5 Ways To Upgrade Your MINDSET & Get Out Of A Rut! EP 1131

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To qualify, you must apply at Apple co getdailycash Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch offer may not be available elsewhere. Terms and limitations apply. The School of Greatness is sponsored by Capital One. Nowadays, most people subscribe to everything music, tv, even dog food. And it rocks. Until you have to manage it all. Which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit cardholders can easily track, block or cancel reoccurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost. With one sign in, you can manage all your subscriptions all in one place. Learn more@Capital1.com subscriptions terms and conditions apply. This is episode number 1131 on how to upgrade your mindset. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur and and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Sarah Blakely said, don't be intimidated by what you don't know that can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else. And Will Rogers said, don't let yesterday take up too much of today. Today's episode is a special one because over the years we've had guests share incredible stories about creating a new life for themselves and developing the motivation and the discipline to follow through. So today I wanted to bring together some of my favorite moments from Episodes to inspire you and show you how to take your life to the next level. Whether you're in a tough spot right now or starting to feel complacent I'm excited to share these messages with you and I believe in you so much that I want you to have this information and in this episode we how to unlock your potential with the great David Goggins the five second rule to change your life with Mel Robbins How Rich Devin trained himself to be motivated as a Navy SEAL how to go from rock bottom to living a life of purpose with Lisa Nichols and the mindset model to become limitless with Jim Kwik. And if you're inspired at any moment throughout this episode, make sure to copy and paste the link wherever you're listening to this and text it to a few friends. During this interview, post it on social media. Make sure to tag me as well and we'll have more about each guest that's in here in the show. Notes over@lewishouse.com 11:31 okay, in just a moment, it's time to transform your mindset and create a greater life. I firmly believe that every human was born to create. Even if you don't think of yourself as creative, whether the last time you picked up a paintbrush was in grade school or yesterday, exploring your creativity and being inspired is not limited. And I recently took a Skillshare class from Gary Vee on social media strategy in a noisy online world and I learned so much. Every time Gary's talking about strategy, he's always teaching me one or two things that'll help me grow and improve. And there are tons of other topics to explore through Skillshare besides social media marketing. And you can dive into classes on creative writing, productivity, freelance and entrepreneurship and so much more. Whether you're a dabbler or a pro, a hobbyist or a master, you're creative. Discover what you can make with classes for every skill level. Experience real improvement with with hands on projects and classes designed for real life. Explore your creativity@skillshare.com greatness and get one month free trial of premium membership. That's one month of a premium membership@skillshare.com greatness in this first section, former Navy SEAL David Goggins shares how he went from having nothing and a rough childhood to unlocking his full potential. David's story is incredibly inspiring and is one of the best examples of changing your mindset to change your life. Work out every day. You haven't missed a day.

I did it for the last 20.

20 years of my life. 20 years or this is two years?

No, 20 some years of my life.

Every day you work out.

So I used to take one day off a week I used to take.

One day off a week for the body recover. Right, Makes sense.

But that one day off was an active recovery day where I would get on a trainer and ride for like two hours, but at a zone one heart rate, very low heart rate. And I replace the carbohydrates in my body while I rode. Because the best way to recover for me is to do something at a very low heart rate. Because therefore, your blood's flowing through your body. As your blood's flowing through your body, refuel it with the nutrients. Because then your blood's flowing, the nutrients is going through all your cells in your body. All that glycogen is now flowing at a low heart rate. So it's not burning it, it's refueling it.

Yeah.

So every Sunday used to be that. And it kind of snowballed into. As human beings, we believe, like so many people before I give them a workout plan, they're talking about recovery. Everybody, Everybody that hears me speak, they want to go straight to recovery. Work out first.

Huh?

Work out first before you talk to me about recovery, how to recover. Yeah, work out first. We are always looking for. Like, whenever I talk to people, people take my words and they put it in a way to where they want to feel comfortable. This guy, you know, they want to put you in a box. They want to put a title on you. No, you're putting a title on me to make yourself feel better about yourself. If you read this book of mine and you see where I came from, this person was not built. This person was not made by God. This person. Sorry. This person was built. I made this person. I made this person by diving into the insecurities that life gave me. Because now they're yours. They're yours to own. If you're not smart, call yourself dumb. It's okay, because you are. But take that knowledge of putting yourself down. If you're fat, call yourself fat. I used to be £300. We want to talk so soft to ourselves. We're looking for that recovery day. And that recovery day is everything in your life. Everything in your life is a recovery day. We're looking for it. It's not coming. It's not coming. Get over that recovery day. And that's the mentality I took with me. And what happened through that process was all the frivolous things of life started to float away. I used to tell people lies so they would like me because I was so insecure. When you start to build yourself up and start to have the one thing that we don't have is confidence. Real authentic confidence from hard work. Everything else goes away. You no longer look to other people.

For your self esteem validation.

You now know I walk in a room now and I know the hours and years and decades I put into David Goggins. That's something. It's not on the wall, it's not a trophy on the wall. It's not a medal around your neck. It is actually a feeling in your heart. And people go, why don't you ever smile? I don't have to. Yeah, I do have a stoic look on my face. I'm a very focused person. But the feeling I have in my soul and in my heart, that's why I don't need to smile. I don't need to smile. I don't need you to look at me and say, oh my God, you look happy. Because half of us aren't happy. We're giving you something that we think you want to see. I don't do that anymore. I don't care how you perceive David Goggins. Because through my journey, I figured out the one piece I was missing. I thought it was cars, I thought it was women, I thought it was money, I thought it was everything. The one piece I was missing was me having the courage to face myself. And once you do that on a daily basis, it's not about the running. People are going to be working out. Where I got my work ethic from was the hours I had to spend learning this. When you sit down and you're not smart and you have a disability and you still want to be at the top of your class, I didn't want to skip by when I realized that I can learn through hard work and I can beat the valedictorian in school, but I got poured in 10 hours more a day than he does. Know what kind of strength comes from that when you're sitting down? That guy that, that validator study for an hour and you know, I caught you. I caught you. And I am dumb, but I have the work ethic to catch you. That's where David Gaga's got really invented.

Yeah.

Was at a kitchen table with 20 spiral notebooks that were empty and then three months later down, yeah, they were full. And you can go through that. I still have them in my storage unit. You go through these spiral notebooks of your life and you realize, this is how I learned. This is unbelievable. There's no miles. It's not about the miles. It's that having a discipline every day to say for me to Learn this one math problem. It's gonna take me 10 hours.

Wow.

And that's where it. And you realize through hard work, you can do. You can outwork anybody, no matter how bad they are. But that's the part people don't want to dive into.

Yeah. When someone's lacking confidence in themselves, what's the answer you would give them? If they're like, how do I gain more confidence?

It starts with yourself, man. You got to start diving into those things that you are afraid of. You don't gain confidence by going to the spot that makes you feel good. It could be a false reality. And the second life gives you that challenge. All you want to do is go back to what made you confidence or what gave you confidence. Is that happy spot? No, what gives you confidence? What gave me confidence was spending years at a kitchen table trying to learn how to read and write on my own, realizing I can't learn the way you learn. I can't, but I can learn. What gives you confidence? Not being afraid is overcoming the fear. I used to stutter severely bad, so right now, I don't know how many people are going to watch this. You know what gives me confidence is knowing I no longer care if I sit here and start stuttering to you.

Yeah.

That's what gives me confidence, is facing these things, overcoming them. And maybe not overcoming them every day, but facing them, face them, and face them pretty soon like this.

You know what, man?

This is where it's at. It's not in that comfort zone. It's in the discomfort zone. Is where my confidence is getting built. That's where it's getting built. But people want to. They want an easier answer. Yeah, there has to be an easier way. There's not. I'm sorry. I searched for it my entire life. I did. I lied. I did everything. And I still felt empty. I coach a lot of people nowadays, billionaires, who call me on the phone and say, man, I'm still missing something. It's because they did what they were good at. And they had this beautiful family, two, three houses, cars, everything. Has everything in the world on the outside looking in like, my God, man, how can you be unhappy? I walk around with a backpack with all my stuff in it and no car. And I walk around, happiest person in the world, have nothing. Happy as hell. It's because I found out the whole key to life. It's not in all that you have to face yourself. So many people live to be a hundred years old, and they die miserable, having everything because they never examined. I call it my live autopsy. You never examine this. Happiness, peace, enlightenment. It's all up here, man. It's all up here. If I start talking like this, people are, man, you know.

I don't know.

It's the truth, man.

Yeah, it is true.

It's all up here. You just gotta be willing to go and face it. That's the hard part.

What's your biggest insecurity today?

Not to be arrogant. I don't have one.

What was the last one you had and when was that?

The last one I had was probably. Still me. Me still living. Because I always talk about. I pay rent, so. We used to live in a $7 a month place when I was growing up.

Is this in Buffalo or is this.

This is in Indiana.

Yeah.

So we had a lot of money in Buffalo. And when my mom left my dad, we went to nothing for a period of time before she got on her feet. And that $7 a month place used to be. It was my. It was who I was. I was no one. I was in the sewer. My mom wasn't there. I had nothing. And you always feel like you have nothing. I achieved so much. I was a Navy seal. I'd gone through Ranger school, I've gone through Delta Force selection training. I've done so much. I run 200 miles, pull up records, everything. Learned to read and write, became pretty intelligent. I still was like, man, what is wrong with me? It wasn't until I got real sick and I talk about in the last chapter of that book, I got real sick. And I was about 38 years old. I'm 43 now. And my life got real quiet. I went from running 205 miles in 39 hours to. So I couldn't get out of bed. The doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. But once again, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Why is that?

In that moment when my whole life changed, I went from a guy who worked out every day, trained every day, to a guy who couldn't get out of bed. My life was taken from me. The one thing that kept me going was my training.

Now, you didn't have that.

I didn't have anything.

Now you just had to sit alone. Alone and not train.

And that's what changed me. And that's when I realized I hadn't thought, hadn't taken time to think about what I'd done in my life.

You hadn't reflected yet.

I hadn't reflected. I'd done all these things, but there Was no finish line. I still believe that. But you must have time to reflect. I was just going. I wouldn't even. I finished a race of life and I wouldn't even receive my medal. I go on.

You're like on to the next.

I get in the car and I.

Go, you won't even take the medal.

Gone, don't care about it.

Like I'm not going to waste an hour sitting around for this ceremony.

Most people sit around and that's what they like. They need the ceremony.

If I accomplish something, validation.

I haven't done anything. Let's go, let's go, let's go.

I'm just getting started. I'm just getting started.

That's right. When I started figuring out life that I was leaving so much in the tank, I called my 40% rule. I was leaving so much in the tank. Once I realized, my God, man, I was just dumb fat kid being bullied. And now I'm 180 pound person lost 106 pounds in less than 3 months. Learn to read, learn to do this, learn to do that. I was like, I need more. I was fueling my mind with everything. I never took time to say, my God, you came from this hell and you're here. So those insecurities and this is how I explain it the best way. SEAL training became pretty hard and a lot of guys weren't getting through it. So they designed a SEAL pep prep program.

Like a boot camp for the boot camp.

That's right. And it was two months in my last two years before I retired from the military. They sent me there to train these kids.

Wow.

To get ready for 18, 19, 20 year olds.

Yeah.

Young kids. So when they get to Navy SEALS training, man, they were physical studs. They were running, swimming. I mean they were, they were hybrids.

Wow.

But they get the buds and the same amount of people would quit.

Why is that?

This is why we were training bigger, stronger, faster quitters.

Hmm.

It's not about not the mind.

