How To Create A Riff List That Will Help You Share Your Story And Get Better Results with Joe Polish and Dean Jackson - I Love Marketing Episode #446

I would encourage everyone here to make riffs of whatever your category is, whatever your business is, whatever your career is, whatever that area is, is to create a riff list. And I have a hundred things on one riff list that's in three columns that are just jumping off points. If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event, or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com so welcome everybody.

I'm Dean Jackson. Guy in the yellow there is Banana Joe Polish. I don't know if you might have heard, but Joe's got a new book out right now available in bookstores everywhere called what's in it for Them? Great book, your books, if everybody's got one. Okay, so everybody knows. So we don't need to talk about that. What are we going to talk about?

Why don't we talk about how to. How to apply the principles or some of the things that will be helpful for people to. With. To connect.

I want to.

No, no, go. Go ahead, Dean. I want to. I was going to show people too, one of the things that I do because I write about it in the book. Some people ask me, what, like, what do your riffs look like? So this is a sheet of Joe's. Wow. I've got this backdrop.

There you go.

It's a sheet of riffs. And so basically what I do is every one of the things. And I write about this in the book where every person that has any knowledge or expertise or like musicians have riffs. There's a certain ways that they sound. And so there's certain things that I will say and talk about whenever I do podcasts or wherever I do speeches. And I oftentimes don't prepare anything so people will translate that. Well, you're just kind of doing stuff off the cuff. And I am. But what I'm also doing is I'm doing things based on stuff I have known and I've spent many years learning. So it's not like I haven't done any prep. I've spent my life learning about marketing and applying what it is I do in marketing. The same thing with addiction recovery and the same thing with connection, which is what this book is about. And so I could go to any chapter and I have every chapter summarized with riffs now. And so I just wanted to share that because when you read the book, if you haven't read the book yet, there's a section where I talk about riffs. And here in real time, if I needed to glance down and look at my riff list in order to think of something to say or talk about something I can do that I don't rely on it like it's a crutch. It's just a jumping off point. And so, yeah, and I would encourage everyone here to make riffs of whatever your category is, whatever your business is, whatever your career is, whatever that area is, is to create a riff list. And I have 100 things on one riff list that's in three columns that are just jumping off points. But this is my entire what's in it for them book where I go through riff.

A log.

Yeah. Because, I mean, I spent two years writing this book. My brain, unfortunately, is not. I finally had a chance to meet Jordan Peterson in person on Monday. He came into town and then I went and met him backstage after the show. And. And he's one of these rare individuals where I wish I had the ability to retain information like Jordan Peterson. This guy can just talk about endless. Let's say I don't even know how a brain like that operates. But the thing is, you don't need to be super intelligent, because I'm certainly not. You just need to have a few tools in your toolbox, and you need to know how to access those tools when they're most useful. So the whole point of that is to encourage everyone to come up with your own riff list and utilize it, because I find it to be quite helpful.

You know, it's so funny is that one of the greatest things you can do with those is document them. And, you know, I've been doing that in emails. You've been doing it in your three emails a week, sending out. They're all sort of riff, you know, ideas that you. That you have. Same thing with me. What I've been doing now is recording video of them. I've been doing.

I've.

Yeah, I've been doing video podcasts now, like in a studio, like the one you and I did. We did a interview on. I love marketing. And that in between the podcast recordings or at different times, I'll go in, I've got my remarkable tablet, and I'll just put headlines like the names. Almost like a musician would have a set list kind of thing. Know of the songs that you know, then you've played these songs so many times. All I need to do is wind you up and say hello Kitty or whatever. You could tell hello Kitty wallet story just because it's. We've told it a lot and that thing. But to get it all documented, you know, it Used to be the thing is everything you know, written down somewhere is a good frame of reference to think about. And I think that it's a really good exercise for everybody now to start thinking in terms of what are your rifts, what are the things that, you know that you repeatedly say that would. You can tell in a story format in, you know, three minutes kind of thing and just challenge yourself to record those. Even I would do a lot of these videos where it's just me looking at the phone and recording like that on a walk or sitting out in my courtyard or whatever. It doesn't have to even be formal. But when you get into the habit of recording and documenting them now you've got this great. You start building up this catalog that you start populating your YouTube channel or your social media and they start spreading and you've got the opportunity to get earned, earned media, as they say, where people, they're spreading. And it's easy to like how many times you talk about is selling evil would probably be one of the first like real rifts that you documented and how many people have seen that video now and it's available on YouTube right now. But that was just. How long was it? Three minutes and something. Just talking about is selling evil.

Yeah. Yes. 3 minutes and 50 seconds. If you guys have not seen that, okay, that's a good example of a riff. Like, if you look at my current Instagram page, there's a whole bunch of videos we've been putting up. All of a sudden I've kind of got a little wacky with Instagram and this is not because of me, but it's my team. Not just Instagram, but Facebook and, you know, whatever Twitter. I need everyone here to follow and comment on Twitter because I neglected it for so long that I all of a sudden need to make it more. And I say all of this with. I'm not spending hardly any time on social media. What I do is I record riffs and then we post the riffs up and I have a second backup phone that has social media on it because my main phone, I do not have social media for protection of my sanity reasons. The thing with riffs, if you look at what I'm doing on Instagram, they're just little riffs. If you've read my book Life Gives to the Giver, it's all a bunch of riffs which are a copulation of my three a week emails that are organized into different categories. If you've not read that book, it's. You can get it@joe's freebook.com so going back to is selling evil. That was a little clip that a guy who works for us named JR Years ago was watching some B roll where they were interviewing me for a documentary.

