3.5 Hours of Motivation and Pure Inspiration

And beliefs are the lens by which we actually see the world and by which we behave. And so if you want to change your results, don't focus on changing your behaviors. Change your focus on the beliefs that drive your behaviors. We developed at our company, at Praxis, we developed a process called the 5R process. And the first R stands for recognize your thought patterns, recognize your emotions, recognize your behaviors, and ask yourself, are they going to move me towards what I want or away from what I want? Okay, so you don't try to change anything. Just ask yourself. You recognize, just become more aware. And then instead of reacting to what you don't like, you learn how to respond. That's the second R. So recognize, then respond. Hmm. Can I change this? Can I change the meaning of this? Can I change the emotion of this? Can I change, you know, anything about this that is destructive?

And the answer is yes.

The third part is to reframe anything that doesn't work for you. So whether it's a person, a situation, a circumstance, how can you reframe it? Look at it from a different point of view so that it doesn't have the same meaning anymore. And one of the things that we know is the meaning that we give anything determines how we feel about it. Yes, the meaning we give it. Nothing has a meaning independent of our own thought, thoughts, and meanings. So can we reframe something, look at it a different way, emotionalize it a different way so that we can use it as opposed to it using us? The fourth part is when we're feeling a negative or destructive emotion, can we, through breathing exercises, through reframing, release that emotion? Because every emotion is a wave. So there are six main emotions that we have. There's sub emotions as well, but we feel fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, etc. And those cause us to feel a certain way. So is there a way for us to release the unpleasant emotions? There's not good or bad emotions. They're pleasant or unpleasant. Yeah. And that is. Comes from directly from one of my dear friends, Dr. Joan Rosenberg, who's an emotional mastery expert. And so when you think about, is this emotion pleasant? Yes. Okay, good. Let's do more of that. Is this emotion unpleasant? Okay, well, what's causing it? Usually what's causing is something from my past that is telling me that whatever's happening, maybe I can reproduce it. Well, if it's. If it's a. If it's a unpleasant emotion, usually it's a memory from the past versus reality. And so when you learn that emotions last 90 seconds to a minute and 20 seconds, two minutes. And if you just observe it and feel the emotion, it's like a wave. Feel the emotion without getting into the reaction of the emotion. Observe it. Now you're in control of the emotion. Now you're learning to surf the wave instead of being hit by the wave. And then the fifth part is now to retrain your brain. So recognize, respond, reframe, release. And now I want to retrain my brain to have a different thought pattern, a different emotional response and a different behavior so that I change the pattern in my brain so it doesn't happen again. And if you do that one time, five times, 10 times, 20 times, the same thought or the same emotion or the same circumstance won't have the same power to cause you to freeze or run away or fight. Now we're starting to get in control. Yeah, it's great. Of our own brains, our own emotions. And now we can start to use the spiritual side of our being, the higher side of our being, to move towards the greatness that I think is within every human being. Setting goals is an intellectual and imagined exercise that your conscious brain. Right, I'm going to show you one of the little brains today from the city here on my desk. Your conscious brain, left prefrontal cortex, specifically where you get to choose what is it you would love to have your life be like. What is the imagination, you know, of the ideal life that you'd like? He says everybody could do that. He says, but achieving goals happens as a result of having the right beliefs, perceptions, habits, attitudes. At the non conscious level, where all of the habits reside, part of the hippocampus, part of your brain that drives your automatic behavior, that day in and day out, is what is going to determine whether you achieve those goals or not. He says using willpower to achieve goals is like using gunpowder. It's just a starter. Using resilience or using your imagination, those are all really good conscious abilities that anybody can use. He says, but if you do, you don't develop the habits at the non conscious level, which include your self image for how you see your life. You're never going to achieve those goals. One of the things that I was taught playing sports was repetition is the mother of skill. Repetition is the mother of skill, which is another lesson that I learned at a very young age when. Why does any piano coach, guitar coach, coach for sports, have their students repeat drills over and over and over and over again? Whether it's layups or free throws or playing, you know, certain chords on the guitar or on the piano. Why is repetition so, so important? The answer is because when you repeat a pattern over and over and over again, whether it's a language pattern, an emotional pattern, or a behavioral pattern, when you repeat it over and over and over and over again, 20 times, 50 times, 100 times, 200 times, 500 times, a thousand times, you actually are creating patterns in the brain that initially go from being conscious patterns, patterns that require effort and intention and attention, your conscious mind, to patterns that become non conscious that require less energy and less attention. Because it's been repeated so many times, it becomes second nature. So you have to use intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. So you have to start everybody off well. Why is it important for you to be able to develop these new beliefs? Like what would your life be like if you had them right now? What would your family life be like? You have to give them a benefit that's greater than the switch cost. That's interesting, right? So the switch cost is something that our brain resists. The only human that likes change is a wet baby. Every other human being is resistant to it because safety first in homeostasis and energy conservation. So we are biologically wired not to want to change. So we have to deliberately coax the brain into motivational reasons, emotional reasons. You have to have intrinsic reason. Why must you do this? And so you can use pain as a frame as well. If you don't, then are you okay with your life being like this at this age, in five years, in 10 years, in 20 years? And if you're okay with that, then you're not a candidate for change. But if you're committed to letting go of the old so you can create the new, and you create motivations every day, that's where the power is. Remember earlier progress, not perfection. So anybody can do one minute or, or 10 seconds. So if you can start to formulate a habit, a daily habit, a weekly habit, it doesn't matter how long it is. If you can create that space in your brain that on this day, at this time, this is what I do, and you do that repeatedly, that becomes a habit. And it takes those 66 days or so for a simple habit that you have to consciously do to then the habit doing you. Hey, this is John Assaraf. And do you love good books? I love to read because there's so much wisdom in books. You get to take somebody else's knowledge, skills, research, pay 15, 20 bucks and you learn so much. Now I'm reading this awesome book called Built to Serve, find you'd purpose and become the leader you were born to be. And one of my new friends, really smart guy, really great, great guy who serves a lot of people. Evan Carmichael wrote it. And I'm gonna read a little bit from chapter number one. And I love this piece. And maybe it's because I just watched the series on TV on Michael Jordan the Last Dance, which is really great, by the way. Also, one of the things he says here is everybody has Michael Jordan talent at something. Everybody has a Michael Jordan talent at something. You just haven't found it yet or you have and you don't believe in yourself enough to go all in. To go all in, right. And you're a genius. I believe you're a genius and so does he. You're amazing. You were not meant to live a photocopy of someone else's life life. You were not created to wake up and do work that is below your capabilities. You have Michael Jordan level talent at something and you need to uncover exactly what your purpose is and how you can serve and use the serve. So lots of pearls and gems and motivational pieces pick up. Built to Serve. Evan Carmichael, Rising Star. The first thing that you have to ask is what are your highest values? So for me, for example, my number one highest value is God. My number two value is my health. My number three value is my family. My number four value is contribution to the lives of others. My number fifth value is fun. So every day when I wake up, I think about what am I doing today to connect with God? For me, just for me, it doesn't have to be, you know, it's not religious, it's just for me. Then what do I need to do every day to make sure that I'm healthy? What I need to do every day to make sure that my family and my dear close friends who are part of my family that I have the relationship. That's rich. Then contribution. How do I use my passion, my gifts, my stories, my things I've not done well? Things I have done well, how do I share that with those world? And in doing that, I feel good and then I have to have fun. And so if I do those five things every day, then at the end of every day, I've had a great day. And if you have a lot of great days, then you end up with a really great life. And that doesn't mean that you don't have ups and downs and things that don't work and trouble that happens and things that come up. But if you keep your Focus on what's important. Then the rest of the stuff is really inconsequential. And there isn't a hundred different things you have to do. There's two or three things in each one of the areas that's important to you, that when you do those every day, you're so far ahead of the curve. So when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is I do a gratitude exercise where I ask myself, usually in bed, what am I most grateful for today? And usually, you know, I'm grateful for my health, I'm grateful for my wife, I'm grateful for my children. I'm grateful to be alive. I'm grateful for my family. I'm grateful to have experiences. Do you do that eyes closed? Yeah, I do that eyes closed. And while I think about that, I feel it. And so the feeling starts every day with a great feeling. So I start every day with a great feeling. Do you visualize some things, like your children or do you talk to yourself? How do you do that? Yeah, I have an internal dialogue. I see images of the things that I'm thinking about. And that just takes me two minutes. Just two minutes when I wake up. And then I go to exercise to take care of my body. How long? Usually one hour to an hour and 15 minutes every day. And so I do variety of different things. I hike, I bike, I work on aerobics, I work on strength, I work with weights. I do whatever it is. I just do it to give my body the physical exercise. Then as soon as I finish my exercise in my gym, one hour and half an hour, an hour and 15 minutes at the most. So then in my gym, I have two things. I have a vision board, which is my dream board for my. You are known for that. Yes. So I have my vision board for my physique and my body and my health. But then I also have, in my gym, something called an achieved board. Okay, so I achieved some of the things that I achieved. Past and future. No, Achieved in the past. Yes. So past. You have the past and the future. So I have in my gym, in my home gym, I have a. Like a place where I sit. And before I start my meditation, I look at my vision board from the past. So I get connected to the different things that I've been able to achieve. And I remember every day when I set my mind and my focus to achieving goals. I can achieve all of my goals. But what I also do is I reinforce. Most people focus on what's not working. This isn't going well, this didn't work. I want to remind myself every day of look how many things I was able to accomplish by being clear, by being passionate, by using these rituals. So before I go into my meditation, which is with my eyes closed, I look at my achieved board, I get emotionally associated with it to remind myself that when I set my mind to achieve something, I can do it. And then I look across because I have a mirror in the gym and I look across and I say, I love you just the way you are. And I say, I accept you just the way you are. With all of your skills and passion and faults and insecurities and doubts and fears. I accept you just the way you are. Well, I. And I smile and then I close my eyes and I do about a 15 minute meditation. And in my meditation, sometimes I have no thoughts where I'm just one with the universe and everything. Other times I'll just follow my thoughts and I'll just pay attention, be mindful of where are they going this morning, where are they going today? So I'll follow my thoughts and I'll just follow them. Other times I'll follow a thought and say, release that one. And follow another thought and say, release that one. So I am teaching my brain that I'm in control of my brain. The more you can create success rituals, processes and systems, daily success rituals to activate your motivational centers, your emotional centers and behaviors. The more you can create daily rituals of how you start a day, how you deal with stress during the day, how you plan your day, how you evaluate your day, how you follow through to the end of the day in a process that puts you in a cycle of success, the easier it becomes to achieve success and to make that the default mode of the brain. Once you understand that the power center is right within you and you learn how to just use the tools a little bit better. We've got the most powerful three pound tool in the world with no user's manual. And so we teach people, here's the latest research, here's how you can apply it to your life to be healthier, happier, make more money, get a better job, get a raise, start your business and do better by retraining your brain to be totally in aligned with your goals and dreams and learning how do I stay focused, how do I stay motivated, how do I stay on track? How do I develop the habits that will empower me and how do I do the things that inspire me instead of the things that expire me? What happened for me personally when I Was a teen between the age of 13 to 17, I got inspired into enormous amount of trouble with the law. I did a lot of unethical things, and I was getting myself into so much trouble. And I had one mentor that my brother introduced me to. His name was Alan Brown. He was a very successful philanthropist, entrepreneur. And he agreed to meet with me for lunch one day. And he asked me, like, why are you doing these things? You seem like a nice young kid. And I said, I don't know. I just want to make some money and I just want to fit in. He goes, but you seem like you're intelligent. Why don't you just use your brain's natural abilities? I go, listen, based on my education and based on what the teachers have told me, I'm not going to do very well in life. And I left high school in grade 11 thinking that I'm not worthy enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough. And this one man, in one minute, in one meeting, changed my life because he asked me, what goals do you have? And I said, what do you mean, what goals do I have? I said, I want to go out this weekend to the bar. I want to have some good food. I want to find a nice young lady, maybe hook up with. And he says, no, no, but what are your bigger goals? And I didn't have any. So he actually sent me home, and he said, fill out these pieces of paper. And on the pieces of paper it said, like, what age do you want to retire by? I was 19. This was May of 19. I wasn't even started yet. I said, but just fill out these papers. So I said, I want to retire by the time I'm 45 with $3 million. I want to have a Mercedes, I want to have a house, I want to travel the world. I want to have a great lifestyle. And so I came back on Monday and he looked at it and he asked me one question. And that question transformed my life. And he said, are you interested in achieving these goals or are you committed? And I stopped and I looked at him. He was standing up. I was sitting at my desk there at his office. And I asked him, Mr. Brown, I said, what's the difference? And he said, if you're interested, you'll do what's convenient. You'll come up with stories and excuses and reasons why you can't. And you'll use your education as an excuse. You'll use your stories as an excuse. You'll use the fact your father was a cab driver and was a gambler and never had any money. You'll use all of that as your reasons why you can't, he says. But if you're committed, you will do whatever it takes. You'll let go of your stories, you'll let go of your excuses, you'll let go of all the reasons you currently have that are formulating your identity of yourself, and you'll learn how to let that go and become who you are destined to become. So if someone's listening right now and they're thinking, you know, there's a lot of things I want, you know, I want to get out of this relationship, or I want the relationship, I want to have a better health, I want to have more money, whatever it may be. And they've been saying that for years. And they feel like they've been consuming all the information they need to have, but they haven't been able to take action, maybe because their why isn't powerful enough. What would you say should be their first step? Well, the first step is to take one thing. I'm going to go back to one thing and say, great, let me move one thing forward. Why? Because that just changes the trajectory of the same pattern repeating itself itself. And as soon as you interrupt a pattern, and then you repeatedly interrupt the pattern, it's like taking a detour. And as soon as you take a detour, one day you're like, okay, that was. That was okay. But you intended. Your tendency is to want to go back to what's comfortable. But if you take the detour, two days, six days, seven days, we know from a neuroscience perspective, it takes about 66 days to create a solid enough neural pattern that it'll go from conscious effort and thinking about it to a non conscious pattern that has the beginnings of automaticity happening without your involvement. You're just doing. Yeah. And so for me, what I do and for myself is I. Whenever I want to change something, whether it's a habit, whether it's a thought or emotion or behavior, I say, I'm going to work on this for 100 days. Not 30 days, not 21 days, not 66, which is right around there, I say 100 days. And then I focus all of my just on that one thing for 100 days. Why give an example of something you've done? Sugar, sugar, sugar. I'm a sugar. Me too. I'm a sugar. Like if he was an alcoholic, I'm a sugar aholic. So you take one thing, just one thing that, you know, maybe a little challenging. 100 days, 100 days. Just 100 days. So let's say you to want to drink more water. 100 days, a glass a day. Conscious effort to one a day. Whatever you did before, you'll still do but one glass a day. So, you know, I started that with my assistant. I want to drink, you know, like four of these a day, you know, like, you know, 32 ounces, whatever the case is. And so every. We got a mug, and it's on my desk every time I walk in. And then I have some support from her saying, hey, remember to drink your water. So just do it. So the first, you know, know, two, three weeks, I feel like I'm going to drown myself in so much water. But then it's like, okay, now I'm used to it. Now I'm drinking as much water as possible because the habit is there. And one of the rules that I love to follow is the habit is more important than the intensity at first. So don't worry about the intensity. Develop the habit. So can you take one minute a day to focus on how you will achieve a goal? Just one minute a day. Can you take one minute a day to focus on your health? Yeah. Can you take one day to retrain your brain? Yeah. Can I take one day, you know, or one action a day? And you start off with something, you know, and reduce it down to just a minute or two minutes or one behavior. If you can get that behavior to be a habit. It's easy to stack, right?

Of course.

It's just like the foundation of a building. Once you have the foundation, if you build it right, you stack. And so every good discipline affects another, and every bad discipline affects others. Let's say you have a fear of public speaking. Is it really a fear of public speaking that you have? Or is it a fear of getting up on stage and being embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, or judged?

Hmm.