That's right. We weren't diving into the sewer. Everybody's got a story. We don't share it on social media. We share our nice life on social media. We all have a dungeon. I'm just willing to talk about mine. Most of us aren't willing to talk about it. I want to talk about my dungeon. I wasn't getting into the dungeon of these guys minds. I wasn't building that so called mental toughness. Mental toughness isn't something that you sample. It's something that you live in every Day. So when something hard would happen to these kids, like in Hell Week, it would draw on something that made them very insecure. And they look for comfort. Whenever hardness comes and you don't know what it is, it may be different for you than it is for me. But you go back to your insecurities. And then when you go back to insecurities, you then look for comfort within those insecurities. And we all look for that cookie that your mom used to give you when you were sad. When you were sick, we look for our wife or our husband. We look for comfort. It's in those moments you must retrain your mind to think differently. In hell, I wasn't training them to do that.

Why weren't you training.

I wasn't training myself because at that time, I was doing what I was told. These guys need to meet a standard.

Physical standard.

A physical standard. The physical standard is not what they need to meet. It's a mental standard you must meet in life. So going back to when I was sick, I was hitting the physical standards. I wasn't meeting the mental standard. The mental standard is you must know how far you've come.

Wow.

I wasn't. I had come 8,000 miles from where I started. But if you never know that, you're still in the $7 a month place. When I was sick, I was able to slow it down and reflect back on my entire life. And in that bed when I thought I was dying, because that story is long, that sick portion of my life is long. I didn't care if I died or lived. Because I was, for the first time in my life, happy and at peace. Because I reflected back on where it started.

You said, well, I have come a long way.

That's right. And no one saved me. It wasn't like someone came down here and guided me through life. When you figure this out on your own, the amount of pride and dignity and self respect you have. That's why I walk around the streets with a backpack and just like, I don't need anything else. Yeah, you figure it out by going inside yourself, by callousing over the victim's mentality. You're always a victim, even if you have everything in life, until you realize what you've achieved, you have to first realize what you've achieved. And my mom has accomplished so much in her life since my father, but she hasn't done that one step, really.

She doesn't acknowledge it and reflect on it.

She continues to go back to the dungeon of her past life and live in that space and live in that space versus living the space that she's in now and reflecting back on, my God, this is what I've done with my life.

So have you talked to her about this?

We talk about all the time. And you have to be willing to go there. You have to be willing to really go there. Not. Not surface. I don't live on the surface of anything. Surface is what got me where I was at. It got me from 175 pounds to 300 pounds, telling everybody, I'm good. I don't give a damn, I'm good. No, they're hollow words. A lot of us speak in hollow words. I used to speak in hollow words. I don't do anymore. Everything that comes out of my mouth has substance, is real. And we all have these feelings in our bodies, in our minds and our souls. I act on mine. A lot of us who are afraid of something, we allow our minds to choose the path of least resistance. So we go a different route. I'm afraid of something is telling me, you must do this thing, you must do that. Yeah, you have to go that way. And most of us don't understand that mentality. We go left and we wonder why we haven't fulfilled something in our lives.

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Take the journey that is mapped out and how I look at it is I talk in life like a lot of us in life. Want to take the four lane highway that has road maps and all this other stuff on it. Man tells you where to go. Gas stations. The next 10 miles up you're gonna see a McDonald's or Cracker Barrel. Yeah, it's the easy route. Very few of us want to go to the right side.

That Cracker Barrel is that Midwest life.

That's right.

That's right. That's right. From Ohio.

It's all about it, man. Indiana barrel, cracker barrel everywhere.

Dude. That's amazing. Bringing back memories. This is powerful because I've been telling people this. I've been living that way unknowingly my whole life of like, whatever the thing is I'm afraid of. When I was in high school, I started doing those things and it's just like I'm sick and tired of feeling afraid. So I need to do the things that scare me the most.

That's right.

You know, I've talked about this a lot on the podcast. Tiffany's heard me share these stories. But I was afraid to talk to girls when I was a teenager. I was afraid of dancing. I was afraid of like singing and playing music in front of people. I was afraid of all these different things. And so I said, I want to do this. I'm gonna give myself a challenge every single day until the fear goes away. Sure. And I feel like that's what more of us should be doing. I'm hearing that that's what you how you live your life.

That's all it is, man.

And it helps me feel so much more confident. When you overcome that fear of saying this doesn't have control over me anymore. It's like you can be at such more peace.

It's a hundred percent life most of. Like for instance, I never thought in my wildest dreams I could be a Navy seal. It's until you opened your mind. Open mindedness creates that we all shut down our mind. Like for instance, when I broke the pull up record, everybody around me who heard the pull up record was 4020 pull ups. That's the first thing they did. Oh my God.

4,024 hours.

Or was it's 4,020 pull ups in 24 hour period. The first thing I did versus closing my mind, you're like, oh my God, that's crazy. I went and got a penny.

Say how many is that every minute? Exactly every hour, every second.

Instead of taking life and making it out to be this grandiose thing, start breaking it down. Start breaking it down. And most of us, we live in a box and we don't want to go outside that box at all. Ever. Outside that box is all these possibilities of life. But what we do is we shackle our mind. We are a prisoner in our own mind. That this is all I can do, this is all I'm good at. And we take away the possibilities of you could be this, you could be that, you could be all these things. And I never thought at £300, I could be Navy Seal. So if my mind was shackled, me and you would never meet. There'd be no book, right? There'd be no book, right? There'd be nothing. So what people understand is that they live for themselves. Not knowing that you have the power within yourself to change millions of lives by facing life, by facing yourself. And through that, I would die never knowing that I had the power to change millions of lives. And what haunts me the most? People ask me, what haunts you the most? What haunts me the most is that if I were to die at 300 pounds, let's say I was 75 years old, I got to heaven, and God has a chart like that on everybody's life. God knows all. Let's say that I don't care what you believe in. Doesn't matter. I'm not judging anybody. Let's say my thing is God. You get to heaven, I'm £300, I sit down. I was a cockroach terminated my whole life. And we're sitting down just like this. You're God and I'm David. And he gives me that chart and he says, look at this. Now look at this chart. And on the chart, it has all these different things, but my name's on it. But these things aren't me. I was going to change the world. I was going to set records. I was going to be a Navy seal. I was going to be all these things in the military that I accomplished. You're going to get the VFW Award. You're going to be honored here, honored there. I'm like, God. I was. This isn't me. Like it says, David Goggins. I was an Ecolab guy. I sprayed for cockroaches, and I'm 300 pounds. It said here, I'm 185. It says here, I got a bachelor's and a master's. It says all these things, and God goes, no, that's who you were supposed to be.

Wow.

My biggest fear in life, as if there is a final resting place in this world and there's a final judgment, and you talk to something much bigger than you. I don't want to sit down and have a conversation with someone with something that says, you're in heaven. This is what you should have been on Earth. And are you really in heaven now? Or are you in hell? Thinking about how much I left on the table for fear, for not willing to go over the wall and over the next wall and over the next wall. So in my mind, I Believe that and God knows all. At least I believe that. I want God to be up there right now as we're speaking, writing stuff down, saying, my God, he exceeded even my expectations. That's how I live my life. I now know that there is no cap on the human mind. There's no cap we cap in ourselves.

Wow. Is there a cap on the human body? That's right. Is there one?

I don't believe so, because one thing I found out was I didn't. For several years, I gave myself a way out.

When you were £300 or.

No, I was £300 when I was all the way up Till I was 24 years old, I would climb a mountain. I'd fall back down. I start climbing, I fall back down for the first 24 years of my life. I went to my first hell week, my second hell week, and then my third hell week came in SEAL training. And the co, Captain Bowen, looked at me, I'm on crutches, I'm all jacked up. He says, hey, this is your last time. You're going to go through buds zit. I had several stress fractures. I had double pneumonia. I was jacked up. And he gave me a few months to heal. He said, this is your last time going through. I shouldn't even let you go back through.

Wow.

I started Navy SEAL training with stress fractures. Stress fractures, not shiny splints.

That's hard to finish.

Stress fractures. Starting the hardest training, arguably the hardest training in the world with stress fractures. And this is when I started to not put a cap on the body if the mind is there. Every morning I wake up at 3:30 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning, go to my dive cage, go in there before anybody saw me. I get duct tape. And I would tape from my forefoot all the way up to the middle of my calf, and I would put two black socks on. And so I ran, not using the pivot.

Oh, my gosh.

And I ran my hip flexors. So for the first 45 minutes to an hour, I was in absolute excruciating pain. But what motivated me through that whole process was the fact that this kid came from that I'm in the hardest training in the world in the worst shape of my entire life. What if I can graduate amongst these studs?

Wow.

All these guys around me are studs. They're stallions, they're gladiators in my class. They're all healthy. Most of them. They're not broken like this. They may have some, you know, everybody's sick going to that training. But if I can graduate, it would change everything for me. If I can start the hardest training in the world broken and graduate. So my mind fed off of that. You are now from the weakest man. You are now the hardest man to ever live. If you can do this, if you can do this. Life is one big mind game.

Yeah.

And you're playing it with yourself. Is it true? I don't care.

In this section, best selling author Mel Robbins shares the five second rule that she's become known for that turned her entire life around. And every time I hear this story, it inspires me to bring this practice back into my life. First off.

Yeah, tell me.

Discover the five second rule.

Okay, so 2009, that's when you first.

Tried it or discovered it or.

Oh, it's a total horror show mistake. Yes. Okay, so 2009, I was unemployed and feeling like you.

Unemployed how?

Well, okay.

Too much charisma, too much passion. Yeah.

Because everything's working right now. That's why I'm not like this when things are not working. Ask my husband of 22 years. Well, what had happened is I had had all these career changes and I got into the media business again by mistake. I had a coaching business and Inc Magazine was writing an article about coaches and they featured me in it and CNBC called.

Got it.

And that led to me doing some stuff with cnbc and I spent a year still coaching people and then doing some stuff for cnbc. And then FOX called and they were interested in having me host a television show. Now you got to understand, I'm from North Muskegon, Michigan. I mean, the media business, Fox, la, the closest thing I had ever seen to a celebrity. Lewis was the Muskegon Lumberjacks. The farm team. Right, right. From our. For the Pittsburgh Penguins. Yeah, my dad. Yeah, my dad was the hometown doc for the hockey team there.

Right, right, right.

So I thought the mayor was a celebrity. Wow. My life's about to change. I'm about to be a celebrity.

Wow.

We're gonna solve all. This is amazing. You know, So I was originally going to be hosting a show for Fox where we were making over small businesses.

Nice.

Yeah, Pretty cool, right? We show up, we like do extreme home makeover for the office. Everybody's happy. We all know that doesn't solve business problems, but it makes for a nice television show. By the time I get to la, they've changed the format. It's now called Someone's Gotta Go. And I'm gonna be firing people on national Television from real jobs.

Wow. Uh huh. That sounds fun.

Horrible. Plus we haven't told the offices that this is what we're doing.

Oh my gosh.

So you show up in Act 1 and you've got everybody all like this because they're gonna think they're gonna get new Ikea furniture and a paint job and this is gonna be the best thing in the world for their small business. Now meanwhile, I'm a fourth generation small business owner, so that's like my people grew up at a kitchen table with farmers and you know, my mom at a retail store and my other grandparents were bakers. And so when it comes to like the heart and soul and what's so important when you launch your own business and how personal it is, I mean this was like gut wrenching. So I show up. The first act, you kick out the owner of the company, who then freaks out, then all the employees freak out. Act number two, we announce that somebody's getting fired. And then that's, that's the, the bad news. The good news is that I'm not picking. We're going to have you vote somebody out. So it's Survivor in an office place.

Oh my goodness.