And.

And they asked me the question, is selling evil? And then I just responded and it was 30 minutes of B roll that never made it into the movie. But he saw that little clip and he's like, that's actually a really good response, and just uploaded it on YouTube without me even knowing it. Next thing you know, this is videos being shown in college classes and different stuff like that in business classes, teaching how to think about selling. And I give a whole little riff on his selling evil. And so if I wanted to go into it, I would say, you know, my favorite definition of selling is from Dan Sullivan where he says, selling is getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and getting them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result. And so I will then ask people what's the most important words of that definition? And people will say, you know, committed or take action. And then usually no one gets the words exactly right that I'm looking for. Not that there's a right or wrong and it's just perception. I'll say good for them because I'll say the definition again. Selling is getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and getting them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result. Now you can get someone intellectually and emotionally engaged in something that's not good for them or that's dangerous or shitty food or shitty behavior or whatever. But if it's really good for them, then selling is being used in a way that actually benefits someone. So the whole definition from that standpoint is one about integrity, not one about taking advantage. So that's a riff. We can go on a bunch of different things. But you know, Dean Jackson, like, if you think of riffs, nine word email before, during and after compelling offer is ten times more powerful than a convincing argument. Those are, you know, who, not How. Even Dan Sullivan's book who not how with Dan, with Ben Hardy. That is something that Dean originally said. He's the one that came up with who, not how, and then they ended up writing a book about it. So whenever, you know, there's a guy that's on here Right now live, Dr. Don Wood. I'll ask Don to unmute himself and speak to this in just a moment. But I write about this in my book that Don, who's a trauma therapist, used to be a hockey player. And when I first met him, I met him at the Spartan World Championships in 2019, and we were both speaking there, and I. He was on a panel being interviewed for a podcast that was also, I think, being broadcast live on ESPN or something, one of the sports channels during that time. And I heard him say some things about trauma and addiction. And he. And he. He ended up taking the guy that ended up winning the world championships that weekend. He had taken him through his process, like, a few days prior to that. But he said this to me. He said he talked about atmospheric conditions. Because one of the conversations me and Don had had is I said, you know, I believe addiction is a solution. It's a solution to pain, and you cannot punish pain out of people. And, you know, it's not that the drugs or the behaviors are the things that are bad. It's what's. What's. It's the. The reasons they're doing it. They're trying to soothe and satiate a pain. And so we really connected. And he said, if you understood the atmospheric conditions of somebody's life, it would make sense why they do what it is that they do. So one of the things that I write about in there with giving credit to Dr. Don Wood is that everyone has atmospheric conditions. My life. Everyone's life here. That's a riff. So I could talk about that in anywhere. So, Don, why don't you say something about atmospheric conditions? Because I believe that a person can alter and change their atmospheric conditions. But since you're right here, it's a good treat and opportunity to have you here, since it's something actually I write about and what's in it for them.

Perfect. Thanks, Joe.

Yeah.

The atmospheric conditions is something that I use because I'd meet all these different people and they would have all this guilt and shame about, you know, addiction or things that they've done in their lives. And then what I would say to them is, how could you have been any different?

Right.

If I lived your life the way you lived your life, I would have found the same kind of resource. Maybe not the exact one, but I would have found something to stop that pain. And I always talk to him about. Humans have very unique memory systems. We have two memory systems, explicit memory, where we store billions and billions of bits of information. And we also have associative repetitive memory, the same way animals do. They learn through association and repetition. So if you've had a lot of trauma, that explicit memory is Stored in real time and high definition. So your subconscious operates in the present. So when it accesses memory from something that happened to you, maybe as a child, it's going to create an autonomic nervous system response. It has to. It's not a choice. So if your system gets activated, then you're going to feel an emotion because the emotion is a call for an action, but you can't do the action because there's nothing happening. And so how. So it's doing a Google search through your entire life for how do we respond to this? Then it goes into the second memory system, which is the associative repetitive, which I call coding. And so the more you've used that substance, you've built a code, a neural pathway that your mind says, oh, we know what to do when we feel this pain. Go right to the code. And then the code says, take a drink, take a drug, have sex, whatever it is, to stop this pain. And I say, you couldn't have done it any other way.

Yeah, yeah, you couldn't have done any other way. So even if people are doing what's considered good or bad, that just happens to be the current state of their atmospheric conditions that kind of create the outcome. And so the good news, and I'd love to hear your thinking around this, and this is one of the things I've been saying to people, and I think I've always believed this, Don, even when I was in the state of hopelessness, when I was in the worst state of being a drug addict. You know, some people, they just have lost every shred of hope. And that's where suicide and complete, you know, complete just destruction of their, their lives and family and everything surrounding comes in. That there's always been that, that part of me, that flame that even when it was almost completely burnt out, where I actually believed, you know, I could come back, I believed, you know, there was a possibility. And I think the, the framing of atmospheric conditions, I, I believe one can not only alter and change their atmospheric conditions or to reframe and make sense of the past, but if you do that for yourself, you can really, in a very beneficial way, influence other people. So I think every human here has the ability to change their atmospheric conditions, not only how they think about them, but how they actually live out their life. And that you can fashion and design your own future for sure.