Let me take you to another type of fear. Being buried alive. Can you imagine for just a moment if there was an earthquake or there was a natural disaster and somehow you were buried alive, wouldn't that trigger this crazy amount of fear of dying while you were buried alive? Now, why am I taking you there? I'm taking you you there because fear is a subconscious trigger whenever we feel threatened. And the threat could be a threat for our very lives. And when that happens, we move into one of four modalities and modality. Number one is we try to fight this feeling. Number two is we freeze because we're in such shock. Number three, we may faint because of the Neurochemistry that the fear causes, or we might run away. If we can run away now, these neurological reactions are our brain's way of keeping us safe, which is the highest need and desire of the brain, safety above all else. So when we are looking to achieve a goal that we want to achieve, and it doesn't matter if it's, you know, to start a business or grow your business or leave a relationship that you're not happy in, or a job that you're miserable in, whenever we think about the actual behavior that is required to achieve that goal, once we get motivated in doing that, that that's part one of how our brain works. But right after that, our brain has to analyze if there's any real or imagined danger associated with taking that action step. So if you are going to leave a relationship that you're not happy in, your brain is going to activate the memory circuits and discover what's in there that may have caused you pain and been suffering in the past. And when that happens, whether it's a relationship you want to leave, a job that you want to leave, a goal you want to achieve, your brain is always analyzing, is there any danger here? And when there is real or imagined danger, the amygdala part of the brain, the emotional response center in the brain, is going to fire off an amazing amount of neurochemicals like cortisol, epinephrine, or norepinephrine. And it's that rush of those neurochemicals that causes this emotion, energy in motion, we label as fear. Now, once you have that rush of neurochemicals in your bloodstream, that actually gives you an enormous amount of energy. But what most people never have learned how to do is how to take that energy and channel it to action versus the fighting it, freezing or running away. When you recognize a fear, I want you to do this. It's called inner size number one. It's called take six. Calm the circuits. When fear neurochemicals are released in your brain, you've activated the fear or stress response center in the brain. When you just observe the emotion called fear through being quiet and breathing six times in through your nose and out through your mouth like this, you take a deep breath in for five seconds, You blow out like you're blowing out through a straw. And if you do this five seconds in, five seconds out, five seconds in, five seconds out. With six to 10 breaths, you're going to deactivate the fear response center. And that actually is going to reactivate your thinking center in your brain so again can move on to inner size number two. Inner size number one is take six comm the circuits. Inner size number two is called Aya, A I A and that stands for awareness, intention, action. So here's how you do this. After you do the first inner size, then you move to inner size number two. And then you ask yourself in a calm relaxed state, what am I thinking, thinking right now? What am I feeling right now? Am I calm or am I tense? Am I breathing deeply or shallow? Is my heartbeat fast or slow? And in this state of calm awareness, as you deactivate the brain's fear or stress response, you can observe what you are feeling and what you are thinking and what you were doing. And then you can ask self the next question that is the I, what is my intention right now? Is my intention to move forward or is my intention to stay in this fearful state? And chances are you can say, well, I really want to move forward. And then, then you ask self, what is one action step that I can take to move forward towards my goal and dream? So this is how it works. After you do the inner size number one to calm the circuits and to deactivate the reactive state that fear causes, and then you move into the second inner size called aya, to move into the responsive state. Awareness, intention, action now puts you in control of being aware of the fear, being aware, okay, of what you've been thinking and then being at choice of what you want to do. So when you combine these two inner sizes, you are now reconfiguring the neural network in your brain around the goal that you want to achieve. And instead of allowing the real or imagined danger to control you, to stop you dead on your tracks, you take one action step in a calm state and that rewires your brain so that the same reaction doesn't hold you back anymore and that you are now able to use fear as your fuel for success. I want to separate like behaviors and emotions. So usually when people say they have they're having a bad day day, sure, certain things may have gone wrong or something that they tried to do, you know, didn't work out. All information and experiences are processed at the non conscious brain first. And then it gives rise to something we call a feeling. So emotions are processed nonconsciously. The electrical and chemical reaction to that is called a feeling. So when I'm not feeling, feeling the way that I want to feel, I don't focus on the feeling, I focus on the cause, the neuroelectrical charge that's occurred in my brain. And in most cases, it's something that you're doing to interpret an event that's causing the neuroelectrical signal causing the feeling. So in meditation, for example, why do you meditate? Well, obviously it's great for a whole host of health reasons, whether it's less stress, less, you know, lower blood pressure, less cortisol release, et cetera. But the one thing meditation does more than anything else is it gives you the ability to have a pause of awareness so that you sense what's happening at the non conscious level and what's happening outside of you. So when somebody behaves a certain way, it's processed at the non conscious level, gives rise to your conscious mind for you to respond. And so when something happens, I like to be able to check in so that I don't react and I have the ability to respond. And if you do that enough through mindfulness, being aware, just being aware of exactly what's going on, then you have fewer and fewer of those times. So, you know, something happened last week. I was in a hotel room and I spilled some water on a shirt that I needed for a wedding that we were going to. And my wife was, oh, she was going off deep. And I was just calm. And she goes, aren't you worried about this? Will it help? Right, no. Let's just figure out what to do. The accident already happened. When I was a kid, I had a lot of my own challenges. I didn't have confidence in myself. I didn't believe in myself. I had some big challenges with the law and getting into trouble in school and getting into trouble outside of school. And I was really fortunate. When I was 19 years old, I met a wonderful gentleman who was very successful with his family. He was very successful giving to charities. He was very healthy. He was very gentle and kind. And he really wanted to do good in the world, not just for himself, but to make the world a better place. And he started to teach me that the reason I was getting into trouble, the reason I wasn't getting great results, was what I believed about myself. And he taught me the power of, of my beliefs. He taught me the power of, you know, what I do every single day matters. He taught me the power of the intelligence in the universe, that I could utilize my brain like a radio, sends a signal out into the universe. He said, you could send a signal out using the power of your thoughts, he says, but you're also capable of receiving information just like the great inventors. Well, whether it was Albert Einstein, whether It was Edison, Michelangelo, any of the great inventors. They had these ideas that came to them, and they were just normal human beings, but they took advantage of the messages that they were getting in their hearts and their intuition. And so he taught me some of the power of the brain. And by using what I learned, I learned that I could achieve a lot more than I ever thought was possible. When I was younger, I was really fortunate. When I was 19 years old, I met a wonderful gentleman who was very successful with his family. He was very successful giving to charities. He was very healthy. He was very gentle and kind. And when he started to share with me, to teach me that my entire reality was based on what I believed was real and what I believed was. Was true about myself, about what's possible, and that I could change that, that's when my life started to change. And he said, if you start to change the way you think and you start to learn every day for one hour to upgrade your knowledge and your skills, and then you take action every day on the things that are the most important instead of all the different things that you can do. He says if you focus on doing three to five things every day towards your goals, he says in one year, you'll be at a totally different destination. Three years, big distinction. Five, 10 years, your life won't be the same. And I was tired of living a mediocre to less than mediocre life. And so I said, listen, you seem to have a good plan and good path. You're making millions of dollars. You're giving a lot of money to charity. You're happy, you're healthy, you've got a great family. I want that. He said, if you want that, follow the blueprint. Don't try to figure it out, just follow the blueprint. And that was another lesson that he shared with me, is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Yes. Like, if you want to fly right now, you don't have to figure out how to fly. You know, there's already a blueprint for how to generate or create an airplane. So if you want to be healthy, there's already a blueprint. If you want to make more money, there's already a blueprint. If you want to buy real estate or the stock market or start a business and grow a business, there's people before us that have already got the blueprint. And all you have to do is paint, paint the numbers inside the box, and then you can use your creativity. So I just became very good following for a long time. Of things that worked. And when you follow things that work, it's like having the combination to a safe. If somebody gives you the combination to a safe and they tell you, turn this way a little bit, turn this way a little bit, turn this way a little bit, turn this way a little bit, then open it, you can have access to it. But most people don't look for the combination. And then even when they get the combination, they try it in the wrong order. The law of Goya is simply get off your ass. So if you think and you believe and you emotionalize, you visualize and you create your plan for how am I actually going to achieve this? So what do I need to do? When am I going to do it? How specifically, how am I going to tweak it, measure it, and iterate it so that I'm consistently making progress? Progress. I learned the value of progress versus perfection. None of my mentors ever had me focus on perfection. They had me focus on progress to just keep getting better, little incremental gains every day, every week, every month, every quarter. And even when you move backwards a couple of steps, what's the progress that you made in what you learned? So I was taught that failure, failure is an opportunity to learn. And I was also taught to disassociate me being a failure from failing for sure. When you start talking about my brain, it's an organ. It's like your heart is an organ. You can speed up your heart, you can slow down your heart, you can speed up the brain waves in your brain, you can slow them down, you can tune in, you can tune out. We haven't been given the user's manual for the most powerful tools that we're aware of. That's right. And so the great news, you know, I know you being an athlete and a successful businessman, you have discipline. You cannot, you can't achieve results, achieve results without some kind of discipline. And so we know that there's some fundamental truths to achieving success. And every successful person will tell you, you know, and Jim Rohn is, I know you love Jim Rohn. Said, you either pay the price of discipline or you pay the price of regret. Discipline weighs ounces. Regret weighs tons. But the thing is, can you teach discipline? The answer is yes. How? You have to have a willing participant. And if the participant's reason why is big enough, if they know I want to achieve X and the reason why, the motive for their action, motivation. The motive for their action is a reason beyond just, just themselves, chances are they will do more to achieve that success than if it was just left up to their own. But there are some people that are born, you know, with incredible drive. They just have this insatiable drive and they'll just, I'll do whatever it takes for the things that I want. And there's other people that want things, but they just don't have this insatiable drive. And this is where, you know, I, as much as I hated school, I love to use school as an analogy in the game of life, whether it's health, wealth, relationships, career, business, spirituality, fun experiences, you have to decide, what level of the game do I want to play at? Is it the grade school level, the kindergarten level, the high school level, the university level, the pro level? Because each one of those levels requires a totally different mindset and totally different skill set. They're building blocks on each other. But if you are extremely talented, but you're not prepared to practice and rehearse and drill and fall and fail forward to the next attempt, you will never make it as a pro. You will never make it as a pro business person, you'll never make it as a pro husband or wife or athlete or musician. You just never will. So just get used to that. If you're not prepared to pay the price, if you are prepared to pay the price and you have the aptitude and the talent now, now we're talking about there's some real potential here. And what we don't know is, you know what's in your heart. Like what is the fire that stirs you, that you wake up saying, I will do this even when I don't feel like it. I will do whatever it takes to overcome my temptation for mediocrity, my temptation for excuses, my temptation for reasons and circumstances to hold me back. I won't allow those to be in my way. And if you have that within you, you'll achieve whatever you choose, right? And so the question you asked before is, how do you develop that? Start small. Yeah, start small. So if you don't have discipline, show yourself that you can give yourself one command and one follow through. So you know what? Right now I'm going to get up and I'm going to do two push ups right now, not like later. Now can you give yourself a second simple command? 1 sit up right now. I'm going to go get a glass of water. You start with something ridiculous. I learned many years ago, reduce it to the ridiculous. So if I reduce it to the ridiculous and I start that, I said, can you do that? Great. Will you? Because that's the difference. Right there is. That's the razor's edge. The people who can. Will you. Will you? Yeah. Great. When? Now. Now? Right. So if you develop that skill, and specifically from a brain plasticity, a neuroplasticity perspective, as soon as you do that, you give yourself a command and you take the action. You have just created a neural pattern that you can give yourself a command and take action. Now, that may just be one time. Well, what if you did that every hour by putting a little bell on your computer and every hour, like if you were. If my computer was open, I'd have every hour. It would say it's 12 o', clock, it's 1 o', clock, and I take 60 seconds just to be in control of my mind. I don't care where I am. Stop what you're doing, stop. Take six breaths, just get centered. Am I on track? Am I off track? Am I doing something I shouldn't be doing versus a high impact activity that I need to be doing every hour. I've trained myself to just reset. I didn't always do that. So I just started with one a day, then two. Sure. Then three. Then it was working so well. I said, great, let's do this every hour. Part of the work that I love to do now is really help people understand what is your story like, what's the story you're telling yourself? Because we all have a story. We have a money story, a relationship story, a health story. We have a story for everything. And then that story keeps recreating our lives over and over and over again. And we have beliefs that support the story. We have habits that support the story. We support, we have people that support the story. We have systems that support our story. And so my question, I always ask people, who would you be with a different story? I was born in Tel Aviv, Israel and moved to Montreal because my parents were tired of raising their kids in a worn, torn part of the world, which was, you know, in Israel and the Palestinian areas. And I'm sure everybody felt that same way in that whole region. My parents moved to Montreal from Israel and at the time I really had a hard time learning the French and the English language. And I developed some, I guess, self esteem issues that I wasn't smart enough or as good as the other kids because I couldn't communicate when I was really young. And then I got into a lot of trouble as a, as a young teen, from the age of 12 to 17, I got into a lot of trouble with the law, mostly because I had low self esteem, if you can believe that. I did at the time. People have to make a decision what they want to trade their life for. Yes. Because every day we're trading our life for the people that we associate with, for the business or job that we have, you know, for what we eat, for the health, for the enjoyment, for the fun, for the experience, experiences. And you have to ask yourself, is my life worth trading for that? If it's not, today is a good day to stop. I know that. Right? Yeah. But most people don't think that they're trading their life, you know, for something they think that, you know, oh, there's tomorrow and there's next week. Really? Well, I have evidence to prove otherwise, that we have no idea when the last breath will be. So let's trade our life every day as it's the most important thing in the world. And not from an ego perspective. From a humble, grateful perspective of, wow, I get another day to live and to enjoy. Grateful for that, but then to respect it. See, respecting your life means you're going to trade it for things that you feel are worthy of it. Most people, you know, ask themselves the wrong question. They ask themselves, you know, am I worthy of the goal and the dream that I have? And they should be asking themselves, is that goal, that dream that I have worthy of my life? Change the question. And if you say, yeah, I'll trade my life for that. Good, then go and do that. Talk to me about set points. That was something really interesting in what you talk about around the stories and things that we carry that I found really interesting. Sure. So Maxwell Maltz wrote a great book many, many years in probably the 70s, called psycho cybernetics. Right. And Maxwell Maltz was a surgeon who performed surgery on people. And what he noticed is even after plastic surgery that he performed on people, some people didn't see any change in their faces. And it was visible to everybody else, but not to them. Because they had a map of what they thought they looked like. Yes. So we all have a map of Riyadh. We have a map of what we think we look like. And any deviation on the physical level to that map, to that visual representation we have in our brains that doesn't match the map. Your brain deletes or distorts it. So when we were working with real estate agents or when I worked with business owners, in addition to upgrading knowledge and skills, if you think about how, let's say income, we have set points for how much income we earn. So whether it's 10,000 a year, or 20 or 50 or 100 or a million, it doesn't matter. We get this set point and then we behave the way we need to behave and we feel what we need to feel to earn that income. And over a period of time it becomes part of the brain's default mode network. So we develop set points for everything. And so if the set points in the brain, and there's a psycho cybernetic mechanism in the brain, a control and response mechanism in the brain, and it's our brain, why not learn how to reset the set point? And so now we're looking at what technologies are available to help reset that, what evidence based methods are there to set that or to reset that. And so when we take, let's say visualization, right, and, and you start to see yourself, even if the picture is not clear in your mind of achieving the next level of your success, whether it's releasing weight and keeping it off, getting into a relationship that you love and are happy, and whether it's to make two or three or five times more money and live a certain type of lifestyle that allows you to do the things that freedom with having money allows you to do. If you start in your mind first and you impress that through conscious efforts into the subconscious mind, it then causes thoughts and emotions and behaviors. So I like to work from the outside in and from the inside out. So use both. I want every advantage. Is your financial governor holding you back from doubling or tripling your income in the next six to 12 months? Now you may be asking John, what in the world is a financial governor? And I'll explain it this way. Many years ago, when the car companies were building engines that were faster and stronger and more resilient, cars could go 200, 250 miles an hour, some maybe even to 300 miles an hour. But because of laws in Europe and in the United States, these governors were put on the engine so that the car, even though it can go faster and perform even better, it was limited to about 155 miles per hour. So here we are, we have these cars that can go extremely fast, but for obvious reasons, to conserve on gas, to be able to have more safety on the roads, and to keep us generally all driving around the same speed limit, we created these governors to, to put on engines in order to limit the speed at which the car can go at. Well, what does that have to do with you earning more money, you accumulating more wealth? And the answer is everything. If you understand that you have a conscious brain that wants to set goals. But you have a subconscious mind that is going to limit your thoughts, emotions, feelings and behavior to what you are governed by, which is your subconscious mind. Then here's one of the things that we have discovered. People who make $30,000 a year or 50 or 100 or $500,000 a year, or a million dollars a year or more, their financial governor is set at a totally different setting than somebody who's earning less. So what is the this make a difference? Well, it makes a difference because there's a part of your brain that chooses the goal that you want to achieve and there's another part of your brain that's responsible for everything else. Your thoughts, emotions, feelings and behaviors. And so if you don't have coherence between these two parts of your brain, if you don't know how to remove the governor and reset it, change, chances are you're going to have goals and dreams, financial ones and even lifestyle ones that you're not going to achieve. Not because you're not capable of doing it. It's just because you are wired, set, conditioned, programmed, whatever you want to call it, to earn the income you're earning right now and maybe a little bit more each day, each week, each month versus doubling or tripler quintuple your income. Now let me give you a different visual for this that'll hopefully cement what I mean. Let's say you're in a room that has a thermostat in there and the thermostat is set to a nice and comfortable 70 degrees and you feel nice at that temperature. What happens if you open up a window and let's say it's winter and cold air comes in? Well, what happens is, is the mechanism in the thermostat that picks up what the temperature is in the room picks up a deviation that cold air has come in the room. And what does it do? It sends a signal through the electro system for the heater to go on so that the room gets back to 70 degrees. That's called a cybernetic mechanism, a control and respond mechanism that occurs in machines that we create them in or in animals like us. So whether it's hot air coming into a room or cold air coming into a room, any deviation from the set program activates the air conditioning or the heat until the program and the room are one and the same. That is a cybernetic mechanism as I mentioned. And here's what happens in us humans. If you're used to earning running 30,000 or 50,075, 100 or 200 or more, or you are used to a certain lifestyle, any deviation up or down from that setting, that comfort zone, that programming kicks in your nervous system. So that you either turn up the jets and earn more based on what you're used to, or if you do really well for a week, week, a month, a quarter, you actually back off and sabotage your success until you meet the setting that you have in your mind. That is how a governor works in a car. That's how a governor works in your brain. So if you want to double or triple your income in the next six months, 12 months, two years, doesn't it make sense that you should reset your financial governor? The expectation point, the programming, the conditioning? Well, of course it does. What I've seen in my years of training, whether it's salespeople or entrepreneurs or individuals to make more money, is the ones that think that they could do it just by gaining more knowledge, miss the point. Because there's a part of our brain that gains more knowledge but doesn't change behavior. What you have to do is reprogram your financial set point, your conditioning, the expectation point. And when you do that, and you create this coherence between your goal and your dream and your subconscious programming, that is when your behavior starts to change. That is when fears dissipate. That is when you stop procrastinating. That is when you, you take inspired action and you don't sabotage the success that you are achieving. So in order to achieve your goals and dreams, you have to reset your governor, reset your financial thermostat. Self talk is so critical. And so I'm consistently paying attention to how am I speaking to myself? Am I speaking to myself in a kind motivating, empathetic, compassionate way? Or am I consistently self deprecating and putting myself down? I used to think a lot when I was younger. I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough, I'm not worthy. Those thoughts and lots of fear. Fear of being embarrassed, fear of failure, fear of being ashamed. And I still have the thoughts every once in a while, especially when I'm setting new goals. Those come up, holy mackerel, they come up so fast. Frickin fast. Are you smart enough to achieve that? Are you good enough to achieve that? Even when I got into really diving deep into the brain science and even my new book, I was petrified to release my book. It took me two years to write it because now I'm entering another whole domain of neuroscience and neuropsychology with World renowned experts that I've worked with for years. But now here I am putting myself out there with, hey, this is neuroscientifically correct. So I had to make sure that it worked. But there was a lot of fear. But I understand what the emotion of fear is. It's a subconscious trigger that causes this feeling that I don't like. And it's a ghost signal for me, not a stop signal for me. If you have a big enough reason why you want to achieve something, you'll do whatever it takes. Yeah, but if your reason isn't big enough, your excuses will be. So it's a kind of balance. It's always a balance. Yeah. And we're always looking to be in harmony. Right? We want harmony just like an orchestra. And you want harmony between the different areas of your life so that it flows. And sometimes there's areas that are really great areas that are not, and other times it's a little calmer. And the more you can be in that nice gentle flow, the more your life works. And then I find that the happier people are. In the past, I used to teach and also do visualize my goals, whether it was my body, health, relationships, money, charity, whatever. I used to visualize the outcome. And some of the latest research now shows, in addition to visualizing the outcome, visualize the obstacles. And in the past when we talked about this law of attraction. No, don't visualize the obstacles, you attract them to. No, no, no. Your brain's way smarter than that. So if you have, whether it's a belief that's in your way, a story that's holding you back, a circumstance, references, you know, something that's holding you back from achieving X. So take a look at whatever it is that you already know is holding you back. I don't believe I'm worthy. I don't believe I'm smart enough, don't believe I'm good enough, don't believe I'm scared, skilled enough, I'm too young, too old, I'm too this or to that or not enough of this, not enough that. So address that and say, okay, here's an obstacle. I'm going to visualize that obstacle being real and I'm going to visualize just moving it aside and me moving towards my goal. The very act of acknowledging that releases the neural tension around. If you do that over and over and over again, what your brain starts to see is, yes, there was a struggle. And so it's worthy of me creating this neural pattern around this new effort. Most of what we're doing is we're on autopilot. We're just eking through the day on autopilot. And so the brain loves anything that makes it curious. The brain likes anything novel. The brain likes a challenge. So earlier you were asking me about one of the brain training companies other than ours. I said, does it work? I said, yeah, it's a workout for your brain, brain. And if you can strengthen the neural patterns of you seeing yourself with an obstacle and overcoming it, what do you think that does to your self? Confidence and certainty. Builds it up, big time builds it up. So if you actually do the work and develop those patterns in your brain as you're doing the stuff you need to do in the physical world, you just strengthen those neural patterns and that's what becomes your habits. I was taught the law of attraction. I was 23, 24 years old. Also at a real estate conference, they were talking about this law of attraction thing, that there's this energy, everything's made up of energy. I am energy, you are energy. And my thoughts create this resonance between what I attract and what I don't. I'm like, oh, good. I like that. I want to attract more of the good stuff, right? And so I bought in. Like, I bought into stuff that just made sense to me. But then I was a voracious student. I want to understand how, like, explain to me how it works. Like, if somebody tells me visualize, I go, why? Like, how does it work? Like, if you ask me to visualize, like, why does it work? Like, why should I invest my time on that versus something else? If you're asking me to use affirmations, like, how, specifically, why? How does it work? If you're asking me to emotionalize, well, what's happening in me, to tell me I need to create these false senses of feelings, I want to know why it works. Think about the era that our parents lived. Okay, Great Depression, right? Very, very hard to make money. Very, very hard to find resources. Very, very hard to do anything unless you're a professional. So our parents said to most of us, if you don't become a professional, you're going to struggle. You're going to struggle and suffer. And even the professional said, okay, so become a professional, and here's your ceiling of what you have. So we became conditioned to be worried of scarcity in a world that has no scarcity. We became conditioned to having certain beliefs about what's possible or not possible. So even now, you know, as we, as we were sitting here and we've Got this amazing election time. Crazy. You know, one of the things I've been thinking about is, you know, there are some people that believe that if Donald Trump wins, they're going to make a fortune. And there's other people that think they're going to lose everything. And I have a friend of mine who has got about $70 million in the bank that believes that if Hillary gets into office, he's going to lose millions. It's going to be really tough. And what really is, you know, going on in people's heads, it's. It's all of their references, their beliefs, and their perceptions that are locked away in the implicit part of their brain that is driving those thoughts. And even the behaviors, they may not even be aware of it. They're not even aware of it. Yeah, they can be, but there may not be. And so what we really have to go back to, to focus on is it really makes no difference who becomes president or who doesn't. If you have the belief that regardless of what happens in your external world, you can navigate towards the success that you want. That's a belief. And beliefs are the lens by which we actually see the world and by which we behave. And so if you want to change your results, don't focus on changing your behaviors. Change your focus on the beliefs that drive your behaviors.

