Jamie Smart And The Truth About Feelings: How To Reduce Worry, Overwhelm Or Stress

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and.

This is the I love marketing podcast.

Hello, this is Joe Polish, and you're about to hear our I Love Marketing episode with a very special guest, Jamie Smart. And we ended up spending so much time asking Jamie some awesome questions that we decided to break this episode up into two episodes. So what you're about to hear is part one, and then the next episode that we publish will be part two of the interview with Jamie Smart. So enjoy.

Hey, everybody, it's Dean Jackson and Joe Polish.

And here we are. We have a special guest on this particular episode. And Dean, do you want me to give the official professional bio or do you want to speak to your experience?

Let me hear this official. Let me hear this official bio and then we'll expand on that.

Okay, well, first off, our guest is literally from where we're located in the United States. He's in another country, and that would be somewhere over there in the uk. His name is Jamie Smart. He's an internationally renowned coach, trainer, and author of the best selling books Clarity, Clear Mind, Better Performance, Bigger Results, and the Little Book of Clarity. And he shows people the keys to clarity, the ultimate leverage points for productivity, innovation and transformation. And Jamie's primary focus is on training coaches, trainers, consultants, and business leaders to bring the principles behind Clarity into their work with clients and into their own businesses and also into every aspect of their lives. And so his guiding purpose is psychological freedom for everyone. So welcome, Jamie, to I love marketing. How are you?

Oh, I'm really good. I'm really, really thrilled to be here talking to you guys.

Yeah, it's actually great to have you here. And you and Dean have known each other for a while. We just recently got introduced to each other. And your newest book, the Little Book of Clarity. I am almost, I would say, probably about 60% of the way through. It's really, really excellent. And I'll have it finished up in the next couple days. But I just wanted to put that out there because I, you know, I'm just getting into it. But for people that don't know who you are, based on what I said, I want to hear Dean's perspective on this too. But who is Katie Smart?

Well, so I'm basically a regular guy who very, very fortunately, about, gosh, back in, like 1998, I happened to get sent on a training course, which was an NLP training course. And at the time, I'd been working like I was in my early 30s. I'd had a job managing projects for big companies. Which I was quite good at, but I didn't really enjoy it that much. And I went on this NLP training course and I was just blown away that there was stuff you could learn about the mind that could make a big difference to you in your life. And I was so blown away by it, I quit my job two weeks later. I secured a contract first with another company to make more money so I could go and retrain in this stuff. And I spent the next couple of years retraining as an NLP guy and then I did that for many years. And so who am I? I'm a guy who's fascinated about the mind, fascinated about people, and just love sharing big ideas and having impact on people. And clearly I love talking, so I'm going to shut up.

Well, Dean, you've read Jamie's books and everything, so our listeners get the most out of this conversation we're going to go into because we need to set the st.

I think that here's the thing and I some of the people listening may remember when I got back from London last year, after having spent some time with Jamie, I read his book Clarity on the plane on the way back from London. As soon as I got back, I shot a little video in Toronto talking about my revelation from Clarity. And what I really loved about the book was how it was. You didn't have to do anything. It wasn't about learning a mental discipline. It wasn't about learning any, you know, state management techniques or anything like that, which is what a lot of NLP is about and works very effectively. But what I found was that this book, even upon reading it, you get the idea, you get the message. And it's one of these things that once you get it, you've got it. It's just a complete shift. Once you understand. It's almost like knowing how a magic trick works, that once you know how the magic trick works, you don't. You never look at it the same way again. And I think that that thought and I'll share as we go through some of the things that I've done, like some of the visual things that applied with me. But what was most impactful is Jamie, you told me a story while we were walking in the park in about what was going on in the 1850s in London. I think it'd be really valuable to kind of tell that story as the opening to this conversation about Clarity.

