--:-- Host: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. We have a tremendous conversation for you today with John Azaroff, New York Times bestselling author, five multi-million dollar businesses, coached millions of people across the globe on how to change their brain to change their income. You are going to love this conversation. If you are about personal development, if you are about getting better, becoming the best version of yourself, this is going to be one of the most impactful conversations you've ever heard in your life. And when you're done listening to this conversation, I hope you dig into John's work. And if you're not already, subscribe, whether you're listening on Apple, Spotify, or you're watching on YouTube. Lots of visuals in this episode. So if you are listening to the audio, jump over to YouTube and check out the episode as well so you can see John in action. If you have questions, comments, reviews, leave them. I read them all. I respond to them all. I appreciate and love you for being here. Let's get on to one of the most powerful conversations we've ever had on this show with Jon Azaroff. Jon, it's incredible to have you on the show. I'm looking forward to our conversation, man. Thanks for taking the time.
--:-- Guest: Thanks, Ryan. Me too.
--:-- Host: So I want to start with limiting beliefs. One of the things that I come across a lot with the individuals that reach out to me or that I work with or manage in my own company, it's almost as if we've been programmed and we don't even know that we're capable of more. In so much of your work, you have this great free training, "Change Your Brain, Change Your Income." The deeper and longer I've gotten into my career, the more I've realized that what goes on here basically drives everything else, which makes sense in a very logical way, but emotionally we don't tend to operate that way. So one, do you believe we're programmed with a lot of limiting beliefs early? And two, how do we start to become aware of those? Like when you're working with someone and breaking down what's going on with them, how do we start to become aware of the things that we tell ourselves that keep us from where we want to go?
--:-- Guest: It's a great place to start. Here are some frames for us to use while we're chatting. There have been about 108 billion humans since the time we started walking on earth 300,000 or so years ago. My question I always like to ask people is: was any one of them born with any belief? Forget about limiting beliefs, what about empowering beliefs? Was any baby ever born with a belief at all?
--:-- Host: I don't know. I actually don't know the answer to that.
--:-- Guest: Probably not. You weren't born with self-confidence. You weren't born with self-esteem or self-image. You weren't born with one fear. You weren't born with any patterns in your brain. From a neuroanatomy perspective, a belief in the brain is nothing more than, to use a term everybody will know, software that was coded and developed. So the question is, if I developed beliefs that are limiting me right now, what is a belief in the human brain? The answer is it's nothing more than a reinforced pattern that we heard, learned, discovered, or we gave something a meaning that created the belief about it.
--:-- What happens with our brain is initially we don't have any beliefs. These brain cells, or neurons, fire as we're learning stuff or hearing stuff or being told stuff. Those neurons that fire together create electrical activity, release neurochemicals that create a reinforced pattern or coding. Any pattern that's reinforced—good pattern, bad pattern, negative pattern, positive pattern, constructive or destructive—goes from the conscious part of the brain in an area called the hippocampus, which is where short-term memory of a belief is, and through spaced repetition, it goes into long-term memory in another part of the brain called the cerebellum.
--:-- Why am I starting off with this technical explanation? Anything that is programmed, conditioned, and wired in the cerebellum is considered a habit. This habit creates what you see. This habit creates what you feel. This habitual belief creates what you do. But more importantly, it deletes and distorts anything and almost everything that doesn't match with that belief. When we have limiting beliefs—I'm too young, I'm too old, I'm too this or I'm not enough of that, I don't deserve this, I'll never amount to much, success is like he can do it because, while she achieves it because—we have these stories. These are nothing more than patterns that percolate up to reinforce themselves in an automatic fashion. It's called automaticity in my world of neuroscience.
--:-- So the question then becomes: if I have a belief that is limiting me, can I deactivate that pattern? Can I deliberately create a new belief and reinforce that based on neuroscience or psychology? The answer is yes. We used to think that our brain, which is worth in my opinion $100 billion or more, was hardwired. We thought we were born with our beliefs, our propensities, our character traits, our habits, our fears, and then we just are like our fathers or mothers or grandparents. That's not true. It's just a false understanding.
