Preston Smiles: The Abundance Secret EVERY Leader Needs!

Today, you're going to get to hear from Preston Smiles, a world guru in abundance and conscious living. He's got over 400,000, close to 500,000 people following him and engaging with his amazing work, his books, his podcast, and as part of Mindset and Meaning Week. I know you're going to love this episode. The Lead On Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages.co nz. Preston Smiles, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Blessings and blessings, James. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so glad that we get a chance to sit down because I've watched you over the last number of years. I've been really enjoying where you've taken your brand, your message, how you've helped serve. You've transformed people's lives. You've got hundreds of thousands of humans around the world who are inspired by you, who choose to subscribe and follow to your way of thinking and being. And I feel like this is the time right now where we need to talk about how we create abundance, how we welcome it, how we nurture it, whatever it is, to make our lives more abundant. I believe you're the guy on the planet that we need to talk to. So thank you for creating this space. And we're going to talk about your book. I mean, I just think it's a transformational work. But before we get there, let's talk about Preston, where he started and was he born into mega wealth and therefore it's just kept generating itself or. Or were there some challenges there? And, you know, what did you navigate that's helped shape how you see the world today?

Yeah, man. First of all, thank you for that beautiful, gracious intro.

Abundance to me is one of the most important topics, period. Because.

I believe that we live on a planet that is governed by laws, right? There are certain laws that none of us have an issue with, like gravity or buoyancy, but there are other laws that.

Are at play, and how those laws get enacted is by way of our abundance consciousness. And it's super important that we focus on and remember, right, who and what we really are. And so to give you a little bit of background and backdrop on me, very early on, I was placed in special education, special needs, and my parents would fight about what was wrong with me. And what they didn't know was that I was dyslexic and I just didn't have a standardized brain, therefore I did bad on standardized test.

I was in classes with down syndrome children and Asperger's children and my 7 year old and 8 year old brain could not distinguish between this system and these adults making a mistake and the egocentric way in which I saw myself. And so I gained an identity of being the dumb one, the stupid one in the family, the burden to my family. And so out of that identity I became an out of the way kid where.

I adapted in such a way where I made myself have no needs. I was this perfect little nice Christian boy who had no needs. And I was rewarded for not having any needs. But the truth was that I had a lot of needs. I just buried them, suppressed them and hid them away from the people who I love the most because I didn't want to add to their stress. Children in general adapt based on who their parents are. If you have sad parents, you might become a cheer upper comedian type kid. If you have stressed out parents, you may become a out of the way kid. If you have very angry parents, you might become a shy kid. And these are all safety strategies and mechanisms that we use to stay safe. And the problem is that most adults never come out of that. And so they spend the rest of their lives in a safety strategy and pattern that was formed in childhood. And then they believe that's who they are. And so in my work I remind people that that's not who you are, it's who you became. And now what's possible right as we begin to sort of cut the second umbilical cord because the first one gives us life, the second one holds us back from life. And so now going back to my story.

Out of that identity, I joined the gang by the time I was 11 years old in Los Angeles and started smoking weed. And I had a, a moment where my dad caught me smoking and he sat me down and he said, I want you to take 24 hours to think about everybody, you know who smokes weed and does drugs. And if you want their life, then you can keep going. But if you don't want their life, then I, I want to challenge you to make a different decision. And he left me in it at 11. Well, 24 hours goes by, come back, we have a conversation and I say, yeah, I'd rather be like Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson who were my heroes at the time. And they don't smoke weed. So I think I'm not going to smoke. And my dad says that's a great choice. And let me tell you something about you. You're a leader and if everybody else is going left, but something in you says you're going right and you need to go right. You'll do it anyway. That's how much of a leader you are. Now I'm 11.

He tells me this at 11. Fast forward to 15 years old. My best friend Scott calls me to go out and drink and do these things called run outs, where we go into a liquor store and pretend like we're 21, even though we're 15 and 16 and 17. And we grab the liquor and we run out before paying for it. And we. I had done 30 of these at this point. And Scott called me and he said, yo, we're going out tonight and we're going to do the damn thing. And something internally said, no, don't go. My body literally said, don't go. Then my dad's voice popped in my head. You're a leader. Everybody else is going this way, but you feel like it's not go the opposite way. So he's. We're going back and forth. And I say, man, I'm not going. Hang up the phone. Within one hour of us hanging up that phone, every single person in that blue Astro van that I was in the night before that and the night before that and the night before that, every single one of them was shot. And my best friend Scott was shot in the head and died. And this was a really, really big moment for me on multiple levels. One, survivor's guilt. Two.

