How to Upgrade YOUR MINDSET: Interview with Tom Bilyeu

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. So I was taught that failure is an opportunity to learn. And I was also taught to disassociate me being a failure from failing.

Hey everybody. Welcome to Impact Theory. Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. Alright? Today's guest is a wildly successful serial entrepreneur who has built five multi million dollar companies including one that generated over $4 billion in revenue. He's also the multiple time New York Times bestselling author of the Answer and Having it all. And he is widely considered one of the leading behavioral and mindset experts in the world. And part of what makes extraordinary is that he has had a just crazy string of successes in multiple industries across absurdly divergent product lines. His areas of expertise range all the way from real estate and Internet software to brain research and business consulting. This broad spectrum acumen has seen him featured in eight movies including Quest for Success with Richard Branson and the Dalai Lama and the global phenomenon the Secret. He is also a much sought after coach and speaker who's been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and on cnn. And additionally he's been interviewed and mined for his priceless insights by such high profile interviewers as Larry King, Ellen and Anderson Cooper. He's not one to sit back on his laurels and retire, however. So despite the kind of repeated success that eludes all but even the most die hard entrepreneurs, he's launched yet another new company, this one called Neurogym, that aims to use the most advanced technologies and evidence based brain training methods to help people unleash their fullest potential. So please help me in welcoming the man whose latest book Innersise is poised to unlock your brain's hidden power, the Brain Whisperer himself, John Assaraf. I love what you've talked about. The difference between the law of attraction and the law of Goya.

Oh yeah, yeah.

So what? Talk to us about that.

So the law of Goya is simply get off your ass. So if you think and you believe and you emotionalize and 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. 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 is an opportunity to learn. And I was also taught to. To disassociate me being a failure from failing, for sure.

I want to go back to what you're talking about with beliefs. And you said, this is so cool. You were talking about how you wrote down these beliefs and you were reading them over and you were doing what you were told, and you're running your finger across it. You're really allowing yourself to feel it, imagine it, and your brain was screaming something at you.

My brain was screaming, that's bullshit. That's not true. You're not successful. You're not earning that amount of money. You're not smart. You're not this. But I was also taught at the same time that when that happens, first and foremost, that's normal. That's the old self and the old patterns trying to fight for their life. And he said, with repetition and emotion and consistency, initially, it's hard, and you have to use conscious effort to create the new beliefs. He says, but over 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 180 days, that new pattern that you're focusing on and paying attention to, your brain basically says, well, I guess you really don't need those old patterns. You keep activating these new ones. Let's just make these ones work and let's make these real. But I want to understand what happened. And with even the Law of Attraction, you know, I was taught the law of Attraction. You know, I was 23, 24 years old. Also, at a real estate conference, they're 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 shit. You know, 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 wanted 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, you asked 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 that tell me I need to create these false senses of feelings? I want to know why it works.

And why does it work, especially emotionalizing. I think that's something that people hear a lot. I talk a lot about embodying something, really feeling it, but why does it work?

Great, great question. It has to do with circuits in the brain and neurochemicals that are released. And so when we feel something, chances are that we're going to release dopamine in the brain, the feel good neurochemical that activates the reward center of the brain. And chances are if we feel that and we have this positive emotion around it, and that neurochemistry is flooding our brain and our body with feel good chemicals, we're actually activating the motivational center of the brain. And so when we visualize, when we set a goal, when we take an action step, when we emotionalize, when we read our goals, the initial flood of neurochemicals, dopamine, serotonin, feel good chemicals, and then if we share it with a friend, oxytocin, those three neurochemicals, those are the neurochemicals of goal achievement. But then there's the other side of it, the other circuits of fear, of stress, where norepinephrine, cortisol or epinephrine, the stress hormones, can be released as well. And so I'm fascinated and I want to teach people the stuff that we've learned about beliefs, self esteem, self worth, fears, and the stuff that really holds people back. Because all the how to, how to get healthy and stay healthy. We know how do I build a business and sustain it? We know how do I get into a relationship and make it successful? We know, we know most of the how to for anything that anybody wants to do in this time frame that we live in. So the how to is the easiest part of the equation. So the harder part of the equation is why am I not doing the things that I know I should be doing and why am I not doing the things that I could find out easily how to do?

Let's talk about that. So in your real estate company, you said, I'm giving everyone the same training, they're reading all of the same books, and yet they're not getting the same results. And it wasn't like, oh, well, the smart people are doing better than the dumb people you said. Sometimes it was people that you were like, God, in real life, this guy's.

Not that bright, but he's crushing, crushing.

So what ended up being the difference between the people who didn't do anything with the information and those that did.