Every human being has a relationship with money. And money is something that envelops people's brains about what they buy, what they don't buy, whether they buy, you know, business class or first class or regular economy seats, whether they're always looking for the cheapest or the most expensive, the nicest or average, how much they will tip, how much they won't. We all have a money story that we've developed mostly from our parents and the people that we live near. And we developed this relationship around money and our beliefs around money. You know, are we good enough to earn that amount? Are we worthy enough to earn that amount? Is it worth it or not? And so one of the things that Mary Morrissey says that we should do, she says for seven days, write down the thoughts you have about money and notice when you're thinking, and notice what you are thinking. And notice that the money story you're telling yourself, is it positive, negative, is it abundance thinking or limited thinking, is it scarcity thinking? Or is it what? Fill in the blank. And so once you know your money story, and this is also something that one of our psychiatrists who works with us, Dr. David Krueger, says, once you know the story, the Money story. That's when you can start to be aware of it and go, wow, where did I get these limiting beliefs about money, about my value? Where did I get these limiting beliefs of what I can afford and what I can't? Where I get these limiting beliefs around how I behave with money? Let's say you have a car, which I imagine most people who are watching have a car. Imagine you're driving your car and a light comes on the dash. It's like, oh, I wonder what that light is. And you look a little bit closer and it says there's a little. You're low on oil in the engine, okay? So you're aware of that and the light stays on. And then two seconds later, another light comes on and you what's going on? And it says that the rear tire is low on air. What the hell is going on? And so you keep driving. You say, at the next gas station, I'm going to stop and I'll fill up the air and I'll put some oil in the engine so that I top everything up. Now, why am I using that example? When we have an emotion, all emotions, everybody pay close attention. You have emotions. You are not your emotions. Emotions are different than feelings. Emotions happen as a. As an automatic subconscious trigger when your brain is evaluating something you want to do or something that you are doing against the memory that's in there that's causing this old emotion of how you felt or what you did or what you were thinking or what you were experiencing at the time that. That the memory was created. So all emotions are processed at the subconscious level. And whatever pattern is associated with that behavior that you're doing right now or the incoming stimuli from the outside world is going to trigger this emotion, which then sends a neurochemical release that you feel as guilt and has the thought patterns of guilt or the emotions of being embarrassed. The feeling is the conscious awareness of the cocktail of neurochemicals that have been released. But the emotion is subconscious. So is it possible to recalibrate a neurological pattern in the brain? Is it possible if a pattern is nothing more than neurons that have been coalesced or connected? Can you interrupt a pattern from the past? Is it possible to interrupt a pattern from the past? So answer that question. Is it possible to interrupt a pattern from the past? Of course it's possible. Any pattern that exists in the brain is nothing more than a group of neurons, brain cells that in many cases have 10,000 connections, okay, at the end of each neuron that formulate this connectedness, between the neurons. So you can interrupt a pattern, Just like you can interrupt and create a new habit. You can interrupt an emotional pattern, a behavioral pattern, a feeling pattern, and you can interrupt it using a variety of methodologies. You can take a pattern and you can visualize it getting smaller. You can accentuated with colors, with animal images, with visualization, with meditation, with mindfulness, with affirmation, with subliminal programming, you can interrupt patterns. And even more important than that, based on the latest research on neuroplasticity, you can create a new pattern, and that becomes the new default pattern.