So, and that's what I do is I say we just need to reset the way your mind filters through your set of atmospheric conditions. So if you have, say, a situation you had as a child that's stored in high definition, very bright, very intense. Your subconscious mind that's operating in real time sees that as if it's happening now. And so then it's going to call for an action. So every time you have an emotion, your mind is calling for an action. The purpose of fear is to escape a threat. The purpose of anger is to attack a threat. So when you think about something that happened to you 20 years ago and your heart's pounding in your chest, it's a glitch, it's an error message. Your mind is trying to get you into an action to make it stop, but you can't make it stop. So the problem for the individual is they keep looping through this trauma, activating their nervous system, and they can't stop it. And so how do they stop that? They stop the mind from Google searching through its memory by taking a drug or taking a drink, and it stops it. And then they keep repeating it. So now the second memory system that codes on how to make behaviors and habits, right, then builds a code on what to do with it. So what we do is go into that explicit memory and reset that memory system. So I take it at a high definition, get it into a low definition, Almost the opposite of what they did with the wizard of Oz, where they went from black and white to color. We're going to go from color to black and white. Then when the mind sees that data, it doesn't respond to it because it's just data, right? So when I worked with the Boston Marathon bombing survivors, right, when she first sat down, Rebecca Gregory, she was four feet from the first bomb and she lost her left leg and five and a half years of post traumatic stress, tear nightmares every night. And when she first sits down, starts talking to me, she starts to shake and cry. And I said, rebecca, do you know why you're shaking and crying? She says, well, because I'm talking about what happened to me. And I said, right, but your mind thinks there's a bomb about to go off. It's looking at the information about the bombing in real time, trying to get you to run. But it's an error message. All we have to do is reset that. So, Joe, you're absolutely right. Nobody has to live with post traumatic stress, depression, anxiety. You can fix it.

Here's what I would say. There's a lot of different ways that you can connect with other people. And my book will go through lots of different ways that what I've done, the first chapter is about be a pain detective and look for the pain and connect with someone on how you can reduce their suffering and how you can, you know, develop real, you know, rapport and empathy. And it usually comes from a place of pain, although it could come from a, you know, a place of pleasure too, certainly. However, the reason I bring up these conversations about pain and stuff in the book is that if you're disconnected with yourself, it's really hard to be connected with other people. And if you have trauma that's kind of overriding your behavior. You know, one of the things I mentioned in my book is humans are either communicating where you're just talking to each other and that could be on zoom. It could be in person, it could be, you know, on the phone, it could be whatever, it could be any form of communication. But if you just take an in person situation, and I'll mention this, at events where you're at an event in person, there's either a few or a lot of people around you. And if you're at a one or two or three day event and you're interacting with everyone, you're either communicating, we're just talking, you're connecting, where you're finding common ground and you really feel like you're, you're dancing well with the other person, you're enjoying it. And the third experience is you're trying to escape where you're just like, get me away from this person. There's something about the energy or you're distracted or you're hungry or you're, you know, you're just not there with them or you're frankly don't like them and they don't like you. There's something about what you believe or just sometimes it's this energetic feeling and you don't even know how to explain it, but you just don't. You kind of pick up on it. And what I hope is that everyone can develop their spidey senses to identify the takers in the world and kind of put up boundaries to it. Because the real goal of my book is to help givers be better boundary givers so that they can really spend their. What I call in chapter two, your Tammy, your time, attention, money, effort and energy on people that are worthy of that. But to go back to Don in atmospheric conditions, if that keeps you from being connected with yourself, how the hell are you going to connect very well with other people? And the people that are the biggest con artist is they don't connect, they connect with people. There's connecting where you're connecting by conning people. And, and that's what a lot of marketers that do it unethically do is they bullshit people. And then there's real connecting where you're actually coming at it from a good place. So the reason I intermingle so much about addiction and so much about, you know, just the human being, you know, the million dollar racehorse. That analogy that I talk about quite a bit, I'll. I'll go more in detail on that in a little bit, is that, you know, you. If you don't take care of you, I can teach people connection strategies all day long. But if you're walking around the world constantly trying to escape your own skin or you don't feel comfortable anywhere, you're just not going to do as good of a job leveraging any potential relationships and opportunities that are always available. You know, people that cannot seem to get things to work in their life, I almost want them to look at their life first before the external opportunities that are out there. You know what? The sun is often always there, but there's clouds in the way that are preventing, you know, the sun from coming through. And sometimes that's just the weather conditions, but the atmospheric conditions are the weather conditions of our own lives in our minds.

