The Science of Success: Harnessing the Power of Positive Thinking, Dopamine, and Mindset EP 1447

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The brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. I think there is great value, however, to.

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The question that you're asking is a very important one. It's actually the question, which is to what extent does our subjective narrative, the story we tell ourselves, actually mean something for the body? And to what extent does the body actually mean something for the subjective narrative? So this gets into some areas of work that we're doing now. And so I do want to highlight that it's ongoing work, but I think You know, the old narrative, meaning a few 10 years ago, was that if you're feeling depressed, just smile. Well, if that worked, we would have a lot less depression than we see out there. Now, that does not mean-- Most people.

Actually who are depressed just aren't smiling as well. Like when you change your physiology, doesn't it also start to change the way you think about yourself a little bit?

The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that The brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. The idea that when we're depressed, we tend to be in more defensive type postures. When we're feeling good, we tend to be in more relaxed and extended postures.

All true.

But it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that I'm going to completely shift the mind. That's a first step. Think about two interlocking gears. It's one gear that turns the other, but then they need to dance together.

Before you can get the whole system going.

So how do you get it to dance together? Exactly. Subjective, there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body. To answer your question, can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold? So a couple things that are important. First of all, just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are. Thoughts happen spontaneously all the time. They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection. But thoughts can also be deliberately introduced. For instance, right now, I can say, okay, have a thought that just decide to write your name and you can do that. I'm going to decide to write my name and you can do it. So that's a deliberate thought, which says that you can introduce thoughts. So I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them. Generally, they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time. But we can introduce a positive thought.

Can you think of two thoughts at the same time?

Probably not.

So you can only have one thought at a time.

Right, but they come very fast.

But it comes and goes. So you have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think otherwise and a spontaneous thought will pop back in. That's right. Based on your experience, based on sensory, based on how you're feeling or perceiving something, your environment, it's just gonna keep popping in.

Right.

So how do we deliberately have a positive thought more often?

Right.

So I'm a big fan of wellness and I think it's a great community but it tends to run in absolutes and there are there aren't a lot of operational definitions, as we say in science. And what I love about your questions, you're asking for really getting to the meat of things, asking for the operational definitions. One of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your body hears every thought you have. What a terrible thing to put on people. You know, what a challenging thing. I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. I think there is great value, however, to introducing positive thought schemes. Now, the reason is not because I think it's just because I think so, but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort. And that relates to the dopamine pathway. So the molecule dopamine is a reward. It's released in the brain when you win a game, you close a deal, you meet the love of your life, someone likes your photo, the great love of your life, you complete something. But most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals. It's actually released when we are in route to our goals, where we're in pursuit of our goals, and we think we're on the right path.

This is why a lot of people get depressed after they achieve a big goal, because they feel like I'm supposed to feel something greater. I felt this thing for two minutes, and now that's it?

That's right. High achievers know to attach dopamine to the effort process.

To the pursuit, the day-to-day tasks, the growth, the lessons, the losses, like everything, right?

And it can be to some wins along the way. But growth mindset, which is the academic discovery and laboratory discovery of my colleague Carol Dweck at Stanford, the hallmark of growth mindset is really two things. One is, I'm not where I want to be now, but I'm capable of getting there eventually. The other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself.

In fact, Don't reward the result, reward the effort.

That's right. And if you look at true high performers, people that are consistently good at what they do, they don't peak and go through the postpartum depression and crash and come back and their life is a cycle of ups and downs, but really people who are on that upward trajectory consistently, those people attach dopamine to the effort process. And actually Carol's one of her original studies on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that love doing math problems that they knew they couldn't get right. So it's like the people love puzzles, but in this case they knew they couldn't get it right, but they love doing it and it incidentally or not so incidentally, these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer because they feel some sense of reward from the effort process. Now, the cool thing about dopamine is that it's very subjectively controlled. We can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain in response to things that are in a purely subjective way.

Our interpretation.

Our interpretation. But it has to be attached to reality. one should never confuse what is real. Right, so if you're thinking about the effort you're expending, so let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels and they're setting up a new business for instance and it's hard. If they can take a few moments or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole potentially, that it's giving them an opportunity, that it's somehow they are on the right path, or if they're not in movement along that path, or at least oriented on the right path, they're not lying in bed all day.

They're taking a step.

They're taking a step. If they can reward that process internally, two things happen. First of all, the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine get stronger, so you get better at that process. And second, and most importantly, dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline. and buffer epinephrine. And what I mean by that is there was a study that was published in the journal Cell, excellent journal, Cell Press journal a couple years ago showing that with repeated bouts of effort we use and we release more and more epinephrine.

