Tony Robbins Interview: The Science Of Building Extreme Discipline

I'd love to hear what you guys feel are your best rituals or what it is that you are doing that just massively impacts you to be as effective as both of you are. If there's something simple or something that you just do that makes your life work, starting, be it a morning ritual or just anything that people here could do. Watching cartoons with my kids at 7am Count. No, that may be accurate.

I mean, it's.

For me, it's anchored in. My desiring to do to make the impossible stuff I set out happen, Right? It's anchored in this infinity challenge. I'm never bored.

These problems I've taken on with an.

Amazing group of people are all sort of infinite and there's no getting there.

So when they're, for me, they're my guiding stars.

So it's like, okay, what am I going to do right now to move the game forward this day? You know, I wish I could say I was a great meditator or yoga.

Person or so forth, and that will.

Come, but not right now.

For me, it's just dedication to the child inside me and what I care.

Deeply about, which is.

Making these succeed. And ultimately, it's trying to be clear.

About what I'm enjoying doing, right?

It's surfing the stuff I love versus this is work. I'm probably not good at this work. Who else can I find that can do it and doing the stuff that.

I truly love better and doing more of that.

I mean, there's nothing sophisticated there. Tony, what do you got?

I think anyone who succeeds has something that they aspire to. There's a mission, there's a direction, there is a desire, and they bring it up regularly. And you do that even though you say you don't do it in a sophisticated way. Attacking the human genome and figuring out how to get meteors to feed you. What you need is a fairly large vision, somewhat sophisticated. Mine's really simple. Mine's simple. I believe that the body is the place that drives the mind the fastest. You can go inside your head all day long trying to resolve things and make excuses or freak out. But I learned early on in my life that in order to make myself do things, I had to trigger this body to feel strength and to know that when I say something, I mean it. And so I have a simple ritual that's actually enjoyable. May not sound enjoyable, but it is now, which is I get up every morning and I'm privileged to have multiple homes. So if I'm in those homes, one of the homes I have a River. The rest of them, I have cold plunges and I go into a 56 degree temperature just for about 60 seconds. I jump straight in. Or I was just in sun valley, the river's 38 degrees, a little bit cooler. And I took my nephew and said, you're about to learn how to start your day. And I bring all my friends when they come, they all have to do this. They're like, holy shit. I know when I go see Tony, he's got something for me to do of his nature. But every cell, every nerve in your body explodes. And it's phenomenal for your lymph system, phenomenal for your health. But it also is just a simple discipline that says. I say it. It happens. I'm gonna say, I'm gonna do this. I do it, and I've done it so much, it's there and it's invigorating. And then I do, as you said, something I call priming. I don't. You know, you wake up and you're, you know, 22 hours off your normal time zone, and you've got to get up and take care of 10,000 people for three days and nights for 14 to 15 hours. You don't always wake up feeling, wow, is this the coolest thing in the world? Somebody wake up and go, what universe is my body in? You know? And so I do my physical ritual, but then I also do this priming. And priming for me is just. I don't hope that I'm going to show up. At my best, I create a state for it. Most of, you know, probably the principle of priming, you know, you can. They prove it. In so many scientific studies, we all think we make our decisions consciously, when much of our decision making that we think is conscious is being made by contextual environmental manipulation that we're not even thinking about. One study, they took some people and they hired actors that would go to 100 people and they'd walk up to you, and they were trained to do the exact same look, same expression. And they'd say, would you hold this and hand you a coffee cup? And they reach in their pocket, grab their phone, put them back, say, thank you very much. They just kind of assume the action. And they would do it the same way, same facial expression. 100 people one way, 100 people other. And what was the only difference? Cold iced coffee versus hot coffee. An hour later, they come back with some people, different people who've got little caps on. They're saying, listen, we'll give you $10 if you'll give us two minutes if you'd read this three paragraph story and give us two question answers. And they read this little story. Everyone reads the same story. And at the end they ask them, how would you describe the main character? What are they like as a. 80% of the people that got warm coffee said they're warm, they're generous, they're loving. But warm is always one of the language patterns. 80%, like clockwork, people got the iced coffee, same story, say that they're very cold, that they had. They were using language like being obsessed or being about themselves. Selfish things of this nature. I give you dozens of examples. So what I do each morning is I do a breathing pattern. It's an explosive breathing pattern I learned in India, breathing your breath in and exploding it out, you know, from the gut, out the nose. And I do that three sets of 10, pause, three sets of 10, pause, 3 sets of 10. So it alters my state. And I just do three things for 10 minutes because I have this deal with myself. If you don't have 10 minutes for yourself, you don't have a life. Who's with me on this? So I said, you know what, I don't need to have 20 minute, 30 minute, 40 minute meditations. I want 10 minutes. And I don't know, I need to meditate. I don't know if I'm going to meditate, to not think. I don't know too many people can do that. And I don't even know that I want to not frickin think. So I thought what I want to do is I want to focus on the emotions that will cause me to be the better me. And the two emotions that most people are messed up by are anger and fear. And when you're grateful, you can't be angry. Try to be grateful and angry simultaneously, it'll never work. And you can't be fearful when you're grateful. So when I look at people, almost always they're reacting out of fear or they're reacting out of anger. It's some version of those two. So gratitude to me is the antidote. So I spend three minutes, just three minutes, and I think of three things I'm grateful for. Three people, three situations, but I step into it. I don't remember the roller coaster over there riding it. I put myself in the front seat going over the edge. So I feel the moment and I make sure one of the three things I'm grateful for is something really simple, like the wind on my face or something beautiful like my Child's smile. And the reason I do that is because I remember interviewing some of the astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and these guys. And most of you probably know, you can imagine, to be an astronaut, this man knows, I mean, to aspire to do that and then go through the thousands of people and be picked and then to actually go to the moon and stand on the moon and look back and see that picture we've all seen, that blue, green, Earth. I mean, you imagine, then you come home and what happens? There's a ticker tape parade and you shake the president's hand and now what the hell do you, you're 32. What the hell do you do for the rest of your life? And you know what? If you know the story of many of these astronauts, most of them had some major emotional challenges, right? Some abused alcohol, some drugs, and they had a real rough time because they forgot to find adventure in a smile. They thought the only way to go to the moon. So I trained myself to make sure not just the big beautiful things that are part of my life, but the little things. And so I feel that for three minutes. Then I do three minutes of a blessing. Horny as it may sound, I imagine life, God, energy coming into my body, healing every muscle, every nerve in my body, strengthening everything, strengthen, strengthening the best of me, my passion, my love, my generosity, my creativity, my humor, my love. And then I see any problem that needs to be solved just being solved, because otherwise I tend to think I got to do it all. And then once I feel that fully and that energy comes through me and back through me multiple times, then I do a circle of my intimate family, my kids, my wife, my friends. This little character over here is one of my list. And I just circle out, all the way out to my clients and I send that same energy to them. And I imagine, as corny as it sounds, they're being healed, they're getting what they need, energy wise, they're having the life that they deserve and seeing it multiplied. So I do that for three minutes and the last three minutes are my three to thrive. I think of three specific outcomes that matter to me and I don't think about achieving them. I see, feel and experience them as done and I see the impact that it has. I see people's lives touched, I see the joy. I feel it as done and I feel grateful. And it's 10 minutes, but honestly, it usually goes 15 or 20 because I'm having a damn good time. But by having a 10 minute walk, there's no excuse not to do it. And I do it every day, and I don't hope I'm going to feel good. And then what happens is you're primed.

You're.

You literally, you see things through a different set of filters. You make decisions from the filters. And also think of it. Most people are wired for stress. They're wired for frustration. They're wired for feeling lonely. And they, you know, they got a highway to pissed off, and they've got dirt roads to happiness. So I decided I'm going to wire myself for happiness. I wasn't born that way. I had. My view is I have to change the whole earth to be happy today. That's different for me. Now I can just wake up and be happy because I've wired myself in a different way neurologically. And then I show other people how to do this as well.

So you talked about, you know, rituals. So what. What's your morning ritual? And why is it so important?

You know what? I couldn't wait for you to ask that. Actually, to me, this is the way you start. You brought it up. So I just love how it organically flows out of that, that you. You can't. You really can't get anywhere in your life until you get leverage over yourself. Yeah, right. So this is the way I get leverage over myself. I start my day with three steps. So the first step is I wake up.

That is a good one.

Isn't that a good one? And it's funny because I'll ask people in an audience, I say, how many of you woke up today? You know, and then you get.

People raise their hand.

And people that haven't woken up yet, you know, or have didn't raise their hand, I'm like, so just think about that for a second. You know, we're in a process of waking up. And on a deeper level, to me, why I do what I do now versus being, you know, in the business of law, is that I get to help people to wake up, wake themselves up to the their true self. So it's physical, but there's also a metaphor involved. So say you woke up and is that a good thing? And people say, yeah, of course it's a good thing. Well, let me ask you this. Take a deep breath right now. So take a deep breath and let it, you know, release it, right? And you go, at this very moment, as you took that conscious breath, you intentionally took a deep breath. Are there not people all around this beautiful planet of ours taking their very last breath, breath? And so there's no Question that you being alive in this moment, regardless of whether you're, you know, today's the day you go to court for your divorce or today's the day you get your bankruptcy degree, or today's the greatest day of your life, it's a blessing no matter what.