The parts of the brain that register an experience versus the part of the brain that can imagine and experience are not different. So if I imagine doing a bicep curl in my mind, I see my arm moving and I'm doing a bicep curl in my mind, I'm accessing the occipital lobe part of my brain. It is no different than me going to the gym and doing a bicep curl. So when you do both, you select solidify the experience even more. Now, I want to just talk about what you just said about your partner who brings in meditation. When most people are asked to do something that they're fearful of, the sympathetic nervous system in the brain kicks in in nanoseconds, not in minutes, in nanoseconds. That's the fight or flight response system in the brain. So they want to run, run away, or they freeze and they can't do anything. But if you take that same experience that you want them to do, and you have them do it in their mind first in a calm state. So first, if you have them visualize doing that, and they feel nervous, but you just have them do one little thing. Six breaths. Why six breaths? We know from the research now that if you imagine in your mind doing something that you're fearful of, and you allow the parasympathetic nervous system to rule, that means that you're going to be shallow breathing, you're going to raise your blood pressure, you're going to activate your sweat glands, and you're going to activate all of the fight or fear response mechanism, the fight or flight response mechanisms. And that is a very tense situation to be in. What if you could take somebody and have them imagine that exact same thing, but before they take the action, they see themselves, they just take 60 breaths. One, see yourself doing it. Two, three, four, five, six. What happens is, because you're breathing deeply in and out, your parasympathetic nervous system, okay, kicks in. Why? Because that Is the relax response mechanism in the brain. So if you consciously activate your relaxation response mechanism with something that would normally be stressful for you, you actually deactivate the fear center in the brain, the amygdala, and you actually open up your thinking center of your brain, the genius part of your brain that can actually override the fear center of the brain. It's a small little mechanism that you can just learn how to do. So I say you do both. Not one or learn both. Goes back to upgrade your knowledge and skills of saying, why am I afraid? Which system of mine you know is operating right now? So think about this. When we walk into a room, we could flip the switch and turn off the light because we want more light. Well, why not flip your own genius switch? Why not flip off the switch of fear and anxiety and stress and flip on the switch of calmness, certainty and creativity? It's your switch. We just haven't been taught how to turn one switch off and turn one switch on. Highly successful people, whether they, they're taught it like we teach it, or they just know how to do it, automatically they do it. No matter what has happened to us in the past? Yes. Whether it's a traumatic event, a failure, somebody who's hurt us, a mistake that we've made, we have to understand that the way that our brain works is it does as much as possible to move away from anything that could potentially hurt us. So the first thing that your brain does is keep you alive. Yes. But the second thing that it does is it keeps you away from hurting yourself. Whether it's real or imagined, your brain will move away first. Protection mechanism first. So if you've had an experience from the past where you've made a mistake or you've disappointed yourself, you've disappointed other people, your parents, your parents, your teachers, your brothers, your sisters, your co workers. Your brain is always looking for associations and similarities in what you want to do that might lead to the same disappointment or the same pain that you've had before. And as soon as it senses any type of correlation, it lights up the part of the brain that remembers the past and brings all of your past into the present moment. So you feel it and projects the possible negative consequences into the future. As soon as that happens, your motor cortex shuts off. The part of your brain that takes takes action. In the motivational centers of your brain, it just shuts off. And what it does, it either fights, freezes so that you are paralyzed, or it makes you run away the other way. So that's one part of the brain that works. But if you understand that when that happens, you have an emotion, and it might be an emotion of fear, fear of disappointment, disappointment, fear of success, fear of failure, fear of abandonment, fear of rejection. There's 50 or more fears that we have as human beings that we're always aware of in the environment. And if you realize that those fears are possible, but they're not certain, what we have to teach ourselves is to be aware that those are possible, not certain. But then to flip the switch to the left prefrontal cortex part of the brain, which is really the brain that comes up with solutions. It's the brain that comes up with, you know, directions, instructions, strategies, and tactics on how to make it happen instead of all the things that could go wrong. So we have different parts of the brain that are responsible for different functions. Most people don't to listen that they can switch from this part of the brain to that part of the brain. They could lower the amygdala part of the brain that's responsible for fear and the emotional response of fear in the brain that sends epinephrine or cortisol neurotransmitters in the brain that we feel in our body, and then we feel these neurotransmitters in our body, Then we think about what we're feeling, and then we feel more about what we think about. And if that's what we only focus on, then it keeps perpetuating the exact same cycle, but we have in our mind. That's why people are repeating. Same mechanism, right? Yeah. There's a term in the neuroscience field, in the brain research field called repetition compulsion. So we have a compulsion to repeat things over and over and over again. Whether they're good or bad, it's irrelevant. So we will just keep repeating stuff. Even when we do things that don't give us the result that we want, we become addicted to that result in that emotional state in our brain and in our bodies. So if we repeat that over and over and over again, we become addicted to that emotional state, and then we just repeat it because it becomes automatic. Well, fear is an emotion. Emotions are all triggered at the subconscious level. They release neurochemicals that causes a feeling. We are consciously aware of feelings that are triggered at the subconscious level. The feeling is the end point of the human experience and the physical body. And so when you have something in your brain that a neural network says, well, what if this book comes out and you fail? What if it's not good enough? What is scientifically not correct. What if, what if, what if my brain's going to process that the same way as your brain and everybody else's brain? Because everybody's brain is the same. The mechanism of how the brain works, it's Einstein's brain, Hitler's brain, Genghis Khan's brain, Tom Bilyeu's brain, John assert, all the same functionality. So if you understand the mechanics of what's supposed to happen, then you say okay, great, when I feel this, then what am I going to do? So I like to use an analogy of a car. You're driving a car and you're talking to a friend of yours and a light pops up on the dash. You don't take a hammer and hit the light. It's a signal. Something's happening in the engine, in the trunk, in the tire, something's happening. Emotions and feelings aren't positive or negative. They're empowering or disempowering to varying degrees if you don't understand them. So what does your morning routine look like now? Oh great, what's, you know. So today was a little bit different except for one thing. Because I drove from San Diego to LA to be with you. But I wake up, I pee, I do my meditation 20 to 30 minutes every morning. I don't care where I am in the world at least one of the time. I do a variety of different meditations. So there's meditations that I can do where I'm just observing my thoughts. Now a lot of people think, well I thought you're not supposed to have thoughts when you meditate. Says whom? There's hundreds of different ways to practice awareness. See, meditation is the art of, of awareness. Awareness internally, awareness externally, but also the various millions of layers that exist in the physical and the non physical world. So this morning I did a meditation with some ocean sounds. And so it was about 5 o' clock I woke up this morning, sat in my little sofa, you know, with my feet propped up and did a 20 so minute meditation in the dark with the ocean, just listening to the ocean, just paying attention and going into a trance like state where after two or three minutes I disappeared like my body was part of air and space. So today was I was using sound to get into that trance like state. Other days I'll do a mantra, whether it's a lot of people know, transcendental meditation. So it's the Om mantra. So you just take a deep breath, breath in, then as you exhale it's O. And the question is, why would you do that. And the answer is, anytime you can give your brain a rhythm, it will entrain to that rhythm. That's one. Anytime you could pay attention to your breath, inhale and exhale, you turn off the parasympathetic nervous system. You turn on the parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and relaxation and your calm state of flow, versus your sympathetic nervous system, which is the stress response system of adrenaline, norepinephrine, cortisol, et cetera. So when you get the serotonin, oxytocin and dopamine going and you're in that state of calmness, you're able to enter deeper levels of consciousness and awareness. So you're able to observe a thought, you're able to hear your heartbeat, you're able to, to sense different things that are being risen in your body through thoughts that you're having. So you can actually start to see when I have this thought, here's the sensation in my body, and you start to get so attuned to what's happening, what stimuli is happening within you that's producing these sensations that cause you to either take action or not retreat or move forward. You can start to get a feeling for how the mechanics work. So I'll do that sometimes. I'll put on some of the Tibetan monks and chant with them. So I use sound, no sound. I use breathing. I use open eye, closed eye, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes. So I practice the art of being in control of my breath, not breathing, just being one with the entire universe and feeling this other than, than normal state of consciousness that we're used to. And it's not sleep, and it's not conscious awareness. You're in an altered state of awareness. And you can enter deeper and deeper and deeper layers of energy which everything is made up anyway. Everything's connected. We have this obviously our physical body, but the space between you and I right now, there's just vibrating pockets of energy, right? And so you're able to access different layers of all of the intelligence and information that already exists in the universe versus the memories that we have in our brains. And that's magical. When I was 5, 6, 7 years old, I moved from Israel to Montreal. I spoke Hebrew, but not English or French. And for two and a half years, I felt dumb. I felt like I wasn't smart enough and I wasn't good enough and I was made fun of as a kid. That led to me being involved in street gangs from the age of 12 to 16 in Montreal. In Montreal, we trafficked drugs from Florida. We did break in entries. We had a little street gang about 12 of us that just got into a lot of trouble. My path was either jail or the morgue, one of the two. And there's a lot of successful people that have that kind of a story for some strange reason. And at 19, I met a mentor. His name was Alan Brown. He was a real estate developer. Still in Montreal? No, this was in. I moved from Montreal. After years of turbulence, I finally broke free and moved from Montreal to Toronto, which is about 350 miles Canada. Yeah. And May 1980, I took my real estate course June 20, 1980. Became licenses of real estate agent. And the reason I did, I met a man the weekend before that. My brother introduced me to who was interpersonal development. And he was into, you know, Zig Ziglar and Dennis Waitley and Brian Tracy's, you know, 35 years ago. And he introduced me to this world of, you know, the mind. Introducing me to the world of changing my beliefs, changing my habits, changing my perceptions of first, who are you? And he really helped me see that, that you know, the spiritual greatness within everybody, the intelligence that's within everybody. He had me start with getting in touch with that. And it was very philosophical and didn't have the evidence that we have today on affirmations, visualization, meditation, mindfulness, subliminal programming, habit creation and all of the different methodologies that we've all heard about. Whether it was the astronauts that went to the moon initially that trained their brains or the musicians that have. Or the athletes that do the science now is just so phenomenal on what is actually happening. And so as I was building my own companies, I built my companies by training my employees not on the skills that they needed, but on how spectacular they were as human beings and the greatness was within them. And if they trained their brain to have the belief that is, they may not have the skill or the know how. But if you have the belief that I can, I will, I must. You can build a habit. You can build the habit. You can start to. If you think about this, I don't care if you. If we asked any question on health, wealth, relationships, career, business, spirituality, we wanted to find the answer to something. Yeah, we could Google it and within minutes have everything we want to know, tutorials, everything we do, tutorials, videos, audios, how to step by step, blueprint, color, coordinate, whatever you want. So our problem isn't how to all the how to exists, how to build a business exists, how to be a great Lover exists, you know, it all exists. How to get in shape, right? So I wanted to focus on, you know, how do I help more people take more of the action they know they should be and want to. We have this phenomenal brain, right? It's, it's genius abilities. We can't figure out how to replicated anywhere with billions of dollars. But we are getting some of the user's manual now. So when you feel fear, what should you do? I teach the first two inner sizes that I teach every one of our students. Number one is called take six. Calm the circuits. So if you have this unpleasant, anxious, fearful emotion, energy in motion, right? And it's unpleasant and the breaks have gone on. If you just take six deep breaths in through your nose, out through your mouth, like you're breathing through a straw, you will deactivate the stress response center, which means blood is going to go back to the left prefrontal cortex. The Einstein part of the brain can actually think through this problem because what happens when the stress response center is activated by blood goes away from that into the fear response. So you have epinephrine, cortisol, adrenaline to be able to get you out of this situation. It's part of our instinctual brain, part of the reptilian brain. The first part of the brain that was developed was that then the mammalian brain, the limbic system, then the neocortex, the thinking brain. So when our brain has this signal of oh my God, you might get hurt, you might lose this, you might get in trouble, you might be embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, judged, acceptance, etc. That part of the brain is going to get activated. So if you take six deep breaths first, calm down, calm the circuits first, then do. Inner size number two is called aya a I A. The first A is for awareness. What am I thinking right now? What am I feeling right now? What am I sensing right now? What is my behavior right now to you? Thoughts, feelings, sensations, awareness of behavior. What's my intention right now? That's the I. Well, my intention is to move forward. I want to do this great. What's one very small action step that you can take? Now? The reason you want to take one small action step is one small action step your brain can handle. If it's one small step towards it, the threat requires response goes away. But if you focus on the end game right away, you're going to get that rush and that instant trigger of the fear response, stress response. So the first thing you want to do is learn how to manage your mindset and what you focus on, learn how to manage your emotions because they drive your behavior more than anything else. Because we move away from pain and we move to, but we move away from pain a thousand times faster. And pain wires in the brain faster for survival mechanisms. So purely from a neuroscience perspective, just understanding self, once you understand, okay, this feeling is normal. Okay, what should I do? Take six con the circuits, Aya. And now you can start being progressive and make progress towards what you want. There's something in the weight loss industry field called a fat set point. And every brain has a fat set point. And it basically states that you have a set point just like a thermostat that's programmed in a room to have a set point. We have fat set points, we have financial set points, we have relationship set points, we have these set points that we become accustomed to achieve. And then all of the supporting evidence, the stories, the themes, the plot lines, the perceptions and behaviors all must match the set point. And so you can ask yourself two questions. Number one is how did that set point get there? And then how do I change it? Right. So how it got there is through all of your conditioning, through what you've read, what you've done, what you've experienced, what you've been told, what you've seen, all of that has created your financial center set point based on your story. And so the first thing to recognize is the set point can be changed. And the question is how? Right? And that's the million dollar question. So number one, what drives behavior more than anything else? It's not skill, it's not knowledge. Skill. And knowledge is potential power. But what does drive behavior more? Anything else is beliefs. And so if there is a belief, belief in the brain that says, yes, I think I'm capable of achieving double my income, we'll just use double my income. But there's another belief that opposes that, that causes what we know is as neural dissonance. So it creates a chaotic vibration in the brain between the conscious and non conscious mind. So the key is to get alignment between the new goal, which is a conscious pattern of thought that you can choose in an instant, and the non conscious part of the brain around that goal. So how do you develop a belief? Right. So it's a pattern. So if I gave you a sentence and you said that sentence one time, you probably great. It'd be a sentence like one that was like hearing a line in a song one time. But if you heard a line in a song repeatedly, 20, 30, 40, 50 times, and yet Other associations with that to reinforce that pattern, Then you would start to develop a non conscious pattern through that. So we know that using, let's say, visualization, you're actually bypassing the conscious mind and you're accessing the visual cortex of the brain. It's a non conscious process, the visual processor. And so if we take words and we affirm them and we feel them, and we visualize and repeat them 100, 200, 500,000 times, now we start to create a pattern at the non conscious level that basically reinforces a conscious desire. A lot of people ask me about money all the time. It's one of the things we teach people how to do is grow their businesses and how to make more money. And they say, well, you know, I want to make more money. I said, well, in order to make more money, first you have to believe that you can. Right. Then you have to believe you deserve it. Then you have to make sure that you have something that you can earn money with. So it's either going to be your ideas. You want to. You can sell your ideas. You can, yeah, like a trainer. You can sell your time, you can sell your product, you can sell your services, which means that you have to have some skill or you have to have somebody else who could do it for you. You have to see your skill. Right. Well, you have to either see your skill or determine what skills are needed. Okay. And if you don't have it, get somebody else who has it to help you. And so when, when somebody tells me I want to make more money, I say them. Let's say we have a pen. I don't have a pen here, but if we had a pen. Yes. And we wanted to make money, we could go and find somebody who wants to buy this pen right now. And how much is somebody willing to pay for the pen? Well, if the pen is worth a dollar, maybe you can get a dollar for it. But what about finding somebody who needs it? Because they have to sign a contract that's due in 10 minutes, that person might pay a hundred dollars for that pen. Yeah. So our job is to take, you know, our skills, our knowledge, our products, our services, our abilities, and to be able to present it to people who need it and want it in exchange for money. I think feeling and knowing that you've used your life in a way that makes yourself proud, that you're proud of you, you felt like, what a journey. And I left it all out on the field. I just left it all in the field. That's my own greatness Knowing that I used my life in a way that I left it all out on the field. The bruises, the bangs, the trials, the tribulations, the highs, the lows that you used it. As soon as you blame, shame, or justify, you are disempowering yourself. Instead of being responsible for your emotions, your feelings, your attitude, and your actions, when you take responsibility, then you are not at the mercy of the outside world. And what happens in the outside world, you learn how to upgrade your emotional ability. So whether you are happy or sad or disgusted or frustrated or angry or fearful, you know how to navigate the emotions. That causes either the motivational center in your brain to light up or the fear center in your brain to light up, thereby causing you to stop and procrastinate and not take action. In many cases with adults, we have to unlearn what we learned in the past, what we learned in the past. And one of my friends wrote a really good book. What got you here won't get you there. So if. Yeah, if you want to achieve another result that you've never achieved before. Who is he? Marshall Goldsmith. Yeah, I see. Yeah. And wonderful, wonderful man. And so if we want to achieve another result that we've never achieved before, then we have to become somebody different. We have to upgrade our skills, we have to upgrade our behaviors. We have to master our emotions better, because we're going to meet resistance. Yes. And we don't like change. The human brain and body doesn't like change. I've said for 30 years now, the only human being that likes change is a baby with a wet diaper. That's the only human being that likes change. Everybody else likes. I like everything just the way it is. And as we get older, it becomes harder and harder to change because the patterns in the brain are so strong. If you think about an oak tree and if you looked underneath the ground to the root system, it's connected to all the other oak trees, maybe for miles around, all interconnected. It's hard to change. It's hard to change it because you can pull the oak tree, but you still have all the roots that are connected. And if you had a little baby tree that's maybe been there for one year, it's much easier to go in and pull the tree out and take the root system out. And so as we get older, we become more and more conditioned to be more and more the same. So it's not that change isn't possible. It's. Most people aren't willing to commit to switching from what's comfortable to what's not long enough for the new to be comfortable while you're in the, you know, in the what am I thinking? Feeling. It's a chance to be aware. And the biggest gift we have as human beings is our awareness. Because awareness is what gives you choice and choice is what gives you freedom. Most people are living their lives in a reactive state, automatic reactive state because of these set points that we started talking about. So we're in this repetitive cycle over and over and over and over. We react to the same things, we behave the same way, we eat the same foods, we dress the same way just to maintain that homeostasis and comfort zones. And we've never been taught, like, when were we taught as kids, like, here are your six core emotions. Here's the way you deactivate your stress center or fear. So here's how you activate your imagination center. Here's how you have more focus. Here's how you develop a new belief. Here's how you develop a new habit. Here's how you release one. We haven't been taught that. We've been told they're important things, but we haven't been given the tools. And then we haven't practiced the tool, the tools enough to be able to make them part of our unconscious competence brain. Well, the key factors to becoming a loser. Let's imagine that together we build the training to help people become a loser. Yeah. Repeatedly thinking, feeling, and doing the wrong things every day. Okay, Great things. Okay. Do you have another one hanging around with the wrong people? Your environment, is it working? Your environment shapes who you are very, very much. When I was getting into trouble as a young man, the people that I was hanging around with were also getting into trouble. When I was a little boy, I remember my father, he used to tell me, show me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are. Yeah. And so you're going to be the sum of the people that you invest the most amount of time with, whether it's at home, your friends, your family, or your business people. So if you tend to be around winners, you'll start to, by sheer environmental factors, listen and learn how they think, think. You'll be able to observe what they do. You'll learn the skills that they've acquired. And if you hang around with losers, you'll see patterns. Everything in life is about a pattern. And so people who are unsuccessful and losers, which I don't even like to use the term loser, although there are some, not a lot they have got habitual patterns of destruction, self sabotaging thoughts and self sabotaging behaviors. And people who are successful, and I don't mean just financially, people who are successful in their health, their relationships, charitable contributions, they have consistent successful patterns that are constructive towards being successful. After I, you know, got into real estate, then I traveled the world. I ended up buying the franchising rights for ReMax for the state of Indiana. And I was 26 years old and I bought the franchising rights for Indiana, moved to Indiana. And I remember being interviewed for the Indianapolis Business Journal and the guy said, what are your goals here in Indiana? 26 years old. I was wearing, you know, I remember a brown pinstripe suit. I had glasses on even though I didn't need glasses. I just wanted to look older. And I said, we'll do a billion dollars in sales in Indiana. And the gentleman said to me, says, are you certain of that? I said, well, that's my goal. He says, well, the two largest companies have been here for 100 years. Don't do $100 million, $100 or billion dollars combined. And my cocky young self, I said, we'll be first. Three weeks later in the Indianapolis Business Journal. And I have it at home, it says, sets $1 billion goal. Wow. May 1992, we hit a billion dollars in sales five years later. Wow. For the last 35 years, you know what I've been doing is I've had coaches for skill training, I've had coaches and mentors for mindset training, I've had coaches on brain training. I've had coaches for business skills and training. I've had coach coaches and mentors and experts for every different area of my life, whether it's health, nutrition, business, money investing, getting out of debt, making more money, protecting your assets. There are experts for every single area of our lives that already know what you need to do.

Back in 1987, when I bought the franchising rights for ReMax of Indiana, I had no idea how to build a company. I was 26 years old, but I had another mentor who I invested $75,000 to become his partner to have the opportunity to learn from this man who at the time was worth probably $100 million. And so I was very, very keen on learning. And I didn't know how to build a business. I didn't know anything other than how to sell real estate. And I set a goal to generate $1 billion a year in sales. And I set the goal for five. Not knowing a billion dollar goal is like mind boggling big for me. And there was an interview the second week I was in Indianapolis. I moved from Toronto to Indianapolis for this opportunity. And I was interviewed by the Indianapolis Business Journal. And I said in the interview that I had a goal for a billion dollars. And the reporter said, are you aware that there's two companies that have been in the state of Indiana for 80 years? 1, 100 years, the other one, and they haven't hit a billion dollars in real estate sales in. And I said, yeah, I know it's Graves and Tucker and you can let them know that I'll be the first.

Right?

And as I said that, I almost felt like I put my foot right in my mouth because I didn't know how I was going to do it.

Right.

Long story short, five years later, we sold enough franchise, recruited enough agents, we did $1.2 billion and we were stuck, which is a great place to be stuck. And I was asking myself, how is it possible that I'm training these agents with strategies, with tactics, with selling skills, marketing skills. We were the gurus of here's the books, here's the cassettes, here's the trainers, here's like out of the deep end. And the agents who, for example, would make $30,000 a year kept making 30,000 a year. The agents who made 50 kept making 50. The agents who made 100 kept making 100. And so I realized that they weren't missing the skills or the knowledge. There was something else at play. And what helped me from the age of 19 to 27, 28, 30, was every single day. And I still it today. And I'll share this with you in just a little bit. Every single day, I was priming my brain with the beliefs and the self image required to achieve the goals that I want.

So when we talk about reprogramming, I think the important thing to understand is 99.9% of what we think, what we feel and what we do. Although most people think I'm in control, I'm the one doing it. It's really non conscious patterns that are repeating themselves over and over again. So let me explain. When you and I were born, the only neural networks that we had were for survival, right? We didn't have any beliefs of are we good enough, are we smart enough, are we worthy. We didn't have any experiences to show us that that's a scary situation, that one's not, snakes are safe, or snakes are dangerous, or spiders or heights or whatever the case is. So over the course of the first seven to 10 years of our life, our brain's plasticity switch, our brain's switch that connects all of these neurons and creates the neural map in our brain is being created in the form of millions of connections per second. By the time we're 10 or 12 years old, that switch basically goes off. And now there's more selective, okay, creation of neural patterns based on what we like, what we dislike, what we experience, what our parents tell us, what our teachers tell us. Up until that time, we're just an empty open nest where everything's being formulated. And so what happens is after, you know, 10, 12 years old, we're pretty much running on autopilot. And we become conditioned or trained to see the world a certain way, to feel certain things, to behave in certain ways. And so most of our life, we're working on autopilot because the non conscious processing parts of our brain is working at 400 billion bits of information per second and trillions of electrical and chemical reactions per second happening without our thinking about it and so forth. Adults, you know, 25, 35, 45, 50, we have these patterns that we have to revamp, almost like a remodeling of our own brains. If you think about, you know, when you're driving in a town that you know, whether you're at home or in your city that you know, and all of a sudden you see a detour. If you take a detour, and then you start driving down that new detour for a day, seven days, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, that detour becomes the new easy road to take. Even though you're used to going a certain way, the brain works the exact same way. So if you've got these patterns that are easy for you, your brain wants to take those patterns that are easy for, easy thinking patterns, easy emotional patterns, easy behavioral patterns. Why? Number one, because it's less energy that the brain needs to use. So law of best use of energy in the brain is where it goes first. So the way you retrain your brain using, for example, the 4R process, is you recognize my patterns of thought, my patterns of emotion, my patterns of behaviors, and you ask yourself, are these gonna help me achieve the goal that I want to achieve? Whatever the goal is, it's just yes or no. If they are great. If they're not, then what you want to be doing is saying, okay, how do I change that path? How do I change my thinking? I'm learning that I could be still. I'm learning that I could be aware of my thoughts, but then let them go. And I Come back to focus on a sound wave in this particular meditation. And then what happens is over a period of practice, you realize that you're basically, your body disappears. You're no longer in this physical thing. You're no longer having these waves of thought after thought after thought after thought after thought after idea, positive, negative, and everything in between. And in that space of recognizing that I'm not my physical body, I have a physical body, I'm not my thoughts, I have thoughts, I'm not my emotions, I have them. When you see, start to train yourself to use your brain better, more efficiently, more productively, you realize that a, I am one with this, you know, incredible universe. So what's the big deal about that? Well, the big deal is that if I am one with this universe, with this energy, with everyone and everything, and that's where everything percolates from, is it possible that all my answers are right here, right now anyway? And the answer is yeah. And so meditation is about practicing. And we know that we have different brain waves. So right now, as people are watching or listening, you know, they're in this beta brainwave frequency where their brain is oscillating at a certain frequency. And there's 50 different brain waves going on at any given time. But what happens is when I move into. From beta to alpha to theta, delta or gamma, I'm actually accessing and activating different parts of my brain, which now gives me this deeper, greater sense of awareness of a much bigger, you know, onion that I'm used to seeing. So I'm living on a layer of an onion. And what if I could see like, 10 layers up and 10 layers down? All of a sudden it's like, wow, look.