Well, it's so fascinating, Dean, because what I was thinking about one day is like, if you think about it, if you took a 10 year old kid from the USA or from England and sent them back in time 200 years to the, you know, to 1815, they would be more leveraged than the best, best educated, most brilliant doctors in the world purely because they knew about germs. See doctors in the early 1800s, they didn't know that germs existed. Or rather they knew that germs existed, but they didn't know that there was a link between germs and disease. And so literally getting operated on in the 1800s was like Russian roulette. It was so dangerous because the doctors do like, they'd be doing like autopsies one minute and cutting umbilical cords with the same scalpels the next minute. They just didn't know. And so a 10 year old kid, just by virtue of knowing something that's already true about how life works, would have more impact than the best doctors in the world in the early 1800s. Well that's the power of understanding something that's already true about how the mind works. And can I dive into this real quick on this one point? So if you think about it, there are certain things that are what we could just call facts of life. So like gravity is a fact of life. From the second you're born, you're learning about gravity. Every dribble you do, every time your hands move, everything you bump into, you're learning about gravity. And for the first few years of our lives, we learned about gravity so automatically and so fluidly and so effortlessly that every single person on this call has used gravity a thousand, used your understanding of gravity a thousand times this week. Every time you run up and down stairs, every time you pick up a cup, you're using an embodied understanding of gravity that you don't even remember learning. And that's because gravity is obvious. And, and so you get a learning curve, gets automatically initiated. And it's a learning curve not like studying. It's automatic data based learning. So our senses are pulling in data around the world and it's an automatic learning curve. Well now here's the thing that didn't happen with germs and bacteria because they were invisible. They were invisible. So we couldn't have an automatic learning curve. I was talking to one of my clients in Singapore about this and she said, oh, my daughter just had this year old daughter had gone to school and the teacher was going to teach them about germs. And so the teacher's job was to make germs visible to them. So she got, you know, that Glitter that little kids. Like she got two of the kids, it's like a class of 34 year olds and she puts glitter on two of the four year olds in the morning and says, let's check in at the end of the day and see where the glitter is. Of course, by the end of the day, every kid in the whole classroom is just caked in glitter. And she goes, that's germs. So she made germs visible to the kids just like someone made germs visible to us, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, whenever it was for you young gentlemen. And it was made visible to us. And that started an automatic learning curve. So you know how long the sandwich can be on the floor before the three second rule is up or whatever. You've got intuitions about germs. You know, when a piece of food has to be thrown away or if it's okay just to run it under the tap. You have all these intuitions about germs because someone made it visible to you. Well, no one knew that in the early 1800s. And so it was horrific. The things especially in hospitals and stuff, just because they didn't know about an invisible fact of life. Well, it's the same with the mind. Our mind is such an amazing, amazing thing. And there are some facts about how the mind works that are just not visible to us. And so my job when I'm working with groups and when I'm working with individuals and in writing the book, was to take something that's invisible and to give you eyes for it. Just like that teacher gave those little kids eyes for germs. So that's the purpose of the book, that's the purpose of my work, is to give people eyes for this. Because I find that when people get eyes for this fact of life, everything gets better. Their results get better, they have less on their mind, they're more productive, all that sort of stuff. So that's the thing in a nutshell.

I want to say a couple things just before we get into some of the questions. For one, the story you just told reminded me years ago. I mean, boy, this must have been like 16 years ago or something. I interviewed a guy by the name of Dr. Michael Berry. He was the Environmental Protection Agency doctor for like the EPA that specialize in like the cleaning area, you know, when I was obviously selling training and whatnot to professional carpet and upholstery cleaners and restoration companies. And I remember the statement where he said 80% of the diseases in the world can be solved with a bar of soap. And you know, and I don't know if that's 100% accurate. And that was a long time ago he said that. But it was just like, you would never think that something as simple as that could, hygiene, cleansing could make such a difference. And I think a lot of what your message is is the things that seem so complex and are so difficult to get to if you have clarity, they're not at all. It's almost like washing off the windshield wiper. And then all of a sudden you completely see the world differently. So I want to kind of get into this now. You had a company called Salad and you transitioned from NLP and selling your company to writing the book Clarity for so many years in that world. What all of a sudden was the big shift? I mean, what did you see that you had never seen before?

