5 Ways To Finally Break Free From Narcissistic Control Feat. DoctorRamani and Gabor Maté

How would you define transformation? Like, what does that even mean? Because there's, you know, there could be the. The fluffy spiritual ways that we can look at it, but, you know, there's. What does that mean?

So to me, transformation is not like a. A wholesale 180, but it's actually an orientation of a person back to themselves and seeing themselves accurately. That's what transformation is to me.

So is it possible to heal from narcissistic abuse without constantly focusing on the narcissist? And. And if so, how do you do that?

The only way to heal from narcissistic abuse is to not focus on the narcissist. Right?

The understanding.

The narcissist piece is to me is.

Like the module one.

It's like the first grade of it, all right? You need to understand what you're up against. You need. That helps inform the dynamics and the. Really, the it's not you of it all, but from there on in, it's all you. It's about you. That was the thing that happened that tripped you up, that shape your identity, that basically the only way the relationship works is if we quit ourselves and become what they want us to become. So that's why the COVID of the book is always these layers, right? Because it's really meant to be an excavation. You're going back and finding the little shards of pottery that made you.

There's so many more questions I could ask you. We could. We could do this for a long time. What did. What did I not ask you that I should have.

I'm going to ask you a question. How about we do it that way?

Love it, right?

Because you work in the addiction space.

And this is something. Interestingly, in the last year and a half, I've been asked to talk to you about what are your feelings about what we find in the science about the overlaps between narcissism and addiction?

Well, I think we find people whose dents match our dents. And so if we heal ourselves, the relationships that are no longer expanding or contracting us tend to go away. I approach everything from is this person, is this situation, is this feeling expanding me, or is it contracting me? When I was in active addiction, I was not responding to life, meaning not being responsible. Because what is responsibility? It's. It's responding with ability. And so I was reacting to life all the time. And if you are around a reactive narcissist, because my view of narcissists is they're setting off bombs, they leave a lot of shrapnel constantly, right? And so to remove some games in life, the only way you win is you don't play and you have to get out of these games that you're not winning. And like Gab Mormonte, who we're going to be with here in a few minutes, you know, he has that, that term. The question is not why the addiction, but why the pain? So I view addiction from the lens of it is a solution. It's not a very good solution. It's a solution, but if you're lonely, if you're hurting, if you're anxiety ridden, if you're depressed, you're going to look for a way to scratch the itch. And the narcissistic supply is very similar. You know, like, why was Al Anon created? Or you know, codependence. Anonymous. Right. Who? I, you know, I know Ken Richardson, who's created, you know, coda, because you become addicted to the person, to the, to, to the crazy making. And so I think the link between addiction and narcissism in a lot of ways, if you feel broken, if you feel hurt, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of like cotton candy doesn't have real nutrition, but it gives you that hit does. And it's, there's a narcissistic hit. And so I don't know if I'm answering the question very well. The, the way that I look at it though is like, man, it's kind of like the whole purpose of your latest book, it's not you, is to heal yourself. And if you heal yourself, you can, you can't free fully remove yourself oftentimes from it, but you can definitely put up better boundaries. And I think, I believe everyone can find peace and healing if they stick with it long enough. And it may not have to always be super long. I mean, you can, you know, every passing moment is another chance to turn it all around. Yeah, I think that was from the really wacky movie Vanilla sky years ago. So I think we could have that. But, but ultimately it's heal yourself and remove yourself from those relationships and be aware of it. Last thing I'll say is that I never noticed. I ignored red flags and you helped me a lot with this. I ignored a lot of red flags because I always, I, I felt I'm an empathetic person. Let's give people a chance, right?

Yep.

And, but they were there. But what I didn't notice at all with the yellow flags.

Yeah.

Didn't even occur to me. And so as, as I build up my Awareness. As I built up my awareness, I've gotten a lot healthier relationships. What I have the longest stretch of addiction recovery that I've ever had.

Right.

And so, yeah.

And then last question, because this is Genius Network, and it's for entrepreneurs, My last question to you is, do you feel a person can be a successful entrepreneur without narcissism?

Absolutely. I mean, I've asked you many times, am I a narcissist? Like, are there parts of me that are quote, unquote, narcissistic, that sort of thing? And yes, not only do I think you. Well, it depends how you define success. Because if we look at financial success, there's tons of very financially successful narcissists and world leaders right now that are, in my opinion, awful humans, causing not only damage emotionally to people, but murder. I mean, they're literally hurting people that are very wealthy, that have high status. And I think that's the hardest thing for people that are good, caring people to see. Why is this? Why do I work so hard? I raise kids, I raise my family. I do so much work. And you see this out here getting rewarded. But is that really success? You know, success is, to me is, you know, you. Like you said, if you're in a home with a healthy relationship, you just want to stay there all day. It, like, hugs you. You know, to be able to go to bed and feel like, you know, I can hug myself, I can love myself because I didn't leave, I didn't go and hurt people all day. To me, I don't have a bunch of people hating me because of my behavior. I'm a contributor. I mean, to me, that is far more successful than. Than anything else.

I totally agree.

And I think one of the big challenges in entrepreneurship is because it is. I mean, there is. I admire entrepreneurs. Some entrepreneurs scare me. I consider myself an entrepreneur. I've learned so much from you is that I think we often conflate that the. The success, the success, the competitiveness, the capacity to market, all of that requires that narcissism. I firmly believe it doesn't. But I do think in some ways it might slow a person down to a growth that's more organic.

Right, Right.

Because they're not just doing anything and everything to get to the top and saying, well, I'll clean up the messes later. So I think to ethical, heartfelt, compassionate entrepreneur is not only possible. I see it happen all the time. And it's an extraordinary thing to witness. It may not be as Sassy and Forbes 500, but it certainly can be something that changes the world. The way, like I always say, planting an orchard always takes a minute, but it's going to yield a lot of fruit for a long time.

Love that saying.

Love that.

And look, there's a lot of successful people that live in prisons with golden bars.

Absolutely.

And you've seen it. You see it all the time. And unfortunately, you know, I always say this to young people. If I would have known that being successful was this much work, I would have stuck with being a loser. Right. And I say it jokingly because, you know, you have no idea. I mean, if people went behind the scenes, I mean, I know that's one of the reasons I say complimentary things about you. You have worked your ass off. I mean, you wake up every day in and you go to battle with things that most people won't. And that's admirable.

It is battle. Yeah, yeah. For both you and I. Yeah, totally.

But you know what? That is such meaningful stuff. It makes a difference. And with all these narcissists that have a bunch of people that hate them, that leave a bunch of scorched earth, that don't encourage people, I mean, I will like, if there's any karma, if there's any sort of thing, which I believe there is, and there's. There's a source of ethical energy, I think life gives to the giver and takes from the taker. It may not happen right away, you may not see it, but if you, you know, you go long term, you know, be nice to the people you meet on the way up. They're going to be the same people you meet on the way down. And I've seen a lot of narcissists that have had, you know, lots of, you know, external validation success and they. Boy, but they hit a point. They end up in prison, they end up with cancer, they end up with all kinds of sort of thing. And yeah, so final thing, how so? You're always a domino. I mean, people will hear our conversations. It will. It will trigger something where. What do you give out some resources that you have for people that are looking for help, where they can go that would be most helpful because you are. You are the one.

Well, I mean, you always go to my website, drromini.com and you'll sort of find the clearinghouse of everything. We've got stuff ranging from free to stuff that's sort of a, you know, mild monthly cause. So we have YouTube, which every single day there's new content. We have the new Dr. Ramany network that's powered by the Fireside platform, which is sort of an interactive network, which is a new thing we're doing, which has actually been really quite fascinating and wonderful. We have a monthly membership for people who are healing from narcissistic relationships. I have multiple books on the topic, taking narcissism and healing from these relationships from a bunch of different angles. If you're a therapist, I have a 36 hour asynchronous you training program that culminates in a certification in working with clients experiencing narcissistic abuse. And we even have cohort models where you can come together and not only do the asynchronous training, but also have an opportunity to meet in groups so we can talk about cases and that sort of thing. So there's all sorts of things we have going on and we sort of try, try to share those pearls of wisdom as often as we can. But there's a lot out there that people can learn from what I'm doing, what we're doing. Yeah.

Awesome.