Look at who I am, what I.

Am, who you are, what you are. And in that realization, in that awareness, I can now start to have different choices made. And so meditation is a practice of awareness. It's a practice of going internal instead of external, which is where most people live their lives every day. If you're going to be uncomfortable, your reward has to be big. Yeah, I think so. So if you're going to be making a change, ask yourself, why is what I want to achieve so important to me? Why am I willing to use my new willpower, persistence? And why am I willing to go through the discomfort of change? Why am I willing to listen to the negative talk that I have or the emotion that I have and. And still do it anyway? And if you don't have a big enough reason the first time you have a chance for an excuse, you'll take it. And that's why people, they start on diets and after a day or a week or two weeks, they're off the diet. Or they say, you know what, I'm not happy my relationship. And you know, two weeks later they're back with the same person. Or they find another person just like the one that they left. Or people are afraid to leave their, their jobs because they don't like the discomfort of change. Well, the only certain thing in the universe, the only constant is change. Yeah, every time change everything. That's the only constant in the universe. It's an oxymoron. It's like, how can change be the only constant, the only stable thing? Because everything's changing. So why not acquire the skill to change every time? To be comfortable in change and in today's era, to be comfortable within comfort. Yes, yes, yes. And so I know that the meaning that I give. Remember I said you have to reframe things? Yes. The meaning I give things now is when I am uncomfortable, I'm changing and I'm growing and I go, yeah, yeah, it's graphic, it's uncomfortable, but this is what I want. And then so we go through these waves of comfort and change. Comfort and change. And that's just like the waves of life. Every morning when you wake up, you have, let's say, let's say it's 10 attention units. If you're using two or three or four or five or six of them. On why you can attention unit. What do you mean? An attention unit is your ability to stay focused. And your ability to stay focused is happening at the concept, conscious and non conscious level. So if you're processing stuff in the back of your mind of something you're angry at, something you're mad at, something that's stressing you out, or you don't have enough money, or you don't have the right relationships or the contacts, whatever. If you're stressing out about that stuff and that's eating up your attention units, that's like having your computer, okay, using up most of its energy in what's behind that you're not using. And we all have, have a certain amount of attention units every day. And so one of the things that you asked me before that I can come back to on the rituals is using the attention units in a way that is highly, highly productive versus wasting a lot of time. And so my ritual we started earlier, I just remembered that is wake up meditation, exercise, the plant based protein smoothie, followed by reviewing My goals every day. You review your goals every day? 5 minutes. The goals for the day, the month, every year, everything. I review my overarching goals. I could do that fairly quickly because that's my longer range goals. I can review the emotions that I want because I'm committed to having those emotions every day and feeling a certain way every day. And then I take a look at from five years out. Three. Three years, one year, 90 days, 60 days to today. Wow. And so I just review it and what piece of paper, laminated and on my computer. Really? Yeah. And I have it in a, in a, in a booklet also. So when I travel, it's really easy. Do you have it with you? No, no. It's, it's, it's a, it's a pretty big gotcha. Gotcha. It's like a little manual. You have to send me a photo so I can see it. Yeah, I'll send you. It's called My Exceptional Life Blueprint. I like it. And, and so the, the question many people may ask is why? Why would you do that? Well, because you're having 35 to 50,000 thoughts a day, right? And your brain isn't certain, like what's really important, what's not. But if you instruct your brain that something is really important, whether it's something you don't want or something you do, it will actually pay attention to you. So by priming my brain early every day, here is what I want you to focus on. Here are the emotions I want you to express through me. Here's the behaviors that I need to take. Then I am on a daily basis setting the course for what I want my brain to focus on. I am cognitively priming the pump. And if I do it one day, that's great. If I do it 60 days, 100 days, my brain goes, hey, I'm just going to make this freaking automatic because I want to conserve energy, right? I'm just going to make it automatic. So not only will you focus on it consciously, I'm just going to make everything happen behind the scenes to help you see, think and feel things that are congruent with what you're trading your life for and what you want to achieve. So I'm just using the system better on my epitaphs. He lived, he loved, he gave, he had fun. I always thought that if there's a way that I could somehow use my life in a way that I can make somebody else's life a little bit easier to live, either through knowledge or understanding or love or A process, then my life has been worthwhile. And so I just want to make a difference. And I'm one of the people that doesn't believe that there's anything wrong in the world. Everything's unfolding exactly as it should. There are many things not to my taste that I don't understand. But I just want to make the journey as good as I can for as many people as I can. When we talk about how do we create rituals or how do we change habits that last, the first thing is to have a different expectation than I'm going to change in a day or a week or in 21 days. Whenever I try to change anything, my number one rule is 100 days or I don't even start. So if I want to, let's say, stop caffeine, it's a 100 day commitment. So first I make longer term commitments. Then I design a plan to retrain my brain around the expectation of following through. I make pre commitments in advance. So if I say, let's say I'm going to stop drinking coffee, I say, okay, I'm going to stop drinking coffee. I commit to it for 100 days and then I write out, well, what will you do in the morning when you wake up and you want a coffee? What will you do when you're at a restaurant with friends and everybody's having a coffee? What will you do? So you counter any of the behavior when you know the trigger is going to happen. Every habit has three parts to it. There's something that triggers the emotion, there's the behavior, and then there's the neurological and biological reward. So when you understand the the habit part of any ritual, you understand that because we are conditioned a certain way, we're going to have a trigger whether it's a flower, whether it's waking up, whether it's a girl or a guy or children coming home. It triggers a response in the brain or reaction in the brain. Well, if we change the behavior over the course of 100 days, we'll still get the reward. Reward. And if we pre commit to what we're going to do, when we say, maybe today I'll have the coffee and tomorrow I won't, maybe today I'll have the pizza or the dessert and I'll catch up tomorrow. Well, if you pre commit in advance that you're not going to take that action, then that's step one. Step two is when you have the trigger. If you interrupt the behavior for one or two or three or four minutes, you interrupt the neural pattern in the brain also. So you come up with strategies. When I feel like having a coffee or dessert or the pizza or the croissant. Okay, then here's what I'm going to do instead for five minutes. And that way I can interrupt the pattern. If you do that long enough, you'll start to develop a new neural pattern. You'll start to develop a new behavior. And if you do it for at least, you know, 66 days, but preferably 100 days, you'll start to develop a new way of thinking and being and doing that will overshadow the other pattern in the brain. Very interesting. Yeah. So there's a psychology behind it, but there's also the neurological processes of the brain. And what happens is our brain doesn't like change. Yeah. So anytime that there is change, the brain, see, it feels uncomfortable. As soon as it feels uncomfortable, it'll send signals to the motor cortex of the brain. It'll send messages. And we'll start to rationalize. We'll start to tell ourselves, well, I shouldn't do it because of this. Well, maybe today, today's not a good day. Well, I'll start today, but I won't continue till next week. Or, you know what? I really don't want this. And we start to talk to ourselves. And when we understand what the brain does whenever we try to change, then we can start being in control of the brain and we can override the automatic responses. There's something called automaticity. Automaticity states that anything that I repeat over and over and over again over a period of time will go from conscious effort, deliberate conscious effort, willpower or persistence, and it'll become automatic. So we just have to know how long that is. And some things take a week, some things take 60 days. Some habits that people have for 20, 30, 40, 50 years take 200 days. And so you start off with a hundred day window. And you ask yourself, am I willing to give a little bit of effort for 100 days to remove this destructive either thought pattern or destructive behavioral pattern in order for me to have something greater and better than what I have right now? Now. So it's very important you, you focus a lot on what you will have or what you. Who you will have, who you will be in the future to keep your motivation. Yeah. If you think about this, one of the best examples that I ever came up with is imagine if I give you a Hollywood script right now, okay? And I say to you, if you learn this script for the next six months, I will give you $10 million. To be on stage, to deliver that. We're going to film you. And if you're amazing, you're going to have a chance to win an Academy Award. What will you do with the script starting today? I start to learn. You start to learn. You start to read it, you start to emotionalize it, you start to practice it. You start to do everything possible to become something that's in writing, something that came out of somebody's head that they wrote a script for that you don't have any idea what it is. But if you made a commitment to becoming that person and you rehearsed it and practiced it every day, you wouldn't get it right the first day or the first week or the first month or the first month. But if you knew there was a big payday emotionally, spiritually, financially, and that people would go to the theaters and love to watch it and they'd laugh or cry or be sad and be happy because you were able to take them on a beautiful, emotional roller coaster ride, then you would become that role. Yeah. Most people are interested, they're not committed. And the difference is when you're interested, you do what's convenient and what's easy. When you're committed, you do whatever it takes. Can you repeat it? Sure. When you're interested, you do what's easy and what's convenient for you. Yeah, but when you're committed, I'm going to get that result. You put everything into it until you get the result. This is going back. Sometimes I think in 1992, we were stuck. But I knew there was more possibility, there was room for growth. And I wanted to figure out if the stuff that I did in the 80s when I was a kid that broke free, would it work with some of my agents? And so we took 75 agents randomly. Agents said, hey, do you want to get into a six month program to like retrain your brain, your subconscious brain around your beliefs about what is possible for you to achieve, around your habits of what you have to do in order to achieve that. And we focused on retraining their subconscious mind. And so for six months, they had to go through a process of listening to certain audio tapes, reading certain materials every day, and find, following the process of training their brain, specifically their subconscious brain, which controls 95 to 90% of all of our thoughts, emotions and behaviors today. And within six months, that group increased sales by $100 million. Jesus. $100 million. And I said, holy right, this is working. And so we started to teach some of what we teach now in neurogym actually, now we have the technologies, we have the. The systems that are far better than what we did back in the 90s. And we went from 1.2 billion to 4.5 billion a year. And it wasn't because we taught them any more skills to be real estate agents. We taught them how to change the way they thought about themselves. We taught them how to change their habits. Our agents who made $750,000 or more were in front of a client 75% of the time. And we asked all the agents that weren't in front of more clients, like, why are you doing that? Why aren't you in front of people that are going to help you earn more income? Oh, well, we're busy doing this and doing this and doing this. And they had stories and excuses and reasons why. Here's something you could do quickly. It's called a reframe. So let's say you're driving in traffic, and let's say somebody cuts you off and you've been sitting at the same spot for 20 minutes, like I said did this morning. And somebody, you know, you're. You're maybe looking down at your cell phone because you have some time because you're parked on the highway, right. And somebody cuts you off. So you could automatically react, go, Son of a. I can't believe he just did that. And just use all of this energy, the cortisol, epinephrine, adrenaline that's flowing through your body and causing stress in your body. Or you can say, well, what if that person just found out their dog died and they're really trying to get home quickly? Okay, I guess it's okay if she or he cut in front of me, right? Or they just got a call from their mother. Their mother fell. Yeah. Would you change the way you felt about it? And the answer is, yeah, probably. And the reason? Because you changed the frame. So you can learn how to create frames for yourself of how you see the world, how you see failure, how you see effort, how you see your habits, how you create frames in advance that actually serve you through awareness and response versus reactivity. And that is what a lot of people who. For example, I'm going to go back to professional athlete. What do you learn how to do? Respond in a variety of different ways in advance or through practice, so that when it's game time, you're just unconsciously doing what you do. There was actually a very, very big mistake in the movie the Secret. Okay. And in the movie the Secret, the story that was told Was that all you have to do is think, believe in your heart and you'll achieve. It's not true. There's a lot of people who think wonderful, great thoughts. They believe that I deserve this, I and I can have this. But they don't do one thing and this is what causes their problem. You know what that one thing is? I want to know. They don't take consistent action every day. So in the secret they didn't talk about you have to do the right things in the right order at the right time. And they let a lot of people to believe that all you have to do. Think about it. Just think about it. Well, I've never met a monk in a monastery who's been praying to make money. And through the ceiling a safe falls with a million dollars. I've never met that yet. But I have met a lot of people who think and believe. And then they learn what they need to learn. They upgrade their knowledge and their skill skills. They overcome their fears, they overcome their doubts, they overcome their lack of confidence, they overcome their lack of certainty and they take action anyway. And then little by little, things start to happen for them. They achieve the results. And we call that the Law of Goya. G O Y A Get off your ass. Law of attraction. It's my favorite log. Attention. Law of Attraction and Law of Goya together. That's what works when it comes to the, you know, the problems that come up every day. I mean it's like weather, it's sunny for a little bit, it's raining, it's hailing, it's windy, it's not. That's life. And that goes back to where we started a little bit earlier about the frames is if you expect things to always be great, you're delusional. You expect things to always be bad. That may be a little might happen. And so it's a matter of learning the frames and how do you frame stuff. So even when I was going through this challenging, challenging times on a lot of fronts, the frame was still good. We are all creatures of habit because habits run themselves. Their subconscious programs just run themselves. Most people don't take the time to become aware what are my empowering habits? What am I disempowering? Habits, habits. And then the next question is, well, how do I release this one and how do I strengthen this one or create a whole new one? And what we're looking to do is build empowering habits that then run their course. We started to retrain our agents brains after we did a, we did an event, 75 agents paid, I think it was two or $3,000 to go through a six month brain retraining program. Those, those 75 agents increased our sales by $100 million. Wow. And we said, okay, we're going to teach this to the entire company. So we went from a billion 2 to 4.5 billion in sales a year in three years by working on this versus what they needed to do. What you'll see is just patterns, patterns and more patterns. The entire universe is made up of patterns that could be explained mathematically for the most part, but we can also just see behaviors. And so it's not difficult, but it takes effort to be able to override some of the natural brain's propensity, the brain's desire to keep us away from hurting ourselves, to re educate our brain. Yeah. And if you, if you think about when we were young, what do our parents do? Oh, be careful. Oh, don't fall down. Oh, watch out how you ride the bicycle. And if you fall down. Well, my kids, when they were young, I let them fall and I let them do things so that they would get accustomed. Get up. I wouldn't go and baby them, they'd fall down. It was like, great, you fell down. Get back up. So they learn that it's okay. Yeah. Most kids, when they fall down, they'll look at an adult to see, well, is it okay or not? Is it okay or not? And usually the adults are either gonna baby them and overcompensate or they're gonna look at them and say, come on, get up and do what you need to do. Think about what is a belief. And let's go to again. I just like to go to the neuroscience field because it's just my passion now is a belief is not more than a group of cells that have been connected and then reinforced. And we have two types of beliefs. We have beliefs that. What I really fast, I'm going to stop you there because that's so important and so different than I would have expected. I think when people hear belief, it is believe in something that is true. Which did not enter into your definition. No, we believe whatever we believe is truth for us, but it's not the truth. That's really interesting. Right. But we have been conditioned, if we go back a little bit to what we talked about earlier about, you know, when you were a baby, when you were born, what belief did you have? Zero goose egg. Zero, not one. And so you learned what to believe and how to even formulate your beliefs. Chances are from Parents, teachers, brothers, sisters, television, maybe when you read some books, right? And we behave based on what we believe. So we might be behaving our lives away based on false or inaccurate or disempowering beliefs. So if a belief is a neural pattern in the brain, then we probably have some good ones, empowering ones, useful ones. And chances are we have some that are not useful, not empowering, and not worthy of the geniuses that we all are. So the question is, is it possible for me to develop new beliefs that I don't believe right now? The answer is yeah. When somebody tells me they've done everything, usually they've done everything that they're aware of doing. But there has to be something. If we go back to some brain research and some brain neuroscience findings, there's a part of the brain that chooses the goal that we want to achieve, and that's in the conscious part of the brain. And that's responsible for about 2 to 4% of what you see and what you do. Yeah. That's called the explicit memory system, or the declarative part of the brain. I can declare. So I give you an example. I could read a book. Yeah. And 10 minutes later, I could tell you what I've read in the book. I can declare everything that's in the book. I can tell you, you know what? This is a great book. I'm so excited, I'm so motivated, and I'm gonna make a million dollars. But if. If at the implicit level, at the beneath the conscious mind, at the implicit level, in secret, they say, I don't know if I'm good enough. I don't know if I'm smart enough. I don't know if I deserve to make a million dollars. I don't have the right knowledge. I didn't go to college. I'm male, I'm female. I'm too young, I'm too old. If there's a disconnect between the implicit, the part of our brains that the real you and me, this hidden part of our self image, if there is a contradiction between my goal and even what I've learned and what I secretly believe to be true by myself, if there isn't the coherence between the two, the hidden self image will always win. So one of the most important things is to create what I call is neural coherence or coherence in the brain. And the best way to think about coherence in the brain is imagine if, you know, you go to listen to a band, rock and roll band, jazz band, A classical band, whatever. And every player, okay. Or every musician is playing the music, but not in harmony. Yeah. New style. You're never gonna have a beautiful symphony. So the way our brain works is if we don't have the symphony at the different parts of the brain, we'll do some good things and some good actions and then we'll do some things that will take away from that. And so what we want to have is coherence. Get the brain, the implicit and the explicit part of the brain, coherence playing together in harmony, then moves the body into action consistently. Now we have flow. Now we have a way for us to take our ideas and take action consistently to achieve results. An hour a day to upgrade your mindset and your skill set. One hour a day is all you need to set aside to upgrade your beliefs, your habits, your attitude, your perceptions, your emotional management, and upgrade the skills that you need in order to play at the next level of success. So if you calculate one hour a day is 365 hours in a year, that equals nine 40 hour weeks. Nine 40 hour weeks. After one year, you're really good. After two years, you're really, really good. After three, four, five, six years of doing this every day, just upgrading your knowledge and skills with expert information and knowledge and strategies and tactics, you are in a whole different place in your life. So invest one hour a day to upgrade your mindset at your skill set. So your action set, what you need to do, becomes automatic instead of something you have to consciously try to do every day. Because mindset plus skill set plus action set equals your results. I've just come through a really challenging time. I was in business with one of my very best friends of 30 years and we started a company together in 2006 or so, and he ended up with severe diabetes and had a stroke and had a heart attack and everything just went hell in a handbasket. Lost lots of money, lots of employees. We had about 70 plus employees. We let them go, closed the company down. I had friends of mine who put $2 million into the, the deal. I put a couple million dollars into the deal and it was, you know, all my intellectual property that developed over six years was basically held up in a legal lawsuit that I had with one of my shareholders and investors. And it was a very challenging time. It was his, you know, reputation, IP start from scratch, assets, relationships. Yeah, a lot. So it was challenging. Very, very challenging, challenging time. And fortunately, because of my meditative practices, staying aware of what is not buying too much into that. I just Started building a new company over the last four years. And I've got 30amazing team members now at our company at Neurogym. My relationship with my wife is great. My kids are awesome. My health has never been better. I became vegan about five years ago. Stopped drinking alcohol seven years ago. Ago. Give up sugar about three weeks ago. Let me know how long you keep it up. I made a decision. Now it's a year. So the one year. One year. One year. No sweets. Yeah, yeah. No refined sugar. If it happens to be. If there happens to be honey on, you know, on something, then a little bit's fine. But no refined sugar, no cookies, no cakes, no chocolate bars, no soft drinks, nothing. Well, right now I don't have any cravings whatsoever. Zero. Wait till the holidays. You know what? I would just came back from Montreal and I was there for the holidays, and the dessert table was about as big as this, and I just said no. And a week before, actually, four days before that, I was in Las Vegas at Encore at the buffet. And I actually took a video of everything that was there. And I said, now what I did beforehand is I pre committed before I went to Las Vegas. I said, now when I go to the buffet, here's what I will do. When I go to this restaurant, here's what I would pre committed it in advance, played it over in my mind 10, 15, 20 times, put myself in the situation in my mind. And then when I was there, it was easy breezy because I had done it 10, 20, 30 times. So I did that. And so when I went to Montreal, usually I go to Montreal and all hell goes loose. My mother, you know, is always. Not anymore. My sister's taken over. So the, you know, the food that's there and. And the desserts that are their breakfast. I love poutine. Oh, yeah, yeah, Dessert. But the desserts for me is. Was the hardest part, but it was like, easy breezy. I own my feelings and my emotions and my results. I own my feelings, my emotions and my results. I learned how to be responsible, to be able to respond to emotions that are unpleasant to feel, feelings that are, you know, yucky. I learned that whatever was happening in my world, I had the ability to upgrade my skill so that I can use everything that happens in a way that serves me as opposed to a way that hurts me or moves me back.