Yeah, great question, Joe. So I was running my business solid, started in 2003 and built up a really decent sized list and community and product business. And my idea in building that business was I wanted to do work I loved, which I was doing and I wanted to have more freedom to do other stuff. So I was doing that, but I was working really hard. And then I read the Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, which you guys must know, because I felt like something was missing. I read this book and I was like, that's it. I need to get my business running on autopilot so I can go and have adventures and mini retirements and stuff. So we worked really hard for like a year to get the business running on autopilot. And I went from my first mini retirement, which is at Whistler in Canada for a three month ski holiday. And I was like, this is going to be great. It'll mean I'm at the top of my profession. I've succeeded. So I get to Whistler and six weeks in I'm like, oh, this isn't it. And I was like, really? Really? I was feeling really down and kind of lost and irritable and like, that's not right. Like I should have white light shining out of all my orifices at this point. I'm so successful. How come I don't feel successful? And. And so I kind of went back to the drawing board and I chucked around for the rest of 2008. And I eventually hired a coach. I paid a coach like 60,000 bucks to work with me because I was so good at doing conversational belief change and that sort of thing that it was really hard to even find Anyone who could coach me, I was very uncoachable at the time. I'm much better now. So this guy's coaching me and he's coaching with this approach, which I just thought was another belief system. And I'm not really interested in another belief system. There's lots of belief systems out there, but they're not my cup of tea. But every once in a while, I'd be on one of these coaching calls and it'd go quiet inside my head, and I was like, whoa, that's weird. That doesn't usually happen. Like, I had a noisy head all the time and it would occasionally go quiet inside my mind. So I started looking into this stuff. And then my big issue for that time leading up to hiring the coach and everything was I felt off purpose. I didn't feel a sense of purpose. And I had purpose in building my NLP business and everything like that, but I kind of lost it. And then literally one night I was at a mastermind group, and literally on the Saturday I didn't have, and the next morning I woke up and it was like, oh, my God, this stuff I've been exploring for the last few months. This is the future of psychology. This is a paradigm. Now, paradigm. The word paradigm gets chucked around all the time. Every time someone brings out a new brand of tinfoil. It's like a new paradigm in kitchen wrap. But a paradigm is actually something very, very rare. Like, there have been like half a dozen of them in the last hundred years, I guess, scientific paradigms. And there's only been a few that actually impact our lives in ways that we're aware of, like germs and the discovery of germs and bacteria. That was a discovery of a paradigm for medicine. And so the field of medicine went from having numerous different theories and ideas about how things worked to having one predominant paradigm that everyone agreed on. That's huge. Just like Newton when he figured out the laws of thermodynamics or the laws of universal gravitation, that created a paradigm for physics, something that the field agreed on. Well, the field of psychology has, like 500 different theories of personality and talk therapy and all kinds of things. There's nothing the field of psychology agrees on, except that it's confusing. I suddenly saw in June 2009, June, May 2009, that this was a paradigm that this represents. And as a paradigm, I was like, oh, this represents the future of psych. Literally that day called up my business partner, Nikki. I said, nikki, we're going to be getting out of the NLP business because I've just found the real thing. And that was shocking to me because I loved nlp. I was like, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. And I thought I'd be exploring language patterns forever and that sort of thing. And then all of a sudden I was like, oh, this is a paradigm. And that was a whole new ball game. So I literally within, within the week I was hiring people to coach me and to learn this stuff and to deepen my understanding because I knew that. It's funny, actually, what I saw was that this is what I was going to be doing for the next 20 years. That was the insight I had. I was like, oh, this is the future of psychology. This is what I'm going to be doing for the next 20 years. And I never told anyone that I would, I told them the insight, I would say, this is what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life. Because it sort of seemed uncommitted to talk about doing it for the next 20 years. It's like, what, you're going to get bored of it. And then suddenly I realized just like 18 months ago, oh, maybe it came to me as 20 years because that's what it's going to take.

Interesting. Even though that time frame, as an aside, that's something that's been coming into our world. I mean, Joe and I have been very involved with Dan Sul, and you know, his whole shift lately has been thinking about a 25 year vista, you know, thinking. And there's something about that that's very peaceful, you know, in a way where you feel like you don't have to get everything, you know, it doesn't have to all come together immediately. You know, in the context of a 20 or 25 year plan, it feels like, okay, we've got some. You can make a substantial difference on something in that period of time.

Unless, unless you don't have any clarity, which of course Jamie will get to that point.

Right.

Because there could be people that can't even fathom what the hell do I want to do with my life, what, what interests me. Or I'm interested in 400 things and I'm overwhelmed by it and all the other things that the, the brain and the thoughts and stuff are going on.

That's actually a good point. How do you define clarity, Jamie? What is that?

Yeah, great question. So I talk about three kinds of clarity. So the first type of clarity I'll often talk about is clarity of connection. Like, you know, sometimes whether you're talking to a client or whether you're on a date or you're talking to a member of your family or something, or a friend you'll have sometimes when you're just completely in the moment and feeling really close to them, like, it's just there's. You haven't got a lot on your mind. And so you can feel that sense of connection with the other person. And certainly in the domain of sales and selling, if you're doing face to face selling or selling on the phone, that's. Oh, pardon me. That's the alarm that's reminding me at the time that our call was originally scheduled to start. Apologies. So clarity of connection is that feeling of closeness and connection to another person. And that's the first kind of clarity that I talk about. And you might talk about it as rapport or being on the same page as someone, but it's something you can almost feel. You can feel that sense of connection. So I talk about clarity of connection. The second type of clarity I talk about is clarity of thought. So, you know, a great example of this is athletes or dancers or musicians talk about being in the zone. Well, when you're in the zone or when you're in flow, when you're working and you're not, it's like you don't really have much on your mind. There's this motorcycle race in the Isle of Man called the TT race. And this race is just insane. They ride motorcycles at really high speed around the country roads and through the villages of this island once a year. And it's just incredibly dangerous. But I was listening to this interview with one of the drivers and he said, yeah, the first time around the circuit, I'm not doing my best thinking. But by the second time around, I've got a really clear mind and I only get exactly the thoughts that I need exactly when I need them. And that's what I think of, like, clarity of thought. Like, clarity of thought is when you get your. Like, I'll ask you, both of you guys, when do you get your best ideas?

Well, go ahead, Dean, because I don't think the Deans have to be good ideas or they can just be good according to him. Go ahead, Dean.

