How The LAW OF ATTRACTION Really Works (Manifest Anything You Want) | Lewis Howes

Everything is a binary choice. You're either believing something that takes you where you want to go or something that takes you away from where you want to go.

Most people use their imagination, they use it the wrong way. They imagine what won't work. You should see yourself where you want to be. You've got to live there.

I need to live my life to set up my endowment. All of a sudden you become responsible for generations to come. Responsible for changing the trajectory of your family's life. That's some bold stuff.

If you want to live a greater life, it starts with your beliefs. And in this video, we talk with some of the greatest thought leaders in the world about how you can use the law of attraction to bring more success in your life. Now, you said, I think at 26 or 27, that's when you started to wake up or you started to have some type of awareness about yourself, the world, the universe, life.

I was unhappy. I was sick. I was broke. And, you know, you never thought it was nonsense. But he said something else. He said, listen, my way's working. Yours isn't. He was happy, healthy and wealthy. The guy always had money on him and big, healthy guy. And he said, you're unhappy, sick and broke. So he said, I must know something you don't know. Why the hell don't you? do what I tell you. Well, I think something clicked. Now, people had tried to reach me. I was 26 since I was a kid, and none of them ever did. And so I started to do what he suggested. And he said, what do you really want? Well, I wanted some money. I was earning $4,000 a year at the time, and I owed $6,000. If I had paid everything I earned for 18 months, I would have just broken even. It was an impossible situation. And I was just looking at what was. I couldn't see beyond that. So that's what made it impossible. And he said, listen, write what you want on a card. Now, I got a gold card in my pocket. I've carried one ever since. He said, write what you want on the card. You need a van, you want. So he said, what do you really want? I said, I want some money. I figured if I had enough money, all my problems would go away. Everybody, I'll get in the phone, where's the money? You know, they're always after me, people I owe money to. So I wrote that I wanted to have $25,000. And now, if I had got together all the people I know or knew at that time and put all their money together, we wouldn't have come up with $25,000. We probably wouldn't have come up with a thousand. I mean, it was an enormous amount of money. It was nuts. So I wrote that in the card. He says, you, got to read it every day. And he keeps saying, did you read it? Did you read it? You know, so he got me reading it. Reading the book or reading the card? No, no, read the gold card. The card.

$25,000.

Just the gold card. Read the gold card. I'm so happy and grateful now that I have $25,000. And I learned something very important from it. All I thought about prior to that was debt. Because people are always phoning me, When are you going to pay me? If you think about debt, you're going to be in debt forever. you become what you think about. Well, this gold card got me thinking about earning money. I never thought of earning money before. I thought about debt all the time. And it got me thinking of earning money. So I started to hear people talking about earning money. And because I heard them talking about it, it started me thinking about it. And some guy said, There's good money cleaning floors. I said, I'm not proud, I'll clean floors. I was prepared to do anything. I wonder in this money. I say, I wonder if money. So I started cleaning one office and by the end of the year I was earning $14,500 a month. What? I was on the fire department. The chief was only earning $11,500 a year. I was earning $14,500. This was in a year from the start. Well, I started to clean one office. It was Canada Starch. I'd wash the floor twice a month. $15 a time, I got $30. Then I got another one, Kirby's Construction, I get $65 a month. Well, do you know in less than five years, I was cleaning offices in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Cleveland, Atlanta, London, England. I mean, think going like a rocket. And I was listening to Earl Nightingale's recordings. I was thinking, listening to, or reading, read, think and grow rich. And every cleaner, I had them studying the same stuff I was studying. None of us knew much about cleaning floors. We just did a good job. We cleaned. But if somebody asked me what I was doing, I'd say I was cleaning offices. It was almost incidental to what I was doing. I could have been selling siding for houses.

It didn't matter.

It was what I was studying, what I was doing with it. I was getting the other people to study it. And I was very irresponsible. I was earning all this money. Well over a million a year. I was living in London. I got on the Playboy Club on Park Lane, I didn't even care if I lost. And I hardly ever did. I almost always won. I seemed to know where the money was. And one day I thought, you know, this isn't very responsible. I don't know what the hell triggered my mind. And I thought, how did this happen? And I didn't know. I didn't know how my life had changed, but it had changed dramatically. And in a short time. I've been raised to believe if you're going to earn a lot of money, you're going to be really smart. I knew I wasn't very smart. I was earning a lot of money, so I thought that's not true. I was raised to believe if you're going to get a good job, you've got to go to school. Well, I hadn't gone to school. I didn't have a good job. I owned the whole company. So I thought, that's not true. So I started to wonder about all the things that I believed. Are they true?

They're not true.

And so then I had to know what happened and I couldn't find out. It took me nine and a half years to figure out what I actually.

Did, how you got to where you were.

Yeah. You were talking prior to starting this about mentors. I believe they're essential in life. And as I look back, I have been fortunate enough to study with some absolutely brilliant people. I mean giants. and any success I've enjoyed is because I've had great direction. And starting with the first one, he says, Do exactly what I tell you until you find out I'm lying or I don't know what I'm talking about. So that's sort of a rule I followed. When I pick a person that I'm going to choose as a mentor, I do exactly what they tell me until I find out they're lying or they don't know what they're talking about and they don't lie and they didn't know what they're talking about. So I've had great great instruction in my life. And it works.

Wow. Who's the most memorable mentor for you?

Well, Ray Stanford, first of all, but they're all very, all very important ways. Earl Nightingale. Huge. I started to study his recordings, and then I wanted to work with him, and I saw where he had Distributors and. so I became a distributor. I eventually, I left my business. I was prepared to pay them to let me work there. I wanted to work with them because I knew if I could work with them, I could watch him, you know. And I'd see what he did. I get to think what he's thinking. Because he was a giant in my mind. I mean, Earl Nightingale and Lloyd Conant literally started personal development as we know it today in recorded fashion. and he started on this strangest secret record. So he was really huge. But I started with Bill Gove, who was a great speaker, Al Van Dusen, Dr. Roeder. I've had just phenomenal mentors. Most of them, people, you wouldn't really recognize your names, but they were giants at what they did.

Do you remember having big dreams as a kid? Or did you just always think you would amount to nothing, you were a loser?

I never had any dreams when I was a kid. I think the area I grew up in, we were so poor, things were so rough. But you gotta remember, that was during the Great Depression in the 30s. I mean, there's not too many people alive that lived through that anymore. And we didn't have dreams. We just, Get by was the deal. Now when I started to rethink and grow rich, I was 26. That's when I started to really dream.

What do you think is the most powerful principle in the book? Obviously there's a lot of them. For you, what's the thing that stood out?

There's a number of them, but imagination is, you know. And I had learned, see I was studying many things at the same time. our higher faculties, school teaches nothing about them. Many seminars don't teach you much about them. We talk about you becoming what you think about, but you've got to go further than that. Most people live through their senses because we're programmed to do that, literally. We're programmed genetically and then environmentally to go by what we hear, see, smell, taste, touch. But I have a dog at home that can hear, see, smell, taste, touch. All animal life operates through senses. We've been created in God's image. We have these higher faculties. We are creative beings, literally. We have perception, the will, reason, imagination, memory, and intuition. They're the faculties that make us separate from everything else. Like all the other little creatures on the planet are completely at home in their environment. We're the only creature that's totally disoriented in our environment. And that's because we've been given the faculties to create our own environment. But we've never been taught how to use them. Now we teach that in our company. We teach how to develop your perception, the will. You change your perception, you change your life. And the will. When John Kennedy asked Dr. Wernher von Braun what it would take to build a rocket that would carry a person to the moon, bring him back safely to Earth, He answered him in five words. He said, the will to do it. Now, many people would hear that and they don't really understand what he said. The ability to hold that picture on the screen of your mind and nothing else, because the will is what gives you the ability to concentrate. Energy flows to and through you. Through concentration, you increase the amplitude of vibration when the energy leaves you. that's how absentee healing is done through the will. A practitioner will hold the idea and they'll have the subject relaxed, be very quiet, they transfer that thought right into the person's subjective mind. And so it affects the body. Well, the will is very important. So we've got to understand these things. Intuition, I can walk by a person and I could tell, as soon as I walk in the room, I know exactly what you're like. you operate, you've probably studied this, but you operate almost evenly between the right and left hemisphere of your brain. You've got an interesting mix in your personality. I don't know if you know that, but I could feel that. You're almost an even balance between the two. As I say that, I'm trying to figure out more one than the other, and I don't think you are. Well, your intuition will do that because your intuition is a mental faculty that picks up vibration and translates it in your mind. It's through intuition that you get answers to your questions. Like you asked a question, the opposite side of question is an answer. It's the equal and opposite side. So our answer comes with our question, but we're not tuned in to pick it up. Like every question is an answer. Well, the imagination, of course, it's everything. So you get these higher faculties and you get using them, and I started to learn how to use these. And I started to see that we've got so much going for us that we never hear about. School doesn't teach us. Our parents don't teach us. You go to work for a company, they don't teach you. So the odds of learning it are really slim, you know? And it's the reason there's so few people that really are successful in life. There's all kinds of material around on success. My goodness, there's more around today than there's ever been. Self-help books are, you know, top of the best sellers list.

They're crushing, yeah.

You know, in 1968, when I started 61, when I first started to study this, you had Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking, you know, how to win friends and influence people by Carnegie. It was a few books, you know, Think and Grow Rich, but There weren't that many. Today there's thousands of them.

People need it because they don't know how to use the tools that we have.

But they don't know how to use the information that's in the books.

Right.

So what are these five faculties again?

You said?

You have perception. Intuition. The will.

Reason.

Imagination, the sixth and memory.

What does that actually do when we start talking either on internal dialogue or we verbally express it? What does that actually do for where we want to be in the future?

Well, we've actually seen studies done where when somebody yells at themselves, you know, gosh darn it, why are you so stupid, Jack? You know, I can't find my keys. It actually affects the brain in a negative way. It actually creates a vibration that almost I want to say it destroys brain cells, but John Assaraf in a recent video he put on actually showed some brain cells dying when people were thinking negative thoughts. Yeah, so some of the new neuroscience out there. But more interestingly, Dr. Masaru Emoto, who did all this work with water, he.

Actually-- yeah, I've seen that. He put the negative words on-- yeah.

Puts negative words on the bottle. But his first experiment was to put a bottle of water, like a little avion bottle of water on a thing, have all of his students send negative energy. I hate you, you're stupid, you're a fool. Took that water, froze it in little petri dishes, bring it out, stick it under a microscope with a camera on top, and as the water starts to melt, I mean the crystal starts to melt, it forms these big ugly black blobs. Take the same kind of water, another bottle on a different day, send positive energy to the water, freeze it, put it under the petri dish when it's melting, forms beautiful snow crystals. So we know that two things were fascinating. Water has memory and 85% of your body is made up of water. Your brain is made up of even more water, the higher percentage. So when you're saying negative things to yourself, you're affecting yourself in a physiological way. If you say, I am sick, you're actually creating sick in the future. Oh my gosh. See, a lot of people think when they're describing the present, they're, well, I'm sick, you know? But the fact is, you're prescribing the future by describing the present as it is. and most people never get that. So this is why the people that live the most effective lives are always acting as if they're in the future and the future is perfect. You know, not waiting to get there. I do this demonstration on stage when I teach this and I say, you know, someone walks out and says, I feel bad today. Then the body goes, oh, you want to feel bad? We'll give you a bad hunch over. Now I feel worse. Oh, you want worse? We'll give you worse. And then pretty soon I'm crawling across the stage, you know, But it all started with, I don't feel good. Instead of saying, you know, and you know, we've all learned to say things like, I'm having a healing crisis. I'm cleansing. Sure, sure. Instead of saying, I'm sick. Basically, anything you say with the words, I am, your subconscious will then take that as a command. And so we're constantly programming our subconscious.

We think we're describing it, but we're actually prescribing it. Are there studies of people that are constantly saying self-negative talk or, expressing negative things against people who are positive constantly, who are, who die at earlier ages or who have more cancer. Are there any studies about that, about the actual lifespan of someone when they.

Would self- I don't know of studies about negative self-talk, but I do know that negative self-talk creates people being unhappy. And there are tons of studies that happy people live longer, they recover from diseases faster, they don't get as many diseases, their marriages last longer. They live longer, people that are in a positive space. Every statistic, every statistic is better.

Sure.

Doesn't matter what it is.