So Mark Waldman in his little training over here, says, seven days of gratitude exercise. The more you focus on your thoughts, the more your brain becomes habituated to it. The brain tends to pay more attention to negative thoughts. This is based on the instinctual parts of the brain. We can train ourselves to focus on the positives as well. At the end of the day, he Sundays, write down three things you feel grateful for and three things you did. Well, this can change your brain. You only have to for seven days, and you will see your self esteem grow for three months. So when we are giving you, you know, gratitude things to do, anything we're teaching you to do, it's all based in neuroscience research. And so the more you're grateful, the more you have to be grateful for. The more you train your brain to be grateful, the more it looks and becomes habituated to look for other things to be grateful for.

That's why I want to show you. There's Einstein, which represents our left prefrontal cortex, the smart genius part of our brain that has imagination, that can come up with all the ideas of, what about this? What about this? I can have this. I can have this. But what most people don't understand is we also have a Frankenstein part of our brain. The inner critic that says, but you're not good enough. You're not smart enough. What if you fail? What if you're embarrassed? What if you're ashamed of. So we have this. You know, that's why I have them. There's Einstein and there's Frankenstein. Just to remind me and to remind my students that both exist within us. And our goal is to understand that, you know, the way our brain works is there's always a protective side of our brain. So Frankenstein's always going, what if you fail? What if you succeed and fail? What if you disappoint yourself? And Einstein's going, don't worry about it. Imagine the future. And so there's this constant battle in our brains going on, and our goal and meditation is one of the best ways to recognize that both exist and both are right. Your Frankenstein part of your brain is there to protect you. Your Einstein brain is ready to help you achieve your goals and dreams. And the key is to remember you're not your brain. You're not the Einstein part, you're not the Frankenstein part. There's another side of you that is much greater than all of it. I thought I was afraid of public speaking, right? I thought that was.

Oh, I would just say I'm a bad public speaker.

That was my story. Well, you're absolutely right when you said that's what it was.

I was afraid of judgment.

I was afraid of rejection. And that was what was holding me Back. And these are subconscious patterns, right? So the feeling, okay, is this uncomfortable? Which is very uncomfortable. It's stressful, it creates anxiety. And so it's not the public speaking. So the question is, where did you learn to have this idea that speaking in public causes you to be embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, or judged? And here's what a lot of people will say if you ask them, like, where did that come from? They'll say, well, you know, when I was a kid in class, and, you know, the teacher asked a question and I answered and the answer was wrong, you know, the other kids made fun of me, or the teacher said, no, that's not the right answer. And, you know, they were embarrassed and the other kids ridiculed them. So, like, who the wants that? So if our brain is focusing on wiring whatever keeps us safe and whatever keeps pain away, we avoid pain. Or we'll do anything to avoid pain way before we do anything to gain pleasure. And so survival first, avoidance of pain second, before we gain pleasure. So if there's any real or imagined danger where we're going to be emotionally hurt, mentally hurt, physically hurt, financially hurt, our brain gives us this signal, be aware, this may be one of those times. He says, be aware, this may be one of those times. And so the cycle, the neural circuit, the cycle shouldn't stop there. But when people haven't been trained on, here are my six core emotions, here are my feelings that those emotions cause, and here's what to do when this emotion is triggered. Do this. When this emotion is triggered, do that. And what you want to do is learn when the emotion of fear is triggered. The neurochemistry is adrenaline, cortisol, epinephrine, norepinephrine. That's like this high anxiety rocket fuel within us. Now in most people, it caused them to just stop, put on the brake. But how is it that a firefighter, okay, could see a building blowing up in front of them, a building crashing down, a raging fire, and yet she musters up the courage to use that fuel from fear and go in. It's because she's been trained. Yep, it's because she's been trained. There's a misconception that business is easy. And I have a lot of clients of mine, for example, that are. There are doctors and lawyers and professionals that have an expertise in a certain area, but nobody's ever taught them about finance, about legal, if they're not a lawyer. About marketing, about sales, about technology, about operations, about management. And being an entrepreneur is like solving a rubik's Cube. Yes, I see that. Right. So you can have the two by two with two colors. You know, it's easy. If you want a little bit bigger business, that's three by three, there's more combinations and more things that need to be considered. 4 by 4 now has billions of different moves. Just 4 by 4 is billions of different possibilities. Wow. When you get to the 8 by 8 or 6, 16 by 16 Rubik's Cube, there's Quintillions of possible moves that you can make. So building a business is all about recognizing patterns and knowing which move to make at the right time. And there's four options that you have. One is do it yourself and try and figure it out. Two is get help. Three, get it done for you. Or four, don't do it. Did you know that some of the most recent studies on setting goals and writing them out or typing them out on your computer will actually increase your chances of achieving those goals by up to 42%? Why? Well, as soon as you put the energy to writing out your goals and getting clarity, you're giving your brain the instruction that this is what's important to you, this is what you want to achieve. So don't be like all the other people where they have goals and dreams and they hope and pray for it to work. Be the type of person who sets her goals or his goals in writing and then focus on that every day and you'll achieve more of your goals. If you don't understand that every brain has an error detection mechanism within it, what is that? Anytime you veer out of your comfort zone, the fat point setting or the financial setting, anytime you veer out of it, the first line of defense is self talk. That's negative. That's the first thing that pops up because your brain is going, that's not true. So it's detecting an error between what you said as an affirmation or even what you just visualized, or even what you just did against the predominant nature neural patterns that exist. So it's an 800 pound gorilla initially fighting the flea, right? Dan Heath's book. And so what we want to do is we want to get the conscious goal, the vision aligned with a non conscious pattern. And as soon as you align that, you have neural coherence. And when you have neural coherence, that's like hearing your most favorite band playing your favorite song and you're just like, oh, that's the best bliss. Yeah, it's just bliss. If it's not bliss, you're out of coherence. And so the key and why we start off early with meditation is awareness of how do I tune in my vibration, how do I let go of that unempowered self talk, that sentence, that thought that I had, or that disempowering. It's an unpleasant feeling. Beliefs aren't good or bad, they're only pleasant to unpleasant at varying degrees. When we're at a coherence, it's unpleasant unless our life is on the line and safety is there for the most part. You know, a fear of failing. Where's that coming from? We failed our whole lives successfully. Yeah, exactly. But the meaning that we're giving, you know, what people will say, what people will think, you know, how I'll be embarrassed or ashamed. Those are all the things that you need to really get in tune with. Every level of success that you want to achieve in health, wealth, relationships, career, business, etc. Requires a new understanding of a skill and a new behavioral pattern. What got you to where you are is not enough to get you to where you want to go. Why do I say that? Because if it was enough to get you to where you want to go, you would already be there. So what got you here will not get you. There may be some stepping stones, but every level of success requires a new level of skill and behavior. And I'm going to go back to one of the other lessons. Since we develop beliefs and habits and behaviors that go from conscious effort to non conscious habits. In order to achieve the next level success, you have to learn how to create new habits of thought, new emotional management skills and new behaviors to match the level of success that you want to achieve. Because I felt dumb, I read thousands of books and did hundreds of courses. And because I didn't feel like I was smart enough, I. I took the thing that could have, I guess, made my life a mess and turned it into my fuel for success. And because I lived with parents that didn't have a great marriage, I ended up divorcing twice. But because of all of those things, I studied and researched and dove deep into who do I need to be to have a great relationship? What communication skills must I have? Who can I model that had a great relationship? I'm afraid not to do it now. So people ask me like, when do you stop? Never. When they bury me is when I'll stop. I have such a habit of working on me, learning more, becoming more, more loving, more, caring, more, kind, more generous, more, giving more, like where do you stop? And it's not a Matter of acquiring more. I'm not going to eat any differently for the rest of my life than I eat now. You know, I'm not going to eat bigger, you know, meals. I'm not going to do things too much differently than I am now. So now it's a matter of expression and expanding more to do more good in the world. So in order for me to do more good in the world, I have to expand in my own mindset. I've got to get away from the fears that I have of maybe not being good enough or not being smart enough. I still get those feelings. But because of my daily rituals and my daily practices, I get back to my spiritual center, my spiritual core, and a little bit more confident and a little bit more certain every day towards the goals that I want to achieve. And I bridge that gap. And then when I reach those goals, keep doing it again.

You all know that you have a conscious part of your brain that's responsible for certain things, okay? But then you also have a subconscious part of the brain. Subconscious. And so what is this 800 pound gorilla that prevents you from achieving your goals? Like, what is it? Like, what do you think it is about the subconscious that prevents you from achieving your goals when consciously you want to achieve your goals. Right. Consciously you want to achieve your goals. And K Cameyar? Yeah, we have, you know, right hemisphere and left hemisphere of the brain, and in between, okay, we have something called the corpus callosum that connects both hemispheres. And contrary to popular belief, we're not left brain dominant or right brain dominant. We use all of our brain every 24 hours. So you don't use only 5 or 10% of your brain. The possibilities are endless. All right, but when you're talking about the gorilla, the subconscious is what I talk about in the book. I named it the gorilla. So conscious and subconscious.

Yes.

And so tell me what you know about the subconscious mind. Like if it is the 800 pound gorilla, what do we know?

Right.

The gorilla gets what the gorilla wants. And so if you ask yourself a question of do I really know how to get my subconscious mind aligned with my conscious desires and goals? So answer that question for me. Answer me that riddle. Do you know how to get your subconscious mind? By the way, the subconscious is not like here, and the conscious is here. We know that the left prefrontal cortex, for example, is the seat of awareness and it's the seat of decision making. It's a seat of choosing what we want. We know that this part of the brain we call the Left prefrontal cortex, and it's what I call is the Einstein part of the brain. It can figure things out. You consciously can figure things out. The right prefrontal cortex is the pessimist, or what I refer to as the Frankenstein part of the brain that moves into the memory system and brings forth anything that may get you into trouble, anything that may be painful, anything that might hurt you. And so there's these things going on in the brain. If you think of your brain as an orchestra, and some of your brain is responsible to play certain pieces and other parts of your brain are there to protect you. When those pieces oppose each other or are not in alignment, then you have.