I couldn't even spell intuition. But it hit me, right like, I'm 15. I didn't even understand what that was. And this is, you know, a long time ago. I'm 45.

And then what's crazier is that at his funeral, I didn't cry. And I didn't cry because by that time, the whole big boys don't cry thing had been beat into me where I didn't even have access to those tears. I was numb. I was suppressed and repressed. And this is really huge because of something that happens much later on where.

To sort of give you the Cliff Notes.

I walked away from that so scared that I ended up going to a different part of the state. I went to Pennsylvania, to an all white high school. And I had this moment at that high school where I was in the back of this kid Brad's BMW and they're listening to Outkast, Tupac and Biggie. But at the time it was Outkast. And there was a song called the Wheels of Steel. And I can hear it playing even now. And I'm in the backseat of this kid's BMW. We're all. They all have 40s and they're smoking weed. I don't smoke weed anymore. But I'm looking at it at this scenario and I'm like, this is odd because the kids at my other school, the one that's where the gang activity and the danger and all that stuff, they're doing the same exact thing that these super rich kids are doing. But these kids are going to Yale and these kids are going to jail. And that correlation for me, again, at 15 and a half, I was like, like, it was like I peered through the veil for a moment and I instantly knew that life was a game and that.

No one was coming to save me. And so I began to gamify and figure out how to win in life. And this was like another step in me reclaiming my power. Because of all the social and historical programming and conditioning for, for boys, for black boys, for boys in America, like Christian boys, like all the layers of who I thought I was supposed to be, that was a part of me cutting those cords and then reclaiming who I was in that process.

Really powerful. Preston, thank you for sharing that. I mean, myself listening to it. I'm sure the listener listening right now as well is going, wow. I mean, you grew up in LA amongst some big challenges, potential, you know, fatality at a young age. You went with your gut instinct. You realized that it was actually existed and that you should listen. You had a dad who for whatever reason was going to support you. Either way, it's going to support you to go, hey, if you want to be the weed smoker and do that, cool. Well, I'm your dad still. However, you're a leader. And he kind of sowed that seed to say that, you know, you've got more in you. Then he started to, I guess, help shape your identity. You mentioned the word identity at the start and I want to talk about that because does our identity who we see ourselves as in the world, how we see ourselves in a relationship, how we see ourselves with money, does that identity shape our existence and our reality and what we attract?

Absolutely it does. It's some of the most important work we can do. Because again, what most people think is who they are is not actually who they are, but rather who they became. And so in my work, I teach that you can't intervene in a world you can't actually see. And so said differently, you can't disown that which you've never owned. And so some of the biggest work for all of us is to go, oh.

You Know, I grew up like this. And all of these of courses, right? Of course, of course you open the door for a woman. Of course you pay. Of course big boys don't cry. Of course this is how a man and a woman should be. Of course this is how you drive all of these of courses that live in our bodies.

Most of them aren't ours. They are passed down. They are inherited. We now know in biology and science that you can inherit something three generations back. And so some of the biggest work is remembering who and what we really are. And in my opinion, we are unique emanations of the most high. Call that God, call it spirit, call it Jesus, call it Allah, call it source, call it whatever you want to call it. But I believe that each of us is unique, divine. Snowflakes, isness, dancing. God re experiencing itself through us and through our lens. And so my job, even before we started this, you said, you know, is there anything that can make this better? And I said, my job is to serve. God writes the checks, in my opinion. And so even in my new book, Spiritual Millionaire, it's less about how to get more money and more about how to re identify with the truth of your being, where you become a lighthouse, a beacon, a vessel for something bigger and greater than yourself. And so therefore.

You bring your own weather. Most people are at the whims of their own weather. I've been coaching and supporting top leaders and multi, multi millionaires. I have friends with private jets I hang with all the time. I'm usually the richest person in the room, even though they have way more money than me. And it's because I've been working on these principles for so long. I was rich before I was ever rich. Right when I had to beat up Prius and I was, you know, basically living out of it and teaching surf lessons in la. I was rich then and I'm rich now. When I got the G wagon and the, and the houses and all the other stuff, because none of that stuff is my God. And again.

When we get.

That the fruit doesn't belong to the tree, that the fruit belongs to the ecosystem, then my main job is to take care of my soil so that my tree can produce the fruit. And then I give it away. Right? I create value in the world. Yeah.