Well, I was going to ask Joe about the, you know, talk about his meditation, whether that happens, because I get a lot of my best ideas in stillness, you know, just sitting in my office looking out the glass door and, you know, in, in thought. And so that's where that, that comes from. Now, the other opportunity, the other thing That I noticed is that I have absolute clarity. It's kind of on a polarity. It's in the moments of absolute stillness where I'm, you know, still and prepared to have clarity and in moments where I am in my unique ability, going, using my unique ability at the highest levels so I'm involved in something with people. We're having high level discussions, we're brains or following an idea that is like a breakthrough marketing idea or being like best example, Jamie is like being in a breakthrough blueprint event where you know, there's, it's like without a net. It's like improv in a lot of ways. But the ideas that come from having, you know, a structured.

I don't know.

Whether paradigm is the right word or what, you know, a structured architecture like the eight profit activators and having a whole world of experience in applying those and bringing those to this moment where we're having a discussion about somebody's business and all of those previous experiences are available and able to create something new right there in the moment. So those are the two moments that I feel the most clarity, I think.

Very cool. What about you, Joe?

You know, it's an interesting question because I remember even reading in your book you talked about people experiencing it during, in the shower, on vacation, things like that. For me, sometimes that happens. I'm really trying to determine where is there any sort of normal place where I have my best ideas? Because to me it tends to happen randomly. For instance, when I do meditate occasionally I'll have a really great insight. Sometimes when I'm doing yoga, sometimes when I'm exercising. There are other times where I'm in the middle of a shitstorm where if there's a lot of pressure, it's almost like it forces my mind to have to hum. Now that's not the ideal way to come up with great ideas. If I guess I had to label it ideal. I just remember something about a week and a half ago where I had a really negative experience with a person that I was helping tremendously and have helped tremendously with a lot of stuff that had a reaction to, you know, I'm not going to go into specific details because it's a famous person and it was kind of. I'm still trying to come to grips with how I think about it, but this person had a really negative, inappropriate reaction. Sort of like if you're gonna. Not, not that someone should, but let's say for instance you're hunting rabbits and you know it requires a pellet gun. Let's say if you're using a cannon, you know, it's just, it's just way over the top.

An out of proportion response.

Exactly. But what it did though is it gave me a great idea of like, aha, you know, I am not going to work with this person anymore.

But I.

But there are qualities about this person that I really like and appreciate. But that reaction was sort of like cross the line. But I've had many things happen like that where it takes something that irritates the daylights out of me or it's like you see something in a way that you're like, this is not what I signed up for. I talk about elf. You can have an elf business, easy, lucrative, fun. Or you can have a half business, hard, annoying, layman, frustrating. And I think people in situations can fall into that. And I was like, this is not elf. But I would have never gotten that breakthrough idea had something positive continue to happen. Meaning it required a negative sort of thing for me to get like a whack to the side of the head and wake up and really take a look. I don't know if you would call that clarity or just like what the hell. However, I sometimes get really profound ideas in the middle of chaos, in the middle of things that are really. I write better when I'm angry. It's really sort of an interesting thing. But again, peacefully having great grand ideas. It's in calmness, it's in the library. I mean I get incredible ideas in the library. I get really great ideas or moments of clarity when I am answering questions, say at strategic coach. When me and Dan ask each other questions about life and we get into a Socratic dialogue, things come to me that way. So it just seems to be.

I've seen you get into that zone at 25k meetings. Same kind of thing, right? Where you've created an environment where it's designed to put you in positions where you can have your best thoughts all come together at just the right time, just the right insight for somebody. I thought about that, that kind of being like game time. You know, it's like Michael Jordan performed best when the pressure was on. And it's like the, you know, the NBA playoffs and the games on the line, you know, those are the moments that they thrive for to, you know, everything has led up to those moments.

Well, I love what you guys are saying because what I found again and again with people is that they get their best ideas when they fall out of how they're usually how they've been thinking about something. And Joe, I've had the same thing happen to me where something horrible happens and I'm like, oh, that's just shone a light on something that I've been putting up with that I need to stop putting up with. So clarity doesn't always feel good because sometimes it's like. Sometimes you get shown something that it's like, oh, okay, actually, I need to do something about this. And I wish I didn't have to, but it's time. But it's the clarity of thought, which is the second way I talk about clarity is basically when your thinking is closely aligned with the reality of life, rather than caught up in an illusion or caught up in ego or caught up in the past or the future or that sort of thing. It's when your thinking clears and you suddenly and often it has a feeling that comes with it, a feeling of kind of knowing. Not a kind of rampant knowing, but just a kind of gentle certainty. Like I. I can't even remember the last time I had one, but like there was one within the last couple of weeks where something which, oh, yeah, I tell you what it was. It's so interesting. I have this thing like I'm good at thinking through very long spans of time and good at thinking through quite short, you know, kind of the next few months. But that middle bit from kind of nine months to 15 years, I find that bit a little tricky. And so I was reflecting on that and really kind of thinking about, wow, I could do with some fresh new thinking about this. And what hit me was, I want to spend more time with my team. I want to be more closely connected with my team. And so the answer I thought I needed, which was, how do I plan out the things that are happening in 12 months time or whatever, that was actually the wrong question. And the answer to the right question was, I need to spend more time with my team. So that was the insight. And as soon as I got that fresh new thought, it just had that sense of rightness about it. And I suddenly knew if I spend more time with my team and we're more connected and we're doing stuff together and implementing faster, we're going to take care of that. So it's. It's when we fall out of our habitual way of thinking about something that we get an insight. So that's what I call clarity of thought. And then the third kind of clarity is clarity of understanding. And that brings us back to the germs analogy. The better you understand, the deeper you understand germs. The more healthy you and your patients are going to be, the better you understand how your mind works, the more fluidly you're going to navigate the ebb and flow of thoughts and moods and circumstances and that sort of thing. So out of those three, we all have times when we have clarity of connection. We all have times where we have clarity of thought. But to my mind, clarity of understanding, that's the ultimate leverage point. Because there's something you can learn about how your mind works that's gonna, you know, you guys talk about 10Xing your business. Well, to me, the thing that has had the 10x effect on my life is getting clarity of understanding about how our minds work and where our experience comes from. Literally has transformed my life. Literally. And my life, for that matter.