What? Yeah, exactly, in our minds. That's really the thing I've been working on. I got a riff in the making in the category of imagine if you applied yourself, that the, you know, that's often talked about how Dan Sullivan and I was talking about this on our podcast, but when my mother died, I. She had a box with all of my old report cards and stuff. So I got to look back, like talk about, you know, going down memory lane there. But my third grade report card was. Summed it all up with the handwritten comments in the comment section was Dean is able to achieve excellent results with what seems like little effort. Imagine if he applied himself. And that's been kind of my life pattern for, for my whole life. And I was, I was talking with Eben or texting with Eben a couple of nights ago because it hit me a breakthrough that I think is like something real. And I'm so glad that Dawn's here too, because it's kind of, I think in the line of what he's saying that it dawned on me that in order for somebody to change something, anything that's not working in our lives is usually there's a breakdown of one of three things. It's either the logic of what you're trying to do that you're just trying to do something that doesn't make sense or you're going about it in the wrong way or the logic is right. This is the plan that will, will work. But the logistics are wrong. You're not doing what you know to do is a logistics problem. But barring a logic or logistics problem, Perhaps the biggest 80% of the reason I think that we don't get the results or get the thing that we're trying to change is a limbic problem problem that there's going on in our minds that's blocking us from following, doing the thing that we know to do. And that's really a, you know, and so I'd love to have. That's the, that's as far as I've gotten on the, the riff in the making. But it. I love the, the elegance of the limbic logic or the logic logistics and limbic and getting those in alignment. I came up with Eben, I was saying that you can test the logic and logistics of something by doing a limbic lockdown exercise that I thought I was talking about weight loss as an example that the logic of eating following a keto diet with intermittent fasting is a lot. That's a plan that you're going to do. That would be the logic of what you're going to do. The logistics of that would be, okay, well, we're not going to eat anything till noon. We're going to eat all the food between 12 and 6 o' clock and we're going to eat this ketogenic plan. These are the meals that we're going to eat. On paper, it's pretty easy logically and logistically to lay it out. But in practice, what happens is you just like Mike Tyson would say, everybody's got a plan until I punch them in the face is everybody's got a plan till somebody presents you a Krispy Kreme donut or something. Right. That your limbic system has linked that Krispy Kreme to delightful memories that will feel the fill you with the dopamine and the wonderful outcome that you're going to do. But if you were to do a little bit lockdown on that, I've said to Eben, if you, there's, there's no doubt that if you were locked in a prison or locked in a room and somebody brought you the appropriate amount of calories, following the exact logic that you've laid out, that you're gonna eat between 12 and 6 and it's going to be the right number of calories with the right macros and that was the only access to food that you had. You did a limbic bypass. There's no way for your limbic system to derail that. It would be inevitable that your plan would work, you know, and that, so I, you know, there's certain things like I was thinking in, along that lines that if you were to put two glasses on a, you know, on a counter and one is filled with a ice filled glass of windshield wiper fluid and one is filled with a glass of Mountain Dew and they look exactly the same, you don't have to convince your brain, I don't have to convince my brain to not drink the windshield wiper fluid. But if you were presented with the, with the Mountain Dew, even though ultimately it's the same outcome, I mean, it's the same poison, it's just long term acting or short term acting, the consequences linked up differently.

You know, so, so we're having an I love marketing live. And you know, there's those shows behind the scenes how it's all that sort of stuff. And you go back a few minutes when I asked Dr. Don Wood about atmospheric conditions. And so I have a great marketing team and I have a couple of, you know, people on my mark. Well, everyone on my, in my company is part of my marketing team from Gina who's hosting this to, you know, everyone. But I've got a gal named Lauren and, and her partner Paige and they have, you know, they, they help with a lot of stuff from articles that are being put out to a lot of the stuff you see on social media and things. And so I asked, you know, I brought up this whole thing about atmospheric conditions and then I asked Dr. Don Wood about it. And so I have a book out that's right, right now. And so what could I have as clips that are supportive of my book and would speak to the things in the book? But we can edit that little section of Don riffing about atmospheric conditions and all of a sudden it becomes a Instagram video or it can become an article or it could become a post. Right? And so oftentimes what we want to do as part of I love marketing is remind people that something as simple as a phone conversation that you're having with a prospect is an opportunity to say, well, how many times do I get this question and maybe I need to start writing, you know, this in my newsletter and I need to have a Q and A section on my website or I need to speak to this now I know a lot of you do this and that's how you create quote, unquote content. It's just oftentimes though, I think a lot of people just miss so much of it that's right in front of them. And we have these little vignettes, these little slices, these little thought bubbles and that we constantly come up with. Like I went to on when was it, I had a very interesting week. So I went to this event that I spoke for about six hours with Nick Peterson were during the two and a half days. So he's a crypto guy who's one of the best that I know in that space and, you know, ethical and just a cool dude. And it was Harvey McKay's 90th birthday and Harvey McKay wrote a book. And if you're too young, you may not even know who the hell Harvey McKay is. But if you're old enough, Harvey McKay sold millions of books and he was a big best selling famous author. He wrote how to Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive. And so I go there and J. Abraham was also there because I picked up Jay the day before and took him to this event. And we did a me, Nick and jay did a three person Q& A with the audience. And so I'm sitting there with jay Abraham, Harvey McKay, couple of his friends in John Gray, who wrote Men Are for Mars and Women are from Venus. And then one of the ladies is asking me about addiction. And I don't know John very well, I met him years ago, but we're not like buddies or anything. And then he starts asking me for my contact info because he wants to talk to me about addiction recovery related stuff, which I thought was cool. And so Harvey. One of the ways that Harvey has written all of his books, he's written many books, is he will literally write on a piece of paper any idea or thought that will come to him. And then he'll throw it into like an in basket, like an old school basket where you would just like collect folders and 8 and a half by 11 page and he fills it up and then he'll go through those things and those become articles, they end up becoming books. And so a lot of people do this digitally. I mean, one of the first things that Tim Ferriss would do when he was writing his books is he would put it all in Evernote. He would take these little thought bubbles and then Ryan Holiday, who we've got on our podcast, you know, he writes them on three by five cards. But wherever you store your riffs, what happens is if we don't start using the things that we do every day as recipe cards and keep them either digitally or physically, we lose them. And every time you have one that works and people respond to it, it's. That's how comedians practice. Like, they go and they do a show and they figure out, what does the audience laugh at? What do they reject? And then I think, you know, if there's any theme here is if you think of. Think of selling as, like, pickup lines. If you're going to go out and you're going to go to a cold market and you're just going to try randomly, you've got nothing to work with except what you say and the tone of your voice and how you say it. There's certain things that are going to get a different response than others. And it may be what you say, but it also may be how you say it. And so when I take an idea like Atmospheric conditions that came from Dr. Don Wood, I can either steal his idea and I could make it my own, which a lot of people do, or I could credentialize the guy. He's actually a genius network member. I heard about this before he was a genius network member. But part of my relationship with Don is in. Part of his relationship with me is we both live our lives according to what I write about in this book. We show up trying to be helpful and useful to people, and that's kind of what we try to do with this podcast. And it's kind of the advice I try to give people. Like, everybody wants something. Nobody showed up on this, on this zoom today if you didn't want something. And it may be I want to learn about marketing, or we, you know, I like Joe's book, or I have rapport with a lot of you, and who knows what's going to come out of my mouth? But let's just see. Maybe you wanted to be entertained. I have no idea. But all of us want something. But in life, you know, we all want something. And. And that's great. I mean, I want a lot of stuff. I'm actually, I. I make. I use this example. I'm actually getting hungry after this. I'm going to want to eat something. So we. We all want something.