I resonate with that. And what's interesting, Preston, is an example, you know, so I can think of you as you're explaining who you work with and who you coach. I have a friend who is an executive chairman of an incredibly successful international commercial real Estate company. And people see him quite buttoned up. They see him with his, you know, beautiful suit and you know, his nice glasses and his nice car and he's got, you know, he's very straight, lace. But actually when him and I sit, have conversations, he has been talking about abundance for longer than I've been alive. He went to the original Brian Tracy events, you know, all the different events you can think of with the people that helped bring the secret to the world. He knows that work, he lives that work and he's imparting that with the 20 year olds and the 30 year olds of the world now. So it's interesting because I feel a lot of people in the corporate world and some of our listeners are in that world. Sometimes this idea of it's all there for the taking in an abundance, it can be that they put a brick wall up like, oh come on, you got to work harder and harder and more hours to make the money.

Yes.

So they sometimes have a resistance. So let's talk to them for a second. This soil that we want to around us, if we nurture it, the tree is healthy. The tree will produce the fruit which will be the abundance of health, relationships, wealth, whatever it might be. So how do we nurture the soil? What is the soil? What are some of those principles?

Yes, I will go there, but before I do, I want to speak to something. There's a book called Healing the shame that binds you. And in that book he talks about the overachiever and the screw up, the F up having the same toxic shame but different strategies to hide in it. The overachiever says, I'll make more money, I'll get shinier cars, I'll get a bigger house so that you don't see how much I hate myself. The screw up says I'll just mess it all up so that you see how much I hate myself and I don't have to be on the hook for anything. I say all that to say when I work with my clients, I explain to them that there's only two games ever happening, the outside end game and the inside out game. The outside end game, no matter what level you're playing it at, says that if my bank account looks like this, if my employees think about me like this, if my daughter, wife, best friend talks about me in this way, if I get this many likes and comments on my social media, if, if, if, if, if all outer, if my house is big, then I'm happy.

Well, to me that's a sophisticated addict. You know, I worked with this guy who had $100 million. And I said that exact thing, same thing to him on our discovery call. I said, you're an addict. And he was like, what? I was like, yeah, you're addict. You're constantly chasing the next carrot. It's bigger carrots, right? You got faster cars and all that stuff, but you're still scared and small on the inside. And I said it from the most loving way, but it was true. And he said, you're hired. And I said, fantastic. Because you know, I'm not going to use the language I use there, but I'm like, your stuff isn't bigger than mine and I think you're beautiful. It's not either or. It's not a win lose. It's a win win here. That's what we're supposed to do with each other. So some of the principles you asked me for.

Understanding the abundance game.

I don't think we can find a multi, multi millionaire somebody. And not just money, right? Because abundance is, is not a, a number in your bank account. It's something you tune into, right? It's something you bring, it's something you experience. It's a state of being and consciousness that you bring to the table. Again, an unhappy journey will never produce a happy ending. Happy endings are a byproduct, a side effect from living truly, from an attitude of gratitude, not writing it down and doing these routine things to say, you check them off, but literally being moved by the sun, by the wind, by the laugh of your child, right? I drop my kids off every day and I play a game called Nana Nabubu with my kids and all the other kids and I chase them all around. And that time for me, that's sacred time that I get to chase these little kids around and play tag and tickle them and chase them like I'm winning not because I have more stuff, but because I understand that all of this can be taken away at any given moment. Now I'm going to flash back to 2008 when the stock market crashed and all the real estate went away. People jumped out of their offices and committed suicide because they were playing the outside in game. All of their value and wealth was, was in the. The stuff outside. And so again, to me, a lot of people think there's. And they found this out during COVID that what they called job security was not actually secure, right? All of this stuff can be taken away. The question is, what do you have if it's when it's there and when it's not there. What's the stuff that you can sink your teeth into? And.

What I've come to understand.

Is.

A lot of life is about range and capacity. And I say in the beginning of our workshops, my wife and I run a workshop called the Bridge Experience. We do all over the world. First one we ever did was in New Zealand, by the way. Really? Yep.

That's epic.

Seven people showed up. Seven, Right. This is the early beginnings.

You come back again, I guarantee there's going to be a hell of a lot more than seven.

Yeah, yeah. We were just in Australia and It was like 200. Right. It's. It's so interesting and beautiful. But we say at the beginning of our workshop.