So let me ask you to define narcissism and let's make some distinctions between sociopaths, psychopaths, because I think that'll help with the foundation here.

So I think the key here, number one, what is narcissism? It's a lack of empathy, entitlement, grandiosity, arrogance, inability to manage any kind of disappointment. And that tends to be manifested as rage, chronic validation seeking. But all of this, envy of other people, but all of this, the core of it, and this is what gets forgotten, is that it's all based on a deep, deep insecurity. Everyone looks at the narcissist. They say they're charming, they're confident, they're successful, they're smart. That doesn't mean if you're those things, you're narcissistic. But if it's built on that core insecurity, that's why the person needs to be grandiose and entitled. Because if I was that fragile inside, my temptation would be to protect it. It's like if you broke your arm, what do we do? We put a cast on it. Why? So the arm doesn't get broken again or the bone doesn't get agitated or moved. When you have a broken inside, you're that insecure, you're gonna protect it. How do you protect it? I'm the shit. I'm the best. No one's better than me. Why should I have to wait in this line? I'm the best after all. Everybody move out of My way so I can be the first in line. Why am I not the vip? All of that's pretty protective. All of that is them putting this carapace around this fragile interior. So anything from the outside, that cracks it. Marital breakup, somebody else beating them at what they do, getting more sales, having more money, having a bigger yacht, having a better whatever, that is going to piss them off. And that's where you see the rage and the acting out. That's narcissism, okay? There's different kinds of narcissism. There's grandiose narcissism, which is sort of textbook. Come to my, you know, come to my palace and be palace y with me. And I'm so great and you're so lucky to be my friend, and I'm so beautiful. That's the what we classically think of narcissism. But then there's the malignant narcissist, and that is somebody who's downright dangerous. They are. They're malevolent, they're exploitative, they're manipulative, they smell like a psychopath. But you're going to learn in a minute why a malignant narcissist isn't a psychopath. They're slightly different creatures. There are the more vexing, covert narcissists. These are people who don't look like narcissists. They look like victims. The world was never fair to me. I never got a fair shake. You know what? Maybe he succeeded because he got more money to start with than me. I would have been better than him if my dad gave me money up front. You know what? I'm too good to show up to a job. Why should I do that? Like, I got all these ideas. I'm the next Steve Jobs. Like, let the world find me. That's covert narcissism. They look so hang dog and so sad all the time that people often think they're depressed and they come to a therapist's office who thinks they're depressed and treats them for depression for three months and then wonder why they're not getting anywhere? And this person, well, the world is against me. The world is against me. The world is against me. Their grandiosity is, why doesn't the world see how great I am versus the grandiose person who says, look how great I am. And then there's even what we call noble narcissists. These are the people who do lots of charitable work and have these big rescue the elephants, rescue the world, rescue everyone kinds of profiles. But they're Doing it solely for validation.

That's the same as a communal narcissist.

No, they're the same as a communal. Same as a communal or noble narcissist. These are the people who you think like, wow, they're saving the world. They're so charitable, they're so wonderful. But then catch them behind closed doors and they treat their partners, their families, anyone, one to one, their staffs. Absolutely. Horribly so they only have empathy when they're on stage or they're saving an elephant.

I mean, I see so much of that, especially in the stuff that I've done in the non profit world. Yeah, it's cosmetic.

It's very cosmetic. Yes. But the work is being done in the name of seeking validation versus for the meaning and the purpose, or just the higher purpose, as you will, of doing the actual work. That's narcissism. I'm sure you're wondering what's the difference between that and narcissistic personality disorder. There was a wonderful book by Alan Francis called Twilight of American Sanity. I don't know if you've read it, but it's a fantastic book. The diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder only entered the world of psychiatry in the 1970s. This is a late entry. Freud wrote about it. Otto Rank was the first person who wrote about it. These were early analysts and obviously theoreticians, but we didn't make it into diagnosis until the 70s. Francis was one of the people who wrote about it. When Trump got elected, he wrote this book about narcissism and he's like, trump doesn't have narcissistic personality disorder. Why not? Because in order for something in the dsm, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of Mental Health, mental illness, you have to. In order for it to be diagnosis, it either has to be caught the person, subjective distress. Think about a depressed person. They're uncomfortable, they can't get out of bed, they feel sad all the time, they're angry. Or it has to be causing them social and occupational impairment. You look at somebody who's got seems to the world a fine marriage, or at least the person thinks it's a fine marriage or relationship. They seem to have perfectly fine kids, at least to the world it looks like that. And the person thinks that and they're not having any distress. We don't get to diagnose it. Which is why the majority of people with narcissistic traits don't get diagnosed, because nobody ever lays eyes on them. So that's why the prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder is about 1 to 5%. I'm spitballing here because we don't have the numbers. The prevalence of narcissism in the American culture is probably closer to 30%, that gap.

So 30% of.

I would guess so, yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, it's one in three. But now when we go to psychopathy, we jump the rails. Narcissist insecure. Okay.

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When the mask gets pulled off the narcissist. And he and I were talking about his program about, you know, getting people ready to go to prison. One of the things he's going to run into most, and this has come up when I've taught at jails and prisons about this to the clinicians there, is that they're so insecure now, the mask is off.

Shame.

You're a bad guy. Like they're. I was once supposed to do, I think, an interview with Steve Madden. I was telling him for this thing on narcissism and he was actually willing to subject himself talking to me. And then at the 11th hour, I think he had something more interesting to do. Surprise, surprise. But he acknowledged it. He said the thing he was most frightened of was going to jail or going to prison. And he did. And so it shatters them. A psychopath is not insecure. They have no fear, they have no anxiety and they're completely stress resistant, which is why they make, for example, great surgeons. They make great CEOs. They make. They make a great. Anyone who needs to stay completely calm at a time of tremendous danger. Right. So nothing bothers them. That's just why they make great hired assassins. I mean, anything that requires you to be calm, cool and collected under conditions that are difficult for people to do them, they're dangerous.

I was watching a show on drug.

Lords and gangsters and mob leaders and.

Stuff, and they were talking about the brain scans and some of these people in fearful situations, for most people, it doesn't even register like it doesn't bother them at all. So is this a genetic thing?

Yeah. So the belief with psychopathy is it's definitely biological. And the imaging studies have shown that very clearly there's likely the genetic piece Is still being argued, because think about it. Far, far more men have been diagnosed with psychopathy than women. So we don't see. There's almost no research on female psychopaths, though we see them. An interesting speculation would be someone like Elizabeth Holmes. Is she a malignant narcissist or is she a psychopath? Like, I've watched everything on her I can. Because you don't see women in these situations much. She's somewhere. I haven't talked to her, so I don't know. Right. But the key with the psychopath is they feel no remorse. That's the issue. They feel truly no remorse. The narcissist actually does feel some remorse for anything from even smaller time stuff like infidelity to big ticket stuff. I embezzled $20 million. So a madoff type reaction. Psychopathy. Okay, that's a great. Absolutely didn't register. Like, this is really inconvenient that you're doing this to me, but no circumspect sense of how this impacted other people.

Do they fake it?

As if they.

They fake it. They can fake it. They absolutely can fake it. But it really. It's like an aftermarket thing. Like, about. This was about 10 hours too late. Like, this should have been what you led with. Another one. Was that guy Larry. God, what the hell was this? Larry Nassar. He was one of the physicians in the whole gymnastics issue of all the gymnasts who were sexually abused. I dug deep into that case because he felt so psychopathic. He never, ever expressed remorse to the girls and young women he harmed. All he said is, basically, this is a pain in the neck. Why are you wasting so much time? You're hearing similar discourse from a gynecologist who sexually abused countless scores of girls and women over 20 years at USC. Just know you're inconveniencing me with all these proceedings. I'm like, oh, my God, you've destroyed hundreds of lives. There's no. That doesn't register. A narcissist would show more guilt and shame under those conditions.

So a sociopath.

