Why Most People Never Change (And How to Finally Break Through)

Everything in your life is controlled by your thinking. And the problem is most of us have not trained our thinking. Our thinking has kind of shown up in reaction to the way we were raised, or our disappointments, or our successes, or our failures. Gravity— it's invisible. How important is it? Too much, you're squashed. Too little, you're not on the planet, right? Sunshine, heat, temperature, electricity. But maybe the most powerful of all of those invisible forces is human emotion, because human emotion It's what causes wars and it's what will eventually cause peace. Human emotion is the basis of everything. We love to think of ourselves as intellectual creatures and don't get me wrong, we certainly have strong intellects, but we use our intellects to justify our emotional desires. And once you understand what really is driving you, you can see where along the way you may have picked up some patterns and you think it's you because you've been doing it over and over again and all it is is a pattern, a habit. And once you change that, the whole game changes. And it's not hard to change a pattern once you can see what it is. But when you think there's something you're messing up on, and it certainly looks like that because you're the one running the pattern, but there's a difference between the pattern and you. Destiny is not just some little goal. It's what do you want your life to be about? Who are you here to become? What are you here to give? What are you here to contribute? What's meaningful to you at this stage of your life? Not 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, when a lot of our models of the world, our way of looking at life was shaped and framed. Most of you don't really know what you got yourself into just yet, but I also want you to know that that journey is going to be incredibly enjoyable. There'll be some challenging times in it, just like anything. There'll be some moments where you might want to just give up, because when you start thinking and getting underneath stuff, it gets uncomfortable a little bit, and it'll be easy to run. So I really offer you to think of a philosophy that my original teacher Jim Rohn taught me. He said, Tony, if you really want to be successful in your life at all levels, not just business, —this in finance. You want to be a happy, healthy person with beautiful relationships. There's one philosophy that works. I said, what is it called? Stretching. He said, stretching? What is that? He said, if you ever find yourself saying I can't do this, then you must immediately say I must and do it in that moment with no delay. He said, but if you know there's something in front of you that feels daunting or difficult or impossible or just uncomfortable and you don't want to do it, make yourself do it immediately if you know it's going to make you a better person, because that's the only way you get momentum that is lasting. And I can promise you that has probably been one of the most simple but sage pieces of advice of my life. So I've always pushed myself through, and the rewards on the other side are amazing. So while we're here, you're going to push beyond your tiredness because we're going to deliberately go beyond where your brain normally would be or your body would normally be, especially today. And then each day it'll get easier and easier and more and more fun. But we've got to build the muscle, so we got to push through. We can't just do what's comfortable. If you do what's comfortable, you're not growing. I believe in intelligence. Intelligence means see things as they are, but not worse than they are. Almost everybody makes it worse than it is. Why? Why do people always make it worse than it is? People don't want to be disappointed. People don't want to get their hopes up and have them dashed. People don't want to go through the pain of it. So instead They come up with all the reasons why it's so horrible that it can't possibly work. I remember after 9/11, people saying to me, my business went under because of 9/11. I said, what about all the companies that were in the building that went down that are still going? It's never the environment, it's always us. When you make a sound, it's different. It goes beyond your cognition. Sounds are deep in the deepest part of your brain where you got wired originally. And if you'll do these things in the beginning, maybe a little faith, might feel a little weird in the beginning, but as you keep pushing yourself, it'll get easier and easier. And pretty soon It feels addictive because it wires into the best and most powerful part of your brain. Everything we do, we're going to not— we're doing it randomly. We're doing it for an impact. So I'm going to ask you to stretch yourself while you're here. And if you're the kind of person that's at home and you got your camera off, turn the fucking camera on. This is not— you can be home. I'm wonderful. You can be home, but stay engaged so we can see you. You can see it. Others can engage because that's how we're going to tap into the force that changes everything. And what are those forces? Well, at the most general level, the things that control your whole life are two things: your beliefs and your values. Every decision you've made, everything you have in your life, what you're wearing today, the fact that you're in this seminar versus not, where you are in the room— everything in your life is controlled by your beliefs and values. And the unfortunate thing is most of us never consciously sat down to create them. We pick them up along the way, some good ones and some maybe not so good, because maybe we modeled somebody or reacted. Somebody did something. It's like people do this in a relationship. We don't want to do that. We want to find what's really going on and make the shifts in what's really going on. That's the process that