It's kind of adrenaline but in the brain.

With more effort, we're going to get more epinephrine. Every time you put in effort. So every time you make, for this, let's keep it, if I were to keep it in the business context, every time you make write that email, every time you, let's say it's a person who's a craftsman or a crafts woman, every time you're working in the in the shop and doing that every bit of effort, you're taking a little bit of money out of this epinephrine account. You're spending epinephrine. At some point, those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you feel like quitting. It feels exhausted. This was done in a beautiful study, actually, where they control the visual environments and they have the subjects exert effort and they can control the visual environment. So sometimes the effort of taking steps and moving forward, this is actually kind of pushing forward and kind of swimming motion, would give them the sensation that they were actually making progress. And other times it was an exercise in futility where they would just keep the visual world stationary and they would expend effort and they didn't think they were going anywhere. Epinephrine's climbing, climbing, climbing, and eventually they quit. Now, dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine. and give you anyone the feeling that you could continue and maybe even the feeling that you want to continue. And you've seen this actually, football is a good example. Two teams play, say the Super Bowl, both teams are max effort the entire time.

Yeah.

Max effort. The team that wins suddenly, in a moment, has the energy to jump all over the place, party for days. They can talk-- I mean, they have--.

They're exhausted right before that.

Well, that wasn't glycogen or stored energy of any kind, it was neural energy. And what happened was effort is this adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline, eventually people quit. They just quit. The dopamine is able to suppress that. And so then you're expending effort, but you're doing it from a place of feeling like you have energy for it.

So we need dopamine to keep the effort going. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

That's right. Dopamine is not just about reward. It's one of the biggest misconceptions. Dopamine is about motivation and drive. It's like a jet that propels you along a path.

How do we get more dopamine?

You practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind.

Like how?

Okay, so that's a great question. First of all, there are ways you can get more dopamine release through thoughts or through drugs or through supplements. I want to be really clear. There is a drug, there are two drugs actually that will cause massive release of dopamine. They're called cocaine and methamphetamine.

That's what gets us addicted because it feels so good.

The problem is, exactly. cocaine and methamphetamine stimulate so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source. It becomes the goal and the path. It becomes the path and the destination. And you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine, and that baseline on their life goes down.

Because there's no reason to work hard at anything else because you feel good.

That's right.

And that's the greatest feeling you'll have, so why do anything else when you can have that feeling?

That's right. If you think about, remember these neurochemical systems, adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, epinephrine, they weren't designed to keep us safe from tigers and to hunt and gather or to build Fortune 500 companies. They were designed to do anything. They were designed to be generic so that depending on our circumstances, we could adapt. So in an animal context, an animal that let's say is hunting or it needs food for its young. It's going to feel agitation. That's stress. That's cortisol. It's like hunger. My babies might not eat. I might not eat. Maybe it's looking for a mate. It's going to feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching. Foraging is called in the animal behavior world. It's foraging. At some point, it might catch a smell of something, a potential mate or berries or a stream if it's thirsty. At that moment, Dopamine is released and now it has energy to continue along that path. Whereas there's a specific pathway in the brain that's involved in depression and disappointment that if it goes to that place and turns out it was the wrong path, there's a signal that actually suppresses dopamine so that you don't repeat that mistake again. So you don't give up.

That's right. You just don't repeat it again.

That's right.

And those events that remind you like that's not the path to go down.

That's right. Interesting. And we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here, which is the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience. Dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity because it says those actions led to success previously. You're gonna repeat those. Those actions led to failure previously and don't repeat those.

So dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path.

That's right. So you asked how do you do this? So to really make it concrete.

Is there such thing as too much dopamine? If you're not on drugs.

Cocaine and amphetamine are bad because they lower the baseline on life. They make people very focused on things outside of themselves. That's the other thing that dopamine does. It can be positive or negative. But when we have dopamine in our system, we tend to be outward facing and in pursuit of things in our environment. You can look at somebody on cocaine and realize that that's the extreme version of that. But I love social media for the reason that you see the molecules in the memes. So it's like get after it, what do sharks do on Monday or I can't remember the specific things. Or then there are the, like sometimes it's just time to chill. Well, that's a different molecule. That's serotonin, right? And then dopamine is the get after it molecule. And epinephrine is effort. So if we were going to break this down really concrete, we'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort, just effort, with no subjective label on them, good or bad effort, whether or not stress or you're pursuing something you want to do, it's exerting effort. Dopamine is about reward, but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards.

What is the difference between a habit and a behavior, and which one should we be focusing on more in order to get to where we want to be, changing our behaviors or changing our habits?