Sociopath. This is a less articulated condition. A lot of people incorrectly interchangeably use the term psychopath and sociopath. The psychopath is considered to be, again, that calm, cool, callous, calculated, smart person who's just able to barrel through in a remorseless way. And we have much more evidence that that is a central nervous system phenomenon. The sociopath is likely someone who was. And again, criminologists and everyone argue about this. That may be more of something that was created by the environment, somebody who was beaten up a lot by a fog or a caregiver, somebody who grew up on the streets or under conditions of tremendous, tremendous deprivation or danger. And that under different conditions, the story could have probably gone a little bit differently. They also tend to be more combative. You'll probably see a lot more sociopaths in prison than you will psychopaths. Sociopath gets into a bar fight. A psychopath would never, you know, diminish themselves in that way. They'll find a way to slowly destroy that person's life or kill him and no one will ever know the difference kind of thing. So whereas a sociopath, they'll fight, they'll get into a street fight, they'll get into a bar fight. They're less regulated, they tend to be less successful. The big difference that's been brought up in the literature is a psychopath at some level doesn't understand the function of rules. They're like, why is this a rule? Like why can't she did me wrong in a drug deal? Like why can't I kill her? Please help me understand this. A sociopath knows he shouldn't kill her and still will.

Interesting.

Yeah. So there's a not knowing. But that said, even though there's a not knowing in psychopathy, psychopathy cannot be used as part of the insanity defense in the United States. That has been taken off the table.

What I mean, is there any idea how many people in the United States as an example are North America, are sociopaths? Psychopaths?

I would guess with psychopathy merciful, it's probably under 2%. It's a pretty low frequency phenomenon. It's rare, it's terrifying. And interestingly, some of the professions, like I was reading some research on the top 10 professions that have psychopaths in them and amongst those were surgeon, CEO and clergy. Those are the professions that attract psychopaths.

Wow.

Wow.

So statistically speaking, if there's anything there, then there's 30% of this audience.

Narcissist then maybe.

Yeah.

I mean, I mean again, I don't.

Want to be the ones that you.

Just because I love this group has been amazing. But what you might have find in a group like this because everyone is so successful is sort of what I consider just sub threshold narcissism. Like just enough cockiness to get you into trouble. And I would love to sit with each and every one of you and find out what your close personal relationships are like, because it may very well be that that's where it's not working as well as it could be. And again, you may have also gotten lucky, Joe, because you're you and you might have gotten 100% entrepreneurs where there's not a single narcissist in the room. Listen, is a little of it going to make you successful in business?

Sure.

Because if her and I are vying for the same job and I like, oh, she's so sweet. I'm going to give her all the intel. We're in this together. I may not get the job, but if girlfriends are like, girlfriend's like, yeah, she's going, she's like, I'm not telling her everything. That's, you know. Is that narcissism? I think it's probably a heavy handed use of the word. But that lack of empathy, I mean, that to me is what the whole thing sort of hinges on. And then when we talk about the origins of narcissism, I think people can self reflect. But I gotta tell you, so far my alarms maybe have gone off one and a half times today at the most.

I'd like to have you first off define trauma and then the difference between using it as a badge or as a living in woundology, which a lot of people do, versus what is really trauma, and addressing it and not just sweeping it under the, you know, under the rug.

Sure. Well, first of all, it is possible to identify with your trauma and make that into your personality. Make that into your identification.

Yeah, yeah.

Which means that you're stuck in something that happened in the past and you can't move beyond it. So that's not. But on the one hand, on the other hand. So trauma can get a bad rep that way. On the other hand, we're not looking at trauma nearly enough. So what is trauma? This is to the point where even though there is voluminous scientific research that's not even vaguely controversial, that shows the relation between trauma and physical and mental illness. To the point that a British psychologist, member of the British Academy, Richard Benthall, said that the evidence, for example, linking childhood adversity trauma to adult mental health conditions is as clear as the evidence linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer. But despite that scientific fact, the average medical student never hears a single lecture on trauma, which is almost unbelievable. But they don't. So that means they don't know what they're looking at. So what is trauma? So trauma literally comes from a Greek word for wound or wounding. So trauma is a psychological wound. Trauma is not what happens to you, it's what happens inside you. It's not the Hit that you get, it's the concussion. So trauma is the wound that happens inside you. So trauma. For example, in the very first chapter of the book, I talk about how when I was 11 months of age, I was given to a complete stranger in the streets of Budapest by my mother. And I didn't see her for six weeks. The trauma is not that I was given to a stranger. She did that to save my life. As a Jew who was living under the Nazis. That's the only way she could keep me alive. So I didn't see her for five or six weeks. The trauma is not that she gave me to a stranger and I didn't see her. The trauma is the wound, which is what I made it mean in myself. What did I make it mean? The only thing that an infant can make it mean, which is that I'm not lovable. And that I'm being abandoned and rejected. So that wound can show up 70 years later when something touches it. So a trauma is a wound. It's not what happens to you. It's what happens inside you. And the characteristics of the wound basically, are twofold. One, if you touch it, it's very sensitive. That's when you're triggered. And by the way, this word about being triggered, I'm being triggered. Good thing you're being triggered, because it means you get to examine yourself. Because the trigger is only a very small part of the mechanism. For the trigger to do its work, there has to be explosive material inside you. Every time you get triggered, you get an opportunity to examine what explosive charge, what ammunition am I still carrying from childhood that has just been triggered? So trauma, first of all, is, you know, if you touch the wound, it's very sensitive. The other aspect of a wound is that it scars over. And scar tissue, while it's protective, is not live. It doesn't have growth capacity. So people who are traumatized get stuck at certain levels of emotional development. Scar tissue has no nerve endings in it, so you don't feel. So people who are traumatized to the extent that they're traumatized, they disconnect from their bodies. They disconnect from their feelings, which is not a bad thing, you see, because if you take an extreme example, a child being abused, you can't run away. The healthy response is to fight back or to run away. But, I mean, I know your experience, Joe. And could you have fought or escaped at that time? You couldn't have. So that the protective response is to disconnect from yourself. So that's trauma in a sense. Represents the organism's automatic defense mechanisms. But then that disconnection from feeling, it creates all kinds of problems later on in life. Mental and physical illness. Or when the pain gets too much and you can't bear it, you have no way of dealing with it because you couldn't deal with this as a child. And now you get into addictions to soothe the pain. So trauma disconnects you from yourself. And that's the biggest impact of trauma. Which means that now you're no longer leading an authentic life. And everybody in this room is committed to being authentic. And isn't it just a challenge? But why is it just a challenge? Let me ask you a question here. I'm just going to ask for a show of hands. How many of you had the experience of having a strong gut feeling about something, ignoring it, and then being sorry afterwards that you ignore your gut feeling? Just raise your hand. It's always the vast majority. You know what you just told me the story of your childhood. Because you've never met a one day old baby who's disconnected from the gut feelings. So something happens that something that disconnects us from the gut feelings is the traumatic experience. Now, I define, or at least I describe trauma as having two major categories. There's the big T trauma. Excuse me, this is the last gig on a seven week speaking tour now, so my voice is rather challenged at the moment. But the big T trauma is when terrible things happen to a child. Such as the sexual abuse that Joe endured. Such as the separation from my mother that I endured at age 11 months. Such as poverty or racism. Such as being emotionally abused or neglected, or a parent dying, or a parent being addicted, or a parent being mentally ill. Or a rancorous divorce that a child has to live through violence in a family, A parent being mentally ill. These are the big T traumas. At least these are the big T traumatic events. But there's another way. You can hurt people. But don't forget, trauma means a wound. You can wound people in two ways. One is by doing bad things to them. Or you can wound children not by doing bad things to them, but by not meeting their needs. Human children have evolved with specific needs. They're not just a blank slate on which you can write anything you want. They have certain emotional needs. As adults, we have certain emotional needs. For the healthy development of the human child. Certain conditions have to be met. For example, an attachment relationship with the parents where the child feels absolutely secure, absolutely safe and secure. Rest which means that the child shouldn't have to Work to make their relationship work. He she, they shouldn't have to be pretty, compliant, smart, any of that stuff. They just have to exist. That's the need of the child. Children have to be given the freedom to experience all their emotions. And our brains are wired for emotions. You see, our emotional brain developed long before our intellectual brain. And in the individual development of the human infant, the emotional brain develops before the intellectual brain. The emotional brain is the scaffolding for the intellectual brain. When the scaffolding is good, the intellect will serve the proper purposes. When that scaffolding is not good, the intellect can go rogue and be very brilliant and create a lot of evil. So that one of the essential needs of children is to be able to experience all their emotions, which we share with all other mammals, by the way, which include caring or love, fear, panic, grief, playfulness, curiosity, rage, anger. In any parenting, and this is a lot of the parenting advice that parenting experts, so called give moms and dads in this society, is that some emotions on the part of the child are acceptable, some are not, and they have to be discouraged and even punished. When you do that, you're forcing the child to make a terrible decision. If I'm myself, I won't be accepted. I won't have the attachment relationship. On the other hand, to have the attachment relationship, I have to suppress aspects of myself. That's why you all put your hands up, because at some point you learned that in your family or virgin, it was safer to belong than to be yourself. And then it becomes a lifelong struggle to get back to who we actually are. So trauma then, is this wound that you sustained either because terrible things happened that shouldn't have, which happens to a lot of kids, or because the good things that should have happened did not. Not because their parents didn't love you, not because they didn't do their best, but because they live in a culture that makes it so difficult to be a good parent.

