The Bridge Between You & Your Financial Goals

Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Dr. Sereni Pillay.

Thank you very much. Thank you so much. It's really wonderful to be here today on so many levels and for so many reasons. One of the things I would like to emphasize is I was trying to think this morning when I was sort of putting myself in a place of what are we doing here today? And what do we actually want to achieve? One of the things that I thought was the thing that would make me happiest is if you felt that you not only listened, but learned and took away something with you to be able to practice and then make those dreams manifest so that they are reality. And the concept here is that there's you, there's your financial goals, and then there's your brain. And we are going to be touching on a few concepts related to the brain so that you can use your brain to get to your financial goals. The brain is essentially a bridge, and it's a bridge between you and your financial goals. And one of the things I would like you to do today is to really enhance your own sense of conversation. Two things that I would like you to register deeply. Firstly, you've already answered a whole lot of questions. Do you want greater financial success? Yes. That's why you're here. Are you ready to act? Yes. That's why you're here. And this is not some kind of preemptory movement that's going to get you to that place. The time to act is now, at this moment. So I'm going to ask you to really have what I think is going to be the most important conversation you could ever have with an expert. The real expert in this room is you. Because if you cannot have this conversation with yourself and you cannot bring yourself to another place in your lives, nothing is going to matter. It doesn't matter how many of us sit up here. So the most important conversation is really the conversation that has to do with yourself. And there are three fundamental questions that we are going to be asking today. One is, given the amount of volatility that exists, is it possible to be optimistic? And why is this important when it comes to making more money? Secondly, why is it that so often we end up doing the exact opposite of what we want to do? And what can you do about this? And lastly, what are the different ways in which fear stands in your way? And what can you do about this? To start us off, I'd like to just ground us in the notion of the magnificent brain, because really, we're talking about your magnificent Brain. And the level at which we're going to pitch these entire two and a half to three days is really to ask you to think deeply about where you want to exert effort and at what level you want to exert that effort. The next video which we're going to show is a video that I'm going to ask you to really take seriously, because what we're actually. This is a video of the Navy seals. And what I'm going to be asking you to do is to take this in, because it's this level of training that we're asking you to participate in mentally. So take a look at this.

Experts believe evolution has hardwired our brains to dread being trapped underwater. As a result, it's almost impossible to control the brain's overwhelming impulse to surface for air. That's why recruits struggle so much to pass the underwater pool competency test.

Pool comp is a very important milestone in their career. Here they're being tested how they can deal with fear underwater. And there is controlled harassment, planned harassment projected at them underwater, and we see how they can cope with that.

Students must spend up to 20 minutes underwater enduring repeated attacks on their breathing equipment by an instrument. Half of the time they are without.

Air, their air is shut off. Their breathing hoses are wrapped around in difficult positions, and they need to respond to those problems with a series of.

Emergency procedures, step by step. Instructions for untangling their gear are drilled into the recruits heads beforehand. They must follow these to the letter. But putting theory into practice isn't easy.

Go down the bottom and the instructors, they come down, they'll start attacking you, taking your mask off, just creating all this stress. And the more the stress builds up, they want to see how you'll handle it.

As the trainee begins running out of air, his brain's amygdala pushes the panic button that urges him to surface. His frontal lobes must win this battle in the brain if he's to stay in control.

Physically, it's very challenging. You have to hold your breath for longer than you normally would. The instructors just take you kind of to that br breaking point to see how you respond.

No sooner has the candidate untied one set of knots than his instructor is back attacking him again and again.

The more the stress builds up, they want to see how you'll handle it. Will you want to go to the surface and get air, which you want to do, or will you take the little air you have and all the problems and solve them and do what's necessary in order to pass the test.

More seals fail pool comp at this stage in their training than anything else. The Navy wanted to know what was going on inside their recruits heads to cause this.

Nothing more scary than not being able to breathe. That creates a tremendous stress response. You have this huge release of stress hormones that make controlling things with thought more difficult.

Under normal conditions, the brain communicates with the body using minute electrical signals. The brain sends out electrical impulses from its nerve cells to others that travel at over 270mph. This is one way your brain can tell your body to do something. But under extreme duress, the brain releases chemical hormones. The part of the brain that senses fear. The amygdala triggers a chain reaction that sends adrenaline and cortisol hormones into the body's bloodstream. These stress hormones act as a SWAT team, quickly preparing the body for action. They increase breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure. Senses become keener, memory sharper, and the body becomes less sensitive to pain. But even in this heightened state of alertness, pool comp is still too challenging for many trainees.

Your mind is going everywhere, and you're seeing your friends come up from the water, they've passed or they failed, and you're kind of sizing yourself up saying, well, he failed. Can I pass? And vice versa. So your mind goes everywhere, and it's of kind key just to stay focused on what you have to do.

Eventually, the student completes the series of tasks and can touch the bottom and then surface to learn from the instructor whether he's passed the test.

I feel fine.

Few SEAL candidates succeed at pool comp the first time. They get four attempts. And there's more at stake with each try.

The most common reason for failing pool comp is, is panic, losing composure underwater. Some of our students, that's it. We'll, we will performance drop them from training.

The Navy wanted to help borderline candidates who had the potential to pass these crucial phases in training. After consulting with experts, they came up with a groundbreaking mental toughness program. A set of techniques to boost the trainees ability to control fear even in the most extreme situations.

You guys need to stay fired up while you're out there. The pain, the cold, and all that stuff, it's gonna eat away at you, but you got to keep going.

The techniques that we're most interested in are what I call the big four.

Goal setting, mental rehearsal, self talk, and arousal control.

So the reason that I showed you that video is because what I'd like you to think about is in your own Navy SEAL training, whether you're making $50,000, $70,000, $90,000, $100,000, $500,000, a million dollars. If you want to take yourself to the next level, what level of rigor do you need to have? What level of discipline do you need to have? And how can you begin to enter this phase with that kind of mentality?