Watch it down with a nice glass of windshield wiper fluid.

Yeah, Yeah, I. I just use these. Mostly just water. But all that being said is when it comes to other humans, the people that we like is. Are the people that show up with a give that's also equal or greater than their want. When somebody wants something. From us and they offer nothing in return except I want something from you versus, hey, I want something. But I'm going to collaborate. I'm going to be reciprocal. I'm going to be appreciative. You would think about all the relationships that are most important in your life. They're the people that have, that show up with wants, but they also have a give that's as good as, or greater than your. You know, than, Than their. You know that. Then they're giving you something that's greater than their want because the people that don't are takers. And this whole riff idea is if you were to think of all of the contributions that you could make to your clients, to prospects to the world, if you're in a, if you're single. There's a section in my book about how to use marketing to find true love. And then I have, you know, a bonus interview with Annie Lala. Some of you heard the podcast we did with Annie Lala, and I literally read a, a singles ad on how to describe, you know, it's literally marketing. I mean it's, it's another form of marketing, but it's very open, it's very vulnerable and it's very contributing. And all of us want something here. And I would think of just putting your very best insights and ideas and awareness onto a page of paper or on your phone or however you store it so you can reference it. And those become the developed seeds of ideas. Because a really great. This book took three decades for me to write. It took two years to work on it, but you know, the concepts of it and I would love to have every person that stays with us and when I mean, stays with us, it could either be a client, it could be someone that's ingenious network, could be someone that goes to, you know, Dean Jackson's breakthrough, breakthrough blueprints. I love all of the people here that offer value in the world to actually document and write this stuff, put it out in the world in, in piecemeal, and also put it together in a book. And then when I have someone like Don that actually I asked him a question about it, it just deepens the whole concept of atmospheric conditions. I can, I guarantee you this book is going to make from my standpoint, the atmospheric conditions a very popular conversation to add to what was what Dr. Don was already doing in his own world and in his own life. So that's, I just wanted to throw that out there. That's like the, the how it's made sort of thing. Dean, I wanted to speak to that and then let's come back. The limbic question you had.

Yeah, I'd love to have. Don't take on whether barking up the right tree with that logic logistics in limbic.

Well, what I was going to say is it that makes sense because people will say oh, I should be able to. To do that. But when there's a survival threat, the logic has no play in it. The conscious mind, it's always overridden by survival. Survival will always override reason and logic and you can't stop it. And here's what's interesting. The subconscious mind, your survival brain, operates 400 millionths of a second before you're consciously able to do anything. 400 millionths of a second, it has already gone forward with its plan, right? So it's in action. And there's a part of the brain, the frontal lobe, which is our conscious mind, our logical reasonable mind called the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, which is supposed to be the impulse control. But it's already 400 millionths of a second behind. And if it's a logical thing and you can stop it, it's possible. But chances are, if it's a survival thing, it's not a chance. It can never stop it. And that's why I always say to people who are in addiction, this has nothing to do with your character, morals, willpower or strength. You can't stop your subconscious mind that survival based from protecting you, even though it's operating with an error message.

So how do you stop it? I mean, what do you. So what's the. There's got to be a way, like you were describing, of essentially what you were doing was rearranging the limbic to support what the logic, if you call logic the thing you want to do. Like if somebody wants to stop the behavior that manifests the addiction or whatever, the impulse control that we're unable to muster with just the logic, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to stop drinking Mountain Dew or I'm going to stop drinking alcohol or whatever. It seems logical that that's easy. And what do I need to do? I just need to not drink or not eat, you know, McDonald's or not.

Whatever.