I like the bankruptcy degree.

Yeah.

You know, whatever that thing is you might be thinking is great or you might be judging is not great. Your life is a blessing. So what does that sound like to you? And people go, you know, it sounds like gratitude. I said, yeah, so that's it. So the first step is you check your pulse. Right. Make sure you're awake. Good, you're awake. That's great. It leads into that next natural, you know, the domino falling over is now gratitude. So what are you grateful for? And it could just be that you are grateful to be alive. You don't. Doesn't really need to go any further than that, you know, or be any more grandiose than that. That's as big as it gets. But it could be, you know, I'm grateful for my family. I'm grateful for my friends. I'm grateful for my business. I'm grateful for, you know, any number of things. I once met a man in Japan who's a billionaire, and I said, well, you know, what's your secret to, you know, or what's. I didn't say your secret, but what's like a ritual that, you know, that you have? And he says, I say thank you a thousand times every day.

Wow.

And I've told a lot of people this guy, know, says thank you a thousand times. So I'll ask, you know. You know, he says thank you because he's a billionaire.

Right?

And everybody goes, yeah, that's why he says thank you. He's a billionaire. I said, is he a billionaire because he says thank you, or does he say thank you because he's a billionaire? Which one is it?

Right.

Because to me, the fact that that's his ritual is the reason why he's so prosperous. So you can get the billionaire status just by starting with a few thank yous in the morning.

Morning.

The point is, even if he isn't, it's still a very smart thing to do.

There's no losing it.

Right?

Right, exactly.

No downside. So then the third piece of this thing is you put your feet on the floor. And that's a blessing for many that not everybody gets to do that. Put your feet on the floor and stand up and say these words, say, I love my life. I Love my life, you know, declare it to the universe, say it out loud or think it. But right then and there, you get to set the most powerful intention you'll ever set, which is that your life is something that you love. And what's interesting about our conditioned mind, you know, this medulla that this reptilian brain of ours, it's constantly, its main function is to keep us safe. Protection. And the way it keeps us safe and it protects us is by being right. Because if it's wrong, we die. You know, if it miss, if it misassesses the danger, we end up getting eaten by the dinosaur, we get hit by the bus or whatever it is. So it wants to be right. And why I love it is really what you said earlier about leverage. Because I know that about myself, I love that about myself, that I want to be right all the time. So when I say I love my life, what happens unconsciously throughout the day is that I look for ways to be right about it. Look for ways to prove that that's in fact true. And so when I put my head on the pillow at night to go to sleep and I do my evening ritual, which is all about forgiveness and it's a separate thing, the last thought I have is that I really do love my life. And when I started this practice, it was right around the time when I was really unhappy, miserable in my law practice and I wanted to shift something. So this was the first pivot, this is the first small change in direction which I could do and anybody could do starting tomorrow morning. And what the book does is it gives people a 21 day ritual, 21 day practice to create new rituals and new habits that become habits in your life. And that's the first one that's wake up in the morning, give thanks, put your feet on the floor, say I love my life. And watch how a few things start to just domino, you know?

Yeah, that's great. And I imagine in the beginning, like with anything new, it's. It's a little weird. It's totally weird, you know, it will. But again, you won't believe it. Yeah. If most people look at the rituals in their life that work and they look at the very first time they started them, they're like, well, you're unfamiliar with it, but if you just stay, it is the consistency thing. So that's great. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's coming and if you'd like to get it, absolutely Free. There's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. So, Craig, I've really crafted some questions here to really get into some good stuff. So you're the discipline and productivity guy, but surprisingly, before you even start scheduling your day, you say there are much more important things to about, think, think about. So tell us about the three V's every entrepreneur needs to know before moving on with their day.

Yeah, absolutely. So you need to start with your values first. So imagine like you have a time pyramid, and so at the top is where you would have actually what you're going to do in the day, but at the bottom, you're going to put in your values because your values are going to drive every single thing that you do. If your values are family first, it's going to drive how you start your day, what you do over the course of the day, how much you work. So you had that example yesterday, Joe, of the guy who was thinking about opening his 57th hardware store and he was overweight and not spending any time with his family. Listen, you can make him super productive at opening hardware stores, but it's the wrong thing. And a lot of people in entrepreneurship become super productive at the wrong thing. And so I ask one question of all the coaching clients that I work with, which is in the next 20 years, what do you want to accomplish in the four top values in your life? Your family, your health, your wealth and experiences. That's where everything has to start. So once you know that I want to raise great kids.

Okay, good.

That means no 13 hour days for you. It's very simple to start planning your day that way. So it's values first on the bottom of the foundation of the pyramid. That's the strongest rock that you start with. Then on top of that is something that Dean was talking about yesterday, which is your vision. That's where you get to next. Values drive your vision and then you have to know your value of your time. So if you take a look at all the people in here, an income level at the bottom line would be $500,000 a year probably. So that means every single hour of your working day is worth $250. Now, who here is willing to admit that they're still doing stuff like running errands, going to the UPS store, cutting the lawn, making meals, all this stuff, even writing a book? And I know that a lot of female entrepreneurs, you are Guilted into it by mother in law or by mother.

Right.

You are still making all the meals, you're still doing all the cooking. And it's killing you because you're trying to run this business at the same time. Now, I remember back in 2009 watching an Eben Pagan video. And Evan said in the video, entrepreneurs can't be doing their laundry. And when I first saw that, I'm like, oh, my gosh, what am I doing? I'm doing my laundry. I'm wasting all this time that all this stuff is below my value. So if Your value is $250 or more per hour, that's a lot of money you can put into having people do everything for you. And that's the mindset you have to have as you go and schedule in your day. Even if you want to write a book, think about writing a book. How long is it going to take you if you're not a writer but you know you have a great book in you? Right. It's going to take you over 100 hours. Now, if your time is worth $250 and it's going to take you more than 100 hours to write a book, just pay Tucker 25 grand and get the book done so much faster. That's who I've used for both of my books. And it saves me a ton of time. So you have to have that type of thinking starts with your vision or your values, your vision and the value that you put on yourself. And it's going to make you a whole bunch of time to then focus on what matters. So what Tony said yesterday, the one problem in his life is time. I bet you if I spend a full day with Tony, I could save him or make him 30 minutes of time. And if the guy's running $6 billion worth of revenue in companies, that's going to be worth a lot to him.

I can do that for him. What we should do. I'll take the video of this and I'll take that clip and send it to Tony.

Good.

And see if he does that.

Yeah, I mean, this guy's done all that stuff better than anybody.

Well, yeah. So that's my next question. So Bedros, you and Craig, you guys have been working together for about a decade, I think.

Yeah, about a decade.

And you've created a whole winning system by watching pretty much what this guy does. He's very much that guy. And by the way, let me mention this because I didn't do this. I've gone through Craig's whole Process. Spent a day and a half with him. Amazing. And really just such a great thinker. So tell us how having clarity of path and becoming a disciplined entrepreneur allowed you to go from anxiety attacks and tremors, which you were having, to a $25 million business. I think it is approximately. And one of the fastest growing fitness franchises on the planet.

Well, I've had the good fortune before he ever wrote the book the Perfect A formula and before he ever had the perfect life workshops that I've gone through as well, I've had the good fortune of having environmental exposure to this guy. And if you haven't had a chance to have environmental exposure to Craig, it's a unique experience. Your gift, his gift is outside eyes. And so at first I would laugh, like, why, why is it that you want to have dinner at 5:30? That's kind of like a late lunch for me.

Right?

Why aren't we partying? Because, you know, we run masterminds together. Miami, San Diego, Las Vegas, Tennessee. We're having good time. We're in great, great cities, man. Let's like party till midnight. What do you mean you're going to bed by 9 o'? Clock? What gives? But I soon started realizing that as I was laughing, I was having anxiety attacks when I'd go home and the essential tremors, I would just love lock up and freeze. And my wife would just like look at me like, what's going on? And I very quickly realized that his life structure is what I need if I plan on taking this franchise that was just puttering along and really making it reach its fullest potential. And I'm far from that. Our goal is 2,500 locations by the year 2020. We've got 614 locations as of yesterday that are actually open and more in development. But the life structure and discipline that I've been able to witness from him, never mind reading the book and experiencing it firsthand from the workshop, has been a game changer for me and for most leaders, most of us in here, and I know you can. You've experienced this where you feel like you're overwhelmed with opportunity. You truly have more opportunities than you have time left on the calendar. That's the reality of it. You try and put so many irons in the fire. And that's what I was doing. And at the end of the day, I realized what is my biggest purpose on this planet? I'm still a personal trainer. It's just now I'm going to touch millions of lives through our Fit Body boot Camp. Franchise. And I'll touch lives of people who'll never know me, but I'll be a bigger trainer than Tony Little and Jillian Michaels through our franchise. So why am I striking up a deal with this guy? Why can't I? Why am I doing another event here when my purpose is to be the world's biggest trainer, making an impact in people's health, fitness, lifestyle, self esteem, self image? And so I went narrow and deep on my focus, a Fit body boot camp. And it went from failing in 2012-13 and anxiety attacks. And I was in a very dark, negative place, taking Vicodin and Nyquil every night to go to sleep, to now a $25 million company and growing where I have two VPs running the organization and a leadership team. And then, of course, implementers who execute our vision. And that's really, if you're in this room, you're a visionary. You just come up with the vision and the path and you execute to your high performance team.