How does someone be positive when they're broke and they're, you know, people are cheating on them and they're coming from a bad family or they're in a bad neighborhood? How does someone come from that place of the future is great or the future is perfect or I am healthy when they're not?

It's a choice. you simply have to choose it. See, once I learned, early on, I was in graduate school and I read a book called Seth Speaks and it was about all this stuff we're talking about. And it was a book channel by this woman named Jane Roberts. And I said, it just rung true as truth. I just said, this feels right. And what she was teaching is that your beliefs are a choice. We think our beliefs are the result of seeing something outside of us. We say, oh, I believe if a spider bites you, you're sick. skin turns red because that's what I saw happen. But we can hypnotize people, tell them my thumb is a poker, hit them on the hand, and their hand will form a blister. We can tell people that this is poison ivy and give them maple leaves and they'll do that and their skin will break out in a rash. Tell people the poison ivy is a maple leaf, run the poison ivy on it, nobody breaks out in a rash. So we know that so much of our internal behavior and our feel good is created by beliefs. Now then the question I had was, well, what should I believe? What if I believe the wrong thing and I'm going to get myself in trouble? I was afraid to believe anything for a while. Then I realized the only beliefs that make any sense are the beliefs that will take you from where you are to where you want to go. What are the beliefs that successful people believe? Look at Oprah Winfrey, born into poverty, sexually abused as a child, but she believed that she could get to where she wanted to go. Someone else without that belief didn't try. Simply the belief, and it's a choice. Everything is a binary choice. You're either believing something that takes you where you want to go or something that takes you away from where you want to go. You're choosing love or you're choosing the opposite, which is fear. It's like it's a computer code, zero or one. Which do you want to choose? Now you have to become conscious because most people around you are unconscious and they're just agreeing with everything that's negative. That's why you want to hang out with positive people. But if you read books like this, if you go to seminars and you meditate and you listen to podcasts, surround yourself with positive positive energy, pretty soon you get engulfed in this positive thinking and then all of a sudden your life transforms.

How does someone practice uncommon appreciation and what does that exactly mean?

Well, uncommon appreciation, most people don't appreciate anybody. Most people are always focused on what they don't have. I took my son to Africa when he was 16 and we went to Cameroon and we spent 12 days traveling around the country. And this is a kid who grew up in the house that we're filming the sins, a pretty nice place and he had everything he could possibly want, which I'm not sure was the best idea. And we get to Africa and he realizes, I mean, he's always going like, I don't have the latest designer shirt, my jeans aren't cool. Get to Africa, he says, Dad, these people are happier than me. They have nothing. They don't even have t-shirts. I complain about the stain on my shirt. They don't have shirts. And it changed his life. I mean, it really transitioned him. And so we have to realize that we have so much to be grateful for. So much. And so uncommon appreciation in relationship means, for me, at least five times a day, verbally, appreciating somebody for something, you know? And whether it's by phone, in person, and if I can't do that, then send an email. So I used to walk around with a three by five card, these daily disciplines of success. Appreciate five people, meditate, drink 12 glasses of water, go to bed by 11 o'clock, whatever. And I had to check everything off before I could go to bed. And sometimes I'd get to my five appreciations and I hadn't done it, so I'd send emails to people because it was like one in the morning or something. But you get into the attitude of appreciating.

Yeah.

And also then you can just have an attitude of gratitude about everything. If you look around this room, everything in here was created by somebody else. That painting was painted by a Vietnamese artist. That statue was carved by someone in Malaysia or Tibet. You know, this fireplace was painted by a faux finisher. Somebody put this carpet down, somebody wove it, somebody grew the sheep for it. You know, there's so much to be grateful for. And you go to, I was just in India, and, you know, wood floors, tin roofs, people sleeping on the streets, you know, and you go, oh, thank God. But we forget. And so if you express gratitude for what you have, then you get more to be grateful for. That's the law of attraction.

It's amazing, yeah. How does someone practice gratitude when they feel like they have nothing still though? How does someone come from that place?

Well, my favorite story about that is Joe Vitale, who was in the movie the Secret, and he said he was in somewhere in Texas, I think Austin might have been Dallas, Fort Worth, He was down the bottom of the bottom. He was living in one of those like $79 a month apartments with like one table that was like plastic with plastic chairs and light bulb hanging out. A mattress on the floor with two sheets. I mean, you know, just the worst. And he said, he borrowed a book from the library and it said, Be Grateful. He said, what the hell do I have to be grateful for? I got a pencil and a piece of paper. That's about it. And then he said, well, if there was something to be grateful for, what would it be? He says, well, I got a pencil, I could write down my goals, I could send a love letter. With an eraser, I could erase my limiting beliefs. And that was a shifting moment of his life when he realized, I've got these two things, I can create my future by writing down what I want. And so, you know, if you're in America and you're in a, even if you're on welfare, you're better than, you know, most of the world, I forget the exact figure, but like half the world lives on $2 a day or less.

Incredible.

Someone in America on welfare is getting several hundred dollars a month. They got radio they can listen to, more likely they got a cell phone. Cell phone, TV, they got a cell phone. Yeah. You know, so here's another statistic. If you're making $100,000 a year, which you are and I am, you're in the top 1/10 of 1% of earners in the planet. Wow. 1/10 of 1%.

That's a lot to be grateful for. A lot to be grateful for. 'Cause a lot of people make money.

Who are very ungrateful and unhappy. Yeah, they're comparing themselves to something they don't have. So start focusing on what you do have and feel great joy for that. And then the weird law is you get more. And when you're focusing on what you don't have, even when you have a lot, well, I don't have that latest Ferrari. I don't have that $52,000 watch. All you have to do is walk through the airport in Dubai and you could get very depressed if you were in that mental state. I saw a bottle of wine in the Dubai airport. was being sold for $196,000 a bottle.

Oh my goodness.

It's like a 1954 Chateau Lafite, whatever it was. And it was like, oh my God, I'd like to taste that wine. But I'm not gonna take my money and spend it for that.

For $50,000 a sip.

No, really?

So when we are ungrateful, what are we saying to others and to... Well.

What we're saying is I don't have enough. And that is your mantra. I don't have enough. And guess what? Whatever you're affirming, you're gonna get more of. You're gonna get more of not enough. So abundance is focusing on what you do have. Just go walk down the street. You know, there's trees and air and birds and people and people that, you know, you could literally ask people for a dollar and most people would give it to you, you know?

Sure.

And so by focusing on what you do have, it's saying to the world, I have enough. And then the reality is you're going to get more. Sure.

It's just so bizarre how that works. Do you have an exercise or an example or homework for people about creating abundance in their life?

Yeah, there's a number of things. Double Comma Stone told me, Always carry a $100 bill in your pocket. I have several in my pocket at the moment. So, the reality is every time you go in, even if you don't have it to spend, you've got it in your pocket. Interesting. So, you go and you go, oh yeah, I'm rich. I got $100. As opposed to you going, I've only got $12. So you don't ever want to be.

In that only got mentality.

Just to opening it up and see nothing. Exactly, interesting. So that was one thing. Another thing he told us to do was go down to the Chicago Stock Exchange, when all these billionaires were coming out getting their limos, say, Thank you for being a model of abundance. Thank you for modeling that it's possible to be wealthy. So we all did that one day. It was a little embarrassing, but-- But it worked. But it worked. But the most important thing is to do what I call a rampage of appreciation. something I learned from the Abraham work of Esther and Jerry Hicks, where you take five minutes and just walk around your house, the hotel you're in, wherever you might be, and just start appreciating everything. You know, the people who made those wax candles over there that I get to romantically light this room with, the people that made that television where I just watched the Super Bowl the other day, even though my team lost. And who cares they lost? It was a great game. It was very exciting. And there's flowers over there that I didn't, plant the seeds of and the woman comes in and waters them. And even if you're living in the ghetto, you have a roof over your head. There's people in the world sleeping on the streets, sleeping in the jungle, sleeping out there. You have fresh water. People in Africa are dying because of lack of water that doesn't have disease in it. More likely you have clothes on, you have food to eat. It may not be gourmet food, but it's food. You have medical care. So just look at everything and just Just a rampage of appreciation. Every single thing. I appreciate that. We have indoor plumbing. You know how many people don't have indoor plumbing? Yeah, exactly. We turn on the lights. We turn on the lights and the electricity comes on. Yeah. You know, in India, I saw this movie recently about in India, people don't have phone service. If you don't have phone service, you can't play in today's world. There's a guy, I forget his name right now, but he actually goes up and he cuts a little wire to the phone, puts a clip, and puts phone service into people's homes in the ghetto. That's interesting.

And he's of Robin Hood.

He's a hero.

Yeah, yeah.

So just, God, there's so much we have to be grateful for.

Before we continue this video, make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day. Let's talk about the four E's. What is this principle of the four E's that you talk about in your book?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I like to break up my life in quadrants and I help my students. I do a lot of coaching. I do personal development and professional development coaching. And no matter where you come to me, whether you come to me for personal development or whether you want to turn your passion into profit and this professional development and business development for entrepreneurs, we go over the four E's because abundance is holistic. It's a holistic experience. So the first is enrichment of self, that you are only going to go as far as you think you're worthy. I can push, you can push, you can have the greatest product, but if you don't feel worthy, you will work hard to sabotage that relationship. You don't know what you're doing. You don't know you're doing. You think these are the things I need. And you're driving that guy away. You're driving that woman away because your self-worth says they weren't gonna stay forever anyway. Or self-worth around money. You have a cap that you feel like you're worthy of a million dollars. You will always get to 999,000 and you will stop because your self-worth says it. So enrichment is number one.

What's a good exercise or process that we can follow on a daily basis, maybe something simple to enhance our enrichment.

Absolutely.

Worthiness.

Absolutely. I did this for six months, every single day, right after I brushed my teeth. And it's the I see you exercise. And you get in the mirror now, it's not necessarily simple because you're dealing with yourself.

Of course.

And as complicated as you are, will.

Be the The mechanics of it.

The mechanics are very simple. Yes, I appreciate that distinction. You get in the mirror and you complete three different sentences. You want to write this down. The first sentence, you look at yourself and you say your name. So you say, Louis, and you complete this is I'm proud that you and find seven different things every day to celebrate yourself for seven different. Each day you can do the same thing you did the day before, but each day do seven different things to be proud of. The second sentence is going to knock you down a little bit. It's going, come from your gut. Louis, I forgive you for and cut the shackles to blame, shame, guilt, regret and anger. In that sentence, you cut those five shackles. Not the first day, maybe not the third day, but by the 21st day, by the 13th day, you'll feel some relief. So, Louis, I forgive you for and go back five years, 15 years, 20 years, do that. Forgive you for that thing don't nobody know about, but you. Go ahead and cut those shackles, because if you can still think about it, it's still in your energy space. And then the third sentence is, Louis, I commit to you that before you make a commitment to anybody else throughout your day, you make seven commitments to you. So the first sentence is, I'm proud that you, you're celebrating yourself first. We are under-celebrated as a society. We look for acknowledgement. They interviewed 100 executives that all made over a quarter of a million dollars and said, Would you like a 5% raise next year? Or would you rather be told, Thank you more often? 100%, 100% said, Keep your money. I'd rather hear thank you. So we're under-celebrated. But first, celebrate you. Be the example. When I was on Oprah, when she said, what do you do? I said, I recognize that I'm the example of how the rest of the world is supposed to treat me. And it's my job to give the world the best example of how I like to be treated. So celebrate yourself, forgive yourself, cut the shackles, and then commit to yourself before.

You commit to anyone else.

That right there, Powerful. That right there will begin to fill your cup up to get to your sausage.

I love that. Where did you start to learn that process? Was that something you just started to practice yourself and started looking in the mirror and trying different things?