And your what?

Say that again. And my business, for that matter, has genuinely transform. So clarity of understanding is the doozy.

Okay, so let's take that one as kind of a jumping off point with. Before we started recording, you asked, what do you think would be the most valuable thing for your listeners? And it's always great when we're about to do an episode with someone that they actually really care about, the people that they're about to speak to, and what do these people want? So let's take clarity of understanding. Me and Dean have recorded hundreds. Well, almost at the time, we're recording this close to 200 episodes of I Love Marketing. There's a tremendous amount of training, and some people will listen to it and hear it and implement it, and others will not. Some people will get direction and confidence and capabilities as a result of what we're offering, and other people may feel overwhelmed. And what do you do with all of this marketing stuff? And so I'd love to hear your approach to how to make the most of this asset that we provide. People called I Love Marketing. When they're listening to this, when they're hearing this, when they're engaging with us, if they have better cleared whatever understanding, then that is going to be so valuable. And so how do we take what you got and make the most out of it? You know, it's almost like our friend Jay Abraham, he has this book called how to Get Everything youg Want out of Everything youg Got. And it's a great line because it's like, how do you talk about leverage, maximum results, least amount of effort and clarity being that.

So talk about that.

I mean, how do you. What is understanding? I mean, I hear the word, but how do you know you got it?