A habit is a subset of behavior. It's a pretty narrow subset, actually, if you look at the true scientific definition. So, Wendy Wood of University of Southern California is, I think, the world's expert on habit. And she would define it pretty rigidly as something you basically do automatically without almost consciously realizing you're doing it, right? Like you sort of make the coffee in the morning with the coffee maker.

You hit the button, you don't even remember.

You're just like showering your hair, right?

And you're like, did I do the shampoo already? I was thinking about something else.

You drive to work and you don't know how you got there. You're like, what? You're on autopilot, right? So that's like, those are the really rote activities, like you hand sanitize if you're working in a hospital. You didn't even notice you did it. Did I do that already? Those are habits. I think there's been a lot of excitement and growth of, in the popular press, the idea that a habit is anything that you want to repeat. And I think that would actually, a lot of the things that we think of, and that we talk about casually as habits, are probably more in the category of routines, which is different. Often, if you're going to the gym, is it really a habit? You probably remember deciding to go to the gym, maybe you do it as consistent time. Maybe you do it a lot, but I would start calling a lot of these things more like routines if you want to talk about the non-academic. And anyway, right? Sure, sure. You know, a little bit like inside baseball, who cares? But I do think it's interesting there's distinction in the processes that drive one versus the other. I mostly, I study behavior, which is like a super category. It's even above routines or habits where Where, and it's just all behavior change requires different behaviors to happen. Some of them are gonna be on autopilot, some of them are gonna be routine, and some of them are one-time decisions that have big implications for your life. So I actually think having all of those categories in mind when we think about change is really important as opposed to narrowly focusing on one or the other.

So what is the definition of a behavior?

Oh, that's an interesting one. Like, what is a behavior? A behavior is an action you take Like, really everything is behavior. If it's inside your head, it's not a behavior, then it's like a judgment. But any actual action you take is a behavior.

Any action you take. So, what are the most common behaviors that we have that, I guess, hold us back? And then what are the behaviors that...

Okay, I thought the most common... I was like breathing.

No, the most common behaviors that hold us back Yeah. And then the most common behaviors of the ultra high performers, successful, you know, in business and sports, what are those behaviors that they tend to lean into? Versus the ones where people are stuck.

Let me start with some of the most common behaviors.

That keep us stuck.

That keep us stuck.

Yes.

Yeah, I think common behaviors where we get stuck are, and this is like, you know, what are the most common New Year's resolutions? They're to change those behaviors that we get stuck on. So the most common things we get stuck on. stuck on our things related to our health, right? We aren't making good decisions about what we eat, what we drink, whether we smoke, whether we're physically active. Those are really common points where we get stuck. Our finances, right? Making good financial decisions on a daily basis about how we spend our money, how we save, who we give our money to. Those are places people often get stuck. We can get stuck in bad social loops. We sort of started by talking about relationships, so I think that's another place we get stuck, whether it's we're, you know, not, we feel like we're too shy, we're not meeting enough people, we're meeting the wrong people, we're in the wrong relationships. That's another area where we get stuck. I think education and career are sort of, I'd put them, because they're like one follows the other. And that's another category. Like if you're a student, you're trying to achieve, but we often get stuck on not really studying rigorously and, you know, putting the time in and the focus in, and then that converts to work where we're not being as productive as we could be, we're not setting ourselves up for success.

Ultra performers or the elite who are accomplishing all their goals and pursuing their dreams, what are those behaviors that they do really well?

So, I have never gone and interviewed the ultra performers and said like, list for me all your behaviors. So, instead of answering your question perfectly, what I'm going to do is tell you some of the behaviors that research shows lead to great outcomes. And then certainly I have seen lots of top performers where I go, oh, They're doing great. They're totally doing great. It's great. So I think one of the most important things.

Is.

Leaning on structure as opposed to expecting to just sort of follow the Nike just do it mantra. And by the way, when you talked about how you're training for your marathon, I noticed you immediately went to all the structures.

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Yes.

That is like, for me, it's so ingrained in me that if you want to accomplish your goals, you got to schedule these things you got to do on a daily basis and make it like...

Break it down.

What's the daily goal?

What's the daily goal? When are you gonna do it?

What's gonna cue you to do it? Why when? Who's gonna watch you do it? Everything.

Everything.

What's at stake for you?

What's it, you know, at stake for other people? What's the higher purpose that if you.

Don'T do this, who are you gonna be hurting? And who is literally holding you accountable, right? You've got your coach involved. So those are the kinds of things.

So structure is one of the leading academic, the research that shows which will.

Help you get more results.