You, boy, you asked the question. I was in a relationship engaged to be married and it became abusive. I was emotionally abused and then he picked me up and threw me three feet across the room. and choked me until I passed out. I don't tell a lot of people that. And I was suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder. And my mother asked me to go to the doctor, strongly recommended I go to the doctor, drug me to the doctor. And after the assessment of me in Manhattan Beach, my doctor said that I was clinically depressed. And I. I said, how did I get here? Me? That don't even fit with my name. I was head cheerleader in my high school. I was the captain of the track team. I'm always the person to get people going. It didn't fit. How did I get here? I don't know if you've ever found yourself saying, How did I get here? I was sitting on the table in the doctor's office saying, How did I get here? And when she wrote me the prescription, she handed me the prescription and I read the prescription and it said, Lisa Nichols, Prozac. It was like I was looking at a foreign statement, my name in Prozac. And I asked her, I said, can I try something for 30 days? Because I realized I was just sad. I lost me. I had lost me in him. I had lost me in being a mother. I had lost me in being the mother of a son whose father was in prison and trying to hide that shame. and then trying to make this man happy and then beginning to fend for my life. I lost me. So I needed to discover me. I needed to remind myself who I was. And so I just realized I didn't celebrate me. I was beating myself up. I was really mad at me and I was showing up for everyone else. So I just made up these sentences and I did it to rescue myself, to turn my crawl into a walk. And I ultimately was able to turn my crawl into a walk, and my walk into a run, and my run into a soar. But it started out as a crawl. So I don't offer the how I got to that exercise often unless someone asks.

Thank you very much, darling. You're welcome. Thanks for sharing.

Yeah, I'm glad I've long since learned four things. To me, this is the road to true freedom. I have nothing to prove. I have nothing to protect. I have nothing to hide. And I have nothing to defend. That your perception of me after I tell my truth is actually none of my business. My perception of me that I go to bed as whole and complete as I woke up before I check how many likes I have on Facebook that I like me first. and every other like is bonus.

There you go.

Like it. That was a long road to get to. Long road.

Sure.

Long road. Yeah.

We probably have to constantly be reminded of it, you know? And then when I get in that place.

And then when I, when I live like I'm forgetting, you have to have accountability partners stashed in the corners of your life. And you have to give them an assignment on your high day. You have to give them an assignment on your high day. If I look like I'm slipping.

Well, my ego's in the way. Get in my face. Get in my face.

Right. Get in my face and remind me of the man, of the woman I said I wanted to be. Don't let me off the hook for the 2020 version of me.

Because we're humans, it's gonna happen. As long as we're breathing, we're gonna.

Be out of integrity at some point. Come on. Your humanity's gonna get in the way.

Your ego, our ladies, your she-go, is going to get hooked.

Exactly. Absolutely. Your resentment, your smallness, your everything. Just smallness. It all fits in smallness. I'm human. And so I'm the best thing I did was to keep people around me to hold me accountable to the woman I said I want to become. Sure, that's great.

I love that. That's why I have a lot of people from the Midwest who work with me on my team to support me, keep me grounded.

Right, right, right, right, right. Like, don't get too Hollywood. Exactly. Don't get caught up in the lights.

And the cameras and the dad-gone headset. Exactly, exactly. Absolutely.

Okay, enrichment, that's the first part. The second part is enchantment. Relationships are going to define the quality of your life. When you're on your bed on your last days, you're going to want to know who's going to be around you. Bottom line, you're not going to care about another podcast. You're not going to care about another sponsor. I'm not going to care about another book or the freaking New York Times best. It matters to us now, but the relationships in your life are going to determine the quality of your life. And so mind your relationships. And so in the book abundance now, I teach you how to, how to heal broken relationships that matter to you. how to get back level set. I give you this great, this great tool called, it's a, it's a, it's a, a conversation to heal a broken experience. So it's called a communication Charter. I use it in my company. I use it at my house.

Yeah.

And so just is about how do I keep great relationships? And then the third area is engagement, work engagement. You're gonna spend so much time in work, and we're so emotionally attached to our work. And most of the time, people are attached in such a dismal way that why would you have that dismal energy around something you're going to spend so many hours in. So I teach you how to shift your energy towards your work so that you no longer look at it as your work. Now it's no longer your JLB. Like everyone in my community, everyone in my tribe, they no longer say they have a job. They say, I have an investor. And when you look at your job as your investor and you really rename it as your investor. Yeah. And it's investing in your breathtaking future. It has the capacity to buy anything you want for your future if you mind your money, right?

Right, right.

It can buy your freedom and all of a sudden you start treating your investor better and you're more excited about going. Matter of fact, you're great. You're grateful for your. I feel like work, man. My investor was LA Unified School District. That was a hard place to be when it was a job. I'm just telling you. But as an investor for three and a half years, I wrote myself a check and I put in the memo line funding my dream. I didn't even know what the dream was. I wasn't even clear. I just knew whatever my dream was, it's going to cost some money. and I needed to pay and I need to have some money to pay in that if I was going to ask other people to invest in me, I had to be my first investor. Who am I to ask someone to put money my way when I didn't put money my way? So I wanted someone for them to match, just match my investment in me. I got 10 in, can you put 10 in? I got 20 in, can you put 20 in? And so when you look at your job, your work engagement as an investor into your breathtaking life, all of a sudden there's a different energy around it. And then the last one is money endowment. And to recognize more than the Dr. Seuss family and the Disney family and the McDonald's family and the Lawrence Welk family has a right to an endowment. When you get the understanding and I really unpack it here where you kind of go, what? Like I'll make you do a couple of Scooby Doo looks in the book. Like, ro-ro-ro. When you look and go, I can do an endowment, like, 'cause we think it's for them. Remember I started this conversation with, Abundance is for those people over there, especially when it comes to an endowment or a living legacy, like in your book and creating a legacy. to recognize that, wait a minute, there's a Lewis endowment and a Lisa endowment and a Don and John and Tanya endowment and fill in the blank here endowment. And I need to live my life to set up my endowment. All of a sudden, you become responsible for generations to come, responsible for changing the trajectory of your family's life. That's some bold stuff. When in your lifetime, you do a needle point move for your family. In my lifetime, I was able to do a needle point move for my son. like he's a Nichols child. He's one of many Nichols men. But that's a Nichols man who now knows what it feels like to cook in Italy and in Tuscany and in Florence and in Venice and in Rome. That's a Nichols child who knows what it feels like to go surfing on the Gold Coast of Australia. That's a Nichols child who understands what it feels like to stand on the tallest mountain in Africa, like his life. I asked him this morning, I said, Jelani, can you When you get married and have children, can you stay in California so mommy can really see her grandchildren? He goes, well, Mom, that's kind of restrictive. It's restrictive to stay in big California. It's like, Mom, it's kind of... Because he knows the world.

Yeah.

His paradigm shift has occurred. He won't ever live like another and he'll take everything he's learned and expand the Nichols male child experience. So in my generation, in my lifetime, I was able to change our family experience for him. And so I believe that we have a right to look at our legacy and create a living legacy and then create a legacy.

There's so many people that just get into personal development and build a business off of that. But for years you were building businesses and selling that, and then you got into personal development. So you've been extremely successful and sustainable because because you know how to run businesses in this and that's why you continue to grow.

Well, business is the fundamentals, being healthy fundamentals, having great relationship fundamentals. It's not rocket science, but it is a science. And if you understand the science, then you take action, then you can achieve the success you want just about in anything.

Yeah.

What do you think is holding people back from growing a business, starting and growing a business to a certain level?

Well, initially what holds them back is fear. So fear of failure, fear of success and then failing, fear of disappointment, fear of being embarrassed, fear of being ashamed, fear of being guilty, fear of losing money, fear of filling the mind. There's over 50 different types of fear that holds most people back, but they're unaware of it. It's like a silent hidden enemy that's locked deep in their non-conscious brain. This is the area that, you know, I study and this is my life's work now, is understanding what actually drives the perceptions that people have about themselves and what's possible for them to achieve. And what's the difference between somebody says, yes, you know, I want I believe I can have it. I believe I could do it. But then there's another voice that they listen to more that says, but you're not smart enough, but you're not good enough. But what if you fail? What if you succeed? So there's voices in our head that most people have not learned how to really just pay attention to because the voices that you hear, the thoughts that you're having, the conscious ones and even the non-conscious ones that percolate up to consciousness, if you pay attention, you can manage where they go because that's what actually fires the electrical signal and the chemical response that drives behavior. And most people don't understand, it's like a spark plug. One spark plug turns the car on and you can push the gas and go. The other spark plug basically turns the car off and your brake is on. Most people don't think of their body, their mind as a system that they actually own. And so we haven't been given the user's manual for that. So fear is one, but then it's all the non-conscious conditioning that prevents people from taking the actions that are needed.

Like what are the conditioning that most people have, the non-conscious ones?

Well, this is from what we've learned from our parents. If we think about the era that our parents lived, great depression, right? very, very hard to make money, very, very hard to find resources, very, very hard to do anything unless you're a professional. So our parents said to most of us, if you don't become a professional, you're going to struggle and suffer. And even the professionals said, okay, so become a professional and here's your ceiling of what you have. So we became conditioned to be worried of scarcity in a world that has no scarcity. we became conditioned to having certain beliefs about what's possible or not possible. So even now, you know, as we, as we, you know, we're sitting here and we've got this, you know, amazing election time. Crazy. You know, one of the things I've been thinking about is, you know, there are some people that believe that if Donald Trump wins, they're gonna make a fortune. And there's other people that think they're gonna lose everything. And I have a friend of mine who has got about 70 million dollars in the bank that believes that if Hillary gets into office, he's gonna lose millions. It's gonna be really tough. And what really is going on in people's heads. It's all of their references, their beliefs and their perceptions that are locked away in the implicit part of their brain that is driving those thoughts and even the behaviors.

They may not even be aware of it.

They're not even aware of it. Yeah, they can be but there may not be. And so what we really have to go back to to focus on is it really makes no difference who becomes president. Or who doesn't? If you have the belief that regardless of what happens in your external world, you can navigate towards the success that you want. That's a belief. And beliefs are the lens by which we actually see the world and by which we behave. And so if you want to change your results, don't focus on changing your behaviors. Change your focus on the beliefs that drive your behaviors. Right?

Powerful.

Yeah, and so the next question though is, well great, what kind of beliefs do I have?

Right?

So, well we have two types of beliefs and this is where it can get a little bit, you know, heady and that is, you know, when you start talking about my brain, it's an organ. It's like your heart is an organ. You can speed up your heart, you can slow down your heart, you can, you know, speed up the brain waves in your brain, you can slow them down, you can tune in, you can tune out. We haven't been given the user's manual for the most Powerful tools that we're aware of. That's right. And so the great news, you know, I know you being an athlete and a successful businessman, you have discipline. You cannot. You can't achieve results without some kind of discipline. And so we know that there's some fundamental truths to achieving success. And every successful person will tell you, you know, and Jim Rohn is, I know you, you love Jim Rohn, said you either pay the price of discipline or you pay the price of regret. Discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs tons.

That's good.

But the thing is, can you teach discipline? The answer is yes.

How?

You have to have a willing participant. And if the participants reason why is big enough, if they know I want to achieve X and the reason why the motive for their action, motivation, the motive for their action is a reason beyond just themselves, chances are they will do more to achieve that success than if it was just left up to their own. But there are some people that are born with incredible drive. They just have this insatiable drive and they'll just, I'll do whatever it takes for the things that I want. And there's other people that want things, but they just don't have this insatiable drive. And this is where, as much as I hated school, I love to use schools as an analogy. In the game of life, whether it's health, wealth, relationships, career, business, spirituality, fun experiences, you have to decide what the game do I want to play it? Is it the grade school level, the kindergarten level, the high school level, the university level, the pro level? Because each one of those levels requires a totally different mindset and totally different skill set. They're building blocks on each other, but if you are extremely talented, but you're not prepared to practice and rehearse and drill and fall and fail forward to the next attempt, you will never make it as a pro. You will never make it as a pro business person. You'll never make it as a pro husband or wife or athlete or musician. You just never will. So just get used to that if you're not prepared to pay the price. If you are prepared to pay the price and you have the aptitude and the talent. Now we're talking about there's some real potential here. And what we don't know is, you know, what's in your heart? Like what is the fire that stirs you? that you wake up saying, I will do this even when I don't feel like it. I will do whatever it takes to overcome my temptation for mediocrity, my temptation for excuses, my temptation for reasons and circumstances to hold me back. I won't allow those to be in my way. And if you have that within you, you'll achieve whatever you choose. And so the question you asked before is how do you develop that? Start small.

Yeah.

Start small. So if you don't have discipline, show yourself that you can give yourself one command and one follow through. So you know what? Right now, I'm going to get up, I'm going to do two push-ups. Right now, not like later.

Now.

Can you give yourself a simple command? One sit up. Right now, I'm going to go get a glass of water. You start with something ridiculous. I learned many years ago, reduce it to the ridiculous. So if I reduce it to the ridiculous, and I start, I say, Can you do that?

Great, will you?