Yeah, very good.

Becoming antifragile, that is really something that's defined my life. But before I can get to that, I have to tell you, I am not a born entrepreneur. And I know that there are many born entrepreneurs here. And I'm sure I look somewhat like an alien species to you. I did not have a lemon stand growing up. I did not arbitrage baseball cards or candy. I was forced to get a paper route, but I was so lazy that I didn't collect the money, so I actually did the paper route. You get paid half of it just for doing it. But the other Half, you have to go door to door. So I did it for half. That is the profound way to which I was lazy as a kid and not at all thinking like a problem solving entrepreneur. But somehow, some way, even with that going against me, I was able to do something to my mind that allowed me to go from, as Joe was saying, scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car. That's a real story. I wish it weren't, but that's a real story. To co founding and building a billion dollar business. Now the question is, what did I do to my mind in order to get to that place? And to tell you that story, I'm going to walk you through exactly what my entrepreneurial journey looked like. So I met two guys who ended up becoming my business partners and they made a pitch to me. Hey, we're starting this technology company. You seem like a really bright kid. We've got a role as a copywriter. Why don't you come on and be the copywriter and then don't think of yourself though as a copywriter. This is a startup. You can have any role in the company that you want. You just have to become the right person for that role. Now I was just young enough and just dumb enough to believe them. I thought that sounded awesome.

Yay.

So I joined the startup and then began the long and arduous process of getting my ass kicked. And what was happening was I didn't have the skill set to keep up with these guys. My business partners are incredibly bright. Their IQs far outshine my own. And I'm just talking from a pure ability to process raw data. I don't overvalue iq, but I understand that it has certainly its applications and they're just two incredibly bright guys. So here I was, I had this goal in my life and that goal at the time, it's since changed. That's a whole other 10 minute talk. My goal at that time was to get rich. I wanted to get rich more than just about anything. So I had the ambition to do what I needed to do, but I didn't know what that was. And so I would find myself in discussions with these guys where I would present my case, something that I believed in, something that I thought was right for the business. And they would just out argue me. And they would out argue me all the time. Now if you're somebody who is foolish enough to pride yourself on being right and this is such an important thing to understand because what you build your self esteem around Matters. And the whole punchline of this talk is going to be that how did I go from being broke and having the traditional employees mentality of keeping my head down, doing as little work as possible and avoiding punishment at all costs? The way that I escaped that was by finally realizing the thing that was holding me back. And what was holding me back was I had a fixed mindset. If you know Carol Dweck, I had a fixed mindset. I believed that my talents and intelligence were fixed. That was it. They were as good as were ever going to be. There was nothing that I could do about it. It was kind of like height. Now I've done nothing to earn my height and yet I can say, hey, I'm six feet tall and I try to stand around people that are shorter than me. I try to avoid NBA players, I try to avoid NFL stars, I try to avoid Tony Robbins. If you've ever stood next to Tony Robbins, that guy is nuts. He's so big. One of the most heart wrenching photos of my my life as Tony, holding me in a warm embrace, making me look like a child. But the intellect to me was the same way. There was nothing that I could do about it. So it was what it was. And my job was to put myself in situations where I could shine. Now the problem was now I was working with these two guys that I couldn't shine anymore. They were way smarter than me. And it wasn't exactly hard to see that not only were they able to process data more rapidly than I could process data data, but they'd been in business for like 15 years before I met them. So now I'm in a position where everything I do makes me feel bad about myself. And so I hatch a plan. I'm going to get really good at arguing and I'm going to debate because I have two choices. I can either remove myself from this situation or I can find a way to feel good. Because people are going to feel good about themselves. And when you think about what suicide really is, suicide is the moment when somebody believes they can no longer feel good about themselves. Now it's false, but that's what they believe. And because of that belief, they check out. And why wouldn't you if it were true? If you could never feel good about yourself again, what would be the point? So I was going to get good at debating and I was going to win some of these arguments and I was going to find that chink in their armor and I was going to explode it so that I could, even if I Didn't feel smart about myself, that I could get that reflected back from them, that they thought I was smart. And so I remember the day that it finally happened. We were debating something and I knew their idea was right, which really sucked. But I had gotten so good at arguing that I convinced them to do my idea. And then I thought, oh shit, what have I done? Because if my goal is to get rich, I'm now acting in complete opposition to that goal because I know that their idea is right and I've simply used a trick to get them to go my way. And so I had a values crisis. Values and identity, drive, behavior. And in that moment, I wasn't sure who I was. Did I want to get rich? Was I willing to do what it took to make money? And if I really did want to get rich. And again, it's changed since then. But that was my focus then. If I really did want to get rich, why on earth did I fight so hard to be right? Because I never said I want to be right. I never said I want to be smart. None of that was happening in my mind. I said I want to get rich. So here I was, moving myself away from that and I realized I've got to make a decision. If I really am here to achieve my goal, then I need to decide what my goal is. And I can't have both. I can't feel good about myself the way that I defined it, about being smart, about being right and achieve my goals. So I realized I was either going to have to totally abandon self esteem. I actually considered that I'm going to have to totally abandon self esteem, put my head down and just grind it out for a few years with these guys until we can have an exit and I'll be rich and then I can worry about loving myself again or. And this was what changed my life, I could change what I built my self esteem around. Now, unfortunately, I did not have access to Carol Dweck's book, but I realized that instead of fighting to be right, I could put all of my time and attention to identifying the right answer. And once you identify the right answer, you can earn tremendous credibility with your team for saying, hey, I was wrong. That's right. Now I'm going to put all my energy behind that. And so that's what I began to do. And as I began to do that, I found that the only thing that was standing between me and where I wanted to get was a skills gap. Now that skills gap is what I call mind the gap. And for you Brits, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Mind the gap. That skills gap is everything. Now, the way that you close that skill gap is painful because it starts with the following mantra. I am not yet good enough. It's one of the most controversial things I ever say. Whenever I tweet that out, people freak out. But what I'm saying is, if you're trying to achieve this objective and you do not have the skills to actually accomplish that, you simply are not good enough yet. That's just the truth of the situation. It's the math. As Elon Musk says, boil it down to its physics. That's the physics of the situation. But if you have a growth mindset, you know that you can acquire those skills. And once you set about living your life by the following phrase, everything will change. Do and believe. Do and believe only that which moves you towards your goals. And that brings us to becoming antifragile. As Joe said, when people hear antifragile, they think resilient. They think tough. But both of those things and every other synonym around there is defined by that thing's ultimate breaking point. It is resilient simply because its breaking point is distant. It is strong simply because it can move a lot of weight before it breaks. But they both have breaking points. If you want to be truly antifragile, the game is, the more you realize you're wrong, the more somebody attacks you and tells you you're stupid, the more mistakes you make, you see in that one thing and one thing the ability to get better. And when you see in your failures an absolutely fundamental, bedrock foundation piece of your belief system, which is that, oh, dear God, thank you for pointing out how wrong I've been. Thank you for showing me that this mistake was just that, that it's a mistake. Thank you for making it clear I am not actually moving towards my goals right now. I'm not making progress. Because when you can do that, the more people assail you, the more mistakes you make, the more times you fall on your face, the stronger you get. Because you respond to that with the acquisition of skills. It's the acquisition of skills that matter. Another talk that I would love to give at some point is the fact that we are all in the matrix, but the matrix is just a metaphor for your mind. And if you have the mind of an entrepreneur and you really can see that acquiring skills will lead you wherever you want it to, you'll truly become capable of the impossible.