Yes, and there's so many pieces of that and like each one of them we could unpack and talk about studies from, you know, okay, a big one is too often people say, I just have this big goal, you know, this big, I think if I set a big audacious goal, and by the way, that's good, it's good to set stretch goals, but then you've got to break it down, like into the, you know, what are you going to do this week? What are you going to do today? What are those component parts and people get a lot further research by Alben Jura, the late Alben Jura of Stanford, great thinker, sort of did some of the pioneering work on this. We just did a field experiment where we tested with thousands of people who wanted to be volunteering 200 hours a year and they had committed to that goal. And we found that just sending them reminders not to volunteer 200 hours a year, but to volunteer four hours a week led to vastly better performance. Just that really simple change even in the way you communicate about this. When you invite someone to start saving $5 a day instead of $150 a month, you get vastly higher takeup rates. Interesting. Identical. So just little framing shifts where you think about let's break this down into the bite-sized component. Now it's harder to procrastinate on it. You can see how it's doable.

It doesn't feel overwhelming. So you're saying if my goal is to save 105 or invest 105 a month or whatever this is. Are you saying it's not the best approach to say, I'm gonna invest 105 a month, but I'm gonna do five dollars a day?

Yeah.

So 100.

I can't remember what the.

Yeah, it's 150 because it's 30 days roughly in a month. 150.

As opposed to saying, I'm gonna save or invest 150 a month, trick your brain into saying, I'm gonna invest five dollars a day.

Right.

You're saying By doing that, what should happen?

Many more people raise their hand and say, I can do this.

I want to separate 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 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 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.

But 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, 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 is sent 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.

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 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 gonna go back to professional athlete. What do you learn how to do? Respond in a variety of different ways in advance or through practice 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. On the game. In the game, I used to react and 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's the second person is the one who gets flagged, not the first person. who does the foul. Yeah. 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.

Right.

I started to train my. My mind, seeing it in the future as it always happening. And that really supported me in not reacting.

And that's actually one of the best ways. It's. 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 talk about this law of attraction, no, don't visualize the obstacles, you attract them to it. No, no, no, your brain's way smarter. shorter 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 worthy. I 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. 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. 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 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. 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 did this one 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 I'm 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 trans-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, and then as you exhale it's ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh it will entrain to that rhythm. That's one. Anytime you could pay attention to your breath, inhale and exhale, you turn off the parasympathetic nervous system. You turn on the parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and relaxation 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 to. And it's not sleep and it's not, you know, conscious awareness. You're in an altered state of awareness. And you can, 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. Right? 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.

Wow.

We trafficked drugs from Florida. We did break-in entries. We, we had a little streaking, about 12 of us 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.

Gotcha.

In Canada still. Canada, yeah. And 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 the mind 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 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, and 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 a 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, we'll be the first. Three weeks later, the Ennaps Business Journal and I have it at home, it says sets $1 billion goal. May 1992, we hit a billion dollars in sales five years later. 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 limit.

They believe they can 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 is 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 this.

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And so we started to retrain our agents brains after we did a We did 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. And we said, okay, we're gonna teach this to the entire company. So we went from a billion two to 4.5 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 neuroscientists, 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, 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. It's an organ.

What do you see? of the future of where we're going. And if someone truly wants to live a happier, more fulfilled life, what can they do in the face of the next decade of just distractions?

Yeah.

I don't think it's going to get easier for anyone with the accessibility to addictions, things, access, the now gratification. Yeah.

You know, think back to to our prehistoric ancestors. Can you imagine going out on a hunt for a woolly mammoth? How much fun that must have been?

Scary, fun, exciting.

Yeah, like you're with your buddies, like the tribe. You all depend upon one another, you all got a role. It's life or death. You could come home dead, you're gonna bring home meat. I bet that we don't experience anything like that our whole life that was as much fun as that. related to that. You know, like everyone, I started out life poor, you know, as a poor medical student. And now, you know, I'm financially more comfortable. And there are things I miss about being poor.

Isn't that interesting?

Have you noticed that?

I was sleeping on my sister's couch for a year and a half. No money, broke, eating mac and cheese and leftovers from her.

Yeah.

I didn't have a car, so I'm walking everywhere and just like living by, I don't know, a couple hundred bucks a month. Yeah. And there's something about that time that I'm like, God, it was so exciting to see, like, what could I create from this space of nothing?

Yeah, you're strategizing.

Yes.

Little wins are huge.

Huge. Someone said yes to meet with me. It was like all these things.