So when, when I learn all this, I have a panic attack even though I'm on Zoloft and I call the guy that got me the gig and say, you got to get me out of this. Like, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. And he said, well, I'm sorry, but they've already cast the entire show and you're out there for five weeks and you don't have a choice, they're going to sue you. And I said then fine, get me some Xanax because I don't think I can get through this thing. Like, this is awful. Luckily we taped two episodes and legal tabled it. But here was the problem. I was attached to the show and I only got paid if the show was shooting. And being an entrepreneur, I also kind of, yes, put all my energy into this, shut down the coaching thing. Really thought that. It also kind of negotiated a deal that was sort of a back end deal, thinking I'm a, you know, entrepreneur, always thinking about, gotta have a piece of the action. Yeah, of course, yeah, that was a dumb move. And I was in a contract for a year while they figured out what to do.

So you couldn't do another show. Yeah.

So, you know, I just felt like I had made a huge mistake and I felt really embarrassed and I didn't know at the age of 41. What I should be doing with my life. And while it's neat that I had jumped careers so many times, I started to feel like somebody that actually wasn't successful at all because I didn't have a career track, I had a bunch of jumps from one thing to another. Now, looking back, it makes perfect sense. But standing in the middle of the mess, it just felt like everything was caving in. Probably just like when you were sleeping on your couch, feeling injured. And like everything I thought that was about to happen isn't happening now. Meanwhile, my husband had opened up a restaurant business. It had been his dream. He worked in high tech and came home one day after getting laid off and said, I. I'm never going to get on a plane and do a PowerPoint presentation for a company I don't care about our own. And I said, great, what's your plan? And he said, I'm going to open a pizza restaurant. And I looked at him and I said, was there a trust fund that was part of this marriage that I was unaware of because I'm not quite sure how it was.

Did someone die? You got an insurance policy?

And he said, no. And I then said the most famous lines of our 22 marriage. 22 year marriage. Louis. I looked at him and I said, listen, buddy, inspiration is for strangers. You get your back to that job and you pay the mortgage and you forget this dream. You're not going to. Well, because change is scary.

Yeah.

So we fought, and he won. And the first one was a real home run.

He opened a pizza store.

Oh, he did? Yeah. 40. 40 seats right outside of Boston, Massachusetts. He and his best friend, and they won Best of Boston. It was incredible. What do you do? And everything they did on the first one. So what do you do when everything's working? Let's go all chips in. Let's put in the home equity line. Let's put in the. The kids, college savings. Let's. And family. And because you're so excited, you think it's going to work. So you go big, big, big. Well, the second one did not work at all. And it did not work at all so badly that when it was finally closed, it was close to an $800,000 loss. And it meant our entire home equity line. Kids, college, savings, everything went right down with it. That was right when I lost the Fox show. So I'm unemployed. The liens start hitting the house. The phone starts ringing all the time, and it's collections, calls. So you unplug the phone.

That would stress me Out.

Well, you just unplug the phone. Oh, my God. I mean, that's how you deal with that. But I remember two things from that period in my life that were really painful. And one was having to call the town and tell them that we could not afford the 175 bucks for our sixth grader to play soccer, so we needed to pull her out. And I remember there being times because I was so afraid to look at the checking account that I would stand at the grocery store and items would scan, and I could just feel that wave of anxiety rising, thinking, I don't think the check card's gonna go through. And so I would stand there. I always had an excuse, and it was to look at the person and go, oh, that's strange. It just worked at the gas station.

Oh, my gosh.

Because what would have been more empowering is to probably say, oh, well, I guess I don't have the money for this. Let's take this, this, and this. And just kind of like the easiest thing to do is to tell the truth. But I was so filled with shame. So I started to develop this habit of hitting the snooze button. Because what would happen is the alarm would go off in the morning, and the first thing I would think about is all the problems that we had and how awfully things had gone off the tracks.

You didn't want to deal with them?

No. And I also didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't think I could. And this goes back to the feelings like you. You think that you need to feel confident or courageous in order to get started. You don't. You actually just have to start. And that's the riddle of life. That lying in bed, hoping that you wake up some morning motivated to change. That's not the answer. You actually have to learn how to push yourself. You have to learn how to. How to leverage the power of your decisions. And you've got to learn how to take action when you don't feel like it. Because every morning when I woke up, I did not feel confident. I felt like a loser. I felt like the world's worst parent. I felt like I had failed at every single turn. I did not know if Chris and I could pull out of this spiral. I did not know if we were going to go bankrupt and lose the house and move from our community. I did not know if our marriage would survive. I knew I wanted it to. And see, this is the knowledge action gap. You can know what you want, you can know what you should Be doing. But how do you make yourself do it when the feelings and the motivation isn't there, when all you got is fear? And so every night, I would. I would lie in bed and I would say to myself, all right, that's it, Mel. Tomorrow, it's the new you. Tomorrow, you're going to wake up and be motivated. You're going to. You're going to get up, you're going to exercise like everybody says you should. You're going to meditate, you're going to get those kids on the bus. You're going to screw Fox. You're going to look for a job. You're going to cold call Cox Media, and you're going to. You're going to do auditions. Come on, girl. Let's go, let's go, let's go. You're gonna take a cold shower.

Whoo.

You know, here we go. And I meant it when I was saying it. Maybe it was the alcohol that was talking, but. But then I would wake up and I didn't feel any of those things, so I would hit the snooze. And I would hit the snooze. Now, why was I hitting the snooze when I knew it wasn't the right decision? I'm gonna tell you why. And this is something that I was blown away by when I discovered it. You don't make decisions with your goals. You don't make decisions with your prefrontal cortex. You don't make decisions with logic. Do you know how we make decisions? I didn't invent this. A neuroscientist by the name of Damasio, who does his research in Brazil, who gave an incredible TED Talk and wrote about this forever and ever and ever. We make decisions with feelings. 95% of our decisions are made by how you feel in the moment. And that is the problem. You need to take control of the moment and leverage the power of your decisions and make them up here. Because when I was lying in bed, I wasn't saying to myself, I should get up because that's going to help me start my day. Right? I was saying, do I feel like getting up?

No, you don't.

No. Do you feel like making that cold call? No, you don't. Do you feel like doing that third set of reps? No, you don't. Do you feel like having that hard conversation? No, you don't. Do you feel like ending this relationship, whether it's in business or in your life, that is sucking you dry? No, you don't. We make decisions based on our feelings. And that is robbing you of joy and opportunity. And it is blinding you from the fact that all how you change your life is 15 second decision at a time, one push at a time. And if you, if you accept the fact that you may never feel ready and you may never feel motivated and you may never feel confident, you may never feel courageous, and that's okay, but you can still push yourself forward. What happens over time is as you start to see yourself becoming the person that takes action, that you start to see yourself becoming the kind of person that speaks even though your voice is shaking. You're the kind of person that, that, that has a bias toward moving instead of a bias toward thinking. Guess what happens? You build the skill of confidence and courage. And so what happened for me is I was stuck, Louis. I mean, I was so stuck. I was on. I mean, we were heading straight for divorce. We were heading for bankruptcy. I knew I wanted to change things. And so one night I see this commercial. This is the stupidest story on the planet, but this is what happened.

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This commercial and you know, again, I also was drinking too much. I mean, I probably had a couple Manhattans in me. That's my drink. I'm from the Midwest, just like you. All right, little Manhattan there. Bourbon. And there was a rocket ship launching on a commercial. Yeah. And I had this instinct, this innovation, this disruptive idea, right? Oh, my God, Mel, that's the answer. Tomorrow morning you're gonna launch your ass out of bed like a rocket ship. You're gonna move so fast you can't even think about your problems. Dumb, right? Totally dumb. Sees, like, this is the dumbest idea I've ever heard. I cannot believe I have this chick on my pocket.

I understand it. You got to get moving first.

Yes.

That's the thing. You just got to wake up at 6am or whatever it is and go into the gym. When you're in the gym, you're gonna start moving the first weight and then you'll start moving the second weight. Yes.

Actually, people, people use the five second rule at the gym. Because you know how much time people waste at the gym standing around thinking.

About the next thing probably 70% of the time.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

So.

So the next morning, the alarm goes off and nothing had changed in my life. I woke up to the lean on the house, the fighting with Chris, the unemployment, the lack of confidence, the lack of courage that, like, the whole thing. But I did something I had never done before. I went 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Just like NASA. I actually counted. And then I stood up and I was like, what the hell just happened?

What?

That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The next morning I Used it again. It worked. The next morning, I used it again. It worked. And then I started to notice something. And this is one of those things. So we have an 11 year old son who has dyslexia. And when they finally diagnosed him, it was as if. Of course it was as if. Like, how could we have possibly missed this? Are we the worst parents in the world? I mean, the kid can barely write, he can't cut his food, he doesn't like. No wonder he doesn't do team sports. It was right under our nose. And what I'm about to tell you is right under everybody's nose. There's a five second window between the instincts, the shoulds, the urges, the inner wisdom, the things that can change your life. If you listen to it. Got a 5 second window. From the moment you feel that instinct to move. And if you don't, your brain is actually designed to kill it. Five seconds is all you have. The second you hesitate, it's actually. And you feel yourself hesitating. That is a moment of huge power. Because what's happened is you've just started to pull back from something that you need to lean into. And if you count backwards, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And this is the neuroscience behind why this stupid little trick works. Counting is an action. Counting backwards requires focus. It's also not a habit for you yet. So when you feel yourself hesitate, you're triggering your mind that something's up. Like Lewis didn't hesitate when he pulled on his pants. He didn't hesitate when he's drinking his coffee. He didn't hesitate when he walked out the door to the gym, but now he's hesitating to make that call. Your mind now goes into a cognitive bias called the spotlight effect. It magnifies whatever it was that you hesitated doing the moment. The moment? Yeah. Like all of a sudden you're like, I don't feel like it. Like, I don't. I don't know, maybe I'll do it later. And your mind is doing it because your mind's trying to protect you. Hesitation signals a red flag to your mind that something's up. Just that small hesitation. It's a habit that we all have. Should you hesitate if you're getting a tattoo? Yes. Should you hesitate if you're gambling? Yes. Should you hesitate if you are signing a legal document? Yes. You need your prefrontal cortex for those things. You need to interrupt it. Make a power, make a decision. Should you hesitate on making a phone call? No. Should you hesitate on speaking up in a Meeting. No. Should you hesitate when you feel yourself starting to procrastinate and you know you got work that you should get done? No, you shouldn't hesitate at all. Should you hesitate in saying the thing that you really feel in your heart? No, you shouldn't. Should you hesitate and edit yourself when you're talk? No, you shouldn't. But we've all trained ourselves to. So it's actually this habit of hesitating. You start catching yourself. It's a huge moment of power because you have a decision to make and you got to make it. In the next five seconds, are you gonna go on autopilot and get trapped in your mind or are you gonna. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And awaken your prefrontal cortex and drive forward. So I started to use this rule as I noticed that every day, all day long, I had these moments of inner wisdom where I would know that I needed to pick up the phone and stop isolating myself. I would know that I needed to call a bunch of media companies and start auditioning for radio show hosting gigs. I knew that I should get on, get out of bed on time. I knew I should stop myself before I snapped at Chris. Right. Self monitor. I knew I should not feel, let the frustration be the things that was driving me. And so I started to use the rule all day long whenever I felt this, I should do this. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And I would make myself do it. And slowly, literally five seconds at a time, my entire life start started to change and my husband used it in his business and he and his business partner dove in. They went on to open seven more restaurants. I went on to launch and sell two businesses and get recruited by CNN and join their team. I had a syndicated radio show that ended up winning the Gracie Award, which is kind of the Female Media Awards for the number one talk show in the country. And you know, I never intended to tell Anybody about the 5 second rule, first of all, because it's stupid, right? I mean, come on, count backwards as the dumbest.

Not stupid to me though. Anything that works, works for me.

That's true.

I mean, I'll take any stupid thing.

