice to me. And we see that a lot in women, unfortunately, just because of their tendency to nurture, they want to be the master. They want to. My mother was the same.

Well, society offers that identity to women, right? That's how you're going to get your needs met. And in world of caregiving, where I've done a lot of training, we actually call that sometimes pathological altruism. People will follow that course to their own detriment even.

Absolutely. And then wonder why, you know, if I've only got two love points in my love bank, but if I give one of them to you, will you give me some back? And of course, get to empty pretty fast and then wonder why they're miserable. But so you have to grow first. Why? Because you need to mature. You're here in a growth centric environment and you hit the nail on the head. The body has a nervous system that is hardwired for comfort, which is very useful sitting on an ant's nest, right. Or too close to a fire. But your soul, the thing that makes you. You spoke about it. That is hardwired for growth. We are in Earth school. We're here to learn how to grow so that we can contribute. And there's no middle ground. If you take a tree and you see a tree that's ever been felled, there's rings in that tree that show the age of the tree. And what you don't see halfway through that ring is where it's. There's a big gap where it decided to take a couple of years off from growing. No, it is a continuous. If you're not growing, you're going backwards. So if we know that growth is a continual experience, we know that physiologically, but emotionally, mentally, energetically, we're here to grow up. We're here to become an elder, we're here to become somebody that can contribute back to society. And the more that tree grows, the more shade it can provide, the more fruit it can provide, the more homes to critters and insects it can provide. It is growing and contributing. It's symbiotic. It's the rules of nature. See, animals don't die of old age in nature. Have you figured that out? The animal equivalent of a retirement home. When an animal can no longer contribute, it contributes itself to somebody else's lunch. The Lions go for the old and the sick and the young, but, you know, the old and the sick and you can't run away from a lion anymore. Guess what?

Right?

So if you realize that, you know, being able to grow so that we can contribute is not a some sort of altruistic philosophy that has its basis in stoicism or altruism or anything. No, it's the laws of nature. I didn't make them up. I just look out of my window and see it operating everywhere. And if you want to try to buck that trend, good luck. You can swim upstream for a while, but at the end of the day, the current's going to win. Growth and contribution is ultimately why we're here, but you need to get it in the right order. I need to grow first so that I can contribute. And if I'm growing selfishly, I just want to acquire lots of money. I just want to be rich. I want the gold medal on the track so that I can prove that I'm the best that's got a time limit before life will start giving you some nudges or some slaps if you're like, nah, I want to be able to grow my wealth. And you see this with the people that finally get to the top of success mountain, you know, financially, what do they do? They give most of it away. They become philanthropic. They become people that get more satisfaction giving it away than they did actually making it. And so growth and contribution are inherent. And if your business or your department, if you're not associated to it from a place of, how can I add value? How can I use this as a vehicle to serve, to contribute, to give more into the game that I'm taking out of the game, then nature's going to put some pretty tough walls up. You're going to exhaust yourself banging your head to try to knock down. As soon as you align with the current of the river, you don't have to swim very hard to move, fight the current. Different story.

So, as we near the end of our conversation here, Peter, I'm going to ask you how people can learn more about your work. But first, I have one last question. You know, you've worked with a lot of people, a lot of clients, you do a lot of speaking. Is there one belief that you run into again and again that most gets in the way of people's performance and success in life? You probably alluded to some already, but I wonder if there's one that is right up there in the top five or something, or even number one that really tends to get in the way of people's performance and success person life.

There's many. But if I was to pick a major culprit, what comes up again and again when I ask people the question, what's the biggest lie you tell yourself? And consistent answer is, I'm not worthy, I'm not good enough, I don't deserve. You can see where it comes from, especially with a school system that's designed to berate people that don't fit a certain criteria and how they can parrot back useless information to questions that are largely irrelevant in today's world so they can get a piece of paper signed by somebody they never met to validate their intelligence. That's another conversation. But the belief that you need to do something in order to be worthy of love is essentially what it comes down to when the reality is, if I was to give you one affirmation to leave with today, that could probably make the biggest shift, it would be this. No matter what I've done, no matter what I've not done, I'm worthy of love.

Beautiful. And you know, I completely agree with you. And I think getting in touch with that unconditional self worth, that unconditional, which builds on a kind of unconditional confidence is really foundational life. And one of the ways we discovered, I mean, I think there's all kinds of contemplative ways we can discover that, you know, introspective, meditative ways and so forth, but also by just getting in the game. When we get in the game and we jump in the pool and learn how to swim, we get in the game, we start touching into even it's not dependent then on playing that game, but we touch into something deep in ourselves that we realize was always there and that's that unconditional worthiness. So yeah, I think that's a great place to bring our conversation to a close here. So, Peter, how do people find out more about your work?

My website is petersage.com I'm all over social. I try to give as much as I can. You know, if you've got people that are just seeking some general furthered insight into some of my philosophy, that's great. My book the Inside Track is probably has been very blessed to have been called by some of the greatest names in personal growth, from Brian Tracy to Kevin Trudeau to John Asraf to John demartini to Les Brown to one of the greatest books ever written in terms of demonstrating techniques on how to live, how to conquer adversity under harsh conditions. So yeah, I'm available to try to help as many people as I can. I will be gone on the ocean for two months on there. That's how long it's going to take me to row across the Atlantic and that's rowing two hours on, two hours off. That's 24, seven for two months.

I'm kind of astounded. I'm even sitting here having a conversation with someone who's about to row across the Atlantic. That's pretty amazing. Will you have kind of a tender boat with you or are you going to be out there by yourself?

It's called the world's toughest row and we're Team cheerfulness, taken after the adage cheerfulness in the face of adversity. So yeah, teamcheerfulness.com as our website and there's about 30 boats from, yeah, fours fives down. I'm in the pairs so that's myself and a childhood friend. And somebody has to be rowing at all times, otherwise there's no engine. It's a small boat. You've got solar panels, you've got a desalinator, powdered food and you've got to be self sufficient. The nearest human being is probably in the International Space Station. The nearest land is 5km underneath you and the nearest boat if there's an emergency is any one time about four days away.

Wow. And it'll take roughly two months to make the crossing.

Depends on the weather. Everything's weather dependent and the Atlantic can kind of make you like a toothpick in a Jacuzzi, you know, it's going over two months. There's never been a period of calm for two months. So we're going to hit a storm, we're going to hit this, you know, just expect it's part of the game. That's part of the gym workout that if I want to be the athlete that I want to be, I'm going to have to. Yeah. Go out and deal with.

Well, I certainly commend you on that. So you're certainly walking to talk anyway. So that's great. I hope that's inspiring to our audience. Really illuminating and inspiring conversation.

Ana, thank you. I love what you're doing. I love what you're bringing to the people that I know are going to benefit and certainly in today's society and today's time in history, I think we need this more than ever.

Thank you and wish you all the best with that Atlantic crossing. May the wind be at your back there.

Thank you.

Be well. Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges us 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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