John Assaraf explains why people fail at financial goals despite wanting them: childhood conditioning creates deep beliefs that conflict with what you consciously want. When your implicit self-image doesn't match your explicit goals, you get stuck in procrastination and anxiety. Aligning them requires inner work, not just vision boards.
Chapters
Why we have so many things that hold us back? Why is it that the conditioned brain believes what we're taught when we're little kids by our parents, our teachers, our experiences, and what effect those things have on us being adults, trying to live, survive, and live our ideal lives? And why is it that we have this disconnect between the dreams, the ideals, and the vision of what we want for our lives and the reality of how most people are living? And so, in doing the research, what became very evident, and we're working with thousands of people around the world, is that every single person. Okay. Is dealing with one issue or another. And I can share with you. This is just a small list that I'm showing you up on the screen of the issues that our clients, people who are doctors, lawyers, engineers, homemakers, students. I mean, every walk of life, I speak to all over the world, and there's people have a lack of confidence, a lack of certainty, a feeling like, I'm not good enough, a feeling like, you know, I'm not smart enough. I'm too young, I'm too old. It's too late in my life. We all have these stories, these excuses, these reasons that affect our everyday behaviors and our way of thinking. And so my question for myself over the number of years is, number one, where are these in the brain? Like, why is it that sometimes I feel insecure, I have fears, I have, you know, doubts with myself and my abilities when I set goals? Why is it that I procrastinate? Why is it that you procrastinate? Why is it that there's a difference between what you say you want and what you actually do? And what happens is that we all set these visions or these vision boards. And most of you know me from the movie the Secret, where I talk about having a vision board. And I created a vision board as a way for me to represent the goals that I had for my health, my wealth, my relationships, my charitable contributions, the things I want to experience in my life. And I created a vision board. And that was something that was very, very new back in the early 90s. When I started to do that now. It became famous in the movie the Secret because I ended up with some companies and ended up with some money and ended up with a nice home. But what I didn't know back then, that I knew today was that in creating my vision board, in creating my goals in writing and in doing some of the inner sizes that I will share with you in just a little bit, I was creating something called neural coher. I was creating a coherent brain that not only set goals, but was able to take the actions necessary to achieve the goals. However, what I've also been studying and learning in the last 10 years, working with some of my advisors that you're going to meet and that hopefully you'll get to see in June as well, is that not only do we have to have a vision board, but in order for us to exponentially grow our incomes, to square the amount of money we're making, to take our, maybe our yearly income, make it our monthly income, or to take our monthly income and make it our weekly income, the new possibility does exist, but it doesn't exist just because you set that as a new goal. Goal. Here's what's standing in the way. Mark Waldman and I were talking a couple of weeks ago about a vision board and part of our research for our new book. We realized that so many people had a ton of crap. And so whether it was their fears, their anxieties, their stories, their experiences, their lack of confidence, their lack of certainty, their lack of feeling like they're good enough or smart enough, all of the crap that we have internally, whether we tell people about it or not, creates neural dissonance. And I'll show you what that means in just a moment. In trying to figure out, how do we help more people achieve their ideal life? How do we help more people release and let go of the crap in order for them to really achieve the vision that they have? That is really the work that I've been doing in helping people break that pattern of thought and break those patterns of behavior. When we talk about this type of thinking, there's two parts of the brain that are really important for you to understand. The explicit part of your brain, and that's the part of your brain that is able to choose your goals, imagine the goals that you want to achieve, explain it, declare it, talk about it. But there's another more important part of your brain called the implicit non declarative part of the brain. It's the procedural part of your brain that if you don't listen, line up what your explicit goals and dreams are with your implicit self image. You have a disconnect in the brain or an incoherent pattern. So let me show you something, if I can, on the screen. I'll ask my team to put the camera on here for a moment. If, let's say this over here is your brain, okay? And over here, you've had this amazing image to double, triple, quadruple your income to Buy that new car to go on that great trip, to donate some money or time to the charity of your dreams, to take more time off. If you've got this big, beautiful image over here in the explicit. Think of explicit as I can explain it. If you've got this image over here, that's a positive image, but in the implicit part of your brain, there's a negative belief that you're not smart enough, you're not good enough, you're not going to amount to much. There's going to be a disconnect between the image and the visual that you have and the implicit image of your current reality. And so if you want to know why, you can set goals, you can write out plans for goals, but you never really achieve them. It's because there isn't resonance between the new image and the reality. At the implicit level of your brain. And what we've discovered, and especially in the last 14, I'm sorry, 18 months, I've been working with about 6,000 clients on helping them create new neural resonance and neural coherence. And so the coherence happens when you're explicit. Your goals and your dreams match the implicit neural networks or patterns in the brain. If you don't have that coherence between the two, you end up in a chaotic vibrational state of thought, of stress, of emotional depression, discontent, of procrastination, of more fear, of more uncertainty, of more anxiety. And that's why so many really smart people say, I want to achieve x goals 2, 3, 4 times more income. If they don't have the matching implicit part of their brain, there is neural dissonance or disconnect. I'm going to show you a little video right now to help explain to you exactly what it looks like in the brain. All right? So again, make sure, turn up your volume, stop doing anything.