Because that's the difference right there, is that's the razor's edge. The people who can, will you?

Yeah.

Great, when?

Now.

Now.

Yeah.

Right, so if you develop that skill, and specifically from a brain plasticity, a neuroplasticity perspective, as soon as you do that, you give yourself a command, and you take the action, you have just created a neural pattern that you can give yourself a command and take action. Now, that may just be one time. Well, what if you did that every hour by putting a little bell on your computer? And every hour, like if my computer was open, I'd have every hour it would say, It's 12 o'clock, it's 1 o'clock. And I take 60 seconds just to be in control of my mind. 60 seconds, I don't care where I am.

Stop what you're doing.

Stop, take six breaths, just get centered. Am I on track? Am I off track? Am I doing something I shouldn't be doing? versus a high impact activity that I need to be doing. Every hour, I've trained myself to just reset. I didn't always do that. So I just started with one a day, then two, then three. Then it was working so well, I said, great, let's do this every hour. But more importantly is as soon as you become the person who believes in themselves, you see, every thing you do or don't do, leaves an imprint on your self-worth and self-esteem scale. And you know it.

Absolutely.

You know it.

Every time you have that cake or that cookie, you either believe in yourself or you don't believe in yourself.

Every time you're voting with every decision, you're disqualifying with every negative belief, you're qualifying with every positive. Same with behaviors. So you start to get getting aware of Am I qualifying myself to move forward or am I disqualifying myself through what I say I want and what I do or don't do over and over and over again? Because thought patterns become emotional patterns, which become behavioral patterns. And our brains pick up on our thought, emotional and behavioral patterns and says, Hey, you know what? You've done that one enough. I'm just gonna make that automatic for you. So all of a sudden, If you're a person who has lots of positive thoughts but you suck at taking action, your brain says, Let me make that a permanent pattern for you so you don't have to think about it anymore. But I'm also going to create some neural tension and I'm going to make you pissed off at yourself now. Now you're going to start talking to yourself about how you don't want to not take action but you're still taking action. And this is where we have this conscious, non-conscious ping pong match going on all the time. Complex. Yeah, it's actually complex but it's actually pretty easy to.

So if someone's listening right now and they're thinking, you know, there's a lot of things I want. You know, I want to get out of this relationship or I want the relationship. I want to have a better health. I want to have more money, whatever it may be. And they've been saying that for years and they feel like they've been consuming all the information they need to have, but they haven't been able to take action.

Maybe because their why isn't powerful enough. What would you say should be their first step? Well, the first step is to take one thing. I'm going to go back to one thing. and say, great, let me move one thing forward. Why? Because that just changes the trajectory of the same pattern repeating itself. And as soon as you interrupt a pattern and then you repeatedly interrupt the pattern, it's like taking a detour. And as soon as you take a detour one day, you're like, okay, that was okay. But you tended, your tendency is to want to go back to what's comfortable. But if you take the detour two days, six days, seven days, we know from a neuroscience perspective, it takes about 66 days to create a solid enough neural pattern that it'll go from conscious effort and thinking about it to a non-conscious pattern that has the beginnings of automaticity happening without your involvement. You're just doing it. And so for me, what I do for myself, is I, whenever I want to change something, whether it's a habit, whether it's a thought or emotion or behavior, I say I'm going to work on this for 100 days, not 30 days, not 21 days, not 66, which is right around there. I say 100 days. And then I focus all of my energy just on that one thing for 100 days. Why? Can you give an example of something you've done? Sugar.

Sugar. Sugar. I'm a sugar. Me too.

I'm a sugar. Like if he was an alcoholic, I'm a sugaraholic.

Me too.

Right?

It's so bad.

Yeah, so I go like, you know, a week, two weeks, no sugar. Then a month, I eat dessert every night. 90 days?

Me too.

You know, like a cake and cookie and five of them a day. And then-- the same way.

I can be very disciplined, but it's either way.

Yeah, I'm an extremist as well, right? So it's all or nothing. Higher off is like no in between, right?

You have one, you're having ten.

Yeah, I don't have one cookie. If there's only one cookie, I go, no, I have like six or seven more. My cookie bills at a hotel, are $21, not $3. So, you take one thing, just one thing that you know may be a little challenging.

100 days.

100 days, just 100 days. So, let's say you want to drink more water. 100 days, a glass a day. Conscious effort to one a day. Whatever you did before, you'll still do, but one glass a day. So, you know, I started that with my assistance. I want to drink you know, like four of these a day, you know, like, you know, 32 ounces, whatever the case is. And so every we got a mug and it's on my desk every time I walk in. And then I have some support from her saying, hey, remember to drink your water. So just do it. So the first, you know, two, three weeks, I feel like I'm gonna drown myself in so much water. But then it's like, okay, now I'm used to it. Now I'm drinking as much water as possible because the habit is there. And one of the rules that I love to follow is the habit is more important than the intensity. at first. So don't worry about the intensity. Develop the habit. So can you take one minute a day to focus on how you will achieve a goal? Just one minute a day. Can you take one minute a day to focus on your health?

Yeah.

Can you take one day to retrain your brain?

Yeah.

Can I take one day, you know, or one action a day, and you start off with something, you know, and reduce it down to just a minute? Or two minutes or one behavior. If you can get that behavior to be a habit, it's easy to stack.

Right, of course.

It's just like the foundation of a building. Once you have the foundation, if you build it right, you stack. Yeah. And so every good discipline affects another and every bad discipline affects others.

Let's go into some of the principles, the fundamentals of success. And I think you talk about being clear is one of the first things and having a clear vision.

Right?

Because if you can't be successful without a vision and being clear.

Well, you have to first take 100% responsibility for your life, give up being a victim, then you have to get clear about what is my purpose. I believe each person has a purpose they were born with, whether it's to be a mechanic or a chef or to be a doctor or to do what we do, which is empower and enlighten people. through the work we do. And so once you've got that, you have to have a clear vision of what would you like your life to look like both in the business world, in your social world, in your relationships, your health and fitness, your travel and fun, all of that. So we have seven areas of your life which we say, let's pretend that you could have anything you want. No holds barred. You know, God comes down and says, you,'re chosen, you won the lottery, you get the life you want, what would you do? And you go, oh, I'd like to live in this house in Malibu. I like to live on the ocean. I want to have three kids. I want to be able to travel to Europe five times a year. Whatever it is, write it down. And then using things like visualization and affirmations, you can start turbocharging that vision with intention and then some of the tools that come out of the Law of Attraction work and so forth. But you first have to know where you're going. I liken it to a GPS system in a car. Here we are in Santa Barbara.

You live in LA somewhere.

Windy roads to get back here. Yeah. But if you have a GPS that says 929 via Fruteria or whatever, your GPS system will tell you how to get there. Now, when you left LA, you did not know exactly where you were going. You just trusted a GPS to say turn left, turn right, turn left. Your subconscious mind works the exact same way. It is a programmable GPS system that will figure out the path if you program it correctly, which is putting in a vision of the destination.

That's all you have to do. Interesting. But a lot of people feel a lot of fear because they're of the unknown of what's going to happen or that they might fail. They have a big dream, right? So what is fear to you and how does someone overcome that fear?

Well, here's the deal. Basically, fear is-- I love this word, the guy who wrote the book Dune, said fear is the mind killer. Fear takes you back into the amygdala, which is in the limbic system of your brain. You want to be in the prefrontal cortex, which is where the executive functions, where spiritual insights, where wisdom occurs, where rational, logical thinking occurs. So basically, as soon as I get into fear, I go back into this primal fight or flight or freeze place. And so I want to be up here. So, you know, basically we now have technology called EFT tapping, I'm sure you remember. Of course, Nick Ordner and all those guys. And literally nine acupuncture points, you tap on those in a sequence for maybe five minutes, seven minutes, and the fear disappears. It literally dissolves. There's absolutely no reason for anyone to be in fear. Now, the value of setting a goal is to watch all these fears come up. I refer to it as a, you ever played the game whacK-A-Mole at the mall? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta whack them before they go back down. So we want to surface those fears so we can whack them using EFT and other technologies that are out there, neuro-linguistic programming and so forth. But now we have this science that just literally you don't have to be stopped. The other thing, a friend of mine just wrote a book called the the fear cure and or the cure for fear, one of those. And she talked about one of the biggest fears is of the unknown and uncertainty of the future. But everything's uncertain. We are trying to create certainty in an uncertain world and stop being afraid of uncertainty. Uncertainty is what's exciting. If you go to Africa on a vacation, a safari, you have no idea what's going to happen. That's part of the adventure. Fun.

That's part of the fun. Exactly. You knew, oh there's going to be.

A zebra that pops out right here or this is going to be nice and make it boring, right? Or if you go river rafting. You don't know where the rapids are and how you're going to do it. And if you go surfing, you don't know exactly how the waves are going to break and all that and how big it's going to be. And so that adventure is really what life's about. And so we need to be excited. Fear is created by imagining bad things that haven't happened yet. So fantasized experiences appearing real. Everyone always says that someone else recently said, forget everything and run. But I think that if you realize that you're creating your own fear, by imagining a bad thing, oh, if there's a recession, I'll lose my house. Why not go? If there was a recession, I'm going to make more money because there's going to be opportunities and we're going to be able to pay our house off faster. Zig Ziglar said, Worrying is negative goal setting. And all you have to do is use that same power to think and visualize to create a positive outcome instead.

Of a negative, and then the fear disappears. Yeah, and a quote of yours, I.

Believe, is in the book. As you say, everything you want is on the other side of fear. Absolutely. You know, we all live in our comfort zone. We want to be comfortable. When I was down in the rainforest a couple of years ago with the Achuar Indians, I always wanted to go to the rainforest ever since I heard- How was it? It was so cool. It was really cool. We got to live with the Achuar Indians, which is an indigenous tribe, which is a, you know, had not had any connection with white people from the outer world until about 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And friends of mine are down working with them to help preserve the rainforest. and I always wanted to go. The trees are unbelievably huge. Roots are as tall as this building and go out like that. You can build a house inside the root system.

Oh my goodness.

There's army ants that are about that big, these leaf cutter ants, and you can see them just going across with all these little leaves waving. We got to swim in this river that was full of piranha, they told us later. But piranha don't eat you. They don't. They have a rule in the river, nothing attacks anything six times bigger than it is. Wow. And so if you are in a tide pool where there's no food and it's flooded and now it's stuck over there and you step in there, a piranha will bite you.

The river they're not going to.

Not at all. We had so much fun. It was so delightful to be in that nature. So the point is everything is an adventure and we have to think of it that way or we're going to be victims.

And one of the other principles you talk about is how to transform yourself for success. So tell me about the people we surround ourselves with and how do people influence us in a positive way of achieving our goals or keeping us back into victim mode? I don't know if your parents ever.

Said this to you, but mine did. They always said, I don't want you hanging out with those kids.

They're bad influence.

Sure, sure.

Yeah.

So that doesn't stop when you're 18, right? So there are certain people who are negative, curmudgeonly, whiners, complainers and blamers that if you hang out with them, that's who you become.

Yeah.

And you look at any bar, all bars have a personality to them. You know, there's bars on Lower State Street and Santa Barbara here where the lower economic class hangs out and they just bitch and moan about how bad everything is. There's bars further up the street where the people that are more successful hang out and they're just doing deals and talking about all the great things that happened that day. Having fun and having fun. They're networking and brainstorming with each other, introducing each other to opportunities. So basically, you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Yeah. I remember Mark asked this one guy who owns Evergreen Airlines if he could give him an idea that he thought might work for him. And he said, well, if I take it, how much money do you think I might make? He says, well, a couple million. He says, Mark, I can't even consider an idea that won't make me $100 million. Oh, my gosh. It's just below my threshold. Not worth it. Yeah. You know, so now most of us, that's a very rarefied atmosphere. Most people listening to this aren't there. But just to give you an example, There's a friend of mine who now a friend, he just died recently, but I didn't know him at the time. His name was Lou Tyson. He ran the Pacific Institute and was teaching a lot of stuff we do. And he was making again, like, you know, a lot of money. His clients included the Navy, you know, the government of Denmark, you know, that kind of stuff. And I said, I want to learn what he's doing. He's playing at a bigger level than I am. So I called him up and I said to him, Lou, if you're ever in LA, could I, this was when I was in my 30s, I said, Could I be your chauffeur? Don't hire a limo. Let me show for you for free. All I ask is I can pump you with questions for the 20-30 minutes and a half. Sure, sure. He said, sure. So about three months later, I get a call. He says, hi, I'm coming to LA. Gonna do a talk at a country club, pick me up at LAX, take me to the hotel, take me to the country club, back again.