It sounds great when you're planning it in your head, but in the real world, then the limbic system doesn't. Whatever you. Whatever that says is it's doing its own thing, right? Is that.

Absolutely.

And it's not listening to that logic because it says if I have to rely on Logic. I could be dead by the time I figure out whether it's logical, right? So it is already engaged. So I'll give you an example. I worked with a professional baseball player. And so we're there, and he's hitting in the bat, not the batting cage. His coach is pitching to him behind a screen. And so the coach throws the pitch. He hits the ball straight back at his head, right at the screen, right? And the coach booms down on the dirt. And so I said to him, I said, did he choose to duck? He didn't. His mind, even though there was a cage in front of him, he can't.

Possibly get hit by this baseball, Right?

He cannot stop ducking. And he would duck every single time because his mind tells him there's a ball coming at your head. Logically, we shouldn't have any worry because the screen's there, but that's gone out the window because it doesn't take any chances. And the other thing that we see, we do brain mapping. When somebody has post traumatic stress, for an example, the mind is looking at subconsciously old information from years ago and responding to it in real time. The brain map shows us that the occipital lobes, the O1, 2, O1 and O2 area in the brain are lit up, which tells us it's looking at something. But it's not looking at what's in front of them. It's looking at memory. So what we do, Dean, is we reset the memory. We take it out of high definition. It's stored in. When you have a traumatic memory, all your senses are heightened. Sight, smell, hearing. So it goes into a high beta brainwave state and records it in high definition. And so what we do is reset it and bring it back into a lower resolution. And we can do that in like two minutes. We can reset it all.

That's so amazing. I recently heard, like, I have a perfect example of this that I recently heard someone. I forget who it was, but they said basically, if you're going to tell yourself a lie, tell yourself a good lie, right? Like, because you're lying to yourself anyway, right? So an example was if you're repeating this constant belief that you have or something. So I'll give you the perfect example of it. Sometimes I'll wake up at like 4:30 in the morning. And in the past, I would think, because that's an awkward time where you're like, okay, there's not that much more time till when I'm gonna wake up. And sometimes I couldn't get back to sleep. But I started. So that was my pattern. When I wake up at 4:30, I think, oh, it's get that awkward. I won't really get good sleep. But I started when I heard that, started telling myself a better lie. I started saying to myself, when I wake up at 4:30, I get excited about that because I'll go pee. And then I come back and have the best two and a half hours of sleep that I've had all night. And I started repeating that in my mind and wouldn't you know it, that now I have the best two. And it's data supported by my aura ring that I actually have the best, like sleep in that last two and a half hours of the day because I've told myself that that's what's gonna happen.

It's fascinating, but it's because your subconscious mind is literal.

Yeah.

I always tell this when I work with an athlete, say a golfer. If you say in your mind, don't hit the ball in the water, it doesn't understand the negation. All it hears is hit the ball in the water.

Yeah.

So when you tell your mind that your subconscious mind is literally taking that logical part of the mind doesn't always use that, but the subconscious does every time.

Hey, that's my. That's funny. I'm a golfer too, and I would always. I might have great belief about my. My driving. I never miss the fairway. I can hit it as straight as I can point. Those are the words that I say to people and to myself. And it's true. You know, it's. I very rarely ever go off the. The fairway, you know, so interesting. I love this stuff.

Yeah.

Talk with, with the professional golfers, this is a really interesting concept. When I work with them, the first thing I'll say to them is, do you think you need to be confident to play good golf? And they'll all say, yeah. And I'll say, no, you don't. You have skill. Right. Confidence is a byproduct of your skill. It's what happens after you execute your skill. If you put it in front of your skill, you'll chase confidence all over the golf course. But if you rely on your skill, you'll never have to worry. And these guys are so good at the professional level that they can hit any kind of shot in any kind of situation.

Yeah.

They're so highly skilled, they don't need confidence. Confidence will leave them all the time.

You know, let's talk about confidence and courage. I just as a jumping off Point. And we can riff on that for a bit. So, you know, Dan Sullivan has that story when he was in the. He was a cadet in the army, and they had like 60 of them, and they were having to do during that time in the world. He was born in 1944, so this was in the 60s, I guess.

He.