So in 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, you know, that broke free, would it work with some of my agents. And so we took 75 age 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 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 shit, 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 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? Like, 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. And so 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 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?

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 ago in the probably the seventies 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 reality, 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 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 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.

It's interesting. So I've heard you now a few times and the first few times it didn't really make my radar. But you always say release weight. You never say lose weight.

Yeah. What do you do when you lose something?

Look for it.

Yeah, I don't want to look for weight that I've lost. I want to release it. I like to use language patterns as well that are going to empower me versus disempower me. 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 freaking 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 was, but there was a lot of fear. But I understand what the emotion of fear is. It's a subconscious trigger that causes this fear feeling that I don't like. And it's a ghost signal for me, not a stop signal for me.

That's interesting. What do you mean by that?

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 in the physical body. And so when you have something in your brain, that 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 gonna 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 a light. It's a signal. Something's happening in the, 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. And so if you think about fear, right, how does a firefighter go into a burning building when there's this enormous adrenaline and epinephrine that could stop most people dead in their tracks? They learn, here's the feeling, it's normal. Do you have the knowledge and the skills and the preparation to deal with this in a safe way? Go. If you don't now, you retreat. So we have this phenomenal brain, right? 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? Blood goes away from that into the fear response. So you have epinephrine, cortisol, adrenaline to be able to get you out of the 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, 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, et cetera, 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? So 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 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 towards pleasure, 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. Now while you're in the, you know, in the what am I thinking feeling, it's a chance to, 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 start 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. 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 tools enough to be able to make them part of our unconscious competence brain.

So how do you do some of those things? I mean, that was a pretty extraordinary list. And I'll say beliefs releasing beliefs, habits releasing habits. Like that is really interesting.

So what is a belief? I mean, think about what is a belief. And let's go to. Again, I just like to go to the neuroscience field because just my passion now is a belief is nothing 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.

So what does that process look like?

So the process is you can read new beliefs to life. And so if you listen to beliefs that are empowering over and over and over again and you emotionalize them and you visualize yourself actually acting out those beliefs and you learn how to pay attention to that little inner critic that says that's bullshit, that's not true, that'll never come true. That's not. If you learn and you remember that that little voice is there to consistently keep you in this homeostatic place. And it's there to protect the beliefs that are There. Now, the latest research shows that to develop, you know, a new pattern takes between 66 days and 365 days.

How do you help people be consistent long enough to form that? Like when people talk about, oh, it takes 28 days to form a new habit. It's like, okay, I can get my head around that. But when you start talking about 100 days, 365 days, it gets pretty daunting for adults.

Yeah, it does. 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 1 minute 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. And that's why they say 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 are my disempowering 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.

I love that.

All right.

One thing I'd be remiss not to ask you about before we go are the three boards. So vision boards, accomplished boards, and the one I don't know about, the crap boards.

So crap board. So vision board for seeing what you want, the accomplish board for reminding yourself that you've got a lot to 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.

No. So I look at them. No. So I look at them just because I sit down and put on my shoes, I want to look at them every day. Oh, 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 in front 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. There are a lot of ups, downs, highs, lows, failures, 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, 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 resisting? 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?

What would you put on a board for conflicts?

Is it a picture of a person? It could be a person that you're having conflict with. It could be something you're trying to figure out that's conflicting. Whether it's in your company, a department, whether you're having conflicting thoughts of should you do it, shouldn't you? And there's Uncertainty, any conflicts that you are experiencing is going to create neural dissonance in your brain. It's just going to create chaos in your brain. And so if you take it out of your head and you put it on a sheet of paper, you can look at it. And now you're one step removed from what's happening in your brain. And so the more you can be in coherence, it's the equivalent of being part of a band that's in harmony, that every player is just like, oh man, this just sounds so good. Well, the more you can be in coherence, the more you're going to be in flow and the more you're going to take action, the more chaos there is in the brain. Neural chaos, whether it's because of emotions, you're lacking something, there's conflict, there's resistance. The more you can get it out into the, in front of you and open say, well, what's causing this? The easier it is for that Einstein brain to say, okay, maybe I could do this, maybe I can do that. But I can also call a friend or a mentor or a coach or I can research.

It makes total sense. Alright, before I ask my last question, tell these guys where they can find you. Online.

You can find me online@myneurogym.com johnasseraf.com on my Facebook fan page, on Instagram, on Twitter. Those are the main ones.

Alright, and then my final question. What's the impact that you want to have on the world?

On my epitaph, 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 is been worthwhile. And so I just want to make, 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.

That's beautiful, John. Thank you so much for being on the show. Man.

That was really incredible. That was fun.

It was amazing.

Hey, this 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.