Chaos. The fascination that I have is around living in a world right now where we have access to all the how to, how do I make more money, how do I grow my business, how do I have a great relationship, how do I, you know, find the love of my life? How do I put a rocket ship on Mars? And a lot of people are confusing having information and how to with actually doing it. And I've been fascinated just in understanding how do I help people unleash more of their potential that already exists. And a lot of people may have heard, you know, they say that we only use 5 to 10% of our brain. That's not true. We use 100% of our brain's capacity, neural networks every moment of every day. But the potential to use more is there. And so our researchers at Neurogym really are uncovering how to take the best information from the world of neuropsychology, neuroscience, and give it to everyday people so they can say, okay, how do I overcome my fear of not being good enough, my fear of not being smart, of my fear of being embarrassed or ridiculed or ashamed, or fear of failure or fear of success? These are all psychological issues that everybody feels, but very few people understand. When I feel that, what do I do about it so that I can unlock more of my potential, so I can actually take more action. First on the things I already know that I could be and should be doing, but I'm not. Next on the behaviors that I could be taking to achieve my success easier and faster. And that's really my passion, is helping people unlock that amazing potential within them. When I was 19 years old, when I had a mentor, a man who was in his 50s, very, very successful, he agreed to mentor me and to teach me what he knew. And so he sent me me home with some paper. And on the paper it said, what do you want to achieve in your health? What do you want to achieve in your relationships? What do you want to achieve financially? What do you want to achieve? Charity? What do you want to achieve as far as experiences? When do you want to retire by? How much money do you want to make? How? He asked me about 10 pages of questions, and at 19, I had no idea, how much do I want to make? I want to make enough to pay my bills. I want to make enough to just eat well and then have some fun. I want to go drinking with my friends. I want to go party and travel a little bit and pay for my apartment and a nice car and things like that. But he had me think, you know, one year, five years, 25 years, and I was 19. And he made me write down the answers to these questions, even though they were. I had no idea how to achieve them. He made me write it down. It took me a whole weekend, and then I went back and he looked at my papers, and so he looked at. At health and wealth and relationships and career and business, and he goes, good way to do the exercise. I'm very proud of you. He says, now I want you to increase that amount. And so I said that, you know, by the time I was 45, I was 19. I said, by the time I was 45, I was going to be a millionaire. Nobody in my family was a millionaire. Not my aunts, not my uncles, not my cousins, nobody in the area that we lived in. And I wrote that down. And he said, no, that's not enough. He says, you could do better than that. And I'm like. I'm swallowing, I'm scared. I'm afraid. How am I going to become more than that? How can I have all of this? He says, don't worry about the how. Right now, you worry only and not even worry, but you write down what you want. And so I went back home and started to write again and took another, you know, half a day to redo my goals. And he said to me, great. Now, in order for you to achieve those goals, what do you have to believe? Well, I said, well, I have to believe that I can. I have to believe that I deserve it. And even though I didn't believe that I deserved it, he said, what would you think you had to believe? I have to believe that it could be done. I have to believe that I could learn the skills. I would have to believe. So he made me write out what I would have to believe. Great question. And then he said, great. What do you think you would have to do every day. Wow, amazing question. Well, I guess I would have to come to work every day and I'd have to really get good at what I'm doing. And I'd have to learn more that I'm learning right now, because I hated to learn back then. And I'd have to, you know, gain more skills, which I didn't have any. The only thing I was good at was I had an easy time talking to people like, I am with you now. And he said, great, well, let's make a list of all of these things and let's come up with a plan to do this. He said, so every day let's look at some beliefs. And so every day he would have me look at my goals. And I would sit in my chair and I'd have my goals, you know, that he had me, right? And I would take my fingers, which he told me to touch my finger, goals. So that I would send a message to my brain as I was reading it and seeing it, to reinforce the goals that I wrote. Then I would read the beliefs that I needed to have. I have all the intelligence I need to achieve these goals. I can now acquire all the skills to achieve these goals. And I read about 20 or 30 different beliefs every day. And for the first month or two months, while I was reading all of this in my head, this one word kept coming up. You know what the word was? Because as I would read it, my brain would say, bullshit, that's not true. And he told me that my brain, brain would try to talk to me and tell me it's not true. He said, if you keep doing it over and over and over again, your brain's going to get tired of telling you it's not true. And especially if after you do this, you take some actions to upgrade your knowledge, upgrade your skills, you'll develop more confidence and more certainty. So. So he taught me how to use the telephone, to make telephone calls to people to see if they were interested in buying a real estate property or selling their home. I was in real estate at 19, and, you know, for the first month it was hard. Second month it was hard. The third month, it was hard. But as I got better and more comfortable at being on the telephone talking to people that I didn't know, that I thought didn't want to hear from me or talk to me, I found one person, then two people, then three people, then five people who said yes. Because as I became more comfortable, as I became more skilled, as I gained more knowledge, people received Me differently. And in my first year, I made $30,000. I was 19, which was $5,000 more than my father made as a taxi driver. Then he started to upgrade my skills a little bit more and he started to teach me some very specific things to do in real estate. And in my second year at 20, I made $151,000. Wow. Five times more income. Because every day for one hour, one hour a day, I practiced my beliefs, I practiced seeing my vision, I rehearsed it, I got on the phone, I upgraded my knowledge, I upgraded my skills. I love your story. Thank you. And, and so he kept, he kept directing me a little bit at a time to become more tomorrow than I am today. And he said that to me. Something that changed my life. Says if you invest one hour a day on your personal growth and changing who you believe you are, that is the equivalent of nine 40 hour weeks of effort. One hour day for a year is nine 40 hour weeks. If you. And I said, today we're going to learn break dancing, we're going to learn knitting, and we're going to spend nine weeks, 40 hours a week. We would get good at painting, we would get good at knitting, we would get good at darts, we would get good at playing a musical instrument if we were committed to one hour a day. So I've practiced one hour a day for 30 days. Two years. And that one hour a day has changed my life. So krap board. So vision board for seeing what you want. The accomplish board for reminding yourself that you've got a lot that you've accomplished so you feel good and the crap. Do you actually put up images of things you've accomplished? Uh huh, yeah. Yeah. I have them in my closet, in my home, encased on the floor. Like on the floor. So that you don't look at them, so you don't know. So I look at them just because I sit down and put on my shoes, I want to look at them every day. Interesting. Yeah. On my, I have this ritual as well. I do something called brush and prime. So on my bathroom mirror I have my goals that are on my mirror so that as I'm brushing my teeth, I'm priming my brain to see my goals and focus of me every morning and every night. I love that. Right. So that's priming your brain, which is a whole other topic we can have. And then the accomplishment board reminds me, whenever I look at the stuff that I've accomplished, I go, that wasn't easy. I mean there are a lot of Ups, downs, highs, lows, failures. You know, times I thought I'd quit and I didn't. So it's to remind me to go through the times that I don't think I'm going to be able to achieve those things. And then the crap board stands for conflict, Conflict, resistance, accomplishments, and procrastination. So what conflicts are happening right now that I need to resolve? What resistance is in my way? What am I Resistance? What in front of me is resisting right now. And then accomplishment as well is to remind you that you can get through stuff. And then procrastination is what's causing me to procrastinate. So if you create a crap board as well, you have that in front of you, and then you can create a game plan for what am I going to do about it? What am I going to do about the conflicts? If you think about what makes up who we are. So obviously there's genetics, there's our genetic makeup, so our predisposition, our propensities, and that makes up a percentage of how we see the world and how we show up. But then the rest of it, we're trained on. On. So we're trained to see the world a certain way. So there are certain people that have something called a negativity bias. And a negativity bias is nothing more than they see the negative first. It's not that they don't see the positive, but they see the negative first. There's other people who see positive first. They have a positivity bias, then they see that first. And the truth is, in almost every situation, in every circumstance, there's both. You can train somebody to recognize that there's always both. Just like every inside has an outside, every one side of a coin has another side of a coin. Every up has a down. That's called the law of polarity. And in the universe that we live in, there is that law of polarity. And so you can teach somebody, say, okay, if your propensity, if the way you naturally are, is negativity bias, first, great. Be aware of that. Then flip over. We call it flip the switch. So if one side of your brain is going negativity first, great. Learn to flip the switch. Go. Great. What's the positive side of that? That's a skill you can learn no differently than playing tennis or chess or music.

When you sit down to meditate, do you come with an intention?

Then each time, no. Once I sit down, then I ask my intuition, hey, what is it that you want to be doing today? What is it that you need today. So we all have this intuition, which is different than our instinct, but this intuition, right? It's what we know before we think. And so when I sit down, I say, okay, hey, what's the intention for today? And sometimes the intention is to just let go and see what happens. Sometimes the intention is I'm searching for, you know, for an answer. Sometimes the intention is, well, today, focus, you know. Today, let go. Today, just breathe. So I just listen. I just. It's just. It's. It's the. The art and the subtle science of paying attention.

The key is to really understand, first and foremost, that you have a brain. You're not your brain. The whole idea with inner size, right, is to create a pathway for you to be able to say, okay, here's how my brain works, simply as I've put it today, and here's what I could do about it. To move out of a state of chaos and dissonance and into a state of coherence and alignment. So when you were born, were you born with any beliefs?

No.

Were you born with any habits?

No.

Were you born with any fears?

No. No.

So from a neuroscience and neuropsychology perspective, a belief is nothing more than this. Imagine that you're born and your brain is made up of 100 billion marbles. And every time you have an experience or somebody says something to you, you read something or you watch something, these marbles make these connections. And the connections that are reinforced go from conscious connections to subconscious connections. And once these subconscious connections are made and reinforced, they run the show 98% of the time. So a belief is nothing more than a reinforced pattern in the brain. And our conscious brain can choose what we want when we're in that part of our brain. But our subconscious mind can't choose to. It's programmed from the age of 0 to 3 in the imprinting years, 3 to about 7 or 8 the modeling years, and then 8 on it's the experiential years. And so if you have these powerful beliefs that you're good enough, you're smart enough, you're worthy to achieve the goals that you have, if you have these powerful leads, you are able to achieve any amount of income you choose, no matter what the amount is. You just need to learn how. So if you have these empowering beliefs, you have brain coherence between conscious and subconscious.

We're in a society that just goes, goes, goes, goes, goes, goes, goes. Texts, emails, phone calls, Facebook, Twitter, vine, all these things are keeping us on this perpetual hamster wheel of do, do, do, do do that very few people stop and say, what am I doing? What am I not doing? What am I thinking? What am I feeling? So the first part is stop. Second part is to reframe. It's called the 4R process. Recognize is first reframe is the way I'm looking at something. And because we are mono focused, the brain cannot focus consciously on more than one thing at a time. All right? It can get distracted to that, that thing, then this thing, then that thing, then this thing. The art of multitasking is actually one of the worst things that you can do from a neurological perspective. Highly successful people are able to mono focus on the right things. So when you learn to reframe your brain's ability to look at this, then look at this, then look at this, but stay focused on what it is that you're looking at. You see different perspectives of it. The next part is to release the emotional stress that most people's brains are under. How do we get into this emotional stress? Well, when we have fears, there's 50 different types of fears. Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of disappointment, fear of being embarrassed, fear of being ashamed, fear of being ridiculed, fear of fill in the blank. When, when our brain goes on these automatic fear circuit drives, then we're in a state of fight or flight. In a state of fight or flight, over a course of a day, a week, a month, our ability to actually use our thinking center, the left prefrontal cortex of our brain, actually diminishes. Our brain gets hijacked into this fight or flight response system over and over and over and over and over and over again. And that response system is actually pretty healthy initially to get you going and out of the gate. But if you are always in this fight or flight response mechanism, you're on this hamster wheel, you actually start to get burnt out and you can't think, you can't use the genius part of your brain. You can't really activate the part of you that connects to the entire universe of intelligence within you and outside of you. And so you learn to release that tension to be able to put the foot back on the gas, change the gear. If you think about what happens when you're driving a stick shift car, you put your foot on the gas in first gear and the car just goes. But if you keep your foot on the gas in first gear, you're going to burn out the engine. So what happens in the release part of using your brain is you go from first gear, pause, Second gear, pause, third gear, pause. You're able to use the engine more efficiently to go faster. Exact same thing with our brains. If we learn how to release the tension and switch gears. Release the tension, switch gears. That's the art of release. And go. And that causes the fourth R. And that's. We retrain, train our brain to operate at higher levels of our intelligence, genius, and abilities.

What happens if, at the subconscious level, okay, so you have conscious goal, conscious vision, conscious reasons why I want to achieve it. What happens if, at the subconscious level, let's say for weight, you try to lose weight before, and maybe you have, but then you've gained it back. What if you've done that three or four or five or six times? Is that pattern, okay, the memory, the pattern locked in the subconscious mind of all those experiences, is it there? Here's how the brain works. You set a goal using the left prefrontal cortex of your brain, your imagination. And then right after you set the goal and you're excited because you're making some progress, your brain says, hey, last time you did this, you gained all the weight back. Why even try? Last time you did this, and your friends saw that you did this, and then you gained all the weight back. Next time you saw them, you were embarrassed, you were a little ashamed of yourself last time you did this, or the three or four or five or six times before that, you gained all the weight back and you disappointed yourself and your significant other because, you know, they said you looked really great, and then you gained all the weight back, so you disappointed them and yourself, and you were embarrassed or ashamed. And so that pattern is there, right? Do you all agree with me so far? The pattern is there. And so if you have. And think about your imagination and your. Your choice to set a goal is one pattern that you formulate. But if underneath, there's a subconscious pattern of embarrassment, shame, failure, guilt, disappointment, etc. If that pattern is also there, then you have two opposing patterns. You have one pattern that says, let's go and do this, but you have another pattern that says, but last time you did this, you failed. Or you've seen your sister or brother or mother or father or friend do this, and guess what? They gained all the weight back anyway, so why even try? I'm going to keep you safe in your comfort zone. I'm going to conserve energy, and that way I'm going to save you some time and money and energy. Does that make sense to you? That is called cognitive dissonance. That is another Way of saying that's called chaos in the brain. And a brain, chaos will do what it'll just stick around doing the things that it's comfortable doing, where it's known.

Something that I learned that I think people will benefit from is an anxiety attack, stress, panic, ulcerative colitis. All of these things are effects, right? So they're effects. So the question is, what's the cause? Yes, Right. So most people are focusing on either, you know, suppressing the effects, depressing the effects, masking the effects. They're doing everything but going, what's causing this? And if we look at the world of cause, whether it's in our physical body, whether it's our relationship, whether it's our bank account account, whether it's our business, whatever the result is, every result in the physical world is an effect. So the question is, what causes the results? And one of the greatest laws in the universe is the law of cause and effect. And it states that for every effect, there's a cause and for every cause, there's an effect. And so I got really inquisitive, I mean, curious early on with, can I control more of the cause of my results? And that required responsibility. And when I was younger, it was like I was more into the blame game. It's because of him, because of her, because of it, because of the market, because of where I live, because of my mother, my father, how old I am or how young I am, how Asian or cocky I am. It doesn't make a difference. So a lot of my upbringing caused me to look outside of myself. And when I looked inside myself and took the, I guess, the prerequisite of responsibility, I own it. Yes, I can change it. That transformed my life, that, you know, that really started to put things into perspective.

If you think about visualization is simulation. Now here is the difference. Whoa, that's good. Okay, go ahead. So visualization is simulation. So when we close our eyes, or even if our eyes are open and we start to use our Einstein brain, the imagination, we now have just activated one of the biggest centers of our brain, the occipital lobe. That's connected to the motor cortex. It's connected to the motivational circuit nucleus that releases that dopamine that makes you feel good, that makes you want to take action. So if you visualize yourself achieving the goal, if you visualize yourself behaving in ways that match the new belief, if you even visualize the words, or you take the words on a sheet of paper and you read them, run your right finger across it, Run your left finger across it, close your eyes, see it and feel it. Your brain is creating a mental movie with the words. And as it creates a mental movie with the words, that's happening in your subconscious mind. And when you give the subconscious these instructions, a couple things happen because of the way the brain hierarchy works. Number one, it's survival, but then number two is safety. And then number three is energy conservation. Now, when you do something 20, 30, 40, 50 times, it takes about 66 days to 365 days of repetition to override an old habitual circuit. Not 10 days, not 21 days, 66 to 365. So if you visualize yourself achieving the goal, feeling the success that you want to feel, seeing the belief on the screen of your mind, you are actually creating a neural network through the science of neuroplasticity. And the networks that you reinforce become the most dominant networks. And since your brain wants to conserve energy, if you do this on a consistent basis, your brain says, okay, you're doing this so often, let me just make this automatic. Let me set aside the old beliefs, let me replace it with the new beliefs. And now you've deliberately and consciously evolved yourself.

One of the things that is really interesting, I mean, just based on what you said, there is something in business, whether it's for salespeople on the phones or salespeople in person on the phone, it's called call reluctance. And in person it's called contact reluctance. And so if you think about what does that mean? So I have a call reluctance. I have a reluctance to call somebody that I don't know. And so when some people think about calling somebody they don't know, when they're prospecting or meeting somebody, they don't know, if you think about what is it that is actually happening that causes them to feel that. So as soon as they have the thought, they're neurochemistry kicks in. Because the meaning that they have is if I call somebody that I don't know and they hang up on me, they yell at me, they say something nasty to me, then they are attacking my identity. And in most cases, they have associated the attack on their identity in a negative way. Such as, well, maybe it's true that I'm not good enough, maybe it's true that I'm not smart enough, maybe it's true that I'm not worthy. So they have a negative association with somebody's response that they don't even know about who they are. So the first thing we work on Is let's focus on your self esteem. Because it's the self esteem that's being attacked. My self esteem and self worth is being attacked. So when my self esteem and self worth is being attacked in a negative way or unpleasant way, I'm going to process that as danger in my brain. Now, when you understand the brain's number one responsibility is to move you away from danger or pain, that's number one on its hierarchy of how it behaves. So if there is real or imagined pain or discomfort, your brain says, stop, put the brakes on, go the other way. That's what's happening. So the first thing we do is we teach people, number one, let's change the meaning that you have around what somebody else's response is, around who you are or what you're doing or what you're offering them. So the first thing we work on is change the meaning, you change the feeling. The beautiful thing about the time that we're living in now is we can share knowledge and experiences. And anybody with a phone, an iPad or smartphone, or an Android or a computer anywhere in the world, in the Kalahari Desert, in Antarctica, can get access and get inspired. The best ideas in the world, yeah, to get the best ideas in the world, but to see that no different, none of us are different. The illusion is that we're different because we're comparing who we are compared to the person that we're listening to or learning from or seeing the gap. And the gap is what causes us to be uncomfortable. But if we remember we're all spiritual, we're all made from the exact same thing. You know, if you think about the human body, it's made of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, helium. There's elements, but we came from the furnaces of stars. You can't have carbon, okay, in the human body, that didn't come from the inside of a star. Helium and hydrogen is what the big bang was initially made up of. And then as all, all the gases coalesced and created stars and then galaxies, we became our flesh and blood. And everything that we became the organism has come from the universal intelligence. That's why we're all connected. And that's why we all have the same abilities, different skills, different knowledge, but the same abilities to become all of the ideas, goals and dreams that we have. It's. And so we just have to say, that is what I want to trade my life for. And even though I don't know how, even though I may not feel totally comfortable or confident or I'm lacking certainty, let's get on the path, and then we can change the world together.