I had 100,000 talks in my head, and when she Asked me, the guy with add, at that moment, what do you want to talk about? I did the smartest thing in the world. I asked my wife, what should I talk about? And literally she said, let me think about it for a second. And she comes back, she goes, here's what entrepreneurs deal with. I know you always talk about influence, you always talk about sales, getting people to get their point across, stuff like that. Why not help people with the biggest thing that they deal with, the shit that shows up in our lives. And the majority of you, you're master marketers, you're really great at getting your point across. But how much time are you spending marketing to you to get yourself to be less bothered? Because isn't that what we do in business? Like literally, you got a person with a problem, you hit them over the head a little harder, you sell them a Tylenol and then you get them on auto ship. How many of you know what I'm talking about? That's our job. That's what it is we're here to do. But the question is, when something shows up in our life, how much time and energy are you literally taking? I'm going to question you. Here's question number two that she gave you the ultimate question. I'm giving you question two and really ask yourself. This very simplistic question is how often are you spending time rewording and recalibrating things in your life that may be slowing you down and possibly bothering you? So I'm going to give you six steps here that are very simple. I use this for high level intervention work. Eunice has been to our event before and she's seen me do this where someone has been raped or abused, has a problem. 30 years of issues, and I get them to see it differently in 10 or 15 minutes to change their emotions. But there's little things that happen in our day that wind up being big challenges for ourselves. So I'm going to give you a little synopsis real quick. I want you to imagine you're four years old again, okay? You're four years old, three years old, two years old. And don't be that person. That four years old was a bad year for my life. Pick a year. It doesn't matter. You're a little kid and you're walking down the street and there's a little hole on the ground and you step in it. And immediately your parent says to you or someone next to you goes, you tripped. Are you okay? Now, before that, nothing had occurred. Your foot went in a hole. Immediately you were told that you tripped. Your brain says tripped. When I trip, people get worried. Something must go wrong. Now, when Tucker was talking about earlier about jamming stuff down in our body that lives there for a while, you're starting to develop a little something called a pattern. Tripping is bad, and I get people's attention. Well, you're about 8 years old, and you're with your buddies, and you trip and you fall, and they laugh at you. Now, tripping is bad. You fell, people laugh at you. It's the wrong thing to do. Then you're 15 years old, you're playing ice hockey, and the coach says, we need to, you know, you need to do a drill you're not comfortable with, or you're doing gymnastics, something you're uncomfortable with, or you're in business at 35 years old and you're wondering why you're the person that won't do something that's outside of your comfort zone and what the most stimulating thing for this, for me to think about is all of us have the ability to do this with others, but how much time are you spending working on yourself? So my challenge is, I'll do my little seven minutes left of this talk. I'm going to challenge all of you even over the next month, spend seven to 10 minutes thinking about the word choices that you use in your life. And Tony brought up something a little bit ago, and I started reframing immediately because my brain is always in reframe, meaning when you said your challenge, like, my person, my partner died, and I finally made as much money as I wanted to make in my life, and I'm more miserable than I've ever been in my life. I heard that and immediately started to reframe. So I'm going to use slides, and I'll see how this works. Here's a big sign we have in our office, and it very simply says your future hinges on your ability to effectively communicate.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video.

And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link.

Below in the description. Or you can wait till the end.

Of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Now, after reading the book about why I thought about this for a second and why we do what we do is that I truly believe that communication is the most underdeveloped and underutilized asset we have as Human beings, most people are miserable at communicating with other people and themselves. And when you communicate with yourself in a weak way, you typically get a weak life. So when I explain this to you all real quickly, I'm going to ask all of you to realize this. How many of you have had some shit happen to you in the last week that's not what you expected? How many of you raise your hands? Okay. How many of you in the last year have had shit happen? Okay. How many of you recognize that immediately when that shit occurred? It happened. And your brain was so searching for, what do I actually call this thing? Because you've never actually had that moment before. So, doc, you're going to get this immediately. I'm taking, like, sick man Freud, Sigmund Freud, forgive me. And I'm taking all of the work. I get that backwards sometimes. And maybe all of you will learn that if you actually put things backwards in people's brains, they'll learn to start seeing things differently. And you'll realize very quickly that one of the smartest things you can do is screw up during your presentation. Say something backwards or use somebody's name backwards. And they start questioning everything else, and they start questioning themselves. So pay attention to this, because it'll make sense. So the first thing that happens is an event occurs. Little boy trips in a hole, or just little boy foot in hole, go on, date. Somebody does something you didn't ask them to do. What happens is an event occurs immediately in our brain. Anytime we have an event occur in our lives that we've not experienced before, the brain almost, almost immediately starts looking for answers. Oh, my God. What is this called? What does it look like? What does it do? And all that happened was an event. If you look the 21st of whatever the hell month this is got circled, there was an event that occurred. Tony made more money than he ever made in his life. His brain said, what do we label that? It's supposed to be a great day. See, my question for Tony is, what Tony did was he set a plan for himself that said he set an event that one day I'm going to make more money than I've ever made in my life. And what that's going to be called is the happiest day of my life. It's going to be called the reckoning. It's going to be called the breakthrough. It's going to be called everything. I invested every dollar in every event ever in his life. And he told himself a story. Am I correct? We do this all the time. We Put a label on something no different than I tripped. As soon as you get a label, the brain immediately gives it meaning. Now, what you said is, Tony said, I'm unhappy. What does that mean when I'm unhappy? Wow. Things in my life are not working out the way I want them to. Now, what's fascinating is, let me give you another example here, because I have six minutes. I'm going to walk a few people through this right now. Who here has had some challenge, something show up recently that's not like super complicated, like a divorce with a narcissist, but has anybody had something happen recently that's a challenge that wants to jump in, go quick. What's that? You gotta go quick.

I have a narcissist stepson.

Oh, geez, the narcissist again. Okay, very good.

Who told us that he wasn't going to come for Christmas Eve dinner?

So let's go back again. So what happened is we had an event that happened. Somebody made a promise. Correct.

Correct.

Very good. And immediately somebody made a promise. So immediately you labeled it and you labeled it and said somebody didn't follow through. Correct. And immediately after that is. What does that mean? That means that that person is a liar. That person lied to me. That person let me down. Correct. Now, anytime you label something and you give it a meaning, which we all do immediately. All human beings do this in a matter of seconds. You can slow this shit down. I've learned how to slow this down. I'm out with my wife one day, and we ran into a jumping cholla. How many of you ever done that before? A jumping choi? Let me explain real quickly. If your wife's screaming and she goes, ow, there's something on my leg, don't always grab it because I grabbed the jumping choi off her leg. Now my hand was stuck to her leg, okay? And immediately I'm looking at this thing. I said, wow, maybe this is telling us that we need to be closer or spend more time together or communicate better. And she's like, no, no, it's just a jumping cholla. Our brains, okay? It is a poisoned latent cactus. They call it jumping because they go in the wind. It's like a baseball. They're like, oh, look how cute that is. And I'll tell the story another time how I try to get it off my hand like this. And then we were out for a run, and I tied my key to my shorts. You know how boys do that? And I put it down my pants. So I have, like. So I had to, like, Whole nother conversation, a whole nother day. But I created meaning out of it. So the whole thing with Tony, for an example, and I'll explain this in a minute, is what that means is so what Tony created for himself is I set a goal for myself, just like you. You thought things would be different this time with this guy, so you lied to yourself. And then you start questioning, how often do I lie to myself? I got two minutes and I could get to the point. So what happened with Tony is Tony goes like this. I'm going to. I'm just going to backtrack and we can hit an event occur. I'm going to make exultant amount of money. He lies to himself, tells himself that this is going to occur. Then what happens is he labeled it said to be the best day of my life. He added meaning to it, said things are going to work out great. But what then really happened is Tony basically said, but the meaning, what does it really mean is that what else in my life is not working out the way I want it to or what else am I lying to myself about? So my question for you is a little different because I want to switch this back and I want to help you out. A question is basically, who told you that making more money would make you happier? You did. Me. You came up with that. So basically you were wrong. And you don't like being wrong because accountants don't like being wrong. So really you're not bothered that making more money, you're unhappy. You're really bothered that you're wrong. Let's step ahead. Another thing. And what happens when you actually become wrong? We're just playing with this. And none of this is true? You feel something, you're wrong, you feel insecure. So then Tony's like, wait a second, is my whole life bullshit? I told myself if I finally get to this place in my life, I would be happy. How many of you are resonating with Tony's story for your own life? If you are, say I am. Anybody catching this? So what happened with Tony? And I'll be done in like a minute. Okay, so what happened? Or 3. So what happens is. Give me a second. It'll be worth it.