Was with 60 of the other cadets. And they were the. The boot camp obstacle course that they were running through had barbed wire and trenches they had to call, go through mud and water, all kinds of, you know, just obstacles they had to go through. And they used real bullets at the time, and they would shoot real bullets over their head. And they said, you have to stay low because if you lift your head up, you could get shot in the head and die. And so Dan is explaining this story, and he said, you know, the sergeant asked, you know, how many of you are scared? And no one except Dan raised his hand and. And said that he was scared. And he said, the only person here telling the truth is, you know, Cadet Sullivan or whatever. And he said, so Dan says, you know, he learned the difference between fear and courage. He said, fear is peeing your pants. Encourage is doing what you need to do with wet pants. And so in order for us to get to confidence, we. We often have to operate with courage. Like. So in my book, you know, I talk quite a bit about how to align yourself with the right people. You know, there's that zig Ziglar line, which is, you can have anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want. But my friend Martin Howey, when he had stage four cancer, came over to my office and he said, you know, a lot of people say these lines like, people don't want a, you know, a drill, they want a hole. Or you can get anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want. He goes, but the problem is those things are often wrong, because sometimes people buy a drill not because they want a hole, they want to stir paint, because there's other things that you can do with drill other than drill a hole. So maybe they don't want a hole. Maybe they want, you know, paint to be stirred. And he said the same thing with, you can help other people get what they want that won't do a damn thing for you. And that's true, like all of us have been in situations where we've really helped others get what they want that not only didn't help us at all, they oftentimes took advantage, and oftentimes Abuse you and rip you off and betray you. And what happens is when you're a giver, it, you can become jaded by being a good human doing the right thing. Like everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. Even when people are doing the wrong things, most people think they're right. So it takes an enormous amount of awareness to realize that even when you think you're right, you could be totally wrong. That's another discussion. But the thing is, most people think they're right. And that whole line, you know, people judge themselves on their intentions, they judge others on their actions. So you know, the, the when the actions of you being a giver and helping someone intentionally followed with action and then someone takes advantage of you, it can leave you in a very dark place. So when you become hurt or you have your heart broken, you become betrayed, you can put up walls to connecting with other people. And oftentimes when someone wants something from you and they're so persuasive to the point of physical assertiveness or you feel like, man, I don't know how to escape this sort of situation. That's where we have to be able to muster courage and either set boundaries now, preferably if we do this in advance, you have less of those sort of difficult situations to get in with people that are half not people that are elf, you know, easy, lucrative and fun versus hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. So what I wanted to talk with you guys about as it relates to this, since you're talking about courage, you know, how do you, how do you muster or develop the ability to resource yourself to fight when you need to fight back, run away when you need to run away. Ask for help when you need to ask for help. Because a lot of times when I was a dead broke entrepreneur struggling, none of this shit was fun. I didn't have an elf business. It wasn't enjoyable. I didn't know how to do marketing, I knew how to do any of this stuff. And I had to, I had to wake up every day and muster as much courage as I could to drag myself through the war that I somehow was in when I was going through addiction recovery, none of it was enjoyable. It sucked. And when you're, when you're doing withdrawals or you're trying to, you know, overcome, you know, the, the consequences of just life, danger, etc, it's very difficult. So I'd love to get your take don on, you know, accessing courage so that we can function in those times when we need it. Because if you, you know, whatever you fear it don't face controls you. Whatever you fear and take steps to face, you can control it or at least get better at it. And that oftentimes requires courage. And I, I don't think anyone here would disagree that operating with courage doesn't feel good. Operating with confidence does feel good. So to go back to the skill, you know you, when you got the skill, you know you, there's a flow that's there when you don't. You're going to have to kind of muster this, this internal resourcefulness. So I'd love to get your take on that. And anything you would say to this Dean also or anyone on anyone here, I'm totally open to hear what everyone else has to say about it because I, I think courage right now is really needed in the world, especially with givers because there's a lot of freaking takers out there.

Well, my thought on courage is what if it's a life threatening what Dan was going through situation, it makes total sense that he would feel fear, right? That's not a lack of courage. That's just the brain saying we may get our head shut off. Right. So courage, you got to over still operate even though you're afraid. And what do they say? Courage is not the absence of fear. Right. It's operating in spite of fear. But what I, when I work with a golfer, I don't need them to feel fear because there's nothing on the golf course. That's what I explained to them. What are you afraid of on a golf course? There's nothing, there's nothing life threatening. But they make it into life threatening because they start seeing the bunker, they start seeing the water, they start seeing the trees, and that attracts their attention. And now it becomes a lion. And that's what I said is if, if you think that way, you're going to create all kinds of fears, but there's nothing at your skill level that you can't do. So again, courage is, is not something that would be absent just because you have skill. Especially if it's life threatening. You have to operate in spite of it.

That's good.

So I used to tell myself, Don, the, the. I would imagine that everything we're seeing is just a holodeck, that the, none of that. The ball is sitting on one little patch of the ground and you're standing on that ground. The ball's not moving. Nobody's yelling at you. No, there's no, no threat. Physically, you could set up exactly the way you need to, you know how to swing and the site, the sight of that water or that stuff in your eye line, that's not affecting anything that you're having to do here. You know, it's all, it's gonna fly through the air and it's gonna land precisely the distance that you know that that club is going to go. When you swing the way that you need to swing. It's just so funny how we psych ourselves out like that.

Well, the skill level of, of golf, it's, it's the hardest sport I've ever played. Because the best explanation I heard is somebody said to me one time, think about having a nail tapped into the wall. Now take a hammer and swing as hard as you can and drive that nail straight into the wall. That takes skill. You wouldn't be able to do it the first few times. It would take a long time. You know the guy who said that to me, Hawk Harrelson is the announcer of the White Sox. He says it's also the equivalent of playing major league baseball and hitting every ball over second.

Baseball, huh?

How hard would that be? Right. And so the difficulty, and that's what I always try to explain to these guys. At your level, there isn't anything you can't do. They're so skilled. When you go out and play with these guys, the thing that's funny is people look at these guys and they say, well, you know, I could go out and play. They don't play the same course as we do. When they go on to a professional course, it is set up completely different than what the amateurs are playing. The rough is longer, the greens are faster, the pins are in tougher places. They're playing like Tiger woods said. He said, if you're a single digit handicap and you play some of the courses we play, you'd have trouble breaking 100.