Okay, so then. So from what I'm getting from you, you're in this place, you then learn how to structure. And so that pretty much is designing your day. So how does one go about doing that and starting that?

Okay, so I speak to a lot of fitness gym owners and stuff like that. And so I use this phrase, the champion mindset, in that all these fitness gym owners, they've, at one point in their life, they've either been a champion athlete in college or they've been a bodybuilder or something like that. And so they're very successful in one area of their life. But then they struggle with sales or they struggle with their time management. And I say to them, listen, you've already been really, really, really successful here. You've put the systems in place. And so all you have to do is transfer that champion mindset over to this other area in life where you're struggling. So that is just thinking, like, okay, well, it's planning and preparation. It was having a coach, it was having a deadline, it was getting the accountability. It was having all those things. And so whatever it is that you guys are good at, wherever you have had great success in life, you just have to transfer that over to having the systems in your own productivity. So can I tell you a very embarrassing story about how I almost fought Shawn Stevenson?

Yes, yes, yes. That was wonderful.

So I hired Sean. I hired Sean for his breakthrough day earlier this year. And it's a heck of a day. And I was going to him because I have all the productivity and Stuff in place. But I wasn't getting into deep emotional relationships. And so Sean was helping me through that. And he showed me by the end of the day of our 12 hours together that I had basically built myself a system to stop myself from getting into deep emotional relationships with women. So I was building myself a prison, essentially. And Sean pointed that out to me. And I was very angry at Sean for pointing it out to me, because I didn't like to be shown that I'm not perfect. And so. Right.

Right.

Sean said, money up front if you can.

Money up front.

I love that.

So Sean was actually. Were you terrified?

Were you worried maybe we could grab him a mic?

Sean was concerned because we were both standing there and staring at this whiteboard where he had pointed out that I had built this prison for myself. And so it sucked. I didn't want to admit it.

There was shame.

It was like, how the hell did I create this very problem that I claim that I don't want?

And that's the hardest part about it.

Yeah. And so he pointed out to me that I built this system that put me in a bad place. And then I realized, hey, I can just go and dismantle that system and build a new system that allows me to have what I want. And I've since done that. And thank you, Sean, for pointing that out. But it just goes to show you that if you've built a system like, there's a lot of great marketers in here who might struggle with family relationships or their health, and you've built a great marketing system, you can go and do the same thing for your time management, for your health, for your family relationships. It's all just about building systems that work for you. And the five things that we use that I've used to build systems for anything that can change your life in any way is having better planning and preparation than ever before, having professional accountability, which is going to give you expert advice and someone to hold you accountable and not let you get away with anything. Third is positive social support. So that's being in a room like this. You know, you might not get breakthrough ideas from everybody in here, but they're gonna pick you up when you're feeling down. Fourth is having a meaningful incentive. So we're not doing things for money or stuff. It's what matters in life is people and experiences. So a meaningful incentive has to come from your heart, not from your wallet. And then finally, the big deadline. There has to be a deadline in the behavioral change that you want to make. And if you have those five things in place, you can do anything in life. You can lose weight, you can get rich, you can find the love of your life, the home of your dreams, whatever you want if you use those five things. So just put them in place, build the systems you want for your time, for your family, for making a million bucks.

And so when you focused on this thing, I mean, I guess the way is that's the big picture thing for you that you needed to build things around.

Absolutely.

So how do you structure your day? Like, what does your day look like? And how can people in this room structure their day?

Well, the most important thing is that you get up. It doesn't matter what time you get up. So I get up early in the morning. But you don't have to get up really early in the morning. What you need to do first thing in the morning when you get up is focus on your number one priority in life for 15 minutes. And the reason why I say that is because most people don't spend 15 minutes a day without electronics thinking about their number one priority in life. It could be an opportunity to take advantage of, or it could be a problem that you're going through. If you give yourself 15 minutes a day, six days a week for 52 weeks in a year, that's 72 hours of clear, uninterrupted thinking. And you can write a book in that time. You can do anything you want. But most people don't do it. And most people does. Anybody in here get stressed out before 8 o' clock because of their morning routine, has too much crap in it. You know, you, you have to do meditation, you have to do gratitude journaling, you have to do freeform journaling, you have to do exercise, you have to do yoga with JP and you have to do interpretive dance. Like you have to do all that before seven in the morning according to like these articles that you see on the Internet. And most people are getting stressed out. So don't do any of that stuff. Instead just sit there and think. Go down to your kitchen table, think on your number one priority for 15 minutes, and then the rest of your day it can go any which way you want. But you've already had that victory. That's the most important thing. If I can just give you one piece of advice, that's it.

That wasn't bad. That was not bad.

Can I share something where that's concerned too? And it's really made a big change in my life. I'm sure it'll make a big change in yours is every single person's morning routine needs to start the night before. And again, this is through environmental exposure, through Craig. I've learned more by watching this guy than ever by asking him questions. Because sometimes when you're the problem, you don't know what questions to ask to get out of the problem. But when you watch, you learn. And even in the evenings now, as soon as I get home, after the first hour of being home, I just turn my phone on silent in airplane mode and I leave it alone. Anything that happens, work wise, I'm not going to be able to solve it. Seven, eight, nine o' clock in the evening, number one. Number two, I don't want to feel guilt the next day when I'm working that I spend actual valuable time connecting with my wife and kids because we're all sucking off the screen there. I don't screen suck anymore. I mean, imagine how many people fall asleep in this very room screen sucking the very last thing you did before you fell asleep. And now that's really impacting your subconscious mind. Instead, I'll still open up my notes because remember, it's in airplane mode. So there's no notifications popping up. And I've turned off all notifications, but there's no text messages popping up. Open up my phone and write down my five things I'm going to attack the next morning. And so I do that brain dump the night before. I'm not screen sucking and reading bad news, bad emails. The problem's still going to be there tomorrow morning when I can actually do something about it with my VPs and my team leads, et cetera, in the evening time, I'm not going to stress about it. And so if you just focus on actually setting yourself up to win the night before by eliminating screens by not hitting the snooze button in the morning. Because I'm convinced, and someone needs to do a study on this, that if you hit the snooze button first thing in the morning, you really are telling your subconscious mind that I'll take 10 more minutes of interrupted sleep over getting out and dominating my purpose in life. And I believe over time that stacks up against you like a stack of dominoes where you hit the I'm a loser domino and off it goes, right? Every morning it's like we have two stacks of dominoes to hit. If you hit the snooze button, you're hitting the I'm a loser stack. But that's been a big thing for me, man. Preparing the night before for the Next morning. And we all know when you win your mornings, you win your days. You win your days. They add up into a massive amount of success in your life, whether it's family, health, happiness. Like when people tell me, gee, bad roast. You know, I just have a few more pounds to lose. It's like, fuck, man, we're all millionaires in here, right? We're all doing well. You can't hire a nutrition expert. You can't hire a personal trainer. Then it's like, well, I can, but I don't have the time. How do you not have the time? And I later found out they're not working in their 5%. And we've talked about your 5%, at least in the genius network groups that I've been in. One time, this was, I don't know, almost 11, 12 years ago. I was working out of my home. We didn't have an office. Then my wife calls upstairs to the guest house, and she goes, hey, dude, sprinkler has a leak. It's like a fountain in our backyard. I said, I'll be down and fix it. And so I went down to fix it, and I'm pretty handy with that stuff, but I got mud all over my arms. And the only employee I had was one assistant. Her name was Amanda at the time, comes down, and she goes, hey, people are responding to the email you just sent out. They actually want to get on the phone with you and see if the coaching is right. I said, oh, man, Amanda, I've got mud all over me. You've heard me do the clothes many a times. You got this. Now I'm asking Amanda to work outside of her 5%. I'm working outside of my 5%. What could have cost me $20 to pay someone else to fix that sprinkler. I lost a $5,000 sale. At the time, it was 5,000. Today, it's 50,000 to coach with me, but $5,000 to me might as well have been 50,000 back then, 11 years ago. And that was the best lesson. And you all have your 5%. Most of you, it's delegate, motivate, and sell. You delegate to your team. You motivate your business partners, your clients, your team, and then you sell. That's it. Anything outside of that, if you're doing your laundry, if you're doing your grocery shopping, we've got a house manager, her name is Valentina. And she does the shopping for us and changes the light bulb. Anything that's in the five. My wife says, hey, can you take out the garbage. No, it's not on my 5%. Hey, the light bulb's out. It's not on my 5%. Hey, the sprinkler sprung a leak. It's not on my 5%. But now there's someone who can do it. You can afford to get another wife in your house or a. You know how I mean that? Some of. You know how I mean that. Yeah. But you really can. And you forget this. And my challenge to you is, why don't you buy back some of your time, focus on your 5% that matters, so you could really focus on what happiness is, which, to me, it's money, meaning health and relationships. That's it. It's a simple formula, really.