That's true. And so I. But I also was like, how do you start talking about something like that? Right?

Yeah.

So I was asked to give a TED Talk like six years ago. And Ted, six years ago, not the brand that it was today. They weren't even putting the talks online yet.

Really?

Yeah, the TEDx talks are not online yet. And so that was the first speech I'd ever given in my life. If you want to see what somebody looks like having a panic attack for 21 minutes straight, watch that speech. I was backstage and it was like one PhD after another going out there. I'm like, scientists, how have I gotten myself into this is the dumbest thing. And so at the very end, I wasn't even planning on talking about it. I say, oh, by the way, there's this thing I do.

That's it.

I don't even explain it. And you know why I didn't explain it, Louis? I didn't know why it worked.

So you didn't have the science or the research.

You're just 00. And then something crazy happened. They put that talk online a year later, and people started to write. We've heard from more than 100,000 people in 90 countries that have written to us that are using the rule in ways big and small to change their lives, to change their marriages, to change their thinking patterns, to grow their businesses. We know of 11 people that have stopped themselves from killing themselves in the moment. There's a gentleman that we talk about in the book, and you can see his social media posts in London. He was a veteran and he was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. And he boarded a ferry with the intention of jumping overboard. And he got to the railing and he was standing there and his inner wisdom kicked in. And this is another thing I want everybody watching to understand. I don't care what you're facing or how low you get, your inner wisdom is always there. It is. And the thing is, is that we often don't listen to it. And so he's standing there intending to kill himself, and that inner wisdom kicks in and he remembers the five second rule. And he goes, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And he turns and physically moves away from the railing and finds the first person working on the ferry and tells him that he's suicidal. Saved his life. He saved his life because he listened to the inner wisdom. And this is the other thing I love about this rule. It's not something to think about. It's a tool to use. So the part of the problem with a lot of the advice that I've found for me personally is that a lot of advice is all about kind of doing mental battle. And if I go upstairs, I'm behind enemy lines and I tend to get hijacked, right? So I love this tool because 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 interrupts those patterns. It actually prompts the part of the brain that I need in order to change. And it makes Changing easier because I've now got my mind working for me instead of against me. And it gets me out of my head. And so I'm super excited to share this rule with people because I now know not only that it's working, just not. Not for me, it's working for people around the world. And you know, in the book, it took me three years to write it. It's all the science behind the rule. It's got more than 150 social media posts in it. So you see stories from around the world of people using it to end procrastination, to build confidence, to deepen their relationships, to launch businesses, to explode the sales. Why does it help with sales? I'll tell you why. Because you can't sell by thinking. Selling is about action. We have, we have groups from companies around the world, sales teams that put 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 up on the wall. I'm sure they hate me.

Let's go.

Yes. Because what cold calling, It's a momentum thing. If you stop and think, the phone is not getting, the dialing is not happening. When you're thinking.

Yeah. If you're thinking about all those no's you've been getting.

Yes.

You're not gonna want to do it again. It doesn't feel good.

Yes. And if you're in the middle of a negotiation or you're in the middle of a really difficult conversation, and again, remember what we said earlier, you cannot control your feelings that rise up, but you can always control how you think.

In this section, brain expert Jim Kwik shares his mindset model for becoming limitless with your learning and knowledge. Every time I hear Jim speak, I feel like he's putting my brain to the test. And I know you'll find it just as valuable. There's a message that you give or a model for how to become limitless. And if we don't follow this model, then something's going to be broken in our life. Isn't that right?

Yeah. Does this model really is a framework for learning anything faster? So for people who are listening and watching and they want to learn a language, they want to learn Mandarin, music, martial arts, management, marketing, any skill. I think if there's one skill to Master in the 21st century, it's our ability to learn faster. Like if there was a genie, and a genie could grant you any one wish, but only one wish, what would you wish for? If there was only one wish, what would you wish for?

You know, most people would say money or this or that. But you think learning is The, I.

Mean, I think a lot of people.

I think being the Matrix, like downloading the Matrix to where I can learn Jiu jitsu in a second.

Exactly.

If I can learn a language in a second, if I have this skill.

So I think the hack a lot of people would do is if it was any one wish, they would wish for more wishes, right? They would ask for infinite wishes. So the equivalent, if I was your learning genie and I could grant you any one wish to learn any subject or any skill, just like become a master at it. The equivalent. What's the equivalent of the answer of asking for infinite wishes? It would be learning how to learn. Because if you can learn how to learn, the world is yours. Especially today. Because nobody who's listening and watching gets paid for, for their brute strength. It's their brain strength. It's not your muscle power, it's completely your mind power. And the challenge is your brain doesn't come with an owner's manual. It's not user friendly. And that's the reason why I wrote this book. But the Limitless model is an explanatory schema, a framework for learning anything faster. And not only that, but really for accessing our human potential. Because I think if there's one infinite limitless resource on planet Earth, its human capability, there's no limit on our determination, there's no limit to our imagination, there's no known limit to our creativity. And yet we're not shown how to be able to access that. And so this framework is a three part framework. And what I would offer everyone to do is I love to turn this into like a little master class, make it really engaging and so don't listen passively because we don't learn through. The human brain doesn't learn through consumption. It learns through, through creation and creativity and getting involved in things. I know a lot of us learn faster when we actually roll up our sleeves and do it. So I would encourage everybody as they're working out or cleaning the house or whatever they're doing at the same time to try to get involved in this.

Well, I think as an athlete I can speak to that because for me in school it's really hard to remember or learn things because I didn't feel like I was participating in a way that worked for me. But as an athlete playing basketball, when a coach was, would tell me, okay, I want you to watch this video and then automatically shoot in a certain way with your hand positioned this way and follow through this way just by watching a video and not actually Implementing and practicing it. He would take me out on the court and we would practice it and do it over and over again. And he would correct me. And I would learn through muscle memory as opposed to just watching something and then thinking I can do it without actually practicing. So putting it into practice, practice quickly for me is how I learned sports and it's how I try to apply it in other areas of my life as opposed to just, I'm gonna learn and then, okay, I know it, I feel like I need to work in it.

I feel you get dirty.

You know what I mean?

I do, I do. I think a lot of people, this is the thing. It's not how smart you are. It's. It's not literally not how like how smart you are. It's how are you smart? It's not how smart you are, how smart your kids are, or how smart your business partner is. It's how are they smarter? How are you smart?

What's the difference?

So you are smart through experiential learning. Like in the book we talk about how are you? Exactly. It's not how smart somebody is, like their IQ or the intelligence, it's how are they smart? And it's always context dependent. And so some people learn. We talk about learning styles in the book. It's like if have you ever been interested? Just like you were saying, you're interested in a topic but you're not getting it. Because sometimes the way you perform to learn is different than the way the teacher prefers to teach. And it's like you're two ships in the night and you pass each other and you don't even realize there's no connection. You don't even realize the other one is there. And it feels uncomfortable. Like if I asked everybody, as an exercise to take out a piece of paper, I encourage everyone to take notes because I'm going to drop a lot of like, practical methods. When you're taking. If you were to write your name first and last on a piece of paper, actually you could do it right now, first and last. And everyone encourages you to just to do this or imagine you're writing your name first and last on a piece of paper. And then when you're done, I want you to switch hands and in your opposite hand, right below it, write your first and last name with your opposite.

I don't even know if it takes me 10 minutes.

And so while people are doing it, you'll notice when you're doing it with the opposite hand as we're doing it. That's actually pretty good that if I was to ask you which one is which one was easier, first or second? And you would say the first was easier. Which one is more comfortable, first or last?

The first one.

The first one. So not only was it faster, it was easier. And then which one was higher quality. Let's check that out.

This. The first one.

Hopefully the first one's higher quality also as well. And so here's the thing that means the second time it took longer. The second time it also was not as comfortable. And the second time also, the quality wasn't quite as good. And here's the thing, when I'm saying it's how you learn. Some people are trying to learn something with the opposite hand, so it takes longer, it feels weird, and the quality is not quite as good as opposed to if you're using your dominant hand.

So how do we know how to learn with our dominant hand as opposed to the opposite hand?

Yeah. And that's a metaphor for how we like to take in information. Some people like to. To learn by reading. Some people, they just cannot get through a book, though. They have to listen to that audio or that podcast, other people.

Or watch someone lecturing it or talking about it.

Exactly. And so we all have different styles, and it's not right or wrong. Now we can actually improve our ability to read. We actually can improve our ability to listen and apply. So if there are areas where we feel weak, you know, this book is a guidebook to be able to level up those areas. So you could be more of a whole brain learner also as well. But really, when it comes to accelerated learning, it's not, again, how smart you are, it's how are you smart? And that honors us. And it takes the judgment out. Sometimes in school, it's like the top 10% get A's, another 10% get B's. And then 80% were like, you and I, it's like, it's like we're. It's like we're failing school as opposed to the way school maybe is failing us. Because school teaches you what to learn, what to focus on, what to think, what to remember, but not how to learn and how to think.

What teaches you how to think and learn in one way?

Exactly. And when I talk about, in the book, I talk about the four super villains that are holding you back in your work, in your schooling, in your life is driven by technology. But one of them is digital deduction, where we're depending on technology to tell us what. What to think. We're not Even using the children right now, they're finding that their reasoning abilities, their ability to analyze critical thinking is not as sharp as where it should be. Because. Because of technology, because technology is doing the thinking for us and our mind. I'm going to say this repeatedly, is like a muscle. It's use it or lose it. And just like when you go, you have your personal trainer to make your muscles stronger, more energized, more flexible, more pliable, you know, more you want your mental muscles to be stronger, more energized, more pliable, more, more flexible. And so many people refer to me as a brain coach because what I do is I train your brain because I think we're in the millennium of the mind, and it's really about mental fitness, Our ability to adapt, our ability to think, our ability to solve problems. And this really is everything. When people see me wearing brain shirts all the time or pointing to my brain, the reason why I do that is because what you see, you take care of. You see your hair, you take care of your hair, you see your skin, you take care of your skin, you see your clothing, you take care of.

Your clothing, you don't see your brain.

Exactly. And that controls everything. And so when I point to the brain or honor with their shirts, just like people have their emotions on their sleeve, you know, I have my brain on my chest because I want to put it forefront to remind people to love their brain, to care for their brain.

Yeah, I think it's, I mean, that's why a lot of people, doctors and nutritionists are talking about gut health. It's like we can't see it, but we can start to feel rashes or we can start to feel the effects of it. I think it's also. Heart health is a big thing right now. It's just like the emotional health, self care, self love, you know, mental health and emotional health kind of together.

And I love your work because you bring that to everybody, to the world. And it's obvious all connected. I talk about in the book, you know, there's this hard intelligence and also your, your gut, as you mentioned, a lot of people call it your second brain. It's the second highest concentration of nerve cells, really. And so, and there's, and it's connected too. And sometimes your, what you eat affects what, how you think. We know that because of the guests we've had on our shows and everything else, that when you eat junk food, which is not, it's not really a thing, there's junk and then there's food.

The sugar and there's food.

Exactly. And what you eat matters, especially for your gray matter. I remember in our previous episode we did years ago, I show people how to memorize the brain foods and all of the best neuroprotective. This area of neuro nutrition. It's really fascinating that your brain has different nutritional requirements than the rest of your body. But I'm going back to the limitless model. There are three keys to reaching your goals. And this is, this is my distinction here because originally I remember years ago when you prompted me to write this book. You're like, Jim, you know, it's been, you know, over two decades. You gotta do something, put something in this book. And so because, you know, fundamentally I'm a reading teacher and you know, somebody has decades. Why I love reading. If somebody has decades of experience and they put it into a book like you, and all of a sudden people could read that book in a few days. They could download decades into days. And readers are leaders. We know that reading is to your mind, what exercises your body. It's the best mental fit.