That's the truth. I played sawgrass the, the last round that you could play before the tournament. And then they, they tore it tore down the clubhouse. And the rough was, you know, you go in that, and that rough is punitive. I mean, it's like.

And they get out of it like it's nothing.

Exactly. Right.

And we could take three shots to get out.

Yeah, it's funny. Let's see you guys talk about golf. So Dean has this great golf analogy about how he works, or he, like, he likes golf. I always say it's like, you know, George Carlin, it's a waste of real estate. But he, he. There's so much more you could do with that land. But anyway, Dean is Like, why do I like playing golf? So he came up with an acronym which is G stands for goal, O stands for. And I remember all this. O stands for optimal environment, L stands for limited distractions, and F stands for fixed time frame. And so Dean set up a house where he does. He calls it his evil scheme hatchery, where he goes and has a whiteboard and a chair. And he doesn't have technology in the room. If he wants to bring in a laptop or a phone, he could do that, but he has it free of like, computers and stuff, unless he wants to bring stuff in. And then. And there's no. There's this whiteboard. So it's like a blank space where he can do his entrepreneurial art, which in his case is thinking. And he goes and plays golf. So he gives himself a goal. He creates an optimal environment to do it in. He has limited distractions there. That's why there's no technology and stuff there. Unless he, he chooses to bring it in and then a fixed time frame where he'll go in and, you know, he's like, I play golf because I can, you know, I can go through 18 holes in what, three and a half, four hours or whatever. I don't ever play golf. So I don't really know this stuff. But, you know, it's a good thing. We actually did an I Love marketing episode on how Dean, how to go play golf in your own life and, and applied post it up.

There's a YouTube video called the 50 Minute Focus Finder and it's right there. Gina posted it up in the, in the chat.

Yeah, and that's from years ago too. That was one of our very first episodes when we started doing I Love Marketing in 2010. Let me answer this question right here from Mario. How do you keep everything still interesting? This for me, Joe. How do you keep everything interesting to you when you've said it 10,000 times before? But you know, it's life changing to the newest person hearing it for the first time, you know, and then we'll take the questions that people have here. You know, the, the interesting thing about that is most of the things that I say, I haven't said 10,000 times. And I always say them differently. And if I ever get bored with it, I actually, there's so many things people that have listened to. You know what? I, I've been teaching marketing stuff since, gosh, for 28 years now. And I, and I really first Learned Marketing in 1992. So I'm 30 years of doing this stuff because I'm 54 years old right now, and if I get bored with it or I don't like it anymore, I. I frankly just quit talking about it. I mean, there's stuff that I used to talk about that I just kind of was done with. And then I started another chapter. And over the years, I've gone into different areas of interest and stuff, so I always have to keep things elf for me. But I went and saw Elton John on Friday night. On Friday night, there were two shows here in Phoenix. We're talking like 30, 40,000 people at each one. And they were sold out. It was insanely packed. And I was like, how many freaking times is this guy saying Rocket Man? You know, like, is he 75 years old? Is he bored out of his mind? And it was a great show. It was an amazing show. And I had met Elton John years ago. He was at Elton John Oscar party. And I went up and talked to him and Katy Perry when they were having dinner, and that was in 2013. And it's like the same shit that he's been singing over and over again. But I'll tell you, I don't know. I don't know if he just loves it, but I remember saying to Sheree, my girlfriend, I was like, God, I mean, I wonder if he's just bored out of his mind of singing the same song. But, you know, it's interesting to be asked the same thing, because to me, it doesn't seem. I always give a different twist on it and the beauty of a riff list. I've never been able to give a signature talk. I admire my speaker friends that can give the same exact talk over and over again. I've never been able to do it. I've tried. I can't. My brain is too distractible. I'm too add. And I. I just go into many different tangents. And so I cannot keep to a script. So some people, I think, work well off of that. I certainly do not. But the thing that keeps it interesting to answer the question is I always go deeper with it. And the beauty of writing this book is I really had to think about things that I what I do and try to explain how I do them. And so my book is a bit of a, you know, capability book and strategy book on things that I do. But it's really designed to be a character book. I hope that it helps people really think about what they do and how they do it and why and who that who they invest their time, attention, money, and effort and energy with. And my marketing friends are like, what are you hoping to get out of the book? What are you trying to sell? Are you trying to sell Genius Network? And I'm like, I. I actually wrote a book so that 100 years from now when I'm long gone, hopefully people are still reading it. I. It's. It's not a book designed to pitch people. Does it talk about Genius Network? Yes. Is it designed as a sales letter? No, it's not. I mean, I have other books for that. And so anyway, that's. That's my, my response to that.

That was awesome. That was great. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Watch your inbox. And I don't know if you guys have heard, but Joe's got a new book. It's out right now. It's available at bookstores everywhere. You can get a copy for you and a friend and fits in stockings. So perfect Christmas gift forever. And until then, watch your inbox, watch your social media, watch everything. And we'll be doing another one of these very soon. So we hope to see you then.

Thank you. I hope. I hope everyone enjoyed it and found it valuable, and I appreciate the support. So thank you all. And thank you, Gina. Thank you, Dean and everyone on my team. And you guys are awesome. Have a wonderful rest of your evening or whatever time it is. And what time zone. Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today@ilovemarketing.com subscribe if you'd like access to the show, notes or resources to help you take action on what was discussed, please visit ilovemarketing.com 446.

Sam.