If everybody can imagine for a moment you're driving a car and everything's going great, and all of a sudden, a light pops up on your dash. Now, the average person won't take a hammer and hit the light to turn it off. An average person will take a look at, what is that light? Am I low on windshield wiper fluid? Am I low on air in my tires? Is my back trunk open? What's going on? So, just like the signal in a car is meant to make you aware, fear is a trigger in our subconscious mind that real or imagined danger has percolated in our brain. And so fear. There's nothing wrong with fear. We can actually use fear as fuel. Now, I like to give people visuals. So imagine if you have two parts of your brain, there's many more. But imagine these two. We have the Einstein brain, and we have the Frankenstein brain. And when fear gets activated, let's assume that that's our Frankenstein brain going, what if. What if you get hurt? What if you lose money? What if you die? What if you get embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed or judged? And so why does Frankenstein even get activated? Because we're not born with those fears. And so if we're not born with those fears, that means that something in our brain is triggering this reaction automatically, without our thought. And that is what we call the fear response. And we also know that that fear response causes something called the sympathetic nervous system to activate, which causes us to want to fight, freeze, or run away. That's just the absolute reaction at a biological level of what is happening now when we want to deactivate that sympathetic nervous system. There are several, what I call our inner sizes that we can do. That actually gives us more control, more power, and the ability to reactivate the Einstein part of the brain. So inner size number one is really, really simple. It's called take six. Calm the circuits. So as soon as you catch yourself in a state of doubt, fear, worry, anxiety, stress, that means that Frankenstein's activated. If you just took six deep breaths in through your nose, as slowly as you could, and then you exhaled as if you're exhaling through a straw in your mouth. If you just did that six times, that very simple inner size would deactivate the Frankenstein brain and allow you to reactivate your thinking, imagination, Einstein part of your brain. And then you can do the second inner size, which puts you right back in control. And that one I call is Aya A I A, which is Now a matter of awareness. Awareness of my thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations, or the behaviors that I've taken, or the one I'm afraid to take. And in a pure state of awareness, without judgment, blame, shame, guilt or justification. Let me repeat, without any judgment, blame, shame, guilt or justification of the feeling or the thought of the behavior. Now I'm empowered again because now I can observe. And now in this observational mode, I could say, okay, what's my intention? Let's say for the next 10 minutes. Well, my intention is to be happy.

Great.

My intention is to be productive. Great. My intention is to take action on this one thing that's going to help me towards my goal and dream. So in the awareness and in the intention, then if I say, what's one small action step I could take towards what I want instead of what I don't want. So all of a sudden I've interrupted a fear pattern, created this state of awareness. I've set an intention and now I'm taking action towards what I want versus being paralyzed by what I don't want. And a fear that may or may not be real. So awareness is what actually gives us choice, and choice is what actually gives us freedom. If we make the right choices. We all have these patterns that are subconscious, that are driving our behaviors more than our conscious efforts. And so when we're dealing with the gorilla in the brain, and again, it's a metaphorical way to look at it, you have to understand that the gorilla is going to get whatever the gorilla is wired to get. The gorilla does not care about what you consciously want. The gorilla really focuses on the patterns that are going to keep it safe. And here's what safe means. Safe just means comfort zone. Let's say you're miserable. Let's say you're broke. Let's say you're overweight. Let's say you're in a relationship that you, you don't like. Let's say you're a job you don't love that is safe to the gorilla.

Why?

Because it's knows the pain it's already dealing with. It knows the discomfort, it knows the price it's paying already versus getting out of that comfort zone, leaving the job that you're not happy with, leaving a relationship that you're not in love with, trying to earn more income, getting out of debt. You could be in debt and comfortable. You could be in a relationship you hate and comfortable. You could be in a job that you don't love and comfortable. And the gorilla is going to keep you in Your comfort zone for the people who think that the law of attraction is, you know, think, believe and you'll achieve. First, I'm going to tell you that. So let's call I love this man. But I want you to think of your brain just a little bit differently. And think of it this way. Let's say you love rock and roll.

Roll.

And let's say rock and roll is on station 95.5. If you're on station 92.1, that might be classical. If you're on station 98.7, that might be punk rock. But a 92.5, that's rock and roll. So imagine coherence just means locking your electromagnetic spectrum of your brain. Lock it and load it on exactly what you want. So what's the vision? What's the goal? What are the beliefs, what are the emotions that create coherence? So you're locked and loaded to the frequency of the universe that is matching that goal. Part one, part two is when you get locked and loaded, you've actually activated the Einstein brain connected to the motor cortex, connected to the dopamine release in your body. And when that happens, okay, now you're in coherence. But there's another part that happens in this Einstein part of the brain. That's actually what the latest neuroscientists, psychologists are thinking is connected to this GPS part of our brain, to the frequency of where all of the tools, resources, people are that resonate with that frequency. So we've been evolving for what, two and a half million years, this Homo erectus, to now 108 billion humans on Earth with a brain that's been changing and growing. And my belief is we're just scratching the proverbial surface when we talk about, you know, a little quantum mechanics or quantum physics with entanglement, how we're all connected, we're all tuning into the frequencies that are us and within us and all around us. Now when we learn to use our brain better, it's just mind boggling how we can achieve goals and dreams that we thought were impossible to achieve before.

I have a philosophy that every moment, every precious nanosecond and moment is perfect. And so when I connect to the perfection of that moment, there's really nothing to do. It's to be aware and to allow, to surrender, but not to give up surrender, but to understand that, you know, as you know, we are talking right now. The oceans don't need any instruction what to do. The, the planets that are moving in their elliptical orbits around the sun don't need yours or my intervention. The universe, the Milky Way galaxy, that's, you know, flowing through the universe at a million and a half miles per hour, doesn't need yours and my instruction. So that means that every moment is perfect. So I want to connect to the perfect perfection of every single moment. Be aware of that every single moment, and realize that many things are not to my taste, many things I don't understand. But that doesn't mean that the moment isn't perfect.

What if you said, okay, I want to make, let's just say, $100,000 a year or a million, it doesn't make a difference. And I asked you, what do you need to believe about yourself to achieve this? So I need to believe I'm smart enough. Good. Write down I am smart enough. What else do you need to believe? I need to believe that I am worthy. I need to believe that I deserve this. I need to believe that it's possible. I need to believe you. Write down five or six or seven beliefs that are just words on a sheet of paper. Now, let me stop for just a moment. I'm going to tell a story and come back to this. I want you to imagine that somebody tapped you on the shoulder sometime today and say, hey, I work with Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks in Hollywood, and we have this new script, okay? That if you get really good at this script where you could read it in front of a camera without the script, we'll pay you 10 million bucks. Now, I want you to imagine you've never seen the script. You don't know how to act. But they said to you, we're going to give you an acting coach. We're going to give you everything you need to memorize the script. We're going to give you everything you need to act it perfectly. What would you do to take that script that's on a piece of paper that you've never seen before? What would you do to take that script to make it yours for you to own it? And the answer is you probably read it. Like, what once would you read it? Maybe 100 times, 200 times, 500 times? Do you think you might role play with somebody while you're holding the script in your hand? Do you think you might research the role? Do you think you might take a camera and practice it? And do you think that if you practice it one time, 50 times, 100 times, 500 times, you can finally put the script down and you can get in front of the camera and go, boom, Here is the script. Do you think you could do that? Well, guess what? A script that's on a piece of paper that you don't believe. With practice, you start to believe. So what happens if you take a belief system and you start to imprint it into your subconscious mind, initially through conscious repetition. But there are ways to access the subconscious mind that we know today that are faster and easier than just doing it consciously. And so you take a vision of you achieving your goals and dreams, you take the beliefs you need, you learn how to manage your emotions a little bit better, and then you develop the habits, which, again, are nothing more than neural patterns in the brain that have been reinforced. And when you learn how to deactivate the destructive ones and activate constructive ones through spaced repetition and reinforcement, now you are resetting your default way of being. So a belief is nothing more than a reinforced pattern that if you learn how to deactivate it and create a new one, it's like a software upgrade for your brain.

All we have, which everybody talks about, is this moment, this precious second right now. So the more I could be here right now, the more I'm living, you know, the life that I want to live. I don't want to be focusing too much about the future, too much about the past. I can use those as something to, you know, hope for in the future, as a guiding post from the past. But right now is the moment that.

Every one of us has any event that's occurred in the past. If you just merely think of that event that's occurred in the past, chances are you're firing off the neural network of that pattern, right? So you can take the idea of eating your favorite dessert. What do you think is happening in your brain when you pretend you're eating that favorite dessert of yours and your mouth starts to water and you start to feel, oh, that's such a great dessert. That's neurons in your brain firing in the neurochemistry that is associated with that memory firing. Now, let's say that you have a disempowering pattern of being embarrassed or ashamed or ridiculed. But instead of just thinking about the pattern going, oh, I don't like it. As soon as you think about the pattern and it has a. I'm going to say, a disempowering or negative emotion. Chances are that means that the stress center in the brain has been activated. That means that your heartbeat's going to go up. That means that your sweat glands are going to be activated. That means you're going to breathe a little bit less Deeply, you're going to be more shallowly. And that is the fear or stress response.

Now.

Now, what if instead of allowing that to continue, you just stopped and you had this intention? I'm going to dissolve the effectiveness or the strength of this pattern. How do you do that? Well, first and foremost, you stop, you sit, and you start with inner size number one, that actually I guide you through through in the book. All right? And inner size number one is called take six, calm the circuits. So you want to move from your stress and react system to your relax and respond system. You have parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, okay? The are triggered within the body. So what happens when you sit quietly and you take six deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth like you're blowing out through a straw, when you do it 6 times in 10 second rhythmic breaths. And you focus on the air that you're blowing out through your mouth like you're blowing out through a straw. That simple. Inner size is inner size number one, Take six, calm the circuits. It actually deactivates the stress, fear, embarrassment, shame, guilt circuit. And in a quiet relaxed state, that same memory does not have the same power. But if you don't do it in that state, you do it in a, in a tense, stressful state. You're actually reinforcing that pattern versus thinking about bringing up that old memory and doing this repetitively 10 times, 20 times, 30 times, 40 times, until the neurons really don't fire that strength. At that strength level.

The stuff that I'm fascinated with is behavior, right? Perception. And behavior is how I see myself and how people see themselves and why and then how they see the world and why. And then we know that the action, I mean, you know, in the Secret, you mentioned earlier, I was in the Secret and the thing I loved about the Secret is gave people some hope that changing my thinking really can make a difference. But there's also the other part of it. You know, in the Law of Attraction, there was one thing that was left out. It was called the law of Goya. And the law of Goya is the G O Y a law. It's a get off your ass law. There's nobody that I know other than trust fund friends, okay, that haven't had to do any work to achieve their success. Nobody that I know, whether it's Tony Hsieh, whether it's you, whether, whether it's me, whether it's Mark Cuban, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, doesn't make a difference. They've all had to take actions. But it's not just any action. It's taking the right actions in the right order at the right time, consistently. And so I've been fascinated with how do we help people develop the mental, emotional and behavioral habits that lead to success? Because that's the key. Mindset, skill set and action set. That's the formula.

I have my vision boards and I actually have my exceptional life blueprint that I've created. It's about 50 pages of my prayers, my rituals for my spiritual growth, health, wealth, my money story, my inner mission, my outer mission, you know, some of the stuff either that I have or that I'm creating. And so I create these visual representations to trigger the biggest part of my brain called the occipital lobe and to activate my memory center. So I have vision boards for what I want to create. So I'm giving my brain the exact instructions so that not only it focuses, helping me achieve that. What most people don't understand about vision boards or creating goals in writing that are specific is that your brain is a deletion and distortion tool as well. So if you give your brain the instruction of this is the stuff that's important to me for health, God, spirituality, charity, fun experiences, my children, my mother, my father, myself, whatever it is. And you say, this is what I want to trade my life for, delete and distort everything else. Now all of a sudden you're using your brain as a deletion and distortion organism in order to be able to help you hyper focus on what you want.

I got really inquisitive and curious early on with can I come control more of the cause of my results? And that required responsibility. And when I was younger, it was like I was more into the blame game. It's because of him, because of her, because of it, because of the market, because of where I live, because of my mother, my father, how old I am or how young I am, how Asian or Asian I am, it doesn't make a difference. So a lot of my upbringing caused me to look outside of myself. And when I looked inside myself and took the, I guess the prerequisite of responsibility, I own it. Yes, I can change it.

So important.

That transformed my life. That really started to put things into perspective.

I tend to be a goal seeking guy, right? And I used to not celebrate the small stuff. And I used to just like, you know, fuck, bigger goal, bigger goal, bigger goal. More bigger, bigger. And somebody says to me, like, are you gonna like slow down? Just to enjoy some of the stuff that you actually have done for yourself and for people in your family. And I was like, well, let me create an accomplished board.

So good.

So good. So accomplish board. You pass that test on your own 40 years ago. Celebrate that you helped this person who was challenged and celebrate that, you know, you did this for him or for her or for yourself. Celebrate that stuff to remind yourself, because I'm tough on myself. Like, I'm like, I'm. Let's come on, let's go.

It's a goal.

Let's go. And sometimes I forget the stuff that I have done, the stuff that I do do that I need to remember. So I created an accomplishment board and a list so I can just go to it when I feel like, holy shit, am I smart enough to achieve that next thing? Am I good enough? What a lot of people don't know, Ed, is when I was a kid, I used to feel like I wasn't smart enough. And when I was a kid, it held me back. And today I still feel like I'm not smart enough. And that fuels me to get smarter.

So I use it.

I set big goals. I go, God, I don't have the skills, I don't have the knowledge. But I can figure it out. I've got contacts, I've got friends, and there's books, there's Google, there's. There's YouTube, there's, holy mackerel, I don't need to have all the specialized knowledge anymore. Let's say you have a shortage of money right now. Let's say you're not earning as much as you'd like, and there's too much month left at the end of the money.

Too much month left at the end.

Of money creates stress. Decisions around money can create stress. What to buy, what not to buy. Is it too expensive? Is it not expensive enough for my taste? Whatever the stress is, I want you to understand stress a little bit differently from the brain perspective. This is the part of the brain, the brain stem, that is attached to the first part of being called the reptilian brain, which is connected very, very quickly to the amygdala, the stress response center in the brain. When we have stress in our life, whether it's money, stress, emotional stress, relationship stress, business stress, career stress, whatever stress, we have the signal that is sent through the electrical system in the brain and the chemical system in the brain. When stress is activated, there's a part of the brain called the vagus nerve and the sympathetic nervous system, which is part of your autonomic nervous system. But the sympathetic nervous system specifically is the system that activates the stress response system activates one of four things. Fear, okay, and when. And we'll talk about fear in just a moment. But when we're in a state of stress, the fight or flight response kicks in the sympathetic nervous system. So when we're in a fight mindset, we are using a lot of epinephrine, adrenaline, cortisol, and there's this current of anxiety. Now, that's not that bad if it's a little bit. But when it's too much, it actually deactivates the thinking part of your brain that can actually solve the reason you're stressed. So when we are in this fight or flight, which is runaway modality or the freeze or faint modality, there are people who freeze when they're under too much stress. There are people who faint under too much stress. There are people who run away, and there's people who just try to fight it. So when we are looking at the brain and we're looking at stress, okay, and this is what Heidi's talking about here. She says stress is our own GPS system saying that something is out of alignment and the energy movement from the calm and respond part of the brain is gone to the stress and react part of the brain. And so one of the tools to calm the brain down, to go from reactive stress, to relax and respond is inner size number one that we teach and that you're all going to be able to learn in my new book called Inner Size. But inner size number one is called take six, Calm the circuits. So whenever you're feeling stressed, whenever there's a problem, whenever you're feeling overwhelmed, whenever you're feeling confused, whenever you're feeling like it's too much, stop. As opposed to trying to fight your way through it. Stop, calm down, close your eyes, take six deep breaths like this. In through your nose, gently, in a rhythm of about six breaths per minute every 10 seconds. And when you do a breathing exercise, take six, calm the circuits. That's inner size number one. You actually deactivate the stress response center in the brain, and you activate the calm and respond part of the brain.

Highly successful people, whether they're taught it like we teach it or they just know how to do it, automatically they do it. They feel fear, and then they release that fear and they take action anyway. So they can turn their fear into fuel is one of the things that we teach people how to do. Turn your fear into your fuel. And when you turn your fear into your fuel in a calm, centered way, you now are able to use that neuroelectrical chemical called epinephrine or cortisol, the stress hormones, and use them to fuel your success faster and easier than ever before. You just reminded me of something, something that I learned that I think people will benefit from is an anxiety attack, stress, panic, ulcerative colitis. All of these things are effects, right? So they're effects. So the question is, what's the cause? Yes, right. So most people are focusing on either, you know, suppressing the effects, depressing the effects, masking the effects. They're doing, doing everything but going, what's causing this? And if we look at the world of cause, whether it's in our physical body, whether it's our relationship, whether it's our bank account, whether it's our business, whatever the result is, every result in the physical world is an effect. So the question is, what causes the results? And one of the greatest laws in the universe is the law of cause and effect. And it states that for every effect, there's a cause, and for every cause, there's an effect. Hey, this is John. And if you like that video, watch the next video because it is packed with things that you can do right now to achieve success way faster than ever before.