So I did.

And I just, I peppered him with like, what'd you do? How'd you do this? How'd you do that? And he told me, so about a year later, we both bid for a contract. It was $875,000 contract to educate People on welfare in California based on these success principles to get them off welfare and we were the final two competitors Pacific Institute and we won. Oh, wow. And so he was very gracious.

He sent me a nice note. He said, you,'re a good student. That's great.

He should have held back some of his secrets. Well, he didn't really need to. I mean, his bigger goal was to get all this out to the world and the father was doing that as part of that as well. But he is, I mean, most people, it'd be surprising how many people say yes. if you ask them to spend some time with you. Yeah, of course.

I want to speak into the mastermind part because when I did my first mastermind probably five, six years ago, when I had no clue what was going on, I think in our company, I was just starting out in business. We did around, I think, $250,000 in sales for like the first six months of our business. And then it was the end of the year, we went to this mastermind of these online marketers, and a lot of them were making five to ten million. and within the next month, the relationships we built from that mastermind, we did 250,000 in sales in that next month, just from five relationships in the mastermind. And that year we broke a million dollars. And it was just like all accelerated after being around people who were at that next level. So I can definitely speak into that. Yeah, I mean you're living proof of it.

Exactly.

Extremely powerful. And if you're not in a mastermind, make sure to join one and find.

One and become a part of it. Or get a mentor, you know, find somebody who's done what you want to do and whether it's being in person with them or reading their book or listening to their home study course or their podcast. But whatever it is, people have already done, Tony Robbins says success leaves clues. I love that. And so everyone who's ever been successful has left some kind of clue. There's a manual, a franchise operation manual, a workbook they wrote, a seminar they're leading, a boot camp. Go, get educated. I have a chapter in the book called Learn More to Earn More. Brian Tracy always talks about the idea that if you want to make more money, become more valuable, have more impact that you can give somebody that will affect their life in a positive way. Whether it's your employer or people like us to our clients, the more I know, the more I can support people. I mean, I have people now who are making, they own companies worth $600 million, and they'll come to a retreat with me just so they can do tapping with me to overcome some fear they have.

Stress or whatever, yeah.

Yeah, one guy, he was from Czechoslovakia, Pavel. And he had this huge company and he was totally miserable. And he basically as a result of all this work we did, he sold two of his companies, he hired some people to run his other companies, he always wanted to be a cyclist, hired Lance Armstrong's cycling coach, and now he's won two cycling races in the Pyrenees in Europe, and he's in his 60s. So why not have a balanced life?

Sure, sure.

Now who are your mentors growing up? in your early career?

Well, my first mentor was a man named W. Clement Stone. He was a friend of Napoleon Hill, and they wrote a book together, actually, called the Success System that Never Fails. And Napoleon Hill, we all know from Think and Grow Rich. And so he mentored me for about two years when I worked at his foundation. I was teaching teachers how to teach this stuff to kids to raise their self-esteem and teach them how to be successful. His big phrase was success is not a four-letter word. You know, it's like most people think success is bad.

Money is bad and success is bad.

Especially back in the 60s and 70s when everyone was a hippie and the counterculture and all that going on. So another mentor of mine was Jesse Jackson, who was a contemporary of Martin Luther King. I used to go to his church when I lived in Chicago. I was teaching in an all black inner city school because I was part of the civil rights movement, wanted to make a difference. And I remember one day I watched him, you know, he always had people like Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby would come in, you know, all these stars. And I remember standing on the edge of the church because I got there late so I didn't have a seat. and I'm looking over and the band is playing and all of a sudden Jesse looks over and he goes like that, just a little nod, the band stops, you know. Wow. And this room must have had a thousand people in it in his church. And I went, oh, that's cool. I want to learn how to do that, you know. And so now I run groups of like, you know, 500 to 800 people at a time and thousands. The largest group I ever talked to was 20,000 people, you know. Wow. And so like learning how to manage the energy of a large group of people like that is a skill. And I wanted to learn to do that. So I used to go to church every Sunday and just watch him master do that work. And then I've had masters along the way that I've worked with in terms of I used to be a psychotherapist, people that have taught me, you know, marketing, people that have been gurus for me in terms of my own relationships, John Gray for instance. And I think you should always have somebody who knows more than you do about something teaching you that so you can keep expanding your capacity.

You mentioned I think one of the faculties who said was the most challenging is imagination. Is that one of the most challenging for people?

It's not the most challenging. It's something we really want to gain an understanding of because most people use their imagination. They use it the wrong way. They imagine what won't work. They imagine something bad happening.

What should we imagine more often every day?

We should imagine you should see yourself where you want to be. You've got to live there. Like Shakespeare said, we're all actors, you know, the world's a stage, and that's true. Well, when you reach a goal, you're going to act like you're already there. It's already happened intellectually the second you think about it. It's already happened emotionally when you're emotionally involved with it. So it's only a period of time until it manifests in physical form. But because it's not in physical form, we act like we haven't got it yet. Well, so that's why most people stay stuck. because they're acting like they haven't got it yet. Or if I can't act like that, Lewis and see that I haven't got that result, he'll think I'm phony. I've got to quit worrying about what Lewis thinks and start concentrating on what Bob thinks. And so you see yourself, your imagination, you've got to be that person. Gurdjieff said that, great philosopher, he said, Before you can do something, you must be something. So you've got to be it intellectually, you've got to be it emotionally. As Saint Paul says, as a person thinks in their heart, the emotional mind. Well, it's only a period of time then until it manifests physically. That's one of the first laws of the universe, is the perpetual transmutation of energy. Energy is moving into form, always. To form, moving into form, through form, back into form again. So we cause it all to happen the way we think. and the way we stay locked into ideas.

How should people be developing their imagination on a daily basis in a positive way?

Well, I think they should take time to image what they want. I have a business partner, Sandy Gallagher, who's a brilliant woman, and she rides horses, gaited horses, and she's in Kentucky right now. and big term shows there. She images herself as a world champion. Every day she takes the time and she sees herself as a world champion. She sees herself getting roses, getting the whole thing. And that's the way she should do it. I think you build the image of what you want. I mean, you obviously image this studio before you ever built it.

Right.

I mean, everything you see here was part of the image in your mind. But everything you create, you create twice. Once in here, once out here, you know, so you never get an original painting. You always get a duplicate. The picture's in here.

Wow.

So we have to see ourselves with what we want here. Now, we've got enormous. deterrent in our paradigm. We're conditioned genetically and environmentally, and that conditioning is controlling most people's lives. That's why brilliant people are broke. Brilliant people are unhappy. Brilliant people never really accomplish very much. They're absolutely brilliant, but their paradigm is controlling them. It's all about intellect. They're smart people. But like, you got to consider where we come from. A little particle of energy from mom, a little particle of energy from dad comes swimming up. That's the nucleus of us. Then that goes on for 280 days attracting more energy until you make your debut on the planet. And then you're programmed environmentally by your environment. So everything that's going on is going right into your subconscious mind. So you come out, you're programmed genetically. We don't know how far it goes back, four or five generations possibly. Like when I was a young man, I had red hair. My mother didn't have red hair, my dad didn't have red hair, I got a brother and sister and they don't have red hair. And you can't help but think, well, my mother's father and all his brothers had red hair. So sometimes it jumps a generation. that's why we look like our relatives. It's genetic conditioning. And then there's environmental conditioning. We know almost all welfare recipients are fourth, fifth generation welfare recipients. So this is passed down from generation to generation. Now, unfortunately, we're all or fortunately we're all exactly the same. We've got exactly the same potential. Our spiritual DNA is perfect. But that perfection never expresses itself properly because of this paradigm, it's conditioning in our subconscious mind. You see so many brilliant people and they don't make it. I had a good friend of mine, Milt Campbell, he won the gold medal in the decathlon.

Well, I was a decathlete.

Were you aware?

I was an All-American decathlete.

Well, Milt won in Melbourne in '56.

Wow, okay.

He won in '52 in Helsinki. Bob Mathias won his second gold. He won the gold in '48 and then in '52. Milt told me, once he told me a thousand times, every time I was with him, there were a lot of athletes in schools that were better than me, but they quit. Well, our paradigms get us to quit things.

Why?

Because of programming. You're programmed. You have to ask yourself, why don't they do that? I did a lot of work with the Prudential of America. In fact, I got stuck in the insurance companies for a number of years. I was so effective at what I was doing. And we raised their sales by, one VP said over a billion dollars. and all I was doing, getting them to change their paradigm, I was having them change the way they worked. A paradigm, a culture is a paradigm. Every country has a culture. Every family has a culture. Every company has a culture. Well, in the insurance industry years ago, they had what they called debit agents. insurance. They went around collecting the money. And it would be a little book like the one you're working with. It would have a record in there. I remember we had a book on top of our ice box, was right near our back door. Mr. Spensley was the insurance man. When I was a little kid, he'd come in and there was a little book, a little box with some money in it. There's always just pennies. And he would collect the debit, mark the book, and he'd be on his and that's how the insurance business operated. They were called debit agents. Well then as time moved along people started to sign a little cheap sheet of paper or something and they would automatically draw it out of your bank account. But the agents didn't change. The agents would just go and sell at night when mom and dad were both there because you couldn't sell mom and if Dad wasn't there, you couldn't sell Dad if Mom wasn't there. This was a programming. So here we are in the 70s. Agents are still going to their office every morning, and they wouldn't go out to sell anybody because you sell at night. They collected their debit through the day. There was no debit to collect. This had been for years they were still doing this. And I, and I'd ask them, I'd say, why do you go to your office? Well, you have to go to the office. And they'd be there and I said, why do you have to go to your office? Because we have to go to the office. They didn't know why they had to go to the office. Then they go to lunch, they go with another agent. I said, you ever sell another agent any insurance? No. I said, what the hell do you want to have lunch with them for?

I got them to do this.

I said, you gotta be like this. You gotta be skin to skin with the person before 9:00 a.m. And you have to ask every person to buy at least $100,000 worth of insurance. They don't even have to sell them. just ask them to buy. Well, I got them doing that. They were selling more $100,000 policies in a week than they previously sold in a year in almost every office.

Wow.

You see, that's conditioning, that's paradigm, that's the way that we're working. They've been doing it for years. Nobody ever thought to change it. Largest insurance company in the world. And the head office was trying to figure out what I was doing because wherever I went, sales went crazy. I was showing them how to change paradigm. Your paradigm is your conditioned behavior.

How do we know when we need to change our own paradigm?

You always need to change your own paradigm.

How often are you changing yours?

I'm working on it right now, every day.

Really? Yeah.

I work on it every day. But you should only try and change one or two things at a time.

Don't try and change everything at once.

Well, you can know what your paradigm is. Just study your own behavior. Think of your results. You want to improve your results, don't you? Sure. You probably want to earn more money. Sure. You probably want this show to be bigger than it is. Sure. Yeah.

How are you going to do that?

You've got to change the paradigm. That's right. You've got to change your habitual way of dealing with these things. So you take a look at the results and say, what do I want to change? The results are an expression of the paradigm, not the intellect. See, the conscious mind is where all our intellectual information is. you know how to do better than you're doing. You know how to do better than you're doing. I know how to do better than that. Why aren't we doing it? The subconscious is programmed. It's your conscious mind where the intellect is, and that's what we are knowing is. Person knows, but they're not doing what they know. They say, why do you do that? I don't know. Well, you know better. I know. Why are you doing it?

I don't know.

Well, I know. It's their paradigm controls their behavior. so you take a look at your results and you say, what's causing that? So you've got to take back your behavior pattern. Why are you doing that? Because you're programmed to do it. Right now, the last time we did a Paradigm Shift seminar in Los Angeles was a number three or four months ago, we gave everybody a ring binder. It's a damn thing's about that thick. And on every page, every page the same. At the top of the page you write 10 things you're grateful for. And then there's a statement that you write. I am so happy and grateful now that I know my spiritual DNA is perfect. And that perfection is within me. Every morning I look for ways to improve my paradigm. I have to write that with my left hand. I'm right-handed. I'm on my 41st day today. Writing left-handed?

Writing left-handed.