Oh, this is A great question, Joe. Yeah. So let me answer this from a couple of different angles. So all my clients, and I'm guessing everyone listening to this, this podcast, has the same two problems that all my clients have. Same two problems. First problem is there's something they're preoccupied with. They're preoccupied with someone and something, and they're thinking about it all the time. So maybe it's how can I get my. How can I double my income and turnover levels? Or profitability? Or maybe it's like, how can I get my boss to implement my ideas? Or how can I, you know, get on better in my relationship? Or how can I lose the weight or gain the weight, or how can I find the partner? Or how can I make more money or whatever it might be? They've got some challenge in their life and they're preoccupied with it. They've been thinking about it. They've been thinking about it a lot. And the more they think about it, the more it's not doing anything for them. It's like they're not finding the solution. So that's the first thing. When someone. Someone. When a business hires me, they'll typically have some particular problem they want to address or change they want to make or goal they want to achieve, and they've been struggling with it. The way they've been thinking about it isn't helping them out. It isn't working. So that's the first problem that they all have. Second problem is they're underestimating what they've got going for them. They're overlooking the fact that we all have this capacity, capacity for fresh new thinking, fresh new thinking that's more closely aligned with reality, fresh new thinking that's there to give us what we need. Now, the thing that gets in the way, the thing that has people attached to their old unhelpful thinking, the thing that has people stuck is a misunderstanding that I call the outside in misunderstanding. And it's the mistaken belief that our feelings are coming from somewhere other than thought in the moment. Now, this is a really odd thing to say to people, but, see, the issue is, the nature of our perception is that it absolutely looks to us like we're looking out through our eyes at a world out there. Okay, you know, look around your room. It looks like you're looking out through your eyes at your room. And for practical purposes, you are. But that's not actually how our neurology starts work. How it actually works is that data pours in through our senses, and then our minds go, what must Be out there for me to be receiving this data. And then it makes a guess at what the world looks like and it paints a picture of the world. And if you're relatively functional, then the pictures of the world that your brain is painting is fairly aligned with, you know, the manhole covers and the staircases in your neighborhood. Neighborhood. And if a person's completely out of touch with reality, then their internally generated virtual reality isn't well aligned with whatever the actual reality we're walking around is. So it looks as though we live in an outside in world. It absolutely does. But we actually live in a world that's being generated from the inside out. Now, I'm not saying my table is being generated from the inside out, but my experience of my table is being generated from the inside out. My perceptions of my table are being generated from the inside out. And just to give you a feel for this, like where I am in West London, I can see the sunset at my window and it really looks like the sun goes down behind the horizon. But in actual fact, the sun is pretty much stationary in relation to the Earth. The Earth is spinning around. It looks like the sun is going around the Earth, but in actual fact, the Earth is rotating in an orbit that carries it around the sun. So it's an optical illusion that the sun goes around the Earth. It doesn't work that way. The Earth goes around the sun. In fact, the Earth has always gone around the sun. But for most of human histories, people deeply believed that the sun went round the Earth. But it never did, not even for a couple of seconds once. It never did. The whole time it was the Earth going around the sun. Well, by the same token, it looks as though we're feeling our experiences from out there. Like someone says something mean to me and a week later I'm feeling like narc ed by it. Or I'm worried about something that's happening next week. It's like, oh, I'm going for this, I'm going to do a big talk or whatever. Or for me, it's going on tv. If I get called to go on TV on live breaking news, I get really nervous about it. Can I tell you guys a story about this? Go for it. Absolutely. It's kind of funny. So first time I get called on breaking news. So basically when sports people, famous sports people have a kind of mental breakdown, they sometimes call me on the news to talk about it. So I get the first call to go on the news. It's like two years ago and I got really anxious about it. I was feeling really uncomfortable. Now I know that those feelings are coming from thought. They can't be coming from the fact that I'm going on the news in 45 minutes. But it really seemed like it had something to do with the news and it was really like it felt real. So I'm feeling uncomfortable. I go to the studio and I'm in the green room where you wait to go on air. This is on live breaking news. So it's going to be going out to five and a half million people. And I'm in the green room and I'm pacing around and there's a guy in there who's a really seasoned commentator. He's like, how are you doing? I'm like, oh, not good. I'm fit to be tied. He goes, oh, what are you going to do about it? I said, oh, nothing. He's like, well, how come? I said, well, my mind's self correcting. The mind's a self correcting system. I don't need to be on good form right now. I'm in the green room talking to you. I need to be on good form when I'm sitting being interviewed on tv. He said, well, good luck with that. But the runner came to take me out. I went out on tv. I sat down in the chair. As soon as the interviewer asked the first question, my head cleared. So that was good because it would have been really bad if I was talking about state of mind that I was in a real mess, but that it seemed like my feelings were coming from the TV interview. That was in the future. But that's not possible. Feelings can't travel backwards through time from the future. That's from events that haven't happened yet. That would be very odd. That's not possible. But it looks like it's possible. It seemed like it had something to do with the interview, but it didn't. It was just a trick of the mind. And we're all subject to this trick of the mind. We can all get fooled by this amazing film director inside our minds that has us believe that we're feeling something other than the film director making a movie in the moment. It really looks.

That was really impactful for me. When I was reading the book and you were. I was reading Clarity. You were talking about the three components of the. You know, it's like creating this image on the screen that we see that's powered by the CPU and but is powered by the being plugged into the electrical. The electrical source. And I forget the. What Each of those represented. But what came to mind was that really, we have this position of being able to watch what's on the screen, but knowing that we're creating it. We're creating what that experience is. It's not real, per se.

And.

And that when I got that, I had this visual of anytime something like that comes up where I'm creating these images, I'm creating something that's negative or that is not the, you know, clarity that I can visualize. Just pushing the button on the screen and seeing almost like the pixels just kind of drop, you know, like the whole. The image. I'm taking the power away from the image in a way, and it's. It just dissolves. And it's really interesting that we do have that ultimate override power. That's kind of. That was a clarifying thought for me.