I just told her not to be because I know you're just being.

You're being Michael, I'm being Michael. And if not, I'm going to be a narcissist for a second. Fuck off. No, I'm just kidding. So what happens is Tony feels something and he says to himself, Tony says to himself, wow, this is uncomfortable. I don't like this. And then what happens is he reacts and he goes, I don't know what to do. I go in my shell. This is what I typically do. And after we react for a while, what happens is you get a result, you get an unhappy person. I've watched that. Most of us look to change people's lives. We like to get them to pretend that the event didn't occur and no, no, that didn't happen. It's one of the worst things you can say to somebody. And then we try to change the reaction of what they're doing. Like, stop doing that. I'm going to tell you all of the gem all therapy I have read every. I have a library you couldn't even imagine on everything from psychotherapy to hypnosis. And you would name it Everything that Works Out Good. From Virginia Satir, one of my heroes. And all this great work basically comes down to a very simple thing. It's you can't change the event and you really can't change the reaction of what's happening. But if you could change the label, the meaning and the emotion behind what happens, you have the ability to change almost anything in your life. See, when we were going over this list of what pisses you off, I use gradient language all the time. It's a term that I use. I don't really have things that piss me off. I have things that bother me. I have things that annoy me. I have things that frustrate the shit out of me. And I avoid the majority of those things. But why I'm bringing this up to all of you to really think about right now is most of you are looking to change your results this year and demand from yourself that you do things differently, or you're looking to pretend those things didn't occur. If you could change the label slightly on what occurred, even the label on being here. Ingenious. Even shifting the label that I'm here to understand myself better instead of like, I have to get it. How many of you recognize you were torturing yourself in genius network with the attitude of, I came here because I spent 25,000 bucks and I have to get it. If you're here to. I'm here to improve myself and find a few things that can make my life better. The emotion in your body starts looking for things differently. Your biochemistry changes. Your emotions change in a major way. So why I'm bringing this up is if I were to recalibrate Tony here real quickly in less than 30 seconds, I would say, Tony, basically what happened is you told yourself something was going to happen that didn't happen the way you wanted it to. Correct. And because of that, it made you a little bit upset. So it wasn't that you made more money. That was your problem, is that you actually did something you didn't expect. You actually achieved something you've always wanted and you thought you'd have a different result. Correct. So you were wrong temporarily. And being wrong temporarily is not wrong permanently. So all I'm going to challenge you to think about is from that context by changing that one word. It changes everything after associated with it. So I'm going to ask all of you to play with your brains for this next couple days to think about this in any major way. I deal with this all the time. I had a woman that was held hostage for five days, and literally she was on a bus. And basically she said, four hostages, I'm in Israel, there's four hostages on a bus. And all of you hold yourself hostage from time to time. And she was on a bus in Israel, and there's four hostages. Got her on the bus, kept her there for four or five days. I said, okay, so four hostages on the bus. I said, four got on, five got off. She. What the hell are you talking about? I said, what do you mean? She goes, you're not listening, Michael. You're being an asshole. I said, no, no, you don't get it. I'm confused. Four hostages got on the bus and five got off. She goes, is your math bad? Are you stupid? What's wrong with you? I said, I think I'm hearing you clearly. Four hostages got on the bus, kept you captive for five days, and five hostages got off. She goes, no, there was four hostages. I said, no, four got on the bus, you were there, and you decided to join them for the rest of your life. You're holding yourself hostage. You became a terrorist and you joined them. You've been terrorizing yourself for years. When she realized that she wasn't held hostage, that she was terrorizing herself, her emotions changed immediately. She got back to me. I worked with her 10 years ago, changed her life, changed her relationship by one shift. In one word, it's like marketing. One shift. Joe could change one word in your context of your copy. Or Tucker, one word. Or yesterday, when he was talking about you and your. Changes everything. So my question is, is, were you terrorized or are you terrorizing yourself?

I remember, as I said, just offline, is that I was there at the beginning of the Genius Network. The very first day. The very first day where we got together and swapped ideas at your apartment in Tempe, Arizona. And I still remember that. And I'm so happy with your success and what you've accomplished and with so many other people. It's just wonderful. You know, we talked. I believe at that time, we talked about the Mastermind concept, and that's why. And you said, well, why don't we get together in Mastermind? And so I flew over to Phoenix and taxied out to your house for the first time. And that's something that's so important in the Genius Network is the. When Napoleon Hill did his work, he said that every single person, the Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and so on, every one of them began to be successful, and they began to Mastermind with other intelligent people and just share ideas. And I have had the same experience, because one idea in combination with your other ideas can change your life forever. I am, I'm happy to say, some years ago, about a decade ago, a publisher said, have you got any books or anything that we could publish? And I said, well, I've got a book on time management. So I sent them a manuscript, and it was called Double youe Income, Double youe Time Off. And he said, great publisher, Barrett Kohler. And he said, well, it's kind of a boring title. He said, but the chapter 15 is 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Things Done Faster. That's the title of the book. And he said, well, chapter 15 is entitled Eat that Frog. And this is a story from Mark Twain. And Mark Twain was the most successful speaker, writer, author in America for three or four decades. And he wrote this. He said, if the first thing you do in the morning is you eat a live frog, then you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that it's probably the worst thing that can happen to you all day long. And your live frog is your biggest, ugliest task. And so just get up in the morning and just get it done. He said, and if you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first. So if you have two big tasks to do, do the most important. And then the other corollary is that if you do have to eat a frog at all, it doesn't pay to sit and look at it for very long. In other words, get on with it. Well, so he said, let's make this the title, Eat that frog and 21 great ways to Stop Procrastinating and then run the theme through setting the table Organizing the plates and so on. And so I did. I sent it back to him and they published it. And he just told me this week, Steve Persani, my publisher is that we just hit 2,500,000 sales in 50 languages.

Wow.

Which makes me the best selling time management author in history. And it has one basic concept for us with the Genius network is pick your most important task each morning and start on that task and discipline yourself to work on that task non stop until it's done. And don't do anything else. If you can do this, which takes tremendous character, takes tremendous discipline, it takes tremendous mental strength if you can do this. The first time you do this, it will be very hard. You must be so distracted and you want to check your emails and make a call and get some coffee and so on. And what you have to do is you have to discipline yourself to stay at that, wherever you are and do that task until it's done. Then I say give yourself a reward. You know, the time management author Julie Morgenstein says, don't check your email in the morning. And I love that as a concept. So you get up in the morning, start on your most important task and discipline yourself to stay at it until it's complete. Then your reward is to check your email. But unfortunately, what do most people do is they check their email in the morning and in the afternoon, and in the evening they get up at night. They just always check in their email. And each time you check your email, they estimate it takes 17 minutes for you to get back to work, takes 17 minutes for you to get settled down and back to work and so on. And then somebody sends you an email and it goes Bing, ding, McBIP. And you stop and you check your email again. And the email is one of the most wonderful communications devices in the world, but it'll kill you if you just keep checking it. So what you do is you turn it off. I always say, leave it off, leave it off. Start your task and discipline yourself. And your big reward when you finish your most important task. Because now you can check your email. And if you can do that, what happens is you start to become so productive. So many people have told me that they became millionaires with the eat that frog concept. Just start and complete your most important task. But if you can't do that, by the way, you'll always have to work for someone else who can discipline you to do it, someone who will supervise you, someone who will check on you. What will happen is you'll always be in the bottom 80% and never be a big success. And remember this 8020 rule, it bites you in the bum all the time. 20% of people make all the money. The 80% of people. Why do you think we're having riots today? Who do you think is rioting? Certainly not the top 20%. They're busy making money. It's the people in the bottom 80% who are frustrated and angry and upset and so on because they have too many bills, as they say, too much month at the end of the money. They don't know how to get out of it. The answer is, make a list of what you have to do. Pick the most important task and work at it till it's done. Your whole life will change.