Well, you know, in 1997, I hired Gary Halbert for. Well, I think you both have maybe heard the triple X Halbert tapes. I recorded it just on, you know, a little cassette player. And I, for myself, we ended up distributing it as a product. And it was me and Pamela Yellen and Gary Halbert, John Carlton. We're all sitting around in this hotel room because I was up there doing consultants consulting with Bill Phillips at the time, Body for Life author. And basically, we're all making a list of if we were all millionaires, what are the things that we would have in our lives? And one thing that every person wrote down is a personal trainer. And then I think it was John Carlton that said, you don't need to be a millionaire to hire a personal trainer. You don't need to be a millionaire to hire a lot of these things. And as a matter of fact, by not doing it, it's one of the best ways to not become a millionaire, because you spend all of your time doing what you just explained, and you.

Start to feel like an imposter in your industry. You really do. Because the content you're gonna deliver on that video, you're not delivering at 100% because you don't feel comfortable in your own skin. How you're gonna pitch from the stage, you don't feel 100%. Let me tell you. I'm in the fitness industry, and it's been 15 years since I've trained a client. But when I was in that stressful period of my life seven to eight years ago, as we were growing Fit Body bootcamp, I was £25 fatter. And when I would get up on stage at Fitness Business Summit to sell, it was no surprise I was selling 5, 6, 7 mastermind coaching clients. Today, 90 to 100. 110 people. Come on Board at a time. The difference is not my pitch. The difference is not anything else other than the fact that I feel authentic. And that transfers to the audience. Now, I don't care what you think through transfers, through video, through your email, through your every. Your mannerisms, your eye contact, every single thing, your stage presence. So work on you, man. Work on you first. So valuable.

Love it. Want to ask you both about how do you deal, I mean, with what you're doing with the franchises? I mean, how do you deal with the information overload? I mean, you've touched on a lot of it with just. Even the, you know, what you do in the morning, what you do the night before. But how do you deal with the sheer volume of stuff? And I mean, everyone here has their own version that.

Yeah. And we're all leaders. And so you can. You can definitely. I know you've experienced this before, where you become the human bottleneck in your business. Right. How often are you the one with the buck in your. In your hands and you don't know what to do with it because you got 10 other bucks that you got to do something with? You're the human bottleneck. And so I quickly learned that I can't be the boss that runs it. I forget who was up here yesterday. I think it was Tony who said, you know, you still have a job. You're a millionaire, but you still have a job.

And.

And so I'm a big believer in decentralized command. And all that simply means is I have two leaders, two VPs, VP of operations, VP of new business. Because as we bring on new franchises that I take equity in, you know, the VP of New Business will make sure that they are running like fitbondy Boot Camp is running so that we have congruency and KPIs in place. But the VP of Operations and VP of New Business are the ones. I meet with them 35, 40 minutes every day after my workout. They go and delegate to the team leads, team leads, delegate to their implementers, their department, and then they execute. And the simple formula is this. What is it that we're doing? How's it gonna look when it's done, and what is the deadline? That's it. So I just have to talk to my two VPs, and they go and delegate. And then when it's done, we'll have a meeting on it. And I might say, well, I don't like how that works, or, what if we did it this way? But again, I'm no longer the bottleneck in my business. And when you're the bottleneck now, you start doing time theft from yourself. I'm gonna cheat my. Who was it? Todd Durkin. Todd Durkin, are you in here? Todd Durkin. Remember you were saying that at some point you're. I'm just gonna eat a protein bar and skip lunch. Eating engineered food is not food. I don't care if it's a protein bar, it's not food. And you start stealing time from yourself, from your family, from your sanity, from your workouts, from your sleep. Before long, you're having an anxiety attack, an essential tremor, because the human body can deal with that. So decentralized command. Find leaders, as Tony said, let them fail. Create the systems and delegate to them.

Anything you'd like to add.

I just don't know how to do anything, mostly with tech stuff. So, I mean, he makes fun of.

Me all the time.

But you know, on my phone I have two apps and that's all I have.

Do you still have a BlackBerry?

I still have a 7 1/2 year old BlackBerry that I use and you can't do anything on that thing. So I just avoid getting myself in trouble. I build a lot of systems because I'm a very weak person like anybody else. I get really tempted by things and so I just keep myself out of harm's way. Just like, you know, I tell if somebody comes to me for weight loss, you tell them to keep the crap out of the house. It's the simplest thing to do. So keep yourself out of trouble. How can you keep yourself out of trouble? Just do like go through your day and figure out what are the things that are causing me the most problems. What you doing are what are the things that are getting me in the most trouble? And then figure out a way to keep them out of your life. So a lot of not to do's is a good place to start. Most people's most important list is their not to do list, not their to do list.

No, what you just said is, it's interesting. I'm a very weak person. We all have areas where I've always liked and you'll hear me talk about it. I'll ask different people here, you know, what's your kryptonite? You know, what is the sort of thing that gets you in the way? Because the best way to get out of a hole is to quit digging it. And people dig a lot of their own holes. And I see that with addiction. You know, a lot of people here that are workaholics. From my conversation with Gabor, mate, there's an understanding of where a lot of this stems from. From it's just the things that a person becomes conditioned to that continues to build these dopamine hits. And so, like, phones is an example. If you have a workaholic problem or tendency or whatever you want to call it, but you're also doing all these other things that you are not strong with that are these temptations. You, you know, if you're an alcoholic, you can't keep booze around the house. You know, if you're a food addict, you can't keep a bunch of fricking Snicker bars and shit everywhere.

So I use this analogy, like if you have young kids, young kids bring home this. You know, they draw something, you can't figure out what it is, but they bring it home to you, right? And you give them their approval, and it's like giving them a gold star, right? And so as entrepreneurs, we're getting gold stars from things. And so, like, the next time you watch a video that says Hustle and grind, you know, 16 hours a day, you're like, oh, I'm gonna go and do that, because, you know I'm gonna do that. And I'm gonna get a gold star from some guy on the Internet because he sees me hustling and grinding. But that's totally misaligned with your values, and that's where you get in trouble. But you keep on doing that next thing. Oh, man, you're really working hard. You know, I see you hustling, grinding. That's awesome. And you're getting positive reinforcement from the wrong thing. And so your actions are misaligned from your goals. And that's what causes what I call the first world problem, which is the biggest stress is when we're not aligned in what we're doing. And so if you keep on. You say you want this in your life, but your actions are taking you down here. There's always going to be that stress inside you until you align your actions with your goals, which is starting with your values and your vision. And so what I've seen Bedros do now, Bedros is even better with his time than I am now. He gets done work at 4 o'. Clock, so he plays with his kids before dinner, has dinner with his family, plays with his kids after dinner, has time to watch one television show and hang out in the hot tub with his wife and run a business with 600 franchises. I mean, that's pretty good.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. So I want to talk a little bit about your rituals. And then I want to get into some leadership and ask you about that. So how do you. What's a typical day for you? I know you travel. There's probably not one typical day. But what are some of the things that you always do that you have found have really been useful?

So, you know, when I'm in my usual routine and in the pocket Joe, there's the 5am Club, right? And I run what I call the 202020 formula. I shared it with you. And many people around the world have found great value from it. And it's pretty simple. I mean, it sort of rolls back to what the Spartan warriors once said. And they said that the person who sweats more in training bleeds less and more. And whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're an artist, whether you're a baker, whether you're a yoga teacher, whether you're a mom, whether you're a street sweeper, you know, when you walk out in the world, there's a call on your life to bring your best game to the world and release as much talent as possible. And a lot of people, what they do is they get up every morning and, and they sort of run their day by default and they're chasing the day and they let life act on them in a very reactive way. And so I think what we want to do is see ourselves as warriors of some sort where we take from five to six every morning and we prepare ourselves mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. And so to give a tactic to your many listeners, it's the 202020 formula. First 20 minutes, as soon as you get up, 5 to 5, 20 intense exercise. And that's going to do a whole bunch of things. A lot of my work is very science based and it's going to create a pharmacy of mastery. So you're going to release dopamine, which is the motivational neurotransmitter. You're going to reduce cortisol in your brain, which is the fear chemical. You're going to release serotonin, which even if you're cranky, you start to feel good. You're going to release bdnf, which scientists are calling Miracle grow for the brain, which actually allows your brain cells to repair from stress. I mean, this is exciting to me. Yeah, it is, right? So that first 20 minutes, you rewire your brain. What else do you do? You jump start your metabolic rate. What else do you do? You prepare yourself for resilience against stress and it just goes on and on. Second part of the 202020 formula. You plan, you pull out a journal. You can do an imprint of your day, which is very powerful, or you can look at your big five or your plan that releases hope, it releases focus. Right. Because an addiction to distraction is the death of creative production. Totally. Okay. And then the final part of the 2020 formula, learning. I mean, he or she who learns the most wins. What made Steve Jobs Steve Jobs or an Elon Musk, is they know more than anyone around them. And so I believe that, you know, the more you know, the more you can achieve. And there's great value investing as much money as you have into audio books or programs like you do at the Genius, you know, the 25k conference and the Genius Network or whatever it is. But, you know, every quarter, I make sure I get out of my office and I go off to a conference. I invest a lot of money in learning and training and coaching, and that's the 202020 formula.