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Model as an exercise, what I want everyone to do, so it's not hypothetical because in part of the book, I demystify the seven lies of learning. There are seven lies that hold you back to learning. And one of them is knowledge is power. We hear that all the time. I've even said it also as well. But when we think about it, is it really true? Right? Is knowledge just knowing something give you power? No, not unless you act on it. Not unless you apply it. So knowledge times action equals. Equals power. And so I would encourage everybody, as you're listening to, to this to take immediate action. And there are three questions I want you to ask as you're listening to this episode to make it very valuable. And I would encourage you to write these down. Three master questions. You know, we were talking about some of the famous actors that I work on before we started filming and we're, you know, Will Smith did the COVID endorsement of the book that says, you know, Jim Kwik, you know, gets the maxim out of me as a human being. I've learned so much from this, this man. Just being around so many, around clients. And what did you learn from Will? So one of the things is this, this idea. We were in Toronto and I help actors speed read scripts, help them to memorize their lines faster. I mean, you imagine like 30 pages of scripts. There's a lot of information.

I can't remember a sentence.

There's a lot, right? And some of them have their strategies. And no matter how great somebody is, you know this because you study, you make, you know, your life about studying and researching greatness. It's. They always know there's another level and they get really good at the fundamentals and the basics. But one of the things, when we're, when we're there, we spent the day together and it was winter time in Toronto. They were filming from 6pm to 6am which can you imagine, like, so hard, like over nighttime, that's very difficult. But during the day, I went. We went through an exercise, and I believe so in there, I talk about how we have 50 to 70,000 thoughts a day, right? And these thoughts are controlling our lives. And a lot of those thoughts are questions that we ask ourselves. You know, thinking is that process of asking and answering questions. And if people are asking, is that true? Notice you had to ask a question to define if it's true or not, right? And there's certain questions we ask more than any other question. So here's the thing. I talk about dominant questions that you have. One, two, three questions that you ask a lot. At end, the. And I want everyone to think about what your dominant questions are, including you. And I'll give you a couple examples to get you started. So, for example, one of my friends, we went through this exercise of meditating and writing, journaling down. We found out her dominant question is, how do I get people to like me? How do I get people to like me? Now, she asked that question all the time. And you don't know anything about her. You don't know her age, you don't know her background, you don't know what she does for a living. You know, she looks like, you know where she lives. You don't know anything about her, but you know a lot about her. If you asked yourself, how do I get people to like me hundreds of times a day? What, what's her personality? What's her personality going to be like, what's her life gonna.

Well, I guess it could be. It could be either side of the spectrum. She could be super outgoing and super adventurous to try to get people to be more attracted to her, or she could be super shy and introverted because she's so worried about what people think about her. So that's the first thing I thought of. But I'm not sure if that's true.

And it's absolutely true. She actually does both of those things.

Really?

I mean, if you ask yourself, how do I get people to like me, Then what are you doing? You're people pleasing all the time. You're a sycophant just saying yes to everything. You people take advantage of you because you're martyring yourself. Because they're always trying to do. They're making themselves less than. Or their personality is never consistent because their personality changes.

The chameleon. They change for people.

Exactly. And you know all that about her, and you only know one question she asks herself, and that's one of her dominant questions. I would offer everybody who's listening to this. What do you think your dominant question is? Because questions are the answer. You know this from the work that you do in high performance and greatness, that the questions you ask determine what you focus on. You have part of your brain called the reticular activating system, RAS for short. And it's your filtering system. So at any given time, there's a billion stimuli that we could be paying attention to. And primarily, your brain is a deletion device. It's trying to keep information out. Otherwise you would go crazy, Right. If you paid attention to everything. So what gets in? So, for example, years ago, my little sister started sending me emails and postcards and pictures. A photograph of a very specific kind of dog. It was a pug dog. You know those men in black dog, right? Yes, exactly. Very smushy faces. They're very compliant. You could dress them up as ballerinas and they don't care. And she starts. And I didn't know why. So my question was, like, why is she sending me these pictures all the time? That became a quite a dominant question of the day. And then I realized her birthday was coming up. So she's a smart marketer, right? Planting those seeds. And here's the magic, though. I started seeing pug dogs, Lou, Everywhere. Everywhere. I would go to the grocery store, I'd be checking out, and I swear to you, woman's carrying a pug dog at the register. I would be running and jogging in my neighborhood, and somebody's walking six pug dogs. Now, my question for everybody is, did these pug dogs magically appear all of a sudden in the world? No, they were always there, but they were not. I wasn't paying attention to them because they weren't important, because I wasn't asking that question. Once you ask a question, you start to pay attention to those things, and that focus determines how you feel, determines your behaviors. And primarily, it's so interesting. It's kind of like social media. There's an algorithm to your mind, like there's an algorithm to Facebook and Instagram. That what you engage with the most you like, and you share, you comment, you start seeing more of those kind of things, right? And so just like your mind, once you start engaging with, if you start watching all this news about fear and all the things that are going on, you start paying attention and your mind just starts focusing automatically. It becomes a reaction, a reflex, and.

You start to attract more of the fear and anxiety or worry that's in the world that's being posted very much. So you start to subscribe to whatever that is to receive more of it.

Exactly as you're thinking about it. So just like on social media, if you start just liking all the cat stuff and everything else, they'll just start feeding you cat stuff. And same thing with negativity and same thing with opportunity also as well. So the questions make a difference. So questions are the answer.

What are the two questions you've been that are dominant in your mind over the last five years? The most.

Yeah. So for learning, because I grew up with the broken brain, many people know my story from the last episode when they see me do these demonstrations at summit series or, you know, events you.

And I have remembering a thousand people's names, right?

Ten minutes, all of that kind of stuff. I say that I don't think do this to impress you. I do this to express to you what's possible. Because the truth is we could all do that and a whole lot more. We just weren't taught, if anything, we're taught a lie that somehow our intelligence is fixed, like our shoe size. But I do it as a demonstration because I grew up with learning difficulties, right? I had my brain injury when I was five. I fell, had a very bad fall when I was in kindergarten. Rushed to the hospital before. I was curious and very energized, my parents would say. But then I. I became very shut down. And my superpower growing up was being invisible. It was shrinking because I didn't want the spotlight. I didn't want to be called on. So I was literally, physiologically I was always trying to look smaller to protect myself so teachers wouldn't call on me or I wouldn't be bullied or something like that.

I would do that as well, except I was just a giant in the class. So I had to do. I always picked on.

So for me, I would actually be sitting behind you and I would guaranteed no one would be able to see me. But going back to my question, my question became all the time. First of all, when I was nine years old, I was slowing the class down and a teacher pointed to me and said, that's the boy with a broken brain. And that label became my limit. And so we have. Think about when you're listening to this, what are the labels that we put on ourselves? It's like we're not born, we're born with a blank slate, right? But through experience, through expectations of other people, through our environment, we learned that we are limited. And the good news is we can unlearn it. And that's, that's, that's the point of the book. But because I was in the broken state, I would always ask myself, you know, you know, why am I, why, why am I broken? Why am I the stupid one? I started getting answers of why I'm so stupid, right? Every time I did badly on a test, I'd be like, oh, because I have the broken brain, right? If I was in pick in sports, I'd be like, oh, because I'm the broken one. And that became my self talk. Adults have to be very careful with their external words because they become a child's internal words. But later I started getting so frustrated, I started asking, getting curious and when you're curious, you start to ask different questions. I was like, why, why is that person so? Why are they so smart? And how come I'm studying three times harder and getting less grades than, than them, right? And I started getting answers. My primary question started getting. My dominant question ended up being like, how do I make this better? But the three questions that I focus on and let me tell you first what will's is Will Smith's. One of his dominant questions when we went through this exercise is how do I make this moment even more magical? How do I make this moment even more magical? It used to be every moment or like an actual moment, this moment, any moment. And it shows up right in his, in his life. Because later that night when we're filming was like two o' clock in the morning, and his family, we're all outside for the superhero movie that many people know of. And it was really cold because it was in Toronto and it was winter time. And we're all just waiting and just waiting and waiting and waiting because people think that. And you meet all these people all the time on your show, and they think it's so glamorous.

Just hurry up and wait.

Exactly. And I asked him this question because I believe genius leaves clues. I was like, you know, how do you. How do you prepare? How do you get ready? When the director. You're just sitting here for hours, and then the director calls on you, how do you get ready? And he was like, jim, I don't have to get ready. I stay ready. And I'm like, wow, that's good to be Will Smith.

It's hard to stay ready for six hours.

Exactly. But that's just who he is, because I believe the life you live are the lessons you teach. The life you live are the lessons you teach others. Going back to his Dominic question, his family was there also at the same time visiting the set. And, you know, from West Philly, you know, the song, and we're all outside and shivering. And when he wasn't shooting, he would bring us blankets. He would make hot chocolate and bring it to us. He would crack jokes. He would live that. That dominant question. Because the life he lives, he like, how do I make this moment even more magical? Now, before, it was like, how do I make this moment magical? Then we played with it, like, even more magical, presuming it is already magical and amazing. And so these questions we ask are very important. Now, there are three questions. When I said there's turning knowledge into power that I want everyone to obsess about, I mean, this will make you a master. And if you get it, this is it. Three questions to turn knowledge into power. Because knowledge alone is potential power. Number one, how can I use this? When you're listening to this podcast, moving forward, every time you listen to it, I want you to ask yourself, how can I use this? Get obsessed about this. Like, even write it down. And this is where your mind can be very creative. Because in here, I teach a power of note taking. Because people don't realize this. When you listen to a podcast or you go to, you know, a summit or an event or have a great conversation with somebody, within two days, 80% of it is gone. We forget it. They call it the forgetting curve. And one of the ways to retain it is to. By taking notes. Exactly what you're doing now, I encourage people to take notes. A very specific way is to take put a line right down the page and on the left side of the page I want you to take notes. And on the right side I want you to make notes. So on the left side of the page you're taking notes, you're going to list the right, you're capturing information. You're like, this is how Jim remembers name. This is how Jim reads a book a day or whatever it is. So you're on the left side you're capturing, but on the right side you're creating. Now that's a subtle difference. On the left side you're note taking, on the right side you're note making. What's the difference again? On the left side you're taking notes, you're writing down the quotes and the strategies, the processes. But on your right side, what you're doing, the right side, creativity. Instead of your mind being distracted when you're listening, have it be distracted on, focused on, how can I use this? On the right side is where you're writing your impressions of what you're learning. How can I use this? Another great question, second dominant question I would ask is not only how can I use it? Because you come up with all these answers just like I see you start seeing pug dogs everywhere. It's like, oh, this is how I could use this in my relationship. This is how I could use it, you know, in my career. Second question I would ask is one, why must I use this? Why must I use this? You know, we know one of the people that endorsed my book, he's on your show is Simon Sinek. And you know, one of my favorite books, I'm going to mention a lot of books, including your own. Start with, you know, his is start with why? Right? And so why must I use this? So once you have all these ideas of how can I use this? Why must I use this? Because if you don't have the reasons, you won't get the results. Results. Right.

You won't care enough about it.

Exactly. Reasons reap results. I'm gonna give a lot of people a lot of quickisms here because it goes from your head to your heart to your hands. You could affirm things in your head all day, set goals in your head all day, but if you're not acting with your hands, you're procrastinating, putting things off. Check in with your second age, which is your heart, which are the emotions, right? Because we are not logical, we are biological dopamine Oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. This chemical soup drives us to act just like people don't buy logically, they don't fall in love logically. They do these things emotionally. So find your emotions. And in this book, we do, we really uncover, and I decode motivation, not motivation getting hyped up and dancing on chairs. And then the next day, not changing. We figured out this formula of sustainable motivation in this book. But the second question is, go back to why must I use this? Because if you don't have the why, you won't do the what. And then finally the third question. First question, how can I use this? Write all the answers down, think about that second question, why must I use it? Gives you the energy and the fuel and the drive to do it. And finally, when will I use this? When will I use this? Because we know that one of the most important performance productivity tools that we have is our calendar. Yeah, right. If it's not in our calendar, it just doesn't get done.