I am so grateful to be here. Because of course, you know, brains run the world. They run the stock market, the local market, huge corporations, mom and pop shops down the street. Brains run governments, although not that well. Schools. Sexual art program in the Fraser Academy in Vancouver. We teach thousands of kids every year to care about their brains. Churches. We have a brain health program in churches around the world. Families. It's my family and you. Yet most people rarely think about their brains, which is a huge mistake, because success in anything you do always starts with a healthy brain. After looking at NOW's 115,000 scans and some of the most interesting people in the world, including Joe, it is very clear to me that when your brain works right, you work right. And when your brain is troubled for whatever reason, a head injury, an infection, mold exposure, you're going to have trouble in your life. With a healthy brain, people are happier, physically healthier because they make better decisions, wealthier because they make better decisions, and they're more successful in everything they do. When your brain is not healthy, people are sadder, sicker, poorer, less successful. So your competitive advantage or your disadvantage is the actual physical functioning of your brain. But let's be clear, you're in a war for the health of your brain. Everywhere you go, someone is trying to shove bad food down your throat that will kill you early. The real weapons of mass destruction are processed, pesticide sprayed, highly glycemic, low fiber food like substances. The clown and the king have killed more people than ISIS has ever dreamed. And these food companies use neuroscientists. They use tricks to hook your pleasure centers because you know, this woman would never look this way if she ate that. Tech companies create addictive gadgets that hook our attention and distract us from our loved ones. New study from Microsoft. The attention span in humans is now 8 seconds. A goldfish is 9. This is evolution going the wrong way. Study from the Harvard Business Review said that only 10% of us are high in both focus and energy, the two things that drive success. 90% of people are without one or the other. Which is why in your bag, I put our Focus and Energy supplement. This is the one I hate now that I'm 61, because it's very clear to me after doing a study with 8,000 people, your brain gets less and less active as you age. Typical 55 year old brain with lots of wrinkles. Worse at 82. But here's a friend of mine who actually lives in Phoenix. At 82, she has a stunningly beautiful brain. Brain aging is much more about your habits than your age. So here's the program. This is the $250,000 idea. And for you in this room, it's way more than that. If you pay attention to me, you're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. I can prove it. Here's the plan we use at Amen Clinics. First, you got to look at your brain. So baseline brain health assessments. We do a study called SPECT that looks at blood flow and activity. Here's a healthy scan. Compared to someone with accelerated aging, someone who has Alzheimer's disease, which we can tell is decades before you have any symptoms, someone with a brain injury, someone whose brain's working too hard, such as people who have obsessive compulsive disorder and people who have underactive brains. This one drank way too much. I think of imaging like a map. You know, a picture's worth a thousand words, but a map is worth a thousand pictures. A map tells you where you are and, and gives you direction on how to get to where you want to go. Without a map, you don't know and you're lost. And it can cost you your life. The second thing we do is we don't want you to have normal anything. Normal is sick. 51% of the US population at some point in their life will have a mental illness. And if you're fortunate enough to live until you're 80, 50% of you will be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. That's normal. And I don't want any part of it. And Genius Network people don't either. So I want to know your important numbers. And you got a copy of my new book, Change youe Brain, Change youe Life. This program is in there in chapter 19, in detail. The third part is your brain. You know, people go, oh, Take my supplement because it'll give you a great brain and it has one thing in it, and that just doesn't work. Why? Because the brain does not get sick in one way. It gets sick in many different ways, and that's exactly how we get it better. So we take a multiple mechanism approach from omega 3 fatty acids for inflammation, ginkgo for blood flow, and so on. And the last thing, and I'm really proud of this, in 2005, I wrote a book and I got all sorts of grief for it. It was called Preventing Alzheimer's. You can't do do that. But since then, there have been programs at UCLA and Johns Hopkins called Preventing Alzheimer's. I love that. Here's the short course. You want to prevent Alzheimer's disease in yourself or your family, you have to prevent or treat all of the risk factors that are associated with it. And if you go after obesity, diabetes, heart disease, hormone levels that are not optimized, and all the rest of these, this is how you prevent it. So let me show you how this works. Joe's one of my favorite people. I love Joe having a problem. I called Joe having a great day. I'll call Joe. And Joe called me. He's like, my brain's not right. And this was about five years ago, and he got hurt. He had a head injury. Most people don't know that head injuries are major cause of addictions and psychiatric problems. And nobody knows because psychiatrists are the only medical specialists that never look at the organ they treat. How crazy is that? He came, his brain was troubled, and he just. What I love about Joe is he just did everything I said. Imagine if you just did everything he said, where your business would be. And in seven months, his brain is better. Five years later, it's freaking normal. It's healthier than his age. Some of you who've come to my clinic, I'll tell you, your brain looks older than you are, and his looks younger than he is. I love that for him. We also did the world's largest study on active and retired NFL players at a time when the NFL was lying that they had a problem. And we demonstrated high levels of damage in 96% of the players that we study. It's horrible. And, oh, by the way, if you played football at any level, 80% of you have brain damage. But my job, my love, is never to tell you you have a bad brain. I'm like the eternal optimist. Well, can we make these bad brains better? And in fact, on this program, 80% of our NFL players showed improvement in memory, attention, mood, and sleep. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. Here's one of our players, Freddie Dreyer, who said, I replaced a part of my mind that had been lost. My energy and focus are much better. Duvall Love played 20 years. He's an offensive guard. His brain just looked awful. Year later, it's much better. Oh, by the way, lost 110 pounds. I was pretty excited for him. Now he has a master's degree. He thinks he's really smart. It's really awesome. And so, November 3rd, Change youe Brain, Change youe Life, which is in 26 countries. And I'm sorry, proud of this book, but it's old. And so I had to revise it, and I expanded it, and I put all of my best work into this book. So I'm very excited. I called Joe up. I said, joe, how do we get this to the world? He said, well, I have a form, the Genius Crowdsource Blueprint, and I'm a good student. I do what he tells me to do. So we have a name. I Changed My Brain and Changed My Life to win the prize, best video or essay on how you used my work to help your brain and your life. Our goal is a thousand stories, a million more books sold, and the prize is we will pay for you to come to Southern California, get a full evaluation that we pay for. I'll actually do it because I don't do many of them anymore. And we'll give you a year's worth of supplements. And the deadline is February 14, because that's love My Brain day. And the first day, we got 60 entries, so we now have about two. It's been out for, like, four days. So one of them, Steve, writes my rental car confirmation number. And I'm thinking, why do I want to know this? The reason I know is that I'm supernaturally able to remember things that I would never have been able to, and they don't go away. My productivity and creativity is off the charts. I'm able to connect with my wife in ways I've never experienced. And the sexual intimacy is another area of peak performance. I love that. But my favorite one so far is Cheryl. My brain was broken because of your work. I went from being homeless and hopeless without the custody of my three children to being an RN on a busy surgical trauma unit in a stable relationship. But most importantly, I'm able to be a good mother to my children. You are not stuck with the brain. You have you can make it better. I can prove it.