Why? It's changing the paradigm. I could be just as proficient with my left hand as I am with my right. But I've got to change my paradigm. I'm programmed. Now when I'm writing, when you're writing, you just write, you don't think. That's why graphologists can tell a lot.

About your personality through your handwriting.

Yeah, sloppy handwriting. You're writing with your left hand and your right hand, your non-dominant hand. You've got to consciously pay attention to every stroke, every move your hand's making. And the second you stop, it looks like it was Chinese art that you were drawing.

Right.

But I know through repetition, keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it. It'll probably take me a year. But I'm learning how strong the paradigm is and how hard it is to change it. So a year from now, I'll probably be as proficient with one hand, the same with the other.

How important is the thoughts that you say in your mind quietly every day and the words you speak out loud every day? How important are they together and which one is more valuable if you could only choose one? Negative thoughts but positive words? Positive thoughts, but negative words, or do they both need to be in alignment towards your mission and purpose?

Well, so I'll start with this. Your life is a physical manifestation of the conversation going on in your head. I'm gonna start with that.

Can we just speak for like 24 hours on this? I love this.

Right.

Your life is a physical manifestation of the conversation going on in your head. So if you said nothing but thought everything, your life is going to show up. to make your thoughts true. So you have one job. You have one job in your life for you to make what you think about life true so that you're not wrong. You don't want to walk around wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. You want to be right about the life you see. So you're going to work hard, work hard to produce the life that you talk about in your mind. Whether that life is no one loves me, I'm all alone, you can be in a group of people and you will think, I'm so alone. And you will feel alone and things will show up to co-sign your loneliness just because you're looking for that. And so if you start with, I'm gonna say the mind, like the mind is that thing. The mind is the core engine. It starts all things. It shuts all things down. When I start thinking something different, I'm like, Hold on, stop. I want to think something. I shut down that behavior. I shut down that outcome. When I birth something, I birth it in my mind. I focus on my mind. I see myself there in my mind. Before I got on with you, I was doing guided visualizations. I'm recording them. So people, and I mean, they're juicy. And I'm saying, see yourself here. Because if you can see it, and then the, the key is evoke the emotion as if you were there.

Yeah. Right.

And that's why people are, who are sad all the time are sad. because they're thinking of things that make them sad. And then the emotion follows the thought. So I'm gonna say everything starts with your thought, Louis. But let me just say this. When you speak, you speak your future into the world. You speak your future. Whatever you say, whatever falls off your tongue, when you say, I am, right? The unconscious mind says, and you are so. Whatever comes on the other side of that, and so you, you, you ask.

Me a hard question.

Which one is most important? It starts with the thought. I think the thought is that that's where everything originates. And then you add a whole lot of turbo boost to it with your tongue.

Yeah.

When you align the two and then you add to it, like the B12, the B12 of action. Action is like, action is like, that's the Nitro. That's the Nitro. Like, Right. And I see so many people they think it they write it they journal it they talk about it and they do no action and I go you understand that the action is that that's like that's like putting the flower in the sun because it requires sun and.

So yeah, yeah, I had this is a beautiful explanation and I had a Navy SEAL on 6-7 months ago. His name is Chad and he talked about as a seal. He used the tongue as a rudder in a boat. He said, what you speak is going to lead you down, you know, the ocean or the river or wherever on the boat you're on. And so he never says anything negative out loud because it's so powerful in the Navy SEALs. He talks about how powerful it is. No matter how much pain they're experiencing in Hell Week and all this stuff they're dealing with, they never allow the tongue to speak something negative. Otherwise, they'll ultimately quit and give Right.

Right, right, right, right.

It's too painful to deal with what they deal with.

Right.

To then say, oh, I'm hurting. I'm tired.

I can't do it. Right, right. Don't, don't, don't speak that. Don't speak that into the universe. You just, because whatever you speak feels like it expands. Of course. Right. Energy grows where energy goes. It expands. So speak life, speak possibility. There is not one dark situation that doesn't have a glimmer of light. It doesn't mean it's going to be convenient to see.

That'S true.

And most of us are looking for convenient light.

Yes. Oh, man. I want to speak for, like, five more hours with you, but I want to. I want to try to finish with a few final questions here. Yes. Even though I don't want to finish this. We'll have to come you back on. Yeah, we'll bring it back on.

Again, I promise it won't be as challenging to get me in the future. I promise, my friend.

I want to talk about for a moment purpose, because I feel like right now we're seeing a lot of people with scattered purposes, especially with everything that's happening in the world over the last three months, six months. I'm seeing so many big influencers go through divorce who are publicly had great relationships. I'm seeing people's businesses go under because of they were in the events business or whatever, and they weren't able to adapt and shift. I'm seeing people scattered. with their purpose and unclear. How can people... Let's speak to this because I think it's two different questions. One is how to truly figure out what your purpose is because I think it's seasonal. You know, what your purpose was when you were 10 is different now.

I agree.

It's seasonal so it's hard for... it's a very broad question and I don't want to set you up with that because I think it's unfair when people ask you that for me. But if you think I know what my purpose is, I know I'm meant to go do this thing. I think I'm supposed to go after this. I feel like maybe I should try this thing, but I'm afraid. How would you coach someone who knows what they're supposed to do, or at least they think they do until they figure it out and it's not it or it is it? How do you coach people or encourage people to actually do it, to actually overcome that final hurdle of fear, whether they're afraid of failure, afraid of success, afraid of judgment, whether they've got a really good life and a really good job, but it's just not there? It's not pulling them to their ultimate purpose. Where do you share in that line?

So one of the first things I do is I ask them to please let's quantify and give life to what does it cost you to stay still?

Oh.

So, you know, I'm a straight no chaser kind of girl, right? We're not just going towards something. We also have to realize that To the same degree that you asked the weight loss, why did I do it? Because what would it cost me? With all my success, what would it have cost me to stay in that 220-pound body? What's the cost? And so when I saw that, that's why I responded. If I didn't give myself this, right, I was very clear with the cost. So number one, I would say, what does it cost you? And my students know me. I do this in my workshop, my trainings for my platinum-level students and my coaches. and students that are getting certified to be a Lisa Nichols trainer. And I ask them hard questions. What does it cost you to stay in that mindset? And they have to list it. And I say, what part of the price have you already paid? And they just get visceral. They're like, ah. And I say, so how long?

I don't know.

Whatever you want. How much longer do you want to pay that price?

Right. Two years, 10 years, two months.

Are we PIS? Are we paid in full now? Are we PIF? I paid in full and I'm cheap paying.

Exactly.

And so I use this metaphor that if you went to the store and bought a dozen eggs and you went home and you scrambled all the eggs and you cook the eggs and then you took the empty carton back to the grocery store and you said, I'd like to buy these again. The cashier will go, but you already bought them. Why are you buying it? Why are you paying for it again? That's what we're doing. We're paying for the same behavior over and over again. And so one, get clear that you're PIF. that you're paid in full for not being in action. Like, I've already paid it. I've done three years of wanting a dream and not have whatever your reasons are, right? Number two is let's talk about everything that happens if you fail. Let's just unpack that.

You go back to where you're at now.

Yeah, you'll actually, you never are back to where you are now because now you got some kind of lesson that you didn't have. Yeah, you got some kind of experience. So what happens if you fail? Okay, great. So what lessons can we pull out of that? So now let's agree to if we fail, let's fail forward. So then let's define what does failing forward look like? So then we get very descriptive on what does failing forward look like? What will I do with the lessons? What will I, I'll document four to six things I did right. And I'll document two to three things that I can improve upon and I'll implement them all on the next go round. So then we take out all the possibility and I even go as far as saying, so what if people judge you? I unpack it. What do people judge you? Let's say they, like, they talk really bad about you on social media for, like, a three days. Like, it goes a while. Well, then what happens? Well, on the sixth day, I get up and do it again. So all of a sudden, I take all the, all the juice out of the, out of the, out of the balloon of all. We just deep dive into the darkness of your Illusions. Deep dive into the darkness of your mind. So, like, Okay, well my I'll lose this money. Okay, you lost how much?

40,000.

Okay, all 40,000 gone. So now what? I don't know. Okay, well let's figure out a plan, because you already lost the money. We lost the money. Let's, now I can start saving again. I can do whatever. Okay, great. So then all these big possibilities are now just situations. Then I go to, so what can we do to eliminate the possibility of that occurrence? So now we go into strategy. So I'm real big on strategy. I'm real big on milestones. I believe that you should not set a macro goal without setting several micro goals. So I live in micro goals. Like my number that I want to generate this year, I don't ever look at that after November of the year prior. After November 2019, I don't really look at it. I look at every monthly goal because that's my milestone. I know that goal and I know that goal is tied into my annual goal. So I don't have to worry about it. So I'm seeing if I'm on track, all track, all track, because I can handle that. That's palatable, right? So then a lot of times entrepreneurs set like big bodacious goals and you have a release of endorphins when you first set it, but then it goes away because you don't even know how you're gonna get there.

Yeah.

And so I'm real big on my, like just on my campus, I'm real big on three things: a strategy, right? Milestones and accountability. by when dates, by when, by who, right? And so make it doable, make it so you could see it, set it up in 90 days. And so I think that purpose comes with a plan. And oftentimes we leave purpose so big and so ambiguous that it feels difficult to touch. And so if you're supposed to inspire millions, okay, great. So for August, how many are you gonna touch toward that million? We're gonna get to millions, we're gonna get to million. But are we touching 5,000? Are we touching 50,000? And then by November, did you grow your social media platform by 3% or by 30%? Like less something trackable and measurable so that you can see that purpose being fulfilled so you can trust your picker. So many of us haven't had enough indicators haven't had enough evidence that we've done it the way we thought we would do it or better, that now you're starting to pull back on trusting your picker. Well, you need evidence. If the court of law sends a man to prison because of evidence or lets a woman walk because of lack of evidence, then why not use evidence in your life that you're ready for such a time as this? But you have to set it up in such a way where you can see the trackable evidence.

How important in your mind is writing down things like affirmations, gratitude, dreams? How important is the act of writing what we think down on a daily basis? Is it important?

Hold on.

Went on another treasure hunt.

I love it.

See this page?

Yep.

Well, at the top of it today, I am grateful for. There's 10 spaces. That'll be done tomorrow morning. Today was 333 days. I've done that. Wow. Every day, not only that. but then I have a statement here. I am so happy and grateful now that I realize my spiritual DNA is perfect and that perfection is within me. I begin each day looking for areas of my life where I want to see that perfection expressed habitually. I write that statement out every day with my left hand and I'm not left-handed. I'm programming myself. I've been doing that for 333 days now. I'm changing the way I do something. I want to gain an understanding of just how powerful that paradigm is. I want to go to this hand because I can do it fast. It's very awkward, but I've been doing it for 333 days. I'll do it for 365 days. But I have here written down 10 things I'm grateful for. That's the first thing I do every morning at 5:30.

Wow.

So you believe it's very important.

See the repetition of all good material is very important. It's extremely important. Repetition is how you fix the ideas or the information in your subconscious mind. It's the ideas that are fixed in the subconscious mind that control our behavior. That's the paradigm. You don't think and then do. When you get up in the morning you automatically move into action. you're programmed. It's your paradigm in your subconscious mind. What people here on the School of Greatness, when they tune into this, they're going to hear great ideas, most of which they probably don't do. If they would hear one and say, that is one hell of a good idea, I am going to do that. They should write it down, and then write it out as an affirmation. I'm so happy and grateful now that I am do it every day. Write it out every day until you see yourself automatically doing it. See, you're not going to do, they're not going to do everything they hear on here. But if every day they listen, they get one idea and say, I can turn that into a habitual part of my personality. They're going to end up really a big winner. that's where greatness comes from. I think I might have told you last time I was with you that Robert Russell was a great author. He said there's no secret to greatness. He said it's simply doing little things in a great way every day. I love that. That's the school of greatness. It's doing little things in a great way every day.

What's the thing that you wish you would have started doing sooner, that habitual habit you know, 10 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago that you just started doing in the last five years that you're like, man, I wish I would have done this as my routine 10, 20, 30 years ago.

I wished I had got really good financial guidance and listened to it when I first started. Yeah.

Do you make some bad?