So as our society progresses farther and farther away from scarcity, we lose those opportunities to have these incredibly big wins that are going to change our life. And so we overeat on junk food. We spend time with these trivial, nonsense pleasures on our cell phones because the big things are no longer in our life. It's no longer about finding sources of food to survive. It's now about, you know, how many views am I going to get with my latest post? It's not the same thing.

So, what can we do over the next 5-10 years as these distractions are going to become more prevalent?

We've got to think about meaning. We've got to think about what is meaningful. So, for me, you know, writing books has become so meaningful and it's nice and hard and sometimes it makes me miserable which is good. you've got to find something that's hard, that will involve failure because that's how hard it is. You can't choose an easy life.

Really?

Yeah. What happens if we choose an easy life?

We become miserable. We become miserable, bored, fat, sick, diabetic, all of those terrible things.

Do you have a chapter or a place in here that talks about meaning and finding meaning?

It's my next book.

That's the next book.

That's the next book.

What is that one about the unconscious mind?

It's about the unconscious mind.

What is the unconscious mind versus the conscious mind?

A lot of people have seen these pictures of the mind as an iceberg, right? Where there's this little teeny part above the surface and the huge masses below the surface. That's the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is responsible for everything that goes on inside our heads that we don't have control over. emotions, excitement, enthusiasm, interest. Most people don't think about this. You don't control what you're interested in, you know?

I mean, really?

Do you, somebody like football? Okay, I personally don't like football. There's nothing I can, well, I kind of do, but not that much. But there's nothing I can do to make myself passionate about football.

Here's the thing. I'm gonna challenge you on this and tell me if I'm wrong. I never liked soccer. I played it growing up. and then I stopped playing it when I was a sophomore in high school and I started playing football. And that was like, I never want to watch soccer. The only time I was interested in soccer was during the World Cup when I was like, okay, I can get behind everyone going out and like watching game and supporting the USA, right? But I never wanted to watch until a few years ago. I was just telling one of our producers here, Mike, that I went to a couple of LAFC games, their LA Football Club soccer team, right? Yeah. And I was like, this is incredible, the energy, the experience. I got to know the players and I was like became interested in the sport of soccer. And I was like, I want to go to more games. So how does that like, what does that mean then if I'm not interested but then I become interested in something?

-Right.

So.

We talked about this pastor who took the month off. -Uh-huh. And boom, the idea hit him.

-Yes.

That came from his unconscious mind. He didn't dig it up. Right? It came to him. You went to the soccer game and you were given a gift. You were given the gift of excitement.

Yes. You didn't work for it.

That was a gift for your unconscious mind. And that's why trust is so important that we have to trust that these gifts will come. We try to squeeze our unconscious mind and force it to give us things. It's going to rebel. We've got to kind of go through saying, look, I'm not, I've got a co-pilot. Or maybe I'm the pilot, maybe the other guy's, maybe I'm the co-pilot, maybe the other guy's the pilot and in charge. But it's a realization that you cannot control everything, that you have to be open to gifts that come from the unconscious mind.

So it's kind of like being curious about life. I think I'm gonna try this thing, I'm gonna check this out and see how it makes me feel.

Yeah, yeah, can I tell the story.

I wanted to tell?

Yes.

So I did this TEDx talk, right?

Yes.

And it's a big deal.

Yeah.

And I practiced- Four years ago, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah, I practiced that every day for a month. That's great.

Great to meet you.

Thank you.

Every day for a month. Every single day, well five days a week. When I went to work, first thing I did first thing in the morning is I ran through that speech. All right, so I get there, we do a dress rehearsal, get up there, and I'm giving my speech. I draw a blank halfway through. Nothing. I'm sweating over here.

Dress rehearsal.

Dress rehearsal. I got nothing. And I'm terrified and there's a dinner that evening and I skip the dinner. I go back to my hotel room and I'm memorizing, memorizing. So now it's the day of the thing and I'm about to go out and I realize, I say, look, I didn't shirk. I wasn't lazy. I did everything I could. and it wasn't enough. And so I said to my unconscious mind, We're all in this together. Be a pal and help me out. You know, I acknowledged that I didn't have control. And I was happy with how it went. My unconscious mind came through for me.

That was great.

But it came through for me as a friend, not as a servant. I didn't order it, I asked it.

So what happens to people who are extremely controlling in their life versus people that are more in surrender?

Yeah, those controlling people don't do well. Really? And a lot of times, you know, the unconscious mind has a sense of humor. You know about the Freudian slip, right? Yes. A lot of times the Freudian slip will reveal a truth that you were trying to hide, but the unconscious mind says, Tough luck. Yeah, you said this. Yeah, yeah. So people are always trying to be in control. The unconscious mind is constantly sabotaging them.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really we love hearing feedback from you, and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

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