My buddy Tom Bilyeu, who has like a podcast, he spoke at last year's Genius Network annual event. He did an interview with Dr. Drew, and he talked about change. And the great thing about it is that what Dr. Drew, who may write the foreword to our book that I've got coming out, the Miracle Morning for Addiction Recovery, on doing with Hal Elrod and Anna David. So that book will be out next year. And one of the things that he talks about is disgust. So on the wall here is one of my favorite quotes, which is, be willing to destroy anything in your life that that is not excellent. And the thing about that is, in order to change something, you have pre contemplation, you have contemplation, you have execution, and then you have maintenance. And being willing to destroy anything in your life that is not excellent requires you first to think about it and to contemplate it, and then you have to actually do something. And then once you do something, you have to maintain that something. And so in order to change. The difficult thing with change is not just doing it, it's maintaining it. And so what's always funny to me is all the New Year's resolutions that people make. And, you know, I was talking about this before we started the meeting in our conference room back there, and that you have people that will make goals. I'm going to eat better. And they do for either a few days, few hours, few weeks. I'm going to join the gym. I'm going to get a gym membership. I'm going to start working out. I'm going to do this thing in my relationship. I'm going to do this thing with my kids or whatever. And then as most human beings, they just stop and they don't maintain it. And so what I would encourage you to look at is what disgusts you so fucking much right now that you're like, I'm just so done with this now, you're going to have to contemplate that. You're going to have to think about that. But if you get yourself now, the difference between disgust and shame, though, is that disgust, you're just kind of disgusted with it. Shame, though, you're not going to be motivated with shame, because that's. I'm a bad person. And that's the thing that I've learned with being an addict is addiction thrives on shame. Addiction has an appetite for destruction. Addiction will actually make you do bad things. Disgust may cause you to change. And if you are just okay with it, you know, you're probably not going to do much. So if you really want to affect change now, one of the best ways to do that is to put yourself around people that are doing great shit, because then it forces you to look at. Well, you know, they seem to be capable. I mean, one of the biggest motivators for me was when I was a deb bro, carpet cleaner, living off credit cards. There's this guy who works. This guy went to high school with. He's working for a guy in Mesa, Arizona, who's an alcoholic that treated his. And I feel bad because he's an alcoholic. I mean, addiction comes out of pain and hurt people, hurt others. And this guy was a really bad person, but he had made $600,000 the previous year. And here I am working my ass off, going broke. And that disgusted me. I'm like, what the hell? What is the deal? What does this guy know that I don't? And so. So it's all how you use it. I mean, your whole life is just a series of raw material sitting around waiting for you to put the ingredients together and to produce a certain result. And be it good habits, bad habits. I think everyone has habits. And if you wake up in the morning and you wake up late and you eat two Egg McMuffins and you smoke ten cigarettes and you guzzle four cups of coffee and you kick your dog and you yell at your spouse, and you just go around being an asshole, you've just developed really good habits of doing that if you do it every single day, right? So winners find ways to win, losers find ways to lose. And so wherever you're winning in life, you're winning because of the way you're putting together. It's the formula. You have a winning formula. And if you're losing, then you need to change that. Discard that, abandon that, do something with it. Surround yourself with other people. So the whole concept of moonshots and multipliers is how do you actually embed into your brain? So to go back to Michael. Michael, I'd love to ask you this. How does one best. Let me do a setup here. Now, we have a whole book here, and I'll forget if I don't do this. So here's a book. All right? Now, this book is filled with genius network members talking about their moonshot buy one. And it doesn't just say, what's your moonshot? It says, what is your best business decision? Your best business decision. What is the one thing you feel accounts for your success? And how how might every Genius Network member benefit from it? What is the biggest tangible performance enhancing, addition, modification and replacement activity or approach you've discovered and added to your model or marketing in the last year? Who are your current business heroes and non business heroes? What are three things you do differently or better than your competitors that drive your business success? And how might everyone in Genius Network utilize any or every one of those advantages? And what is the single best piece of business and non business advice you've ever received? And how did it alter your past? So we ask these questions to all these really bright people and it's freaking phenomenal. Now when you read this stuff, you actually will probably get inspired. You will probably learn things, you will discover some things. You'll probably. And they give book recommendations. What are the most impactful books? This is 100 bucks. All the money we're going to put into Artists for Addicts and Genius Recovery. So it'll go into my recovery Moonshot, if anyone wants one. These are 100 bucks. That requires though, you to actually influence yourself. So my question to you is, given resources, tools, recipes, how does one influence themselves most effectively?

Okay, so it's a loaded question. How we influence ourselves. Every one of us, first off, knows how to do it. We influence ourselves all the time. No matter what, we're always influencing ourselves. If we were influencing ourselves, as simple as answering ourselves, the question, should I buy that book or not? Is that a good question? We can influence ourselves in this particular context.

That's perfect.

Okay. That's perfect. Okay, so the. I'm getting set up right now. Okay, so the.

And by the way, we can disregard the book entirely and just.

Yeah, either way, if we were gonna. We'll talk the book real quick and then we'll just throw an idea because I believe this will. This will make a difference for you. Number one is instantly inside of your brain. When somebody asks you to buy something or whenever you're planning on doing something else, instantly your brain has a chemical reaction that goes off, a series of chemicals that go off. And also pictures start to show up inside of your brain. So one of the ways to influence ourselves is I teach some hit class. It's a very, very simple technique. It's understanding what state that you need to be in. And I don't mean like Tony Robbins, get yourself in state. I mean literally what state that you need to be in to pull off what it is that you need. A lot of folks don't realize that whenever you're selling something to another person, I'll put in the context of them. And then I'm going to turn it on you really quickly. Is the whole purpose of selling or anything is to educate people that it's okay to make a decision and to take down their guard and put them literally find that neural pathway that they've made a decision before, whether they were on an aisle when they were a kid. Like, my daughter did this to me today. She influenced me to. To buy a dog. I bought a dog today. I told myself I'd never buy a dog. But she looked at me and she said something to me that triggered something in me. Abandonment issue. And she found something in me that I don't even really knew I had. And she said simply to me, I'm going to share this in selling and you guys can use any way you want. And then I'm going to talk about influencing yourselves. She said, wouldn't it be nice that when I come home from school, there's a five year old.

Okay.

Wouldn't it be nice when I come home from school that Tara's gonna be going to college soon and you're at work still doing what you do, that I have somebody to play with. And I know I'm probably not gonna get a dog from Santa, but it would be nice. I bought a dog today. Okay. And I spent an hour and a half. I spent six hours online and on the phone calling interesting people from places called Paradise, Pennsylvania. Okay. Which doesn't seem like paradise at all. Side note, what my daughter did is she put. Put me in that state of mind. So if you want to influence yourself to change a habit or anything else you do, you're never going to change it with thinking about the habit that you want to add. So this is why with addiction, I do work with a lot of people with addictions and different types of things. So let's say you want to get in better shape or you want to get yourself to pick up the phone more or do your marketing or do your moonshot or anything. The first thing you have to ask yourself is what state of mind do I need to be in? So exercise for most people, we'll just start with language real quick. Exercise for most. Most people is something that are working out. For me was equate it to something I talk about doing that I know that I'm capable of doing that I really don't do. That is also linked to insecurity and something I'll quit. How many of you know what I'm talking about? Okay. So what I did is I instantly changed the language on it. And by changing the languages. And this happened two years ago when I met Joe from Spartan Races, I stopped working out. I haven't worked out in two years. But I train on a regular basis. By changing the language of what it is that you do is instantly creates a new neural pathway. This is what Joe teaches in marketing. I said, let him teach marketing and everything else. I want to teach it for the brain. Marketing, how to market to ourselves. So stop trying to get yourself to save money and start looking at it from a different. Like I have, I build a second business that's my financial portfolio. So instead of saving money, I build a second business that I donate money to and I loan money to it on a regular basis. So I loan money to a second business which is almost beginning my regular, regular business, which is my financial thing. So the first thing I'll say I'm not going to go into a long term on this is change the language to something which then will change the meaning and changes the neural pathway in the brain. Did that make sense? Did that answer your question? So for instance, a lot of people say they have, like I watch the dating guys do this. Is anyone in the dating world here? Anybody want to date? Okay, I'm not offering. But the dating guys tell people they have this approaching anxiety so they could sell them books. Approach anxiety just means that you don't take relationships seriously. So if you got serious about relationships, that word seriously changes things. And I tell most people, like, you put the word seriously in a context of you really don't take your business seriously. You're not bad at marketing and you're not bad at sales. You don't take your business seriously. If you did, you would find the time to get around the money, to get around the people and do what needs to get done. So that's my three second version of that whole thing. So if you want the book, which you probably do because there's at least three to five ideas, there's at least one billionaire in that book, right? Okay. There's at least one billionaire you can get a book recommendation or two from. If you want the book. And I have it and I've read it, I wish I was in it. I forgot to put myself in it. But if you want it, you really have to ask yourself, like, how would you get yourself to get it? Like, what would be the person, like the person you want to be with? They already have the book or would you have to really talk yourself into or out of it? So that's the long story short, does that answer your question? Yeah.

That's great.

So change your language, literally. Find a different word. And stop trying to diet, too, because that's a crappy word. Start becoming aware of what you eat, and I guarantee you'll lose weight. Got it.

Awesome. Thank you.

Okay.

I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want.

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