we're going through. And what we're really going to do is understand how to master the two worlds of our life, because it's two worlds. There's the external world, which right now has a lot of tension and passion and intensity in it. It always does. But there are seasons in history. There are seasons in life. And if you look at seasons as a springtime where everything's easy and flowing and people are very, very optimistic, businesses are easy to grow, cash flow is easy, things happen like that. Then it comes into a summertime where it's tested, where it's hot and it's difficult and you got to push through. And some people are like, you know, I planted in the spring, you know, where the hell is my crop? Well, you don't come tomorrow and go, where's my crop? You got to make it through the hot summer. Right? And some people are like, but I— it's never going to happen. Well, if you have that belief, it won't. You'll give up. I like all the seasons personally, but fall is a pretty awesome season because in fall, that's when all the fruit that from all your efforts is rewarded. That's where it all starts to come in, and it's in abundance. And then what always follows that wonderful, easy time of fall— by the way, fall is when stock markets go crazy. You can be an idiot, you make money in real estate. Someone gives— you have a pulse, so they give you a mortgage, right? You don't even have a job, they fake it and give you a mortgage. Remember those days, right? That's fall. So what leaders do, and what I believe in, is not positive thinking. It's see it as it is, but not worse than it is. But we got to see it as it is, otherwise you're just bullshitting yourself. So we're gonna look at our bodies, our emotions, our relationships, our finances, our businesses throughout this week and say, okay, what's working, what's not? Whatever's working, let's strengthen. What's not, it's time for a shift. And we're going to go to what's keeping us from the shift. That's why this has such lasting impact, right? So all of those steps that we're going through will shift you, but what's going to make it stick is conditioning yourself, conditioning your mind and your body, your energy, your emotion. That's what this jumping, leaping, and all this crazy shit looks like. So you see it, it is not worse than it is, because I hear people all the time go, I'm skeptical, I'm pessimistic, and I look at them and go "Let's be honest, you're gutless." I'm going, "It takes no guts to say nothing's gonna work. It takes no guts to say I've tried everything. It takes guts to put your ass on the line and have faith and push through and take chances and take risks, which is the only way you get to the rewards." And you don't get rewarded every time. How many of you found that often your plans don't work, right? All right, so, but that doesn't mean the next one won't. That means each one gives us input for a better plan. Some people call it failure, other people call it learning, and they keep moving forward and they get there. So we have to re-engineer ourselves. So think of the external world as one world to master, the internal world is the other world. Some of the same activities can happen if people have a different attitude in a different season. There's wars in every season, but they're looked at differently. There are threats in every season, but they're looked at differently. In the springtime, everybody's optimistic it'll work out. Just remember one thing: no season ever lasts. And you know what's coming next if you pay attention, because in winter most people get fearful so they don't act. So now you can come from behind and take charge. If you're in a business and you can push yourself in winter when everybody else is trying to hang on, you'll win everybody. You'll win over their business. We can't control the outside. You can influence them. But the bottom line is it doesn't matter what the season is. The way you master the external world is you master which world Could you be in a place where all hell is breaking loose, where people are freaking out, where nothing seems to be working, feel— it feels like the whole planet is shutting down, and could you be standing there in this beautiful state, fully energized, fully alive, just in total ecstasy? Is that possible, yes or no? Yes. That's because you've mastered the inside. However, we need to master the outside too, because if you just sit there and bliss out in a Western culture, people come and take your furniture, right? You got to still succeed on the outside too. So we're going to do both, but our emphasis here is first going to be on the inside. Because if you control this and this and you're in charge of these and you know how to drive these, anything you want to create out there you can make happen. Because if we do the easy stuff, there's no growth. If you take a lightweight and do 100 curls, there's no growth. You get to keep what you have. If you don't use it, you what? Lose it. So yeah, but who— we didn't come here just to maintain. We need to put out the energy that's necessary for that. That's going to be the most critical element, and especially when you don't feel like it, because that's where you get that explosion and growth, where your brain goes, I have to have more, and it creates it. And after a while, that becomes your base. So what used to be hard to lift is now easy. You move up, you can handle a bigger challenge, you can have a better quality of life than you had before. The biggest illusion we have in today's society is if I've heard it and I understand it, I got it. It's not how it works. Knowledge is not power. Knowledge is potential power, right? Execution trumps knowledge every day of the week. If you want to get where you master something though, you do repetition with emotion. Emotion is energy in motion, and when you connect that emotion to the knowledge, it goes deep and it locks in.