Well, and what you've realized, what I think has happened for you, Dean, is that you've realized that at an intuitive level, that you're the thinker. You're the one dreaming this stuff up. Well, see, if you look at little kids when they're like, I don't know, three, four, five years old, they just don't understand the nature of movies. They don't get movies. They think movies are real. And then at a certain age, they go, oh, I get it. That's a guy in a costume. That's not real. Well, our ability as adults to enjoy movies or enjoy TV shows or whatever is a function of our ability to get tricked into believing in the reality that the director has created into the illusion that the director created. So if you go to a movie, like, I love movies, and if I go to a movie, if I don't get tricked into that reality, I don't enjoy the movie. But you got to be able to pop out of the reality as well. Otherwise, you'd hide if there was gunplay on the screen or, you know, call the police department if someone got knifed or something like that. So our ability to enjoy a movie is a function of our ability to kind of oscillate between getting. Getting swept away by the movie and then waking up to the fact that it's a movie and then back and forth between those two. And in a good movie, we'll spend more time swept away and a little less time popping out. And in a movie we don't enjoy, we'll be popped out more of the time. Well, our ability to enjoy life is a function of our ability to oscillate between getting swept away by this Mind made illusion of our experience and by waking up to it. When people get overwhelmed, like a lot of people, especially with, you know, there's so much information vying for our attention and social media and all this, a lot of people I meet, they're very, very overwhelmed. Well, that's because they mistakenly believe that their feelings are coming from somewhere other than thought in the moment. Their feelings are coming from the amount of email in their inbox. Like I was working, working with a company, working with the leadership team, one of the people in the leadership team. Every day of her working life. She had started the day by setting a list of stuff she wanted to achieve by the end of the day. And at the end of each day, she hadn't achieved it because she always set a bigger list than she could accomplish. And then she felt bad for not having accomplished it, overlooking the fact that she'd made up the list in the first place and that her feelings weren't telling her about the list. The feelings were telling her about her own thinking. See, just like in a car, you've got the speedometer and you've got the fuel gauge. The speedometer measures the speed the wheels are turning. The fuel gauge measures the level of fuel in the tank. But the speedometer doesn't know about anything else. It only knows about the speed the wheels are turning. And the fuel gauge only knows about how much fuel you've got in the tank. It doesn't know about the temperature of the engine or what color your car is or anything like that. Well, our feelings are like the fuel gauge or the speedometer. They're an expert on only one thing. They're an expert on the form that the principle of thought is taking moment to moment to moment as it creates our perceptual reality. Your feelings don't know about the past. They don't know about the future. They don't know about your bank balance or that. Your feelings don't know about marketing or how much there is to do or how many emails you've got that you haven't checked yet. Your feelings are always telling you about one thing and one thing only. They're telling you about thought creating a reality moment to moment to moment. It's a real time thing. Just to give you a very tangible example of this, your hands. Your hands are only in the present moment, right? You can't scratch your back yesterday or tap yourself on the head tomorrow. Your hands only work right now. Well, that's because your hands are part of your body and in fact, your whole body is only ever in the present moment. And your feelings are part of your body. They're muscular contractions and relaxations and electrical impulses and chemical neurotransmitters. Chemicals. They're all right now as well. Your feelings can't possibly know about yesterday or tomorrow or anything like that. They just don't have access to that data and they're not interested in that data. Just like the speedometer is an expert on the speed your wheels are turning, you're feeling are an expert on the illusion that the principle of thought is creating moment to moment to moment in this hot second. They're an expert on that. So they're always letting you know about what they're letting you know about. Like, you can think of your mood as being like a pair of sunglasses that you look through that colors your world, but the glasses don't mention themselves. And so your feelings are there, there to let you know what color the glasses you're looking out at the world are. Well, but the glass is. No, no, that's the color the world really is.

You know, I'm sitting there thinking about. This is fascinating to me. And in the pursuit of clarity, I wanted to ask you about comprehension because, for instance, one of the things that I was thinking about as I was reading clarity, there's several ways that you describe things that are, well, several that are like big aha's. And then there's others that I have the feeling that these are big ahas. And I haven't gotten it yet. And I don't have clarity on it yet. And sometimes I will have to go through and read things over and over again because my comprehension level isn't there. Sometimes I really kind of get things but in a tired state, in a fatigue state, in a quote unquote overwhelmed state, which is really sort of the thing I'm referring to when you're talking about email. I'm a person who currently experiences massive overwhelm with large quantities of communication and what to do with it. And then I somehow in my process make myself feel bad or, you know, I create the overwhelm. It's, it's an interpretation. It's a, it's. It's just, you know, it is what I am creating. And so as I'm listening to you talk about this, I also have the advantage of having read some of your book and I'm sitting there thinking about our listeners out there like, well, if they're having trouble kind of getting it or comprehending what it is you're saying, where does Comprehend come from, can that happen? Like if you're really like, I don't get it, I don't get it, I don't get it. What do you do with your thoughts that immediately allow you to get it? If you're really, really overwhelmed and you have a lot of pressure perceived on you and how do you let it go? I mean, that sort of thing. And I even asking you how to is, I know, sort of like a booby trap. I just want to hear how you went, I guess explain that.