Well, I will say a lot about you. I mean, one thing that I really admire, I don't think I've ever told you this, is that when you first came to. To one of my events I was doing, I didn't even know who you are initially. I mean, I knew your books. I knew, but I really didn't know who you were. And you had no intention of like, oh, I'm a big deal. I'm the smartest guy in the room, and there are so many authors that I know and so many speakers, and you're incredible. You're one of the best in the world that really want everyone to know that. I mean, there's like, this ego that's driving them, and I've never seen any trace of that with you. And maybe it's been there before. And I'm sure there's certain levels of healthy ego, however you look at it. But you are one of the most coachable people that follows the advice that you demonstrate. I mean, you do. From everything that I've ever seen you do. I mean, maybe you've got some weird, bizarre habits.

I don't know.

But what I like about the way you show up is that you just. You're extremely coachable. And even times where I'm like, hey, would you like to come up on stage? You're like, I'm here to actually coach, learn. So where did you make it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I really think it's a cool trait because I have seen a lot of people that are so used to the world admiring them, you know, they have Fame, they've gotten notoriety, and certainly you've had plenty of that. And they literally can't sit and listen to someone else. They quit learning. And some of the people that I read their books in the beginning, that when I meet them later in life, they're actually not as good as they were when they were more hungry, when they weren't just kind of in that game. And I think you're just a student as much as you are a teacher, which I think is what makes you such a great teacher.

Well, thank you. I mean, it goes back to my dad, and he was very much about humility. I mean, he's 77 right now, and he gets up every morning and he goes off to his medical practice and he still sees patients all day. And he said. I said, dad, why are you still doing that at 77? He said, because my patients need me. And so I think, you know, one of the core values he was so brilliant in sharing with me is to be an instrument of service. And I think the moment your ego runs your brain and the ego runs your business and the ego runs your way of being, then your gifts and your talents and your focus and your capabilities are off. The creativity and the talents and the service that will make you great in the world. And I think it gets to very philosophical point, if I may. I think it's relevant to any leader, any entrepreneur, any business builder, any game changer. But, you know, I mean, there is such an addiction to the shiny toys that the ego sells us, okay? And society and the matrix and our peers and the world says, if you get a Ferrari, if you get. If you sell 10 million books, if you have lots of money in the bank, if you have, have, you know, the beautiful partner in the big house, then you're going to wake up every morning and look in the mirror and you are going to feel full of joy and peace and feel you're fully alive. And, you know, I've had most of those in my life at a pretty exponential level. I've been very blessed. And not one of those things has provided me with enduring, sustainable happiness and fulfillment. And the things that provide me with just deep happiness and deep fulfillment and energize me all come from a position of inner power. And so, you know, at the events you're talking about, I don't derive much power from all the books I've sold or bestseller. I don't care about that stuff. I really don't. I care less about that than ever before. At the end of the day, we are A bunch of people on a little planet in a huge galaxy, and before you know it, we're going to be a bunch of dust. And the great billionaires get buried next to the taxi drivers and the pizza makers, and we are not that big a deal. And I think all that really matters is while we are alive, you know, do your best to use every day as a vehicle to birth your talents into the world. And secondly, if you do that, you're going to serve the world and raise the world with you. And that all just comes from inner power. I mean, that's just driving your power from a place within. And that's where you get grace and. And that's where you get great creativity. That's where you get boundless energy, because it's not about addicted to what the world thinks of you.

You living out of the country. How does. What are Vern's routines? Because you mentioned in your talk today, the routines create freedom. Whereas most people may hear that and say, well, no, I don't want to be, you know, I don't want to be kind of imprisoned by a structure. You know, I want to have the freedom. That's why I became a business owner. The challenge of being a business owner is that you're your own boss. One of the greatest things is you're your own boss. So talk about routines and talk about, like, how do you do it? Because, I mean, you've been doing this a long time, and if there's anyone that has access to some of the greatest habits and rituals of successful people in business, it would be you. So I'd like to hear your perspective for the listeners of what they can.

Take away in a. Yeah, two things. And one of them I took from an early, early mentor of mine, Willard Garvey. The late Willard Garvey. Garvey family was one of the Forbes 400 wealthy families. He, early on, when I was in Wichita, took me underneath his wing. And Willard was just like every other business leader that had multiple interests. He had these nonprofits, he had these political. He had various businesses that he was involved in. And he did something very simple. He had these Focus days that I think even Dan Sullivan talks about. And so I've just copied the same thing. So Mondays is when I deal with all of our Gazelles companies, and it's meeting Monday, and we've got these series of half hour and hour meetings where we're just working through operations and our council and our counting and all the kind of stuff you got to get done.

And.

And because it's all batched together. I kind of can get in the flow versus them being spread out throughout the entire week. Tuesdays and Wednesdays is when I usually go out and do teaching and are most available to come out and do events like today. And I can be relaxed about it because we had a very effective Monday. And I think we get more done on a Monday than most companies get done in an entire week. Thursdays then is my day to write and I know I've got to do that writing and I look forward to it and I'm geared up to do it. And I get in the flow and crank for several hours. And then Friday is my charity day. And so I'm on the chairman of the Riordan Clinic and several other nonprofits. I'm involved in interests that I have. And Friday's the day that I make sure that quarterly board meeting occurs at the Reardon Clinic on a Friday. Now it doesn't. And then Saturday is fatter day. That's when I get to just we go crazy and eat and drink and have fun and just go wild and we fall off our diets and fall off all of our other habits and just go wild.

That's funny.

And then you can stay disciplined the other rest of the days. And then Sunday is for us, that day of rest. We attend church. It's time for family to be together and the like. Now, does it always work out?

Perfect.

No emergencies come in where I get to work on some of the charity stuff on Tuesday and something comes up with Gazelles on Wednesday, that's fine. But the fact that each of those days has a different focus allows me to make sure that I can move that needle a little bit in each one of those key areas of both our lives and our companies is what's been powerful. Those are the routines that I find set me free. The other thing is what's amazing and most of the entrepreneurs that have made their journey to Europe find, is that I'm six time zones ahead of the US and so my team is asleep when I'm up at 6, 7, 8 in the morning. It's not until 3 in the afternoon that all the emails even start to come in. And so you find just because of the time arbitrage difference, that you've got this uninterrupted space that no one's really reaching out to you from when you wake up in the morning till about mid afternoon. And it's this fact that you're uninterrupted for these big chunks of time that allow you to move projects forward fast.

Yeah, I think that's so key. If you're not in a situation where you live like that. The whole point is building in space so you can have time to think. Because if nothing else, it's just taking the thinking time and not having all the crap that will. If you don't manage your life, it will manage you. That's modern life. And so you've done a great job with that.

Well, and by the way, one of the very simple things entrepreneurs can do, John Ratliff did it, our dear friend, and that is you need to find a half day or day a week where you go to an alternative office. Whether you've got to go to a friend's place, whatever it is you've got to have, or you just stay home that day to your home office, you've got to force that into the schedule and make it the same day every week where you just go. And I learned it from was Johnsonville Foods. You know, when Ralph the son took over that business and then took it to new heights. The key thing is he had an office down the road and he'd go there with a yellow pad and a pencil, we have iPads today. And he would sit there and really think about what do we got to do to take this company the next direction? I mean the next level. And so it's forcing that into your schedule every week. That's critical. The other one is that counsel. When we asked Jim Collins out of his books, what was the most important idea again for us mere mortals, he said the power of this thing that they discovered in good to great companies called the council. And it's different than your weekly management meeting. A way el nypos may be listening. It's the equivalent of having a forum meeting every week. And so my council's on Monday. It's 9:00am Eastern, it's 3:00 clock in Barcelona. And it's where we bring our CEOs together, the various companies. And it's not an operations meeting, we're not checking through lists. It's one or two big topics that we just need some talk time around. I just need to get some counsel on in order to make one or two big decisions moving forward. And it's that hour with the council and then that think time that you schedule every week that are probably the two most important habits for entrepreneurs.

What is the best piece of business advice or direction? It could be business or it could be personal that you've ever gotten.

Yeah, this is going to sound so Trite, but it's buy low, sell high. And we all talk about it, but you can't believe how we violate that rule, that fundamental rule of business every single day. And that's why I talk about the second biggest weakness next to marketing is accounting. Entrepreneurs discount accounting way too much. They under invest and spend on that side of the business. Their attitude being, man, I got to keep that overhead low because I just need a statement once a month and keep the IRS off my back. But the reality is when you get better numbers every day that tell you by customer, by sku, by location, by salesperson, by geography, where I'm making, how much money I'm making versus not, it's mind boggling. So we just had one of our clients, a pharmacy in Australia, send me an email this week that said, Vern, that really caught my attention when you wrote about that and scaling up. So we went back, they have a chain of pharmacies and they looked at their 8,000 SKUs and when they really analyzed it, they found out that 6,000 of the 8,000 were absolutely losing them a ton of money, draining their resources. And it's a little bit like Trader Joe's who figured out let's stock the right couple thousand SKUs versus the other hundred thousand that we need that has allowed them to be such an unbelievably successful specialty retailer. And that goes with every aspect of your business. And so pay attention to the rule, buy low, sell high, because you're violating every day and it's killing you.