In this section, best selling author Lisa Nichols shares how she was able to change her mindset from scarcity to abundance at one of her lowest points. That led her to all of her future success.

Don't count the number of times you've been knocked down. Get attached to the number of times you get up.

All right, I'm gonna get these truth bombs all day.

Right?

Right.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

I love it. I'm curious now because you didn't start out, you know, with a lot of money and with a lot of abundance mindset, did you?

Right? It wasn't just not a lot of money. You know, it's one thing to be fiscally broke, it's another thing to be emotionally broken. Two very different things. And I was broke and broken. And in 1994, I had to go get on government's assistance just to feed my newborn baby. I had to get on wic, women, infant and children. And I still say it, and you know, I say it often. I'm interviewed. I was interviewed 155 times in five months for my previous book, no Matter What. And it still hits me in the same place. I was ashamed to stand in line with all the other mothers, some fathers, to get free butter, free cheese, free milk, free pasta. But at the same time, I was grateful that there was such a service to help people like me, that I knew this wasn't where I was going to stay.

Right.

But it was where I was in that moment. I wasn't committed to take up real estate There. But it was my current address, and broke and broken. It kind of hit the. I. I felt like I hit the bottom. You. Sometimes you feel you're back on the bottom. Like, I think that's the bottom. Right?

And then there's always a deeper.

So when I was getting. When I was getting food stamps, I thought I was at the bottom. And then. Right. I went to the atm. I ran out of Pampers for my son Jelani, and I went to the. At him to get money to go buy Pampers. And it said, insufficient funds. And I had $11.42 in the bank.

What's the minimum you take out 20 bucks.

Exactly. You need 20 in to get 20 out. And I had $11.42. And so I went home and I had to wrap my son Jelani for two days in a series of different towels. That. That was my rock bottom. And that was because as a parent, all you want to do is provide. That's it. It's simple. I just want to provide safety and food for my baby. Somebody else was providing my food, and I didn't even have Pampers. And I remember on the second day of wrapping my son in a towel, Louis, I put my hand over his stomach and I said, don't worry, Jelani. With tears streaming down my face, I said, don't worry, son. Mommy will never, ever be this broke again. And so you talk about having financial resources. I realized that I needed to first believe that I could do something different. That wherever my mindset was, my bank account was going to follow. So I needed to change my mental zip code.

What was your mental zip code then?

Scarcity. Lack. I was born and raised in South Central LA. I grew up between the Harlem Crypt 30s and the Rolling 60s. I had three fights a week to get home from school. My highest grade in school was a C plus. In 12 years of school, my highest grade was a C plus. And so if you ever tell this story to anybody, don't forget my plus. Don't forget y'. All, don't forget my plus. It's very important. To a C student.

To a student, I was a. I was a CD student.

To an A student, it doesn't matter, like, plus plus, whatever. But to a C student, the plus matters, man.

I get it.

So. So I struggled. Everything in my life was about a hustle. Everything. Nothing was easy except the love for my family. That was easy and effortless and graceful and bountiful and. But everything else outside of that, it was a hustle. Get or get God, it was the environment I grew up in. And I'm not saying that you have to grow up in that rough environment to have an amazing future. People always say, well, Lisa, I didn't have it rough. Could I have a listen? I would have traded my background in for anybody. Like, don't think I chose that so I can have this. And so I didn't know abundance. I didn't know abundance existed. I didn't know abundance could happen to people who look like me, a woman geographically, from my neighborhood. I didn't know abundance can be that I didn't see it around me. I didn't know abundance can be for someone that was. In my culture, everything was about survival and hustle. So, so many things. And spiritually, I didn't know that someone who loved God, who had a spiritual foundation, can also have prosperity without being perceived as greedy. I mean, everything in my environment said not me. Everything said not me. If I listen to the sound effects, right? And sometimes you've got to turn the volume down and listen to your heart, right?

So what was the conversation you would tell yourself during this time when you're in this scarce zip code?

Someone like me can't have it. Them over there, that, that guy right there, he comes from the right family. That girl right there, her skin color is the right complexion, that I'm full figured, mocha skin, full lips, round hip, kinky hair. Girl. Nah, not me. Not. No. I get other things. I get, I get a bountiful family, I get great children if I want. I get closeness to God, but I don't get abundance. And, and I realized that so much of that conversation was embedded in me before I was, I was five. I mean, it just comes with the territory. I would watch my grandmother make a dime go in 20 different directions. And I never wondered about having 21 dimes. I just wanted to grow up and make my dime go in 20 different directions to be like grandma. And so, so much is culturally inherited gender inherited as a gender. As a woman, you're not raised to make millions. You're raised to either get a good job or get a man with a good job, you know, and especially in.

The 80s and 90s.

Absolutely, absolutely. And that's how we were raised. Spiritually, you're taught, you know, in my background, my religious background, now I'm spiritual, I'm not attached to a religion at all. But growing up in the Mount Tabor Missionary Baptist Church, it was, you know, money is the root of all evil. Well, who would want a lot of that and that good Exactly. Who wants evil? And if that's what you say, then I learned that I don't need it. And Sister Brown, I watched Sister Brown, and Sister Brown was the most godly woman in the church. And she was always selling fish dinners and barbecue dinners to make sure she had enough money. And so unconsciously, I wanted to be like Sister Brown because that woman can pray the heavens down. And so then again, I'm looking at that. And then in my neighborhood, it was the moment you get a little extra, you give it away. You give it away. Still to this day, I kid you not, I want one of my last opportunities. I call, I don't call them challenges. Opportunities is I'm in the top 1% earners in America. And I say that humbly. I'm grateful. And my job now is to learn how to keep it and grow it, because I love to give it away. And I know it's a learned behavior. It's a learned. And I give it away to good things. I just put $82,000 and revamped my grandmother's whole house because I knew she wasn't gonna move. She going to live. She going. That's where she going to rest in peace. She's going to stay right there. She's been at that house since 1968. She's not going anywhere. So I just redid the entire house, gutted out the entire house and, and, and put. Spent close to $100,000 doing it. And I'll do that over and over and over and over again because I also was taught give it away. So now I'm going to people who are more powerful in money in terms of I know how to make a lot, I know how to keep a lot. Now I learn how to grow a lot of, you know, and being willing and being humble enough to say that's where I am. I got the first two down because money is three levels. How do, how do you earn it, how do you keep it, and how do you grow it? And so, you know, I had a conversation for a long time in many different ways, and then it's the conversation as a woman. If I make so much, it's gonna be hard to be dateable. That big D word, you know. And so as an African American, you're unapproached. Exactly. And men are taught, as I taught as a woman about money. You're taught as a man, be the provider. Well, you know, it's kind of hard to provide for a G like me. You know, when I come in, I go how about we just put it together? Because I'm kind of cool on the provision thing, you know? And so I realized that men have to also feel comfortable with the fact that that. That's an 80s conversation. And in 2015, she might make 2016 now. Right? 2016, right.

You had a book tour.

You're still.

Last year I started the book tour. And I have, like, you have to, at every moment, tell me the date that we're. We're living inside of.

I feel you. I feel you.

Right.

You know, you just. You just.

I'm just recovering.

I'm finally just like, tell me there's something on the other side. Recovery is true.

There's a clear voice, there's sanity, there's a healthy body.

Right, right, right.

There's your freedom of time. So I'm curious, what was this moment then that you realized, okay, I need to shift the way I'm thinking, the conversations I'm having, how I'm showing up, who I'm being in every moment, from living in the scarce environment that I've lived in for 20 something years to all of a sudden shifting into an abundance mindset and way of being. What was the moment you experience the thought, the idea, the catalyst that broke that?

I like how you say a moment like, I got a. The ceiling opened up and the lights came in and the angels came.

No, maybe it was over time.

Right? It was. There was a moment when there was a moment when suffering became too painful.

There you go.

So mine didn't necessarily come in a glory moment. It came $11.42. And watching my baby wrapped in a towel. A towel. I. I felt like I was being unfair to him. See, because 30 days before the towel, really tell my stuff. 30 days before the towel, his father called me. And when I answered the phone, I never forget. I said, hello. He said, lisa, I'm in LA County Jail. Well, I don't do jail, and I don't do people in jail, and I don't do people who have a possibility of going, so how did you get there? Because I met you in corporate America and you were a professional. How he got there is his business. I don't know. But now I'm a single mom of a son whose father's now in prison. Prison. Boom, boom, boom. Rock bottom. Rock bottom again. So 30 days later, when I had my son wrapped in a towel, I was done. I was just done.

You're sick and tired of being sick and tired.

I was done. So, you know, the concept of bankrupt is there's Nothing left. That's the concept of bankrupt. So I like to explain it. I was bankrupt in my mess, I was bankrupt in my chaos, and I was bankrupt in every sexy. Because my excuses are sexy, by the way. I've been a linguistic specialist for years. I could talk my teachers. Teachers into doing things right. I mean, that's just been my gift. My father used to say, lisa, please promise me you will use your powers for good. And so I was bankrupt in all of my excuses. So if you ask when it was probably about three hours after I told my son, we'll never be here again on day two of being wrapped in a towel in 1994. And then I said, how? The next question was, how? If I'm done with this, I'm not even sure what that looks like. I just know over there are a bunch of abundant thinkers living an abundant life, having abundant memories, with a surplus of everything. And it's abundance is to be an overflow of the things that you have. Abundance is just about overflow. It's about overflow. That means that if there were a saucer under this cup, abundance would be everything. This tea flows over into the saucer. And I can feed you from my saucer because I have full my. Filled my cup up enough. I use my cup for me, and I feed you from my saucer. And abundance is saying, I have a saucer in my relationships filled with great experiences. There's a saucer my health and wellness. I have so much bountiful health and vitality that can show up for you. There's a saucer with my spirituality that I can pray for you. I can forgive the perceivingly unforgivable and love the perceiving seemingly unlovable. And then there's a saucer for my finances. And that in every area, because abundance is a 360 experience. See, wealth is singularly focused. Wealth is about your money and your possessions. That's wealth. Okay, but abundance is 360. I have a lot of very, very wealthy friends who are miserable, unhappy, who are not abundant, who are not abundant. They're wealthy. Yeah, they're wealthy. They're not abundant. And they understand that. And they come to me and go, lisa, help me with my relationships with my family or whatever. And so I. I had to learn something different. I. Louis, I didn't know what I didn't know. And so I. That, that became the moment when I said, what do I need to know to have something different? What do they know that I don't know? And how can I get it. And I became a hunter.

So what was the first discovery?

That there's a mindset that comes with abundance, that they think differently. They don't just do something different. There's not a hookup. First of all, what camera do I look into?

Is it that anyone. Anyone.

There is no such thing as a hookup. I am still waiting on mine. And if you know where it is, my phone number is. So there was no hookup. Yeah, there's no hookup. Like, it's not true. Like, you got a 297 million chance in one to win the lotto. And within five years, the people win the lotto are in more debt than they were before they won the lotto. So that ain't even a hookup. Right. And so I realized that I needed to change my mindset. I needed to learn something different, and I needed to know it at a cellular level. All that stuff I just told you about my color, my gender, my. I had to unlearn. People are.

We're.