Yeah, well, I think it's a really important question, Joe, because someone who's stressed out of their mind is going, give me the answer, just tell me what to do, give me the aspirin. Right, So I totally understand that. And so I'm going to say a couple of things, some of which may be a little unsatisfying and some of which hopefully will land a bit better. So the first thing I'll say is this is. See, as human beings, we love pot advice. We just love positive advice. So if you look on the COVID of like Men's Health magazine or Cosmopolitan magazine or whatever, every single cover, there's the 10 things you need to do to get your perfect relationship or find your dream job, or get six pack abs, or have red hot sex or whatever it might be every single month, a new 10 top tips every single time. And every time we read those things, we're immediately struck by, oh yeah, how obvious, why didn't I think of that? And then we immediately forget them. Because positive advice only works when you have an insight. When you go, oh, I get that, that makes sense. And we've all had those insights. We've all had them. You know, the fact that you're even able to be part of this conversation means you've had countless insights in your life. And sometimes they're little things like, you know, you can't remember where you left your car keys and then you look for them for 10 minutes and they're not there and then you go and do something else and suddenly you remember where you left them. Well, that's an insight. That's the capacity your mind has to come up with fresh, new, useful thinking. So the stuff that I'm talking about and the stuff that's described in my books is it's all about where does that come from. And it's a natural capacity of your mind. So the first thing I'd say is stay in the conversation. Because this isn't necessarily as quickly or easily apprehendable as a top Three tips or something like that. But what it's got going for it is this is how it really works. And if you stay in the conversation, you will absolutely get relief to that overwhelm and that sort of thing. So that's the first thing I'm going to say. The second thing I'm going to say is, is I'm going to give you a question, but I want to tell a quick story first. So last summer, my daughters live in a city about 100 miles away from where I live. And so I was visiting my business partner and then I was going to take my daughters out for dinner that night and out to a movie. They're like 11 and 15. And while I was up talking to my business partner, my car was getting fixed at the local repair station. I can't remember what they call them in the US but they call them a garage over here. So my car was there and I was due to pick it up at 5:30 and go get my daughters. So I get to the garage to collect my car at 5:30 and it's not ready. And so I'm like, they're like, we're just running a few final tests. It'll be ready in five minutes. So I go into the waiting room and I look and I see that my car is up on one of those car elevators and these two guys in overalls are under it with like blowtorches and hammers and doing all kinds of stuff. And I'm like, oh man, that doesn't look like it's going to take five minutes. But I knew better than to try and hurry them up. So I'm just like, okay, I'll wait. But I was really uncomfortable. I was really kind of stressed and I was thinking, oh God, I'm running late, we're going to miss the movie. Why didn't I think ahead and book it in earlier? All this kind of stuff? And I started getting so uncomfortable with the annoyance and irritation and stress and worry that I started pacing around this service station. I'm pacing around it, pacing around, trying to. And then suddenly this question pops into my mind. Where do you think your feelings are coming from? And it stops me in my tracks. And I kind of went, did you think they're coming from, from the guys working on your car or the time or the fact that you didn't book it in soon enough or the fact that you're running late or might miss the movie? And I was like, whoa, for a second there I did. And I fell out of that thinking and it took an instant. It was like, oh yeah, you're feeling. You're thinking. You're not feeling the stuff you're thinking about. It looks like you're feeling the stuff you're thinking about, but you're feeling thought in the moment. And the moment I. Here's the amazing thing, Joe. The moment I fell out of that stressed out thinking I knew what to do, I literally, a second later, I pulled out my phone, I called my ex wife, I said, I'm running a little late, can you feed the girls? I'll be there as soon as I can. Probably about 20 minutes or so and we'll get to the the movie on time. Problem solved. Now that solution is hardly a rocket science solution. It was there the whole time, but I couldn't see it because I was lost in a misunderstanding about where my experience was coming from. I thought my experience was coming from all the stuff. And so I couldn't see the completely obvious solution that was right there. As soon as I fell out of that misunderstood thinking, the solution was right in front of me. So I'm not saying you don't have a jillion emails, Joe. I'm guessing you probably do. What I'm saying, is that the question I'm going to ask you, and this is the question that everyone can ask themselves. Where do I think my feelings are coming from? Where does it seem like my feelings are coming from? And I can guarantee you, if you're feeling stressed out, stressed out, overwhelmed, anxious, worried, I can bet money it seems to you like your feelings have something to do with the content of what you're thinking about. They have to do with this month's sales figures or the amount of email in my inbox, or the amount of appointments in my diary. If you're feeling stressed out or overwhelmed, I bet it will absolutely seem like the feelings must least know something about that future or about what happened last week, about something other than this moment. And what I'm here to tell you is that they do not know a thing about it. You're feeling. What's that? Go ahead, Dean.

I just realized as you're saying this, it's. It's so funny that it must be universally true that we've all experienced that, but we're so unused to it and it's so rare that even the way people describe clarity is they've had moments of clarity. Not, not that we've experienced periods of clarity or days of clarity, but we've had moments of clarity when we realize those. When we realize those things it's funny.

Well, it really makes sense.

Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, I was going to ask Joe because I know Joe's been doing TM for the last couple of years now, and I've been. My experience of it, that it's made a difference. Difference for Joe. But Joe, I was going to ask you. In moments like that, do you find that that has, you know, that you'll. Something will happen that will. Like in the experience that you were just describing, that you were going through, did you. Do you think that your TM or your thinking about your thinking like that kind of had an impact or that you kind of, you know, glimpse something, some clarity from training your brain to kind of be still like that?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, TM stands for Transcendental Meditation. And it's kind of like a, you know, a river, I guess, or like a lake. You know the difference? I mean, you know, you, Jamie, have a great analogy of the frozen lake and then it's the river, river still flowing underneath it.