I didn't do that. Yeah. you see, there's no sin in not knowing how to do something. The sin is in keep doing it wrong. Don't follow people's advice. I think the trick is to go to people that have demonstrated by results they really know what they're doing, then do exactly what they tell you. I give you a good example. I was doing a seminar for a credential way back in the 70s. and I did seminars for that whole company at one time. And one of the first groups we had was at the Hillside Holiday Inn in Chicago. I had 450 of their agents in the room. The Prudential give out a president's trophy to the number one anything, number one vice president, number one manager, number one salesperson. Ron Semper train was the number one agent out of 20, 000 agents. that year. And I found out he was in the room. So at one point in the seminar, I said, Ron, I'd like to ask you a question. I said, how many people in the last year have asked you if they could take you out for breakfast or lunch with a half a dozen well prepared questions and asked you, how did you become number one? Not one, no one had done that. And I thought, wow. Well, you know, I use that as an example. I think I was guilty of that for a long time. Yeah. I was really guilty because I kept losing. I did nothing right. I couldn't go anywhere, do anything. And then I met a man, gave me think and grow rich. Ray Stanford. He always, I didn't know him well, but he always had money.

A lot of money.

I never had any. I mean, I was always broke. I was unhappy. I had dumb jobs. I was going nowhere. Left school, two months high school. And he said, if you do exactly what I'm telling you, each of anything you want. Of course, I didn't believe that. Here I am, I'm in debt, you know, nothing was going right and you could have anything you want. I don't know why, but I listened to him. I think the key was he said, listen, your way's not working, why don't you try mine? I think that's what got me. I started to do exactly what he said. My income went from 4,000 a year to 14,500 a month in a year. I've earned millions of dollars. I found earning money is one of the simplest things in the world to do. But if you don't know that, you won't believe that.

It's the hardest thing to do, yeah.

Most people think it's the hardest. That's because we've never been taught how to earn money. I was doing a broadcast here a couple of weeks ago and I just did Q&A, just open Q&A. People anywhere could ask me and we had thousands of people on. And there was one person said, I'm really stuck, I don't know what to do. What should I do? I said, figure out how to go and help somebody. Stop and think of what you're pretty good at. Go help somebody. Quit looking for somebody to help you. Figure out how to help somebody else. Now I said that probably going to be a difficult thing for you to do because you're probably dominated with the fact that you're stuck right now. Forget that for a moment. Stop and think, how can you go and help somebody? Because of course that's the secret to success.

It is.

It's the secret of earning money. I like the way Ziglar used to put that. Zig Ziglar, help other people get what they want. They'll always give you what you want.

What do you think about when you have a bad day or when you have a bad moment, where you react and you're not on your game, where you're calm in a frustrating moment or someone on your team does something you don't want or traffic or whatever. How do you process that?

Do you have bad days? Yeah, yeah, I have not days, I have bad moments, events. There's when we're, I want to separate like behaviors and emotions. So usually when people say they're having a bad day, sure certain things may have gone wrong or something that they tried to do, you know, didn't work out. All information and experiences are processed at the non-conscious brain first and then it gives rise to something we call feeling. So emotions are processed non-consciously. The electrical and chemical reaction to that is called a feeling. So when I'm not feeling the way that I want to feel, I don't focus on the feeling. I focus on the cause, the neuroelectrical charge that's occurred in my brain. And in most cases, it's something that you're doing to interpret an event that's causing the neuroelectrical signal causing the feeling. So in meditation, for example, why do you meditate? Well, obviously it's great for a whole host of health reasons, whether it's less stress, less, you know, lower blood pressure, less cortisol release, etc. But the one thing meditation does more than anything else is it gives you the ability to have a pause of awareness conscious so that you sense what's happening at the non-conscious level and what's happening outside of you. So when somebody behaves a certain way, it's processed at the non-conscious level, gives rise to your conscious mind for you to respond. And so when something happens, I like to be able to check in so that I don't react and I have the ability to respond. and if you do that enough through mindfulness, being aware, just being aware of exactly what's going on, then you have fewer and fewer of those times. So, you know, something happened last week. I was in a hotel room and I spilled some water on a shirt that I needed for a wedding that we were going to. And my wife was, oh, she's going off deep. And I was just calm. Yeah. And she goes, Aren't you worried about this? I said, Will it help?

Right.

Like, no, let's just figure out what to do. The accident already happened.

Why are we so wired to react in situations as opposed to be calm and say, well, this reaction is not going to serve a solution?

Well, we have a misunderstanding of flow of information and the way information is processed. And so, so the reaction happens again at the reptilian non-conscious level. So every external stimuli, if you get into some of the brain, which again is my passion, is one of my friends, Dr. Evian Gordon, kind of with a great model, he says, the number one thing to understand about the brain is safety and comfort first. So in the environment that you're in, whether you like it or you don't, is irrelevant. Your brain finds that comfortable because it's the homeostasis. But safety first. So any loud noise, any type of real or imagined present or future pain based on the interpretation at the non-conscious level gives rise to automatic feelings. So the signal ascent from the reptilian or lizard brain to the emotional brain and it's only later logically understood if we take the time To be aware of it.

Be aware of it. That's why people react so much in traffic instantly.

That's right. Instant reactions. Yeah, but here's something you could do quickly. It's called a reframe. So let's say you're driving in traffic and let's say somebody cuts you off and you've been sitting at the same spot for 20 minutes like I did this morning. And somebody, you're maybe looking down at your cell phone because you have some time because you're parked on the highway. And somebody cuts you off. So you could automatically react, go son of a bitch, I can't believe he just did that and just use all of this energy. the cortisol, epinephrine, adrenaline that's flowing through your body and causing stress in your body. Or you can say, well, what if that person just found out their dog died and they're really trying to get home quickly? You go, okay, I guess it's okay if she or he cut in front of me. Or they just got a call from their mother, their mother fell. Would you change the way you felt about it? And the answer is, yeah, probably. And the reason because you changed the frame. So you can learn how to create frames for yourself of how you see the world, how you see failure, how you see effort, how you see your habits, how you create frames in advance that actually serve you through awareness and response versus reactivity. And that is what a lot of people who, for example, I'm going to go back to professional athlete, what do you learn how to do? Respond in a variety of different ways in advance or through practice. Yeah, so that when it's game time you're just unconsciously doing what you do.

Yeah, especially like, you know, I used to react a lot whenever I felt like anyone was attacking me physically or verbally on the game, in the game, I used to react and I want to beat people up and hit people and respond. If I got hit in a weird way, I would always want to have the last say, right? The last hit. And my coaches would always train me because I would always get flagged. The person who just the second person is the one who gets flagged, not the first person who does the foul. And so I started to train myself and visualize, okay, this is gonna happen in this game. Like someone's gonna punch me in the nuts, someone's gonna bite me, someone's gonna do this, and I can either be calm and focus on the next play or I can respond and have a penalty for our team. I started to train my mind seeing it in the future as it already is happening, and that really supported me in not reacting.

And that's actually one of the best ways. It's a cognitive behavior therapy process where you practice in advance anything good or anything challenging. And what's really amazing, some of the latest research on goal achieving is the ability, you know, in the past I used to teach and also do visualize my goals. Well, it was my body, health, relationships, money, charity, whatever. I used to visualize the outcome. And some of the latest research now shows in addition to visualizing the outcome, visualize the obstacles. And in the past, when we talked about this law of attraction, no, don't visualize the obstacles. You attract them to it.

No, no, no.

Your brain's way smarter than that. So if you have, whether it's a belief that's in your way, a story that's holding you back, a circumstance, references, you know, something that's holding you back from achieving X. So take a look at whatever it is that you already know is holding you back. I don't believe I'm with you. Don't believe I'm smart enough. Don't believe I'm good enough. Don't believe I'm skilled enough. I'm too young. Too old. I'm too this or too that or not enough of this, not enough of that. So address that and say, okay, here's an obstacle. I'm gonna visualize that obstacle being real and I'm gonna visualize just moving it aside and me moving towards my goal. The very act of acknowledging that releases the neural tension around it. If you do that over and over and over again, what your brain starts to see is yes, there was a struggle and so it's worthy of me creating this neural pattern around this new effort. Most of what we're doing is we're on autopilot. We're just eking through the day on autopilot. And so the brain loves anything that makes it curious. The brain likes anything novel. The brain likes a challenge. So earlier you were asking me about one of the brain training companies other than ours. They said, Does it work? I said, yeah, it's a workout for your brain. And if you can strengthen the neural patterns of you seeing yourself with an obstacle and overcoming it, what do you think that does to your self-confidence and certainty? Builds it up big time. Builds it up. So if you actually do the work and develop those patterns in your brain, as you're doing the stuff you need to do in the physical world, you just strengthen those neural patterns and that's what becomes your habits. And that's where it becomes really fun because you can develop the habits and the skills that you need that you'll actually take action on versus having knowledge and skills in your head.

Now, I feel like you've been testing things for decades now with all the research and the work you've done. So, what does your morning routine look like now?

Oh, great.

What's, you know?

So, today was a little bit different except for one thing because I drove from San Diego to LA to be with you. But I wake up, I pee, I do my meditation 20 to 30 minutes every morning. I don't care where I am in the world. I do these ones on during that time. I do a variety of different meditations. So there's meditations that I can do where I'm just observing my thoughts. Now, a lot of people think, well, I thought you're not supposed to have thoughts when you meditate. Says whom? There's hundreds of different ways to practice awareness. See, meditation is the art of awareness. awareness internally, awareness externally, but also the various millions of layers that exist in the physical and the non-physical world. So this morning I did a meditation with some ocean sounds. And so it was about five o'clock. I woke up this morning, sat in my little sofa, you know, with my feet propped up and did a 20 so minute meditation in the dark with the ocean just listening to the ocean, just paying attention and going into a trance-like state where after two or three minutes, I disappeared. Like my body was part of air and space. So today was, I was using sound to get into that trance-like state. Other days I'll do a mantra, whether it's, you know, a lot of people know Transcendental Meditation, so it's the OM mantra. So you just take a deep breath in, Then as you exhale, it's ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh and your calm state of flow versus your sympathetic nervous system, which is the stress response system of adrenaline, norepinephrine, cortisol, et cetera. So when you get the serotonin, oxytocin, and dopamine going and you're in that state of calmness, you're able to enter deeper levels of consciousness and awareness. So you're able to observe a thought. You're able to hear your heartbeat. You're able to sense different things that are being risen in your body through thoughts that you're having. So you can actually start to see when I have this thought, here's the sensation in my body and you start to get so attuned to what's happening, what stimuli is happening within you that's producing these sensations that cause you to either take action or not retreat or move forward. You can start to get a feel for how the mechanics work. so I'll do that. Sometimes I'll put on some of the Tibetan monks and chant with them. So I use sound, no sound, I use breathing, I use open eye, closed eye, five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes. So I practice the art of being in control of my breath, not breathing, just being one with the entire universe and feeling this other than normal state of consciousness that we're used not sleep and it's not conscious awareness, you're in an altered state of awareness. And you can enter deeper and deeper and deeper layers of energy, which everything is made up anyway. Everything's connected. We have this, obviously our physical body, but the space between you and I right now, there's just vibrating packets of energy. And so you're able to access different layers of all of the intelligence and information that already exists in the universe versus the memories that we have in our brains. And that's magical.

I love this. Why are you so wired this way? What makes you like so obsessed with this information and sharing it with a billion people?

When I was five, six, seven years old, I moved from Israel. to Montreal. I spoke Hebrew but not English or French and for two and a half years I felt dumb. I felt like I wasn't smart enough and I wasn't good enough and I was made fun of as a kid. That led to me being involved in street gangs from the age of 12 to 16.

In Montreal.

In Montreal. We trafficked drugs from Florida, we did break-in entries, we had a little streaking, about 12 of that just got into a lot of trouble. My path was either jail or the morgue, one of the two. And there's a lot of successful people.

That have that kind of a story.

For some strange reason. And at 19, I met a mentor. His name was Alan Brown. He was a real estate developer. Still in Montreal. No, this was in, I moved from Montreal after years of turbulence. I finally broke free and moved from Montreal to Toronto, which is about 350 miles. In Canada still. Canada, yeah. May 1980, I took my real estate course. June 20th, 1980, became licenses of real estate. And the reason I did is I met a man the weekend before that my brother introduced me to who was interpersonal development. And he was into, you know, Zig Ziglar and Dennis Whateley and Brian Tracy's, you know, 35 years ago. And he introduced me to this world of, of, you know, the introducing me to the world of changing my beliefs, changing my habits, changing my perceptions of first, who are you? And he really helped me see that, you know, the spiritual greatness within everybody, the intelligence that's within everybody, he had me start with getting in touch with that. And it was very philosophical and didn't have the evidence that we have today on affirmations, visualization, meditation, mindfulness, subliminal programming, habit creation, all of the different methodologies that we've all heard about, whether it was the astronauts that went to the moon initially that trained their brains or the musicians that have or the athletes that do. The science now is just so phenomenal on what is actually happening. And so as I was building my own companies, I built my companies by training my employees not on the skills that they needed, but on how spectacular they were as human beings. And the greatness was within them. And if they trained their brain to have the belief that is they may not have the skill or the know-how, but if you have the belief that I can, I will, I must.