That your job in this workshop is to build a somatic body that can hold everything you say you want and then some. And a somatic body means you actually have the capacity. One of the laws in this book is the law of a. Yes. I believe that the universe, God, Buddha, whatever you want to call it, the quantum field is always saying yes. And like electricity. Electricity never says no. Electricity says one thing, and that is, do you have the infrastructure for what you're plugging up? If you have the infrastructure for that iPhone, game on. You have the infrastructure for that Tesla Game on. You have the infrastructure for that city game on. The body, the somatic body for what you are calling in. A lot of people manifest stuff. And you can get the shiny stuff, but can you feel it? Do you have the. Do you have the spaciousness to hold it, to be with it, to use it, to circulate it? What is your relationship? I know people who are just as rich as me or richer, who aren't rich in spirit because they operate from scarcity. They're so afraid of losing it all that they're constantly running and chasing. That's not rich.

That doesn't feel good.

At all. And it's not sustainable. So my work is nervous system work, somatic body work. You have the range, the capacity to be in tears one moment over, you know, a moment with your wife or partner, and then to be a monster in the boardroom in the beautiful, most beautiful way. Because it's not either or. Most people think, ah, if. If I go this route, then I'll become a hippie and I'll just be crying all the time. No, there's so much space in between. Right. And I'm living proof of that. And I work with so many people who get it. You can be both, you can be all of the above, because that's who we are and what we come from.

I have to agree with that. And it's interesting. I think sometimes we're expected to be the same person with the same energy in every setting that we're in. And actually that's just not how it works. It's like there's different settings, scenarios, and we have to be able to adapt. And I love the fact that you go straight to this tangible understanding of the nervous system. We can all get that, we all understand that we have a nervous system. And so the word abundance when you go, okay, I'm going to park that for a second and we're going to talk about somatic. Somatics and nervous system. Great, so how do we elevate from a somatic standpoint? How do we go about doing that?

Yes. Okay. So this is really big and beautiful and it's literally the work that I do. I have a thing called Spiritual Marina Academy, which is online. I have the bridge experience, which is in person. I've been doing this for 10 years straight. So.

All of us come into the world semi blank slates, right? We have, we have stuff in our DNA from our mom, her mom and her mom, our dad, his dad and his dad. And we're born into beliefs and interpretations. And those beliefs and interpretations shape and how we see and view the world.

Also how our mom and dad's relationship with money, with the opposite sex, all of these things play a part in how our psyche and our nervous system is being formed. We don't get full capacity of prefrontal cortex, the front of our brain, until about 12 years old. So prior to that, we're operating mainly out of the reptilian brain, which is the animal part of us. The fight, flight, freeze and appease part of us, the part of us that doesn't have as much executive function. Right. So anything that occurs, and I'll give you an example. Let's say.

There'S a term in trauma work and in somatic work.

A quote that says the body remembers what the mind forgets. Now just park that for a moment. The body remembers what the mind forgets. Now I'm going to give you an example of what that would look like because we've worked with people who've had this.

Early on, parents used to employ this method called cry it out. And the cry it out method, which I've done. I did it with our first kid, I have four children. Did it with our four kid, our first kid. And I won't say I regret it, but we've had to you know, combat some of this. The cry it out method essentially states, let's say you're James, you're crying in your crib, and you want your mom, you want your dad, and you're three, you're two, you're seven months. So you're egocentric, meaning if something bad happens, you think it's your fault. Now you're crying and crying and crying, say, mommy, come get me, Mommy, come get me. And they don't come.

The effects of that.

Because people will come into my workshops and they'll say, I'm just. I'm so anxious all the time. Anytime I get the love that I want, I just want to hold it. Anytime I manifest something, I feel like I just have to figure out how to not lose it. And they have all this stuff coursing through their bodies. And what they don't understand is that that cry it out method left an imprint in their nervous system. And what the. Because there's so many bits of information occurring at any given moment, we delete, we distort, and we generalize. So there's all this stuff going on. And our supercomputer called our body, which is a form of intelligence, is scanning all the time, deleting, distorting, and generalizing. And so anytime it picks up on something that resembles something that hurt us, it will push it away, sabotage it, or send out ring the alarm, the amygdala, and we will go into these altered states, Fight, flight, freeze and appease, new one or fawn. And we will figure out how to survive with these things. Now, the problem with this is when we're in the survival brain, we are not in the executive function. We are not in the creative brain. We are not in the beauty of the world brain. We're in the run from a saber to tiger brain. Now, no problem if that happens once a month or even once every three months. But most humans, it's happening 30 times a day.