So Anna, you've had your own experiences and of course you know the Miracle Morning methodology and use it as do I, inside and out. So what are your questions, thoughts, Anything? Okay, well, two things.

First of all, what you guys were saying reminded me so much of that David Hawkins quote. And I know Joe loves David Hawkins too, I think went to his funeral. But it's. We get what we want when we stop insisting on it. So it's like we want. But the energy we put towards this has to happen is what keeps it away. So it's the balance of wanting and not trying to control. But what I was thinking as you were talking, Hal, and I'm wondering if people must have asked you this before, for somebody who says I can't commit to the whole Miracle Morning routine, is there one thing that you would extract and say it can help give you that faith or that hellness that you have? 100%. Yeah. The miracle Morning is made up of. And Anna, it's great to see you by the Way, always way better to see you than Joe and Dean. No offense, but so, yeah. So for me, so the miracle morning, for those that don't know, it's made of six practices organized under an acronym, savers. S for silence, A for affirmations, V for visualization, E for exercise, R for reading, and the final S is for scribing. And so six practices that you do in the morning from anywhere from 6 minutes, 1 minute each to 60 minutes, or anywhere in between. Anna, My. When I get asked, like, is there, you know, is one of the savers better than the other? Do you have a favorite? Like, the politically correct answer would be, they're all equally important, right? But that, in my mind, that's not true. Everybody has their own that they lean toward. For me, it's affirmations. If I could pick one of the savers that I did every morning, that would be a miracle morning in and of itself. It's affirmations. And I'll speak on this because I think affirmations are very misunderstood, and they've been mistaught, which is why they're misunderstood by a lot of people. We're either taught one of two faulty ways to approach affirmations, and number one is lie to yourself. Essentially. Like, just tell yourself that something is true that you want to be true until you trick yourself into believing that it's true, right? So if you're struggling financially, just say, I am wealthy. I am wealthy. I am a millionaire, right? But if the truth will always prevail. So lying to yourself is never the optimum strategy. Or if you want to be thin and you're overweight, you go, I am thin. I am thin. And you look in the mirror and you are not thin. Again, the truth will always prevail. So lying to yourself is not the strategy you want to approach with. The second problem is using this flowery passive language in the form of an affirmation that promises a magical result despite your effort. So, for example, we've all heard something like this. I am a money magnet. Money flows to me effortlessly and in abundance. Now, the reason that people like that affirmation is if you're struggling financially, well, that gives you temporary relief from your money woes, right? You just sit back and go, yes. Oh, this feels good. Imagining that money is going to magically flow into my life. Ah, the savior is on its way, right? But anybody that's built a fortune, you know, or that's wealthy or financially secure knows that it's not through being a magnet and having it magically. Show up. So I'm not saying that there can't be benefits to those approaches, but I think that for me, affirmations need to be rooted in truth, they need to be practical and they need to be actionable so that they're results oriented. So for me, kind of the three step formula, if you will, for affirmations and what I use during my cancer journey, number one, affirm what you're committed to. So don't say I am blank if that blank is not true. For you, say, I am committed to becoming blank. I'm committed to improving in blank area. I'm committed to achieving blank results. So when I was going through cancer and I had fear every day, now I will say this, the fear, as time went on, it got less and less and less because I kept actively using these affirmations to replace fear with that unwavering faith. And so for me, my affirmation that I read every day and Anna, this really answers your question directly. I am committed to beating cancer and living to be 100 plus years old alongside Ursula, Sophie and Halston, my wife and kids, no matter what. There is no other option. So if you're listening to this, if you're taking notes or you want to walk away with this as a strategy, it's simply I am committed to blank. Whatever your ideal outcome is, I'm committed to blank. Or your ideal effort, I'm committed to blank no matter what. There is no other option. The second part of the affirmation strategy for me is why is that deeply meaningful? So I had bullet points. So I am committed to beating cancer and living to be 100 plus years old alongside my family, no matter what. There is no other option. Because step two, the why I am committed to be. And I had an affirmation for every member of my family and the world and myself. It said, I am committed to beating cancer for my wife, for Ursula, because I promised her forever and a day. I am committed to beating cancer for Halston, my son, because he needs my love, leadership and guidance. I am committed to beating cancer for my daughter Sophie, because she needs her daddy's love and affection and belief and support. I am committed to beating cancer for my dad because he gave up everything to save my life. I am committed to beating cancer for my mom because she doesn't deserve to lose another child. I am committed to being cancer for myself because I deserve to live a long, healthy life. And last but not least, I am committed to beating cancer for the rest of the people in the world, the countless People in the world who are themselves battling some form of physical or mental challenge and don't have the same resources that I do, and they desperately need my love, leadership and support. And if you look at that, the other day, I was interviewed by Dave Asprey, genius network member, and Dave Asprey. He paused me. He said, hal, I want you to note, he goes, I don't know if you're aware of this, but all of your whys, every single one of your whys, except for one, was for other people. And I had never made that distinction. But when you've got a list of compelling whys as to the reason, you're committed to do whatever it takes to achieve your result, to support the people in your life that matter the most, that fuels you to do whatever it takes. And then, last but not least, the third step is what specific actions will you take and win? So your affirmations should include all three of those, right? What you're committed to, why it's meaningful to you, why it's crucial, why it's important, why it's a must, however you want to word that. And then number three, which specific actions you'll take and when. And now you're affirming something every day that aligns your subconscious mind, your conscious thinking, and your actual behaviors to be in alignment with committing the results that you're committed to in your life.

That was very good, Hal. Seriously, really excellent. Thank you. You know, and I'm going to. We'll come to it. I just want to plant the seed. So during this session, we do not cover. This is. You've sold over 2 million, 2 and a half million books. You've created a global brand. You've got. I mean, it's made a lot of impact on a lot of people. And so certainly this is a I love marketing meetup. Right? So I want to talk about that. So I just want to let everyone know that because we have so many entrepreneurs that are joining us, you know, they would love to know, I've got an idea. I got things that could change the world. I have, you know, have an expertise or I've overcome, you know, I've overcome shit. You know, I've overcome challenges. I've overcome things. And I have, you know, I'm a phoenix that has risen from the ashes. And I think I've got ways that can help people. How do you package it? How do you market that? So I do want to have that discussion. I kind of want to stay along. What we're talking about here, that One of the questions I have is, as our world's in the midst of unprecedented times, we're in the middle of. Well, not just the middle. We've been going through the pandemic and so much political diversity and unrest and people arguing and fighting and fear and confusion and all the different things that are going on. Many people are experiencing tons of uncertainty, tons of fear. What do you believe is the most important for each of us to focus on right now, from your experience?