We're information junkies because we got all kind of access to information online, and we're learning all this stuff, but we're not implementing anything. I'm sorry. I might step on a few toes. That's what I do. And so I realized that I had to add a second cellular level first. Before I went to get any more information. I had to be willing to divorce and evict some belief systems that I already had, that they had taken me as far as they can take me, and now they're holding me back. It's almost like you wear a size 11. You have 11 foot, and you tried to fit it back in a size seven shoe.

You.

You passed that a long time ago. And. And that's going to be a very uncomfortable day. I was in discomfort. I was very uncomfortable with my thinking. And so I started diving into books. The first book I dove into was Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And it disrupted me. It disrupted everything. I didn't know. It was like. It was like a double door opened up and then a wall opened up. I'm like, what are they? They know that. Like, why? Nobody told me that. Like, I felt like I was out of a club. And really, you are. I'm just gonna tell you, Abundant thinkers think a certain way, and they don't go around trying to. Trying to convert you like people like you. And I go, let's open it up to everyone.

Yeah.

But here's what I. I know about the human spirit, is that the human spirit has a power choice. And most people don't want to choose this kind of thinking because it cost you something.

What's the cost?

The cost is you got to get up earlier. You get up earlier than the average guy. Your day, what you do in a day is what some people do in a week, but you do in the mornings and some people do in 12 hour day. You got to be willing, what you're willing to do on your book tour to get on the New York Times. Some people say, I got to do all that.

I don't want to do all that.

That's a lot of work.

Okay, great. Then have your life like you have to. You sign up for your life experience. There's no way like you were. When I realized that I was a culmination of all my decisions. That's like straight with no chaser. That's like getting it with no cookies and milk. I was a culminate. You're a culmination of, of all your decisions. And then when you up level your decisions, and that's even hard at times when you go, God, why am I always single? You're a culmination of your decisions. You're a culmination of your actions. Why can't I keep any money? You're a culmination of your decision, your life. So I wanted to make better decisions because my son being wrapped in a towel, me having $11.42, me being overweight, me, my, my son's father being in prison, I, I couldn't shake it. I was a culmination. My life experience was a culmination of all my decisions. And it was undoubtedly a hot mess. And so I went, well, let me go learn from somebody whose life don't seem like it's a hot mess. And then let me adopt some of their behaviors. And I began to hunt. I went to conferences. I and scared the bajeebis out of me. These conferences. I'd never been to conferences before. I went to entrepreneurial conferences. I was the only. I was one of four women at an 800 person conference and I was the only woman of color. So it's all older white men and me. And I was like, okay, well, they're not afraid of money. Seems like they're talking money and business and corporations and ROIs and, and PPMs and term agreements and no habla espanol. I don't know what that means. But I am not leaving until I figure this out. And I went to the same conference. When I say, do what other people Won't do so. And you'll have what other people don't have. I went to the same conference, Louis, 42 times. I told you I was a C student. So I took me a minute and I kept getting sponsored back to the I didn't even have the money to go to the conference. I started volunteering at the conference. I would be on stage teaching because they love the way I spoke. Then I get off and I'd help clean up because I had to pay my dues to be there. I was okay. I ate my slice of humble pie every day. Sure, because I was bankrupt. See, some people you haven't pushed non negotiable yet. You're still optional. I really would love to be successful. And so you want to be successful? I want to be successful.

I want to make money.

I want to make money. I want to be healthy. But it's not non negotiable yet because the moment the rubber meets the road and you feel a little skin and it gets a little too tender and a little blood may show up and you don't want to give blood, you don't want to give sweat, you don't want to give tears. Let me just tell you, can't take the elevator to the top, right? It ain't number stairs.

In this section, former Navy SEAL Rich Devini shares how we can train our mind to stay disciplined to achieve our goals. Instead of trying for a little bit and then becoming lazy and giving up, how do we train ourselves to find motivation and not be lazy? Because I feel like there's a lot of laziness out there or there's moments of motivation, but then it falls back into a laziness structured schedule. How do we train our mind and our body to be motivated towards a goal and not stay lazy?

Yeah, well, first it's know thyself, because we all, we're all different. And so one of the attributes I talk about in the book is discovered. And what I had to do with discipline was actively separate discipline from self discipline.

What's the difference?

Okay, well, the difference is that self discipline is internally focused. Self discipline is about managing oneself and it has very little to do with external requirements. So you or I can decide to get in shape, for example, and we can change our diet, we can work out every day. The external environment doesn't have a lot of say in that, in us achieving that accomplishment. So self discipline is about managing the internal discipline. The way I talk about in the book is about achieving that long term goal. These are those long Term goals that are going to take a while to achieve and the external world has a say. So getting that promotion, writing that book, becoming the famous singer, becoming a Navy Seal. The external world has started a podcast. The external world has a say in whether or not you do that. And that's. And the discipline that is required to move through those wickets takes adaptability, it takes flexibility, it takes the ability to not get seduced by the highs, the successes and not get crushed by the failures and continue to move towards that goal. And what I found was because I'm a very unself disciplined person, I don't have a lot. So I had to separate this because I've been able to achieve a lot of goals in my life. I said what's the difference? Well the difference is if you are overly so those with very high self discipline, sometimes this is not exclusive, but sometimes have trouble achieving long term goals. Because the achievement of long term goals often takes an ability and by necessity to march into the unknown, into uncertainty which is going to throw you off routine and throw you out of certainty. The self disciplined person, the very self disciplined likes routine, likes certainty. That's how it's structure. I mean that's what it is. And so moving towards a goal like that takes oftentimes being able to adapt out of structure and say well I can't do that, I have to just go in, I have to go in unknowing. Now the most successful people are those who have both self discipline and discipline in terms of staying motivated for a goal. The way I would do it by knowing myself is I would understanding I'm not a very self disciplined person. I would simply try to chunk a goal into smaller pieces. So if I want to lose weight then I can say well that's why cheat days are actually good for me because I can say I'm going to take this piece of it and move. So I chunk my reward system in a different way. But I think the way one stays motivated towards a goal is highly subjective. But it would in my kind of, through my thought process and my experience involve a, an active or one to actively map out a reward system that helps someone move through that sort of.

Creating a reward system first for the, for the goal in order to help you stay motivated.

Depending on how you.

Show up, not just say like okay, I'm going to, my goal is to achieve this thing, it's going to take me three years to accomplish it, right? And that's the only reward I'm going to get in three years. But how can I reward myself every day for an action I take every month for a milestone, every year for getting closer? So focusing on the reward system process.

This is neurobiological because dopamine, the neurotransmitter is you get hits of dopamine as a reward when you achieve things. There's many ways you get dopamine, but one of the ways is when you achieve things. So if you're able to effectively create a reward system that means something to you, it can't be inert. So if I want, want to run, if I want to run a marathon and I haven't, and I can barely run to my mailbox.

Right.

You know, then maybe, you know, buying some running shoes and putting them on one morning is enough of a reward system to get a dopamine hit. As someone who runs, you know, somewhat frequently and I, you probably identify with this. Just putting on our shoes one morning is probably not going to give us that dopamine hit. We got to, we got to extend that, we got to extend that task a little bit so that you've already.

Accomplished a lot of. So that you have to push beyond it.

You have to push beyond it to get that reward system. So it becomes subjective.

What would you say, 20 years as a Navy Seal at different levels and you were deployed how many different times are you allowed to talk about that?

Well, Yeah, I mean, 13 and some change. Yeah.

Deployments between what, six months and over a year?

Yeah, I never did year long, but anywhere between three months to six months usually.

This is Iraq and Afghanistan for the most part, and other places maybe you're not allowed to talk about. What would you say of that 20 year experience was the most challenging experience for you? Was it something within a mission? Was it learning how to develop as a leader? Was it having a relationship with your wife during that time? What was the most challenging point for you?

Yeah, the most challenging thing, ironically, wasn't the job because you, because we were all so prepared for the job and we were around just the best people in the world. So the trust and the camaraderie was to this day, I look back on it very fondly. Right.

So not the day to day job even, just like the missions you went out on.

Yeah, that wasn't challenging. I think if I were to say the first and foremost was probably having to leave the family. When you have to say, say goodbye to your family for a stint, whether it's three months or six months or some folks are deploying for a year, that is a rough Deal that not many people can capture. Not many people with families can capture that. When you have to say goodbye to your kids and your wife for that. Okay, well, see you in. However. And then to add on to that, understanding their stress, or at least my kids were a little bit smaller, but understanding my wife's stress, knowing that I was going someplace and she was. Luckily, with today's technology, contact was fairly easy. But we found was again, ironically, we found that daily contact was never a good idea. Because what happens is you establish a.

Routine, you get comfortable.

You get comfortable. So something happens. I'm working, I'm overseas in something. I have a mission that goes long or whatever, and I don't get to call her that day. Well, suddenly she's worried. And it also makes time actually seem slower.

Interesting.

Yeah. So we decided we were only going to talk usually once a week. My son, who had real trouble, he was young. I mean, he was, you know, he was born in 05, so he was. By the time he was 2, he was having trouble with me deploying. And every time I went, it was rough on him. And we actually, for him, we actually almost had to. Well, we literally had to just decide not to. I was not going to talk to him on the phone. It was too hard for him. He had to basically kind of forget me.

Oh, my gosh. So he had to compartmentalize as a child in order to.

We had to help him compartmentalize, survive. Yeah.

And not go depressed or be stressed. Because that's one of the attributes you talk about is compartmentalization.

Yeah.

How do you do that? If you're an emotional human being, that you have these deep connections to your family and friends, how do you just detach, in a sense and become more machine like for a period of time and then allow yourself to feel deeply in other moments.

Well, it never goes away. And I think the attributes. The way I talk about compartmentalization and the attribute is more kind of surrounded by the way our brain functions and processes information versus I'm going to block something out so I don't have to think about it. However, I think Most team guys, SEALs, Spec Ops guys, have a very high ability to compartmentalize away from things, block out things that are painful. I know that about me and I know that about my buddies, because you have to, because war sucks. And at the end of the day, the mission has to be accomplished. So if something gnarly happens on a mission, you can't sit there. These movies that show these extended scenes of people mourning when their Buddy goes down or whatever, like, oh, my God, you don't have that time. You have to win the gunfight because if you don't, then all of you won't make it home. I think the training allows you to do that. The training is so intense and so effective that it requires you to compartmentalize. Training teaches you to compartmentalize. You become very, very good at it. Now, that could be a detriment in a relationship. So I think those of us who were able to recognize that actively try not to do that with our families. And so it becomes much more of a precision tool versus a frenetic thing. It just happens without us having control over it.

What was the moment that was the scariest for you when you were deployed where you thought, like, I may not make it, or our team may not make it, or this is a really bad. I guess you're training for bad situations all the time. But was there ever a moment you're like, I don't know if we're going to get out of this?

No, I was fortunate not to have that moment. I say that. I say that with immense gratitude because I know there's a lot of friends of mine who didn't have that. Can't say that they had those moments where they said that. But no, I was fortunate enough to be always in a position and my team was always in a position that we had prepared, planned, and executed in a way that was highly effective. So that when things went wrong, because things always go sideways, we had complete or near complete control, or we understood the pathways we needed to go through out of. But I say that also this comes back to compartmentalization. One of the things that you have to be able to do when shit goes sideways is to not focus on that thought you just brought up. The focus is not, oh, my God, I don't think I'm going to get out of this. The focus is, how do I get out of this? So the mental acuity attributes, which are situation awareness, compartmentalization, task switching, and learnability, that's how information is coming in, how we're processing it, and prioritizing how we're switching between the necessary tasks and then how we're learning from our decisions. So I talk about the parachute malfunction in the context of. Of that. But ultimately comes to even be able to do that in the first place, it requires a four brain dominance in the sense that you're not letting your autonomic system take over into a fight flight response, and you're able to think through stress, challenge, and uncertainty in the sense of say, okay, what can I control right now? And this is where trust in your teammates comes in, because now I have a team. I mean, I can say this with. With great pride and gratitude. I can remember literally walking in areas when we were overseas and thinking, man, this is a bad area.

