Happiness is an Inside Job with Marisa Peer

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm here with Marissa Peer. And Marissa, thank you for taking time this afternoon. And you're getting me excited about your program and especially your work with kids. But you know, we're all kids at one in one one stage or another and we all the same things. You have as feelings, fears, impressions that you have as a kid, they can pop up. Insecurities can pop up all through your life. And really the funny thing, and I know you've known a lot of incredibly successful people is they can pop up to people that have had like you know, one awards every year for forever but year when they go home, it's like somehow they still carry this baggage around with them.

You know, I was watching a Philip Seymour Hoffman movie last night thinking, wow, that beautiful man with all that talent died with a syringe in his arm. If you look at Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, George Michael, Marilyn Monroe, Whitney Houston, so many people with immense talent because when you're creative, you're very suggestible. It's almost impossible to be creative and not be suggestible. And so many creative people are very fragile. They're easily wounded and damaged. But the other thing is we think that fame makes people damaged, but it's actually the opposite. Damaged people are drawn to fame because they think it's the thing that will make them feel enough. So the Marilyn Monroe's of the world, the Amy Winehouses, need to be famous because it's the only way they think they can feel enough. But when you go to fame to feel enough, even when you pull it off, then you're left thinking, oh, before I felt not enough and I thought I'd be famous. That will work. And now I've got the fame, but I've still got the same feeling. I've conned everyone. I still feel as not enough as I ever felt. Except before I had a dream. Now I've met the dream like Britney Spears. Where will I go now with this feeling of unworthiness? And that's the problem. If you don't fix it, it will really take you down. And it's done that to so many beautiful, talented, amazing people who feel unworthy of fame. They get it, but it makes them go into even more self destruct.

And let's talk about Marissa Peer. Okay, how did Marissa Peer? What got you moving in this direction? Did you have like the greatest parents and the greatest upbringing of all time to where you just understood things and were able to get started helping others? Right, right out of the gate? Where did, where did all this come from?

Well, you know, I both did and I didn't. My father was a very eminent head teacher. You would call it a principal. But I didn't have a happy childhood. My father was a wonderful man, but very invested in other people's children because he got more results. My mother was desp. Unhappy. They were terribly ill suited as parents and I was raised in this craziness in a way that they were both so unhappy. My father went to work and I always saw that as his salvation. My mother would lie on the kitchen floor hysterical. She even threw herself down the stairs a few times that my father would pick up his briefcase and go to work. And I remember as a kid thinking, that's it, isn't it? You need a great job. That's so engrossing. And that way you won't feel any pain. And at a very early age, I really believe that you had a great job. It was a balm for all the pains of the world. And I was convinced that's what I had to have. But I also saw my father who always said, you know, imagine every person you meet has a tattoo on the head saying please make me feel I matter. And he believed that you should approach every child with that belief. And he would do wonders with other people's kids. And I wanted to be a teacher too, but I became a teacher in a different way. And so when I became a therapist, I was working with so many people that came from unhappy families, broken families that believed there was no, no out.

Why did you go into therapy?

Why? Well, I want. First of all, I thought I'd be a teacher like my father. I, you know, he was an amazing teacher and his job gave him so much joy. He truly loved it. And I always thought, well, I need to have a job that's going to give me joy because marriages clearly don't work and nothing else works but this job that gives you joy, that's what I'm going to find. So I thought I'd be a teacher. Then I thought it'd be a child psychologist. And then, I mean, there's no such thing as flukes really, are there? But I ended up working for Jane Fonda in California teaching aerobics And I had very much a therapist mind by then. And I noticed how many women in my classes were bulimic or anorexic or body dysmorphic or exercise compulsive. And then I found a genius called Gil Boyne, and I found hypnotherapy, and he trained me. I became like his protege. And I thought, well, this is great. I can work for Jane all day, and I can just pick all these people out of my classes that are anorexic or bulimic, and I can fix them all night. And that's what I did very successfully. And I loved every minute of it. And then I. You know, I don't know if it was luck or fortune, but I was asked to appear on several television shows like I'm a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here, and Big Brother. And as the therapist on television, that was immensely fun. And that led me to thinking, I've got an audience now. I should write some books. I was working on a lot of weight loss shows at the time, and having worked for Jane, I really understood the absolute insanity of diets and doing punishing workouts, because the whole workout industry is based on self hatred. The whole diet industry is based on shaming yourself. And I was so shocked that this whole industry is based on abuse instead of love. And so I worked. I had a lot of clients. I worked on television. Then I wrote some books, and then I became a speaker. And then I eventually created my own method because people would write me and go, I just want to work with you. But I'm like, well, you're in Alabama, I'm in London, or you're in Australia, and there's any one of me. And now I still have that. I still see clients, I still write books, I still work on television. I still lecture, and I have my own class. So in a way, I've come full circle. My dad wanted to be a teacher. He'd be so proud. I mean, I always think he'd be so delighted. I am a teacher, and I won all these awards because so my life's kind of. You know, I thought my life was going over there, but it kind of went over there, and then it sort of came back over there. And I often think we have a plan, but life has other ideas, so. But everything I've done and been led to has all taken me to what gives me joy, which is helping people live their best lives and be happy. You know, helping people make money isn't really what it's all about, Although it's certainly nice to have it. Helping people is helping people feel happy like themselves. If you don't like who you are, then nothing you have is really going to make that much difference.