And they're not allowing it to complete. The cycle must complete. Okay, I know I'm jumping around, but I'm gonna make this all make sense. We're now in the caves. You and I are in our cavemen. And we walk out of that cave, and all of a sudden we hear a rustling in the bush. And a saber toothed tiger jumps out. Boom. The amygdala fires off, the body goes into fight, flight, freeze and appease. We figure out whatever we need to do to stay safe. Okay, the Saber 2 tiger is gone. Saber 2 tiger is gone. Somebody else got killed. Well, you and I would need to give our body the signal. Okay.

It's okay now. We're safe. We can return back to executive functioning. We can be a regular human again. We can, we can love people again. We can. But instead, what, what modern day humans do is they have 30 of those happening a day and then they watch stuff on social media and then they have this new term called shared fate where you watch somebody die, or you watch somebody trip, or you watch somebody go through something and your.

Mirror neurons fire off and you now feel what they felt. It's all connected. Well, okay, 30 times a day, what would that equal? Well.

If you look at the statistics of what happens, I think it's like 80% of doctor visits are psychosomatic, meaning they have no freaking clue what's actually happening. Well, as somebody in the trauma and nervous system space, I know exactly what's happening. It's the body ringing the bell saying, bro, you did not process what happened to you at 7, nor did you process what happened to you at 14. Nor did you process that moment where you came too quick when you were having marital relations with that girl and then you felt shame and then you went to shame spiral, but you suppressed it. So we're suppressing, suppressing, suppressing, suppressing. And, and this last piece, I'll say, if you try to push a beach ball underwater, where's it going to go?

It's going to slide out. Yep, it's going to slide out in places that maybe you didn't want it to slide out. And so what we're seeing across the board, and this is why so many people, but men especially, come to me after, I mean, seven years later like, yo, that was the most life changing thing I've ever done in my life. It's because we're going directly to the scariest, ugliest, deepest, most shameful parts of, of these humans and helping them process it and move it out of their body. Because talk therapy is not enough. That's just talk. That's head, that's intellect. The body has caught all this stuff and it needs a release. A release, A release. That's nervous system work.

That's massive. It's interesting as you were sharing that few things came to mind. The body keeps the score, obviously. Incredible body of work by Bessel and.

Mast and Kip. Probably more recently I've been learning a little through Maston's work around nervous system. So I really resonate with what you're saying around, like what we need to do in the work and how we approach it for the person that's listening right now that's going, whoa, whoa, whoa. Where's the clinical psychologist in your work? Where's the, you know, they want to know all that stuff.

Yes.

What message do you have for them to say, hey, this is safe and you're still with us?

Yeah, yeah. You can find everything. We've had doctors, clinical psychologists, everybody come to our workshops and go, literally, this is textbook, bro. How did you guys figure this out? And we literally have. Including Mastin. Mastin is a good friend of mine. We all know each other, everybody in the trauma space. We text, we talk to each other.

You can look at any of our work and go, oh, I found that. I saw that in that book. Or I read that here, or I learned that in this college course. It's all. We just weaved it together. So for me, I'm self taught, self led. This is just something I care about. And I care about it, James, because I almost died. What I didn't tell you about in my story is at 25 years old.

I had a heart condition come up. I found myself in a cardiologist's office. And that moment, sitting there with these 75 year olds and these 60 year olds and I'm 25, and this cardiologist basically saying, hey, you got two choices. You can take pills for the rest of your life and regulate your heartbeat, or you can look at your stress and your diet. And I went cold turkey in that moment. I went straight vegan, I went down the rabbit hole, and I healed myself.

By addressing all the wounds and trauma and all the places where I didn't cry, where I didn't feel. There's nothing, literally nothing in our work that you cannot find in the top clinical psychologists, like neuroscience, all of this, all of the above. It's literally all there. And you got to do it how you want to do it.

A lot of times, and I'll say this very lightly, a lot of times.

People in some of those spaces can unconsciously do more harm than good. Because it's the idea if all you have is a hammer, then you're just constantly looking for nails. And so if all I work through or work with is, let's call it attachment theory, and every single person that comes to me has to be an attachment theory, right? If all I work with is ifs and parts work, then everybody I talk to has to be parts work, right? If all I work through and work with is trauma work, then I have to put everything through the lens of trauma. Well, I'm the type of person where I went into all of those spaces, extracted the best.