You can build the habit.

You can start to build the habit. You can start to... If you think about this, I don't care if we asked any question on health, wealth, relationships, career, business, spirituality, we wanted to find the answer to something. We could Google it and within minutes have everything we want to know. Tutorials, videos, audios, how to, step-by-step blueprint, color, coordinate, whatever you want. So our problem isn't how to. All the how to exists. How to build a business exists. How to be a great lover exists. You know, it all exists.

How to get in shape.

Right. So I wanted to focus on, you know, how do I help more people take more of the action they know they should be and want to.

To.

And it all started in 1995 when, in 1992, after I, you know, got into real estate and I traveled the world, I, I ended up buying the franchising rights for Remax for the state of Indiana. And I was 26 years old, and I bought the franchising rights for Indiana, moved to Indiana, and I remember being interviewed for the Indianapolis Business Journal. And the guy said, what are your goals here in Indiana? 26 years old, I was wearing, you know, I remember a brown pinstripe suit. I had glasses on even though I didn't need glasses. I just wanted to look older. And I said, we'll do a billion dollars in sales in Indiana. And the gentleman said to me, says, are you certain of that? I said, well, that's my goal. He says, well, they're two largest companies that have been here for a hundred years. Don't do a hundred million dollars, a hundred or a billion dollars combined. and my cocky young self, I said.

Well, we'll be first. Yeah.

Three weeks later, the in-apps business journal and I have it at home. It says sets one billion dollar goal. Wow. May 1992, we hit a billion dollars in sales five years later.

Wow.

And we were stuck, which is a great place to be stuck. But it wasn't because we didn't try hard. We were stuck because People started hitting the upper limits of their financial blueprint, the upper limits of their beliefs, the upper limits of their habitual ways of doing things. So regardless of how much more information.

We gave them, they just were at their limits.

They believe they could make more. That's right. Well, and again, when we talk about beliefs, there's two types of beliefs. There's belief that I say to you, Sure, I could do that. Oh, yeah, man, I want to do that. But if there's an opposing belief at the implicit part of the brain saying, But you're not smart enough, you're not good enough, you're not worthy enough, you're afraid of failure, afraid of you're afraid of this, you're afraid of that, you won't do it because the non-conscious controls the entire game. And so we started to retrain our agents brains after we did a, we did a, an event. 75 agents paid, I think it was two or three thousand dollars to go through a six month brain retraining program. Those 75 agents increased our sales by a hundred million dollars.

Wow.

And we said, okay, we're gonna teach us the entire company.

Yeah.

So we went from a billion two to four point 5 billion in sales a year in three years by working on this versus what they needed to do. And so I became really pretty well versed in understanding a little bit about the brain. And then after I was retired in 2003, after building a couple companies, I took bamboo.com we took public in 1999. And I wanted to just teach what I'd learned. And I started getting involved with some of the top neuroscience neuropsychologists in the world, quantum physicists, molecular biologists. I want you to understand the mechanics of how it all worked. So when I visualize in first person what's happening in my brain and where, when I visualize in third person what's happening in my brain and where, when I repeat an affirmation that I don't believe and I hear a little voice in my head saying, bullshit, why does that happen? That's not true. And then what are the systems that get activated as soon as you believe it's not true? and then can we learn to override them? The answer is yeah, it's an organ and we're just getting the user's manual now for better than ever before.

Before we continue this video, make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day. And it's time under crisis and worry and fear for a lot of people, what should we be thinking about? How should we be using our imagination in different ways as opposed to fixating on the bad news?

Well, I think a good idea right now would be spend some time thinking about how are we going to adapt when this is gone.

Yeah.

Because we're going to live in a different world. We're not going to be in the same world when this is, all blown over than we're in right now. It's going to be quite different.

Yeah.

People are not going to be rushing out to big events where there's a lot of people. They're not going to be rushing to restaurants. I think they're going to be very careful about what they do, where they think, where they're going. I was listening to cynic and he said, if you're a public speaker, don't look for a stage for a little while because you're not going to have one. Yeah. Now, this also presents great opportunities. It's for us, for my company, we're going online, you know, full speed ahead. Now, fortunately, we built the studio four or five years ago, so you're prepared. we're equipped and we're ready.

Yeah.

We can, we can broadcast. We were, we had a training class going in here just last week with about 300 of our consultants from all over the world. We had a three-day training program for them, and it was very effective.

Online.

We didn't have to come together.

Yeah.

Yeah. We did it from right here. Yeah.

I mean, you, you're known for doing these powerful transformational workshops in person. So for someone, I mean, it's very inspiring for me, for someone at your age where would be the excuse of most people your age to say, well, I don't understand this technology thing and I've been doing this, this way of business for so long. It's always worked this way and I'm not going to try to reinvent or evolve and pivot and grow in this way. So it's really inspiring to see someone of your age with your level of experience and say, you know what? I'm embracing it. Maybe I don't like it. maybe you do like it, but you're embracing it and making the most of it as opposed to resisting. Because what happens when we start to resist in our life? What truly happens?

Well, well, we resist it. We create it in our mind. That's all we think about. You see, I guess my age really has nothing to do with it, but I formed that attitude a long time ago. Yeah. I didn't like the idea that that when you've lived for so long, you've got to cut out, you've got to stop. I thought, hell, I don't like that idea at all. And first of all, I think we're, I believe we're here to do God's work. God's work is creation, you know, expansion, fuller expression, greater goodness. And if we're going to do that, we're going to be working at it. All the time we're here on this planet. We never stop. So age should have no bearing on it.

I had a couple of people ask.

Me when we started to build this place, we put a couple of million dollars into this and somebody said, how old are you? And I think I was probably 83 when they started to break ground. They said, you,'re 83 and you're going to spend $2 million building a studio? I said, yeah, like, why not? I mean, you see, we let things that really have no concern, we let them bother us, we let them control us. Age is a dumb thing to let control you. It's our thinking that controls everything. That's the one point every great leader agreed on. We become what we think about. Well, what's a person thinking? I'm thinking if I get old, I gotta stop. Well, then you'll stop. Or I'm thinking, well, if I've been here a long time, I've got a lot of experience. I want to utilize that experience to keep me going as long as I am here. I mean, anybody had their head screwed on right a few years ago would know that this thing is going to take over. Yeah. And if we don't learn how to use it, we're toast. so, you know, I was doing seminars on my iPad because I can run it right on to a monitor and out through to the universe. Yeah.

What should we be thinking about the most right now in your mind?

If so, I think we should be thinking about our future. I think we should be thinking about the, the greatness like it's the school of greatness. I think we ought to be thinking about the greatness that we've got locked up within it. and bring it to the surface. Everyone has deep reservoirs of talent and ability within them, and they can bring it to the surface to accomplish anything they want. Now to sit in fear and wonder what's going to happen, that is a dumb waste of your talent and your time. And unfortunately, that's what most of the media is promoting right now. To believe in fear is to believe in something you can't see. To believe in faith is to believe in something you can't see. Well if you have a choice, I think I choose faith over fear.

Absolutely.

I think I believe where I can really see something happen. I believe we're going to have a phenomenal year in our company. In fact, I have business partner Sandy Gallagher and a very bright lady, was a securities attorney prior to joining us. She ran a program this morning for our entire company. We have about 70 people in the company. She was teaching masterminding to them all and saying how this is important that every one of us get involved in this, that we learn the basics of masterminding that Napoleon Hill brought to the world, let's say, way back in the 30s. Now, I think that's what we should be teaching people. Sandy was on the right track there. So I think we ought to be thinking about what we're going to build, how big are we going to do it, where are we going to do it, when are we going to start? Our goals have not changed. They're very big, they're very ambitious. and we're not letting this virus slow us down one bit. As a matter of fact, we're trying to figure out how can we use this to speed it up. They care and you can't get rid of it. Use it to your advantage. There is a way we can use it to our advantage. People are more dependent upon the phone. I've got a computer here. They're dependent on their phone, their computer, more than they've ever been. we can reach them anywhere in the world through those mediums.

Yeah, use them to your advantage. You talked about fear for a second. I'm curious, when we live in a state of fear, what does that do to us? And when we, the second part to this, when we feel that fear and we become aware of it, what should we be thinking or doing or acting on in order to shift into a more positive state.

You know, that is one hell of a good question. And it's a question most people are not able to answer. First of all, the cause of fear is ignorance. That is the cause of fear. And so if you follow the ignorance, it doesn't start out as fear. The ignorance starts out in a conscious level as doubt and worry. that's on a conscious level. We're doubting or we're worrying. Then we take whatever image comes into our consciousness of the doubt and the worry and we turn it over to our emotional mind, that's what causes the fear. Well that fear then has to be expressed through the body, through the only instrument it can be expressed through, our physical body. It sets up a vibration known as anxiety. Anxiety is not expressed, anxiety becomes suppressed. We suppress it. And the suppression then turns to depression, which turns to disease, which turns to decay. You see, you're talking about a track a person gets on, it's a very negative track. It's ingratitude, Don't worry, fear, anxiety, suppression, depression, disease, disintegration. Now the polar opposite of all that, the opposite of ignorance is knowledge. There's only one way to get to knowledge and that is to study. Now unfortunately.

School.

Didn'T do the job that it was designed to do for most of us. Schools should teach us to love to study.

Not to dread studying and homework and tests.

They should teach us to love it because study leads to the opposite of don't worry, which is understanding. See, it's study that leads to understanding. We understand how to handle the fear. It's understanding that enables us to cause us to understand where the fear starts. The understanding then we want to say, what do we understand? We want to understand this whole universe operates by law. One of the laws is the law of opposite. The opposite of don't worry is understanding. Now if the don't worry leads to fear, what's understanding leads to? Understanding leads to faith. The faith leads to expression, well-being and expression. It's not depression. It's not suppression. It's not anxiety. The faith leads to well-being. The well-being then is expression, acceleration, because we're aties, we're not aties. there's not disease. So you're dealing with polar opposites. There's two different sides to things. And when we understand that, our world starts to change. It's by understanding that we learn how to deal with these pandemics when they hit. And they will hit. There will be others. There always has been all down through history. If you look back, there's been things like this happen in the past. and unfortunately the masses are sort of paralyzed by it. Yeah. And as a people, we add to that paralysis by feeding them more of what scares them. What we should be doing is helping them understand what the hell is going on.

Why do we do that as people? Why do we feed people more of what scares them as opposed to what you and I do, which is- Because.

That'S what people want. That's what they buy. People don't buy good news. People buy bad news. Why though? Can you imagine if everybody that tunes into CNN, tuned into the School of Greatness every week?

It'd be amazing.

Can you imagine if everybody that tunes into Fox tuned into your School of Greatness every week? Have you any idea the impact you could have on the world?

That's what we're trying to do.

It'd be enormous. It'd be enormous. People want bad news. It resonates with where their mind is programmed. They're programmed with negative information. Their paradigm is all bad news. It's what we're programmed with. Now, is everybody new? There's a small select group of people that don't fall into that category, and they are always working diligently trying to lift everybody up. It's not an easy thing to do. but every now and then, well, a Lewis Howes would come along and start a school of greatness and he'll call in different people that feed into that concept that are in harmony with that, that resonate with that. And so it makes it interesting for the listener. And then that's how it goes. Yeah. And that's what you're doing. And that's what I'm doing.

Yeah.

And it's not a losing battle. It just appears like it is. I'm winning. Yeah. I think you're winning. Now we're not drawing the numbers that CNN is drawing, but the ones we draw are saying, Absolutely.

You got it.

You got it. We're making an impact on them for sure. If you want to learn more about how to master your mind, check out this next video right here.

We're all faced with great opportunities brilliantly.

Disguised as impossible situations, and we are.

At that that point, that nexus point.

In our evolution as a species.

So then you don't try to fix that. That's never going to work.

What you do.