Now let's talk about. As I'm hearing you talk, you know, I have not heard yet. My credentials are that I went to this. I have this degree in psychotherapy and this master's in that and this doctorate in that. And I've got 12 degrees of this and I'm a master of all of these type of. You know, you're, you have grown your system, your business, your insight, your books from the streets up. It sounds like.

Yeah, I mean, I do. I am.

It's wild. That's wild.

Yeah. I did go to college and I, I went obviously went to hypnotherapy training school, got all my diplomas, trained. I trained in hypnotherapy and psychotherapy and counseling. But it's, it's like, you know, you can't learn to swim by getting a degree in swimming. You can't learn to ride a bike by going to college. You have to do it. And I find the best way to be an amazing therapist to do it. No matter how good your training is, you have another set of teachers that teach you everything that is your own clients. My clients are my best teachers. They'd come back and say, when you did that or said that, it changed my life. The thing that really worked was that. And they helped me collate the stuff that really turned them around so I could put it into a system and teach other therapists to do it too.

And where did you go to? Where was your education and what stage of your development? Because you, you know, we started a little while ago. We were with Jane Fonda and we were working out and Jane Fonda.

So I come from Cambridge. I was born in Newcastle in England. I come. I was raised in Cambridge. I went back to Newcastle to go to college to do a degree in education. And after four years, I left that college. I didn't even complete my degree. I left and I went to work for Jane Fonda in Los Angeles. I have to say it was a million times better. And actually that was the best education in the world. And then from Jane, I found Gil Boyne and I studied at his hypnosis training school in London. I also studied with Pritikin, which was an. He was a guy that was slowing down aging. And then I went and studied psychotherapy in the uk, studied more hypnotherapy in the UK and have Taken lots of courses and taken lots of stuff. But actually.

Pretty soon it all starts to become the same though, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does. And you know, it's the same thing. There are a lot, you know, I've had people come on Michael saying, hey, I've done a five year degree in therapy and I know everything except how to work with a client. I don't know that bit. I know how to write a patient profile, but when it comes to work, I don't know what to do. And some people I've trained many doctors and nurses who are wonderful people. I've trained quite a few psychiatrists who say, you know, I know all this stuff, but when the client's in front of you, falling apart, the last thing I want you to say, and how are you feeling today? I mean, obviously they're feeling terrible. They're lying on the floor hysterical. Why do you even ask them how they feel? And how does that make. I never ask people how they feel. I never say the words, what's wrong with you? I say, what? What happened to you? What happened to you? And they don't always know. But I begin to uncover, I always think my, my career. You start off putting on your hat as a detective and you find out what happened to you. And then after you've got that made, you become like a dentist and you try and extract all that toxic matter and then you become like a coder and you start to code in and upgrade better thoughts and beliefs. So just like when your computer's got a bug in it and it doesn't work, you want to find out where that bug is, take that bug out, put in better software so everything is shiny and better. And so I always think, I wear those three hats and I like wearing those three hats. Investigate like a good detective, remove like a good dentist or doctor, code and install like a good coder. And if you do those three together, that's the joy. If you just keep trying to find out what went wrong but leave it there, it doesn't help. If you try and code in new stuff without extracting the old stuff, it doesn't help. But if you do all three at the same time, the results are extraordinary, really incredibly moving and often life changing too.

And the thing is that, you know, you find that in business and sales or whatever, you have people that come in and they've got all this experience.

And.

Immediately you know that most of the time if they're in front of you looking for a new job, that experience has probably not been Great. You're going to have to deprogram them before you reprogram them. And if you just start in without finding out where they came from, what they went through, how well things went, what they were good at, and, you know, the relationships they had, if you immediately, you know, how they look at things, if you don't get a sense of that and kind of clear the clutter, you can't really start training them and expect the training to stick, can you?

Yeah, it's like mowing your lawn and going, oh, you know, I mowed my lawn, but the weeds keep coming back. What's that about? Well, it's about the fact that the roots are still there intact, and you've got to get those out, too. So I like that. Deprogram, reprogram, remove the past and install. You can't remove the past without installing the new, and you can't install the new without removing the past. So it's. It's a process that works beautifully when you do it simultaneously.

Fantastic. If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years, put them into something for you to watch. Go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now. In order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell, and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.