Yeah, it's a good question. And it's for the last six months, to me, it's focusing on the one thing that we all have control over, which is ourselves. It's what we think, how we feel, right? You might think, well, I don't have control over how I feel. Well, if you take control of how you think and then what you do, right? So your thoughts, your words and your actions, that's all we have control over. And so, for me, I think that the ultimate goal in life is what I would call inner freedom. Right? And in the way that I define inner freedom is the ability to choose how you experience every aspect of your life at any given time, no matter what's happening in your life, no matter what's going on around you. And for me, that's been kind of. I guess, you know, that's been my superpower. When I was in the hospital at 20, I felt very little, if any, emotional pain. I'm like, well, I can't change. In fact, one of the stories I told my dad, I said, dad, because the doctors called my parents in and they thought I was in denial, right? The doctors did, and they sent my dad to find out how I was really feeling. They said, your son is probably covering up some real emotions. He's probably, deep down, really terrified of his unknown future, that he may never walk again. He's probably depressed. He's probably. He might be angry with the drunk driver, with life, with whatever, but he's not admitting his real emotions. You need to get to the root of it so his emotional healing can begin. And my dad came in and sat me down, and he told me the doctor's concerns. And he said, hal, it's okay. I know you want to be positive. It's okay to be negative. It's okay to be sad and scared and angry and depressed. It's important, though, that you talk about it and you feel those emotions. And I went inside. You know, my dad's like. You know, like, trying not to cry. His face is red, and he's. He's Emotional. And he asked me, how am I really feeling? And I looked at him and I thought. And I looked at him and I said, dad, I thought you knew me better than that. And I smiled. He said, what do you mean? I said, remember, I lived my life by the five minute rule. And he said, remind me. And I said, it's okay to be negative and feel sorry for yourself when something goes wrong, but not for more than five minutes. And I was taught this in my sales training by my mentor when I was young, when I was 19, that when something goes wrong, literally, you set your timer on your phone for five minutes and you get five minutes to bitch, moan, complain, cry, vent, whatever you gotta do. Feel it, feel it fully, right? As much as you scream, whatever you gotta do. But when the timer goes off after five minutes, you say three very simple, powerful words. Can't change it. And it's an acknowledgement. I can't change what happened in the past, whether it was five minutes, five months or five decades ago. So there's no value in wishing that I could. There's no value in resisting my reality and wishing that unchangeable aspects of reality were different than they are. I said, dad, the car accident was two weeks ago. You know, keep in mind this conversation was before I ever took my first step. I still didn't know if I'd walk again. I said, dad, the car accident was two weeks ago. My five minutes, it's long up. And I said, there's only one of two possibilities. And anybody watching or listening to this, consider that this applies to your life. There's only one of two possibilities. I said, for me, dad, either things go the way that I want and I get to walk again. I said, or things don't go the way I want and I'm in a wheelchair the rest of my life. It's one of those two, right? And I said, I've already thought through the worst case scenario. And if I'm in a wheelchair the rest of my life, dad, I promise you, I will be the happiest, most genuinely grateful person that you've ever seen in a wheelchair. Because I'm in a wheelchair either way. And I will never let the unchangeable circumstances in my life define my emotional well being. I said, so the worst case scenario is I'm the happiest person you've ever seen in a wheelchair. That's not that bad. You and mom have nothing to worry about. I know you guys are concerned. No matter what happens, I'm going to be fine. I said. But the second possibility is I will walk again. I don't even know if that's possible. I don't know if that's realistic. But here's what I know. I'm committed to putting every amount of my mental, emotional and physical energy into what I want from my life. I'm visualizing walking again every day. I'm praying about every day. I'm imagining it, I'm talking about it. I'm going to therapy, I'm doing the exercises. I. I'm doing everything in my power to walk again while I simultaneously accept that I may never walk again. And I'm at peace with either outcome. One I'm at peace with, one I'm a little more excited about for sure, right? But that's true for all of us, right? That you can't change the things that are out of your control. So that inner freedom comes from choosing to be at peace with all that you can't change and truly grateful for everything that you have. And so that for me was the mindset that I applied through the cancer and through the car accident and everything else, and through the pandemic, right? Every day I wake up, I do my miracle morning, and I might have a stressful day. I might have. I mean, there's a lot of stress going on for all of us. I'm a keynote speaker. Like, I lost over half of my income, right? Like, that's not a positive thing. But every morning it's that reset button where I get an hour to myself where I'm reminded, oh, yeah, this is life. All that other bullshit, that's just my life situation. And there's a big difference for all of us, right? Don't confuse your life situation, which are your temporary circumstances, with your life, which is who you truly are. It's your soul, it's your essence, right? It is the extraordinary, limitless being that you are. And that's where you should draw your emotional well being from, not from the shit in your outer world.

I want to touch back on, like last year. It's interesting you said that because last year was probably the most difficult year I've had in a decade. I mean, I had, you know, our dear friend who's actually in the movie, Sean Stevenson, he died. I was with him in the hospital when he died. I had valley fever. Earlier in the year. I had a breakup of a relationship. I probably had the biggest business betrayal that ever dealt with in my entire business career. Last year was a shit show. And then it bled right into the pandemic. And then couple that with all the addiction work and stuff that I'm doing and talking daily with people that are in pain and angst and stuff. I mean, just hearing. And I know you. I mean, I can call you anytime, right? We can talk to each other at any point in time. It's just really good to hear this because the world right now needs some inspiration. If you had just stopped doing your miracle morning rituals, what do you think would happen to your life?

You would be like, most people. Most people go through their day, right? I think. I don't mean to speak that I know all about most people, but I think that we can all relate to. You know, you go through your day, and if you have a stressful day, then you typically go to bed feeling stressed and consider that your first thought in the morning. Our first thought in the morning is almost always the last thought we had before bed, right? So if you go to bed thinking, you know, if you. If it's like, you know, the night before vacation, as soon as your eyes open the next morning, you're like, oh, it's here, right? Or I think about being a kid on Christmas Eve, right? You go to bed excited, I can't wait to wake up. You wake up, the first thought you have is, it's Christmas. But in these circumstances, right, you go to bed stressed, you wake up feeling stressed, and what happens is one day bleeds into another, into another, into another, and. And they start to compound, and your stress level can manifest in the form of ptsd. I mean, it can get worse and worse and worse. For me, the miracle morning is my saving grace. And it is for. I had a lot of people during the pandemic in the miracle morning community that are like, thank God for this practice or I'd be a mess, right? And it's because now, every night when you go to bed, you're not waking up to your problems. You're waking up to your miracle morning. You're waking up to a space of time that you've dedicated to meditation and affirmations and visualization, right? And exercise and reading and journaling. Six practices that essentially calm your nervous system, lower your cortisol levels, right? Remind you of who you are at your core, what you're committed to doing and being and achieving. You know, you visualize. You see what you want in your life. You go exercise and get the. The serotonin and the dopamine and releasing endorphins and blood and oxygen to your brain. You know, for me, my exercise every morning now, Joe, it has been for probably six months is I go for a bike ride throughout my neighborhood and it's a 10 minute bike ride, but I'm working my legs, right? I'm getting the muscles working, the blood and oxygen's flowing, but I'm also getting fresh air. I'm also looking at trees, I'm also looking at the sunrise. For me, the bike ride is more mentally and emotionally and spiritually beneficial than it is physically. And so, yeah, so that's the point is that with that miracle morning, it got me out of depression in 2008, it got me out of depression in 2020. And it has been the most important part because it's giving you that time to give yourself what you need to thrive mentally and emotionally, which then allows you to thrive in the physical world once your miracle morning is over.

Can I ask you about the whole notion of waking up early? Because all of these principles, all these strategies, all these rituals in your books and even in our book would apply even if you're a nocturnal, if you still woke up and did savers, they would still work. What is the pros and cons of morning versus late risers versus early risers? Because you write about it in so many different ways in all the different books, but what have you, why the morning?

So there's a few answers to that. One is if somebody says, I'm not a morning person. If that's like your aversion, I would say that you're not a morning person until you try waking up early for a few days or a few weeks and then all of a sudden you go, oh, I'm a morning person. I hated running. And when I started doing the miracle morning, I was. So keep in mind, I was deeply depressed. 2008, I was depressed. My first miracle morning, I'm like, dude, this is it. If I do this every day and I feel this energized and focused and motivated and inspired, there's no, like, it's only a matter of time before I become the best version of myself that can create whatever I want in my outer world, right? And so in terms of doing it at different times of the day, this doesn't mean you have to get up at 5. Like, there's the whole 5am Club. And I think that's great. But let's say normally you get up at 9. This means getting up at 8 or 8:30, right? Like, it's not a radical change. But here's why people have said, well, Hal, couldn't I do my savers in the afternoon? Or in the evening and still benefit. The answer is yes and no. Yes, you'll benefit. You're going to benefit if you meditate, journal, any time of day. Right. The difference is the benefits of those practices are both immediate and lasting after they're done. So, for example, in the Miracle morning movie, we interviewed Robin Sharma, and he said that the benefits of exercise are scientifically proven to last as long as 13 hours after the exercise or when you meditate, you immediately lower your cortisol levels. You allow yourself to think clearer, have clarity. That benefits you immediately. So the point is, starting your day with those practices that put you in a peak physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual state enables you to win the day. If you don't do those until after work, well, you just had a, you know, you just trudged your way through work, and then it's like, then you got into that state. So that's the point is, will they benefit you any time of day? Absolutely. But if you don't do them in the morning, you're missing out on those benefits all day long. And by doing them in the morning, like, in simple terms, it's, you win the morning and then you win the day. And when you string together day after day after day with that starting that morning in a peak state, then that's when I think you see tangible results in your life that will exceed your expectations.

Yeah. You know, the beauty of this is just how many lives have been changed through this process. I mean, the amount of testimonials that got. I mean, even the ones that we've gotten. When our book came out with addiction recovery, a lot of people were using the Miracle morning as part of their addiction recovery. And becoming. Going from being an addict and having your life being unmanageable and changing that. That requires switching out the form of pain and soothing that addiction was for. Because I have. On the back wall back here, I have a. I'll grab it right here. It says it's one of the gaping void images, and it says addiction is looking for love in all the wrong places.

Right.

And we look for. There's not very many good things that happen after midnight and after, you know, 1am or 2am or 3am, it gets progressively worse. And so when you have a process, you know, the miracle morning to use as a path for your life, incredible things happen along the way. So I've posted a couple of times the savers in there. And doing these things, it's not doing them. That's really just the key. It's the byproducts that come out of doing them consistently. So out of what's the biggest excuse or some of the biggest excuses that you hear all the time that you have to constantly address with people? Because I'd love to have everyone get a copy of your book, watch your movie. I'd love to take all of you that are here to actually enroll themselves into Miracle Morning. I mean, whatever. And there's Miracle Morning. Rattle off some of the Miracle Morning books because you have them in all kinds of different categories.