Sketchy.

This is sketchy. And having complete and utter faith because I was around, because I was with my teammates, I was around people who were just. I trusted. I knew that if something went wrong, we'd be able to handle it. So I think that's a necessity. When you do this type of stuff.

When you're going out on a mission, what's the process like of preparing for that mission? Are you planning more for all the things that could go wrong and how to get out of that situation, or is it planning for. Here's exactly how we would like it to go, Right? Yeah, but let's also have a exit plan or a plan for when things go wrong.

What do.

It's the latter. You plan the mission as you'd like it to go, and then you. Inside of that planning, you put together, you build contingencies within each factor.

So when this doesn't go as planned, what are the three ways to go?

Yeah, so, you know, just like. I mean, just like any athlete would understand, or. So a quarterback coming out of a snap would say, well, I have two or three or four plays I can fall back on, depending on how this line shapes up. Right. You have the same thing. You know, this is where experience matters. You do it over and over again. It's okay. Well, during, as we're coming in on insertion, there's a few things that could go wrong. So if this, then that. If this, then that. And you kind of do that throughout a phase. Throughout the phase, planning. But then there's what we call the 8020 rule, and that is you get to 80% of certainty, and then you recognize that 20% is just out of your control. And that's where confidence comes. You say, hey, if something happens outside that 20%, we will figure it out, because we're not going to figure out everything. And it's, you know, Murphy's law will dictate that something happens that we haven't thought of. So you. So you prepare yourself to deal with uncertainty.

How do you train your mind to deal with chaos in the moment so that you don't freak out and freeze up, but you actually turn on a level of focus and attention towards achieving that goal?

Yeah. So I think we're predisposed each one of us to what I call Huberman and I both have called. This is the autonomic set point. You know, at what point do we start flipping into an autonomic response into fight flight, where our system starts taking over and our forebrain starts coming offline? If we were, if you and I use boiling point as the average, most of us might be average. There are those who start really freaking out at like 190. So 212 is the average at 190 degrees. They're starting to freak out. There are people who it takes till like 2:30 to boil. To boil, right. I think that the guys who make it through that training are predisposed to have a higher set point. First of all, in other words, we tend to, when bad things start to happen, we tend to slow down and start thinking through it versus get all hyped up. It's funny, I live in a neighborhood and in my neighborhood there's four other Navy SEALs in the neighborhood. There's one across the street, one down the road.

Must be nice.

Well, it is nice a because they're great dudes and they're great neighbors. But I remember my wife once saying, she said, hey, I'm so glad these guys are here in the neighborhood. I was like, why? She said, because if something went wrong, I know I could go to them and they'd act like you act. And I said, well, tell me. I said because if something happens, they would immediately calm down and they'd start working the problem. So I think we show up predisposed training to it is difficult and I think so Hebrew and I are actually working on some stuff to help train, have to help teach people to do that. But it comes down to understanding your own neurology. And it comes down to understanding that here's how you have to think through situations under stress. And then it's going to be about putting yourself into deliberate stress to practice that. You can't practice this type of thinking if you're not in stress. You need to put yourself down. You need to put yourself.

What are some things civilians could do to practice stressful moments on a daily basis where it doesn't hurt them, but it's actually preparing them. I talk about every day, I think you should be experiencing some type of pain, something that's uncomfortable, right? Seeking discomfort, yes. Whether it be through a 10 minute workout, whether it be through a longer run, it doesn't matter what it is an uncomfortable conversation. We should be doing this every day in a, in A structured environment. Yeah. That allows us to grow.

Yes.

What do you think are some ways we could do this that's not putting us in harm's way or physically hurting ourselves?

I can't answer that because it's so subjective. I can give some ideas and you just gave some. I mean some people are very social people. So starting a conversation with a stranger is piece of cake, right? For me that would be hard. Right. Starting a conversation with a stranger would be hard. So that might be something I do. Giving a presentation, public speaking for people is tough. So volunteering to give that presentation is a great way for a lot of people. People because that makes them anxious. So working out for some is like, for some people they've developed a system where that pain point of working out is something they highly enjoy.

Right.

So they're not practicing it. So someone should look at their own makeup and ask themselves what fright? Well, fear. Again, it doesn't have to go all the way to fear. Fear is interesting because it's actually a combination of two things. It's a combination of uncertainty and anxiety. You can have each one of those and not have fear. Right. So if you are anxious but not uncertain, that would be. I have to give this presentation on Monday. I hope it's going. I'm nervous about it. Right. But there's nothing uncertain about it. It's Monday, it's at 2 o'. Clock. I know what I'm going to do. I'm nervous about it. Uncertainty without anxiety, well that's every kid on Christmas Eve. But it's when you combine the two that you start to generate fear. Well, the idea is if you have fear, if you have uncertainty plus anxiety and it start to manifest into fear. The key is to understanding which of those two factors can you buy down. Okay, anxiety buy down, which means decrease anxiety can be decreased internally. It's an internal response. Right. So things like some of the tools Huberman talks about, visual tools, breathing tools, you can begin to, you can begin begin to shift your physiology out of your sympathetic into your parasympathetic come off of the autonomic response system. So that's how you could start kind of buying down anxiety. Uncertainty is largely external. That means something around you, outside of you you don't understand. There's unknown. The best way to do that and the way we do it in spec ops is we control what we can control. So some people have referred to it kind of control your three foot world, but it doesn't have to extend. It's not a three foot Thing, it's, what in this moment can I control? And then take control of that? Because then you are grabbing onto certainty. You're taking what is uncertain. You're grabbing onto something certain. As soon as you've controlled that, as soon as you move through that, then you have to make another decision. What's the next thing? This is basically stepping through. Stepping through this challenge. You can start to practice coming off of fear or moving through fear by kind of understanding both of those pieces.

What do you think is the greatest lesson you Learned throughout the 20 years for yourself that has helped you not only during that, but also after being with the seals?

I think it's not fearing the unknown. It's the idea that when you go through something like that, you understand that, hey, I could pretty much do whatever I'd like to do. And I know that even though I don't know how I'm going to do it, I know I can figure it out if there's enough interest, if there's enough passion. I'm not interested in becoming a pro football player, so that's off my list. But I was interested in writing a book, and that was a whole new process for me. When I left the Navy, I started public speaking. I did not like public speaking at all. I did not like it, but I knew it was an edge that I wanted to conquer and say, okay, well, let me work through the things to conquer. This edge, kind of like your philosophy. I think it's a really. It's not only a deep one, but it's profound. Because if we are consistently moving, deciding what our edges are moving towards our edge and then getting there, then we are growing, because guess what we're doing at that point, we're looking for the next edge, and that's. The growth process is continuing to move to our edges and then finding the next edge.

I mean, you say you don't like public speaking, but don't you have to speak to your teams and guys?

Yeah, but that's not public. That's like. That's the guys. So it's not the same. It's different. Yeah, it's different. There's a lot more, you know, when you're, you know, because you're in. When you're in the. In the military, there's no. There's no expectation of, you know, kind of great articulation or humor or, you.

Know.

Here'S the word. And that's what you appreciate, too. There's like, no one wants you to sit there and pontificate. It's like, hey, guys, this is what's going on. So there's a directness that's appreciated and required, but that's not public speaking.

What do you think was the hardest lesson you had to Learn through your 20 years? Something that you were struggling with or challenged with or you kept repeating until you finally learned the lesson?

Yeah, I think the hardest lessons. The hardest lesson, maybe not one. The hardest lessons were just around leadership. What it takes. What leadership. Take what it takes to be a leader. Because, again, being a leader and being in charge are often conflated. They're not the same thing.

Okay, what's the difference?

Well, anybody could be in charge. As an officer in the military, I was pretty much in charge of something all the time. It didn't make me a leader. You don't get to call yourself a leader. It's like calling yourself funny or calling yourself handsome. Someone else makes that decision. You can't designate yourself that way. Someone else decides whether or not you are a leader, and that's done through the way you behave in that position. So if you're in charge and you're behaving in a way that causes someone to make a decision, okay, this is the person I would lead. I mean, if we think about the leaders in our lives, the people who we consider leaders in our lives, it's not because they were just in charge of us. In fact, we could probably think of people who we would follow into hell and back, and they have no place in the hierarchy of our lives. They are just someone who just. They behave that way in a way that's made us kind of endeared to them. So the attributes I talk about in the book in terms of leadership attributes are all attributes that actually cause behaviors that typically cause people to look at others as leaders.

What are the behaviors that most human beings admire the most? That we want to follow that person or be inspired to be led by something that they're sharing or involved in a community, a movement, whatever it may be. What are the three or four main behaviors that they have and we should be developing if we want to be better leaders?

Yeah. Well, I talk about five in the book in terms of the efforts. The first is empathy. Okay. And again, I would say this. There's not an exclusivity in terms of what someone will decide because there are.

People who will look subjective.

Right?

It's a subjective thing. Again, it's someone's choice as to whether or not they think so.

Episode.

Empathy is one, selflessness is another. And this is not just so let's just back up here. Empathy. Not just, I know how you feel. I feel how you feel. I can put myself into your shoes. And that reflects in the way I communicate with you and I care about it shows that you care about another human being.

What is the best way to show that? Give me an example. As opposed to saying, I know how you feel.

How do you feel?

Empathize, Showing you feel how they feel.

Well, first, deep listening. And so listening to another person. But true, like, deep, full on, like, listening. Like, I am hanging on every word, listening. Oftentimes we listen to people and we're two things. One of two things is happening. Either we're thinking about what we're saying next, right? Or we're thinking about how what that person is saying relates to our lives. And it's not from a malicious standpoint. It's really because we're trying to relate. So we're trying to say, okay, you're talking about football. I'm thinking, okay, wait a second, did I play, I played football in eighth grade. Maybe I could talk about that. But what I'm doing is I'm not listening to you anymore. I'm making what you're saying about me, what deep empathetic listening is. I have a whiteboard in my mind. And as I'm listening to you speak, if something pops onto the whiteboard, I erase it and I move on. I just keep on listening. That is, if you do, if you, if you empathetically listen, like look into someone's eyes, attentive behavior, facing each other, you are going, they are going to feel cared for because you're exchanging now. There's an exchange going on. There's serotonin being released, there's. There's oxytocin being exchanged or at least released, and all these kind of these bonding chemicals.

I hope you enjoyed this, my friend. Thank you so much for listening. This is all about how to upgrade your mindset to really start living a better life and improving the quality of your life. And if you did enjoy it, make sure to click the subscribe button over on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and leave us a review over there. If you haven't left us one yet, we'd love to hear your thoughts and your biggest takeaway from this specific episode and make sure to share this with a friend. You can copy and paste the link wherever you're listening to this, or you can use Lewishouse.com 1131 that'll have all the show notes and links to the previous episodes as well from our guests in today's episode. Back on the Show Notes link. You can share this with friends post on social media. Make sure to tag me at Lewishouse as well over on Instagram and if you have yet to subscribe yet over on YouTube. We've got over a million and a half subscribers and it is growing like crazy with the content we are putting out over on video as well. So make sure to subscribe to us on all social media channels, especially on YouTube as it is growing like crazy over there. And I will leave you with A quote from C.S. lewis who said you are never too old to subscribe, set another goal or to dream a new dream. No you are not my friend because age is just a mindset. I don't care how old you are, how young you are. It is just a mindset. And you can make a decision in this moment and in any moment to start changing the direction of your life towards a new goal, a new dream or a previous one that you've had buried inside you for a long time. It can always come out. You can start taking action steps toward those goals and dreams. I so grateful for you. I love you very much and if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.

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