We have Miracle Morning for college students, Miracle Morning for writers, for network marketers, for entrepreneurs, with fellow Genius Network member Cameron Herald, Miracle Morning for parents and families, Miracle Morning for couples, Miracle Morning for salespeople, and most recently, Miracle Morning for teachers. And that is part of the mission. It is funny. I just found my journal entry from 2016 that was the miracle morning 10 year vision. And one of the elements was that every, almost every school in the world begins the day with the savers and with the Miracle Morning. And as a result, bullying is decreased, ADHD is decreased, students are more focused, more calm, more peaceful, more empathetic toward each other. And then I go, wow, that's wild. Now the Miracle Morning for teachers is literally out there and we have hundreds of teachers around the world that are doing this. Yeah. So the Miracle Morning book series was something that kind of came organically. A friend of mine said, hal, we've got all my salespeople that I've given your book to, all of them, literally 100% of them that have read it and that are doing the Miracle Morning, their sales have increased. Have you thought about doing like a Miracle Morning for salespeople or, you know, anybody? And. Yeah, and that was. I just said, hey, no, great idea. Let's co author it. That was kind of how the series was born. Yeah.

Yeah. So you actually took your process, you put it into a book, it started getting some traction. People started using it in all kinds of different areas. And then you have niched it into these different categories. And so the reason I want to bring this up is, for one, I think everyone here pick one of the Miracle Morning books that you think would apply to you if you're in addiction recovery. I mean, utilize it even with people that you're working through with your sponsors or whatever. It's just an amazing book and it's helped so many people. I mean, and so you've got literally hundreds of thousands of people have given comments, testimonials ever since you started doing this house. So what's the big Obstacles that you haven't mentioned that need to be addressed or overcome. Because I don't want anyone leaving here saying, oh, you know, Because I think everyone here, their life can be dramatically improved with this process.

Yeah, yeah, thank you for circling back to that one. And I think it's the I'm not a morning person, right? And so I'll tell you this. I was asked a couple of years ago on an interview what percentage of miracle morning practitioners, you know, which again, it's in the millions now, but what percentage of were never a morning person before they read the book. So this was like, not just a I'm going to do different things in the morning. It was literally like, wait, I got to wake up a half an hour earlier. Like, no, I'm not a morning person. They had to overcome that limiting belief. And he said, what percentage of people were already morning people? So this was just simply switching. Instead of watching the news or checking Facebook in the morning or email, they do the miracle morning, you know, the savers. And I did not know the answer. And I thought, man, I should know the answer to this question. And so we surveyed our community, which back then, the Facebook group of Miracle Morning community was probably 100,000 people or something. 72% said they had never in their life been a morning person before they read the miracle morning. So if you're like, I'm not a morning person, join the club. I wasn't a morning person, right? Just like before I started running, I wasn't a runner. And then I started running and I became a runner, you know, so it's. It really is something that for us is, I think, a limiting belief of I'm not a blank just because we've never really committed to giving it a try. And, and here's what I want to. Let me share. I'll give you guys a little bit out of the Miracle Morning book. There's a chapter in the book that became a linchpin for people that did not consider themselves a morning person. And it's the shortest chapter in the book. It's called the Five Step Snooze Proof Wake Up Strategy for Recovering Snooze Aholics. Don't be afraid to give things long titles. So I'm going to give you a few of the steps, right? So number one is you have to set your intention before bed. In the book there's a download. You can get the Miracle Morning bedtime affirmations that give you a word for word script that you read before bed to do this. But it goes back to what I said earlier, that the last thought we have before bed is usually the first thought in the morning. And if you have to wake up early, you're like, oh, my gosh, I got to get up tomorrow. I'm so tired. I'm going to be exhausted in the morning. Then the alarm goes off in the morning. You're like, oh, God, I'm so exhausted. It's here. And then snooze, snooze, snooze. So before bed, you have to go, hey, I'm going to bed tonight. I'm going to feel rested. I'm going to wake up excited, committed, focused. I'm going to get out of bed. No matter how many hours of sleep I get, my body's going to rejuvenate. It's a miracle, right? And that's off the top of my head. That's not word for word what it says. But the point is that before you go to bed, you set the intention that when you wake up, you're going to jump out of bed, brush your teeth, wash your face, and go into the living room and do your miracle morning. So that's step one. And again, there's a script. In fact, you guys can get it. Tmmbook.com TMM is in the miracle morning. Tmmbook.com you can go download that right now for free. The biggest tip, though, is you have to move your alarm clock across the room. Most of us keep our alarm clock within arm's reach, whether it's our phone or an alarm clock. And what happens is the alarm goes off in the morning. And we've all done that, right? In fact, we do it a lot daily. You reach over and you fumble over and you turn it off. You snooze and you do it over and over and over. And you wake up at the last possible minute and pull yourself out of bed. Keep the alarm clock as far away as you can. Ideally, mine's in my bathroom, right? So that when it goes off, it's radically different in terms of how much discipline it takes to stay awake when you've already gotten out of bed and walked across the room and you're right there in front of the ceiling, sink, and to brush your teeth. That takes much less commitment and discipline to stay awake than if you're fumbling in the dark to turn off your phone and snooze on your phone. So there's a couple of tips is, yeah, set your intention before bed. Make the commitment before bed so that when you wake up in the morning, you follow through with your commitment that you made before bed and move the alarm clock as far away as you can. And my third and final tip is drink a full glass of water first thing in the morning so that you rehydrate. Because dehydration and fatigue go hand in hand. And so don't start the day with coffee. Drink a full glass of water while you're making your first cup of coffee and then dive into the caffeinated beverage.

Well, you know, I have to mention this because I got this little guy that's sitting here and if you pull his pants down, he pees. Watch his. Everyone see that as I'm peeing all over the desk? It's actually water by the way. And you can get one of these at Amazon, by the way if you really feel.

Is that how you drink your water in the morning, Joe?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's bad. I'm definitely not going to do that on video. So how do you. Do you ever pee before you drink the water or do you drink the water and then you pee in the morning?

It depends on. Usually I pee first. Yeah, usually I wake up, I usually brush my teeth first. Even if I have to pee, I try to brush first. Then I go pee and then I down a full glass of water on my way to the kitchen. Then I drink a sodium bicarbonate lemon juice shot. Right. Which makes your body alkaline. Then I go do the Beamer mat for eight minutes which is like a electronic mat. Right. You know what it is? And then that gives my body time to alkalize. Then I go make either a cup of green tea or coffee. And so yeah, I've got that. That's my pre miracle morning ritual.

Awesome. That's great. All right, well I'm going to. In just a moment I'm going to start asking you some questions about marketing. So Dean or Anna, is there anything that you guys want to ask or something related to the topic we've had before I switch over to ask him about how the hell did he build this, this whole empire of miracle morning and help all these people in the movie and all this stuff coming out? Well, I think it's fantastic.

I mean you and I, Joe talked.

About, we joked about Robin Sharma. I had dinner with Robin in Toronto.

And I was talking about the 5am.

You know, he's famously thought it really needs to be is the 9pm club. Because if you're going to participate in that, that's really what it's about is.

You got to Go to bed at.

9Pm is really what that's about.

And Joe and I talked about that.

It probably be it would do much better for people if they try aspired to join the nine hour club and get nine hours of sleep.

Would be a.

Would be transforming for people in a.

Short period of time.

Oh yeah, I got to say something to that D because so Robin Sharma, like my interview with him that I did in 2015 before the 5am club came out because Robin was in join Genius network I think back in 2014 and basically that video's got over 500,000 views on it now. And it was before the thing come out. And you're exactly right, it's like it's not about the 5am Club, it's about the IPF club. So what are your evening rituals? What's your miracle evening look like?

Hal? Oh, I'm sorry, I was reading a comment. My miracle evening. So I don't have my miracle evening. I don't do. It's really more about putting the kids to bed. That's the miracle evening. I don't do a lot. I've had a lot of people in the miracle morning community that have a really dialed in evening routine. It's basically like a miracle morning at night where they'll do some journaling and they'll do some meditation and this and that. My only mirror. Here's my miracle evening. And this is the most duplicable thing that anybody could do. I think positive, grateful thoughts until I fall asleep. That's it. I started implementing that when I had the depression and the anxiety and Covid hit and there was so much to stress about and I found myself, I couldn't sleep. And so that was one of my practices to be able to get back to falling asleep. I just think positive. I made a decision that at night there is no benefit to thinking about the things that stress me out. I'm not going to solve the problems while I'm trying to fall asleep. In fact, it's just going to cause poor sleep. So yeah, that's all my miracle morning is or my miracle evening. I do go to bed. I try to go to bed by 9:30 to wake up at 4:30. So I get seven hours of sleep. Where do you live? And then. Yeah, say again? Where do you live? Austin, Texas. You're in Austin?

Okay, that's funny.

It's almost like be cool to just.

Move a couple of time zones and.

Stick with your same routine.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's a good time to get up at 4:30.

So, yeah, so that's it is I just go to bed, try by about 9:30, and sometimes it's a little later. And yeah, I just go to sleep just feeling bliss. Like one of my simple mantras is, in life, you can be stressed out or you can be blissed out. Either way, life's gonna happen. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that'll be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. You're over here. Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you. Watch them.