--:-- We know through something known as the science of neuroplasticity that even as you're learning right now, brain cells are firing in your head and wiring in your head, but it's at the surface level of knowledge, skill, or belief. If we kept reinforcing this one day, seven days, 14 days, 21 days, a month, you would start to develop this new belief of, "Wow, my brain is powerful. Wow, I can let go of beliefs and create beliefs and I can empower myself from the inside out." I call that "inner size." Then you'd be able to deactivate old, disempowering, limiting beliefs and recreate and reinforce empowering new ones. There are techniques we can talk about on how to do that. But that's really what a belief is, and that's what a self-image is.
--:-- For some people, I say, "Hey, I want you to imagine being offered to hop in a plane right now and learn how to do a skydive." Some people go, "Oh my God, that's great, let's go." Other people go, "Are you out of your freaking mind?" How could the same thing of skydiving create fear in some people and exhilaration in another person? The answer is they have been conditioned to believe something about skydiving.
--:-- Host: That's an amazing way of breaking it down. I've never heard it put quite so clearly. I was opened up to this topic around manifesting for a long time. I read *The Secret*. I didn't really connect with that book. I always kind of felt like this idea of manifesting was this kind of woo-woo thing. Then I heard a guy by the name of Andy Fursella talk about it. I was like, here's this kind of hardcore dude, he's got the supplement program, and I love him. When I heard him talk about the impact of it and he broke it down, it's what you just said. He was like, "Yeah, I get that a lot of people dismiss it because it feels like this ethereal concept. 'Oh, if I just put it out into the world, it comes back.' That's not how it's actually happening." Push back on me where I'm missing this, but essentially what it's doing is programming our brain to see things that maybe it wasn't seeing before. Just like what you said. It's like when you get the new car, all of a sudden all you see is that car or that color everywhere on the road. You're reprogramming your brain. Is that the proper way of thinking about it?
--:-- Guest: It's a little bit more complex than that. When light comes into your eyes, you don't see with your eyes. You see through your eyes. You're seeing an image of me right now. Your brain is processing light—not at light speeds, it actually slows down light because it's 186,000 miles per second—and sound, coalescing it together. In the case of visual, I'm actually popping up over here in the back of my head. You're popping up in the back of my head and I'm popping up in the back of your head, but it seems like you're seeing me out there. It's creating this illusion.
--:-- Manifestation is a little bit more complex than that because we have to understand a little bit more about the universe, energy, vibration, resonance, and coherence. A lot of people have this stupid idea because of the movie *The Secret* that I was in, around "think and believe and you'll achieve." That's bullshit. Just because you think and you believe doesn't mean you'll achieve it, because you also have to take the right action in the right order at the right time.
--:-- In manifestation, there's something called sympathetic resonance. Nobody hears about this, but this is my body of work.
--:-- Guest: Sympathetic resonance is when your thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations, and behaviors are aligned with what's already here in this field of energy we are in. We call it the quantum field. Big words, maybe Deepak Chopra made it popular many years ago. We live in this sea of energy. I am energy. I know you can see the physicalness of my body, but if I took a microscope and looked at my hand, you'd see vibrating packets of energy. Hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon—that's the main four elements of the human body. So I'm vibrating and resonating at my dominant thought level, at my dominant emotional level. And if I take action, now I'm moving towards an outcome.
--:-- Sympathetic resonance works almost identically to a band. Think of your favorite band. If they're not in sympathetic resonance, it sounds like shit. A band that sounds like shit has what's known as destructive interference. I know I'm getting technical on the science of this, but that's my domain of play. So when I have a belief that does not match what I want to achieve, I have destructive interference going on. I may hope and think and pray positive, but if my belief is negative, that's destructive interference.
--:-- Let me give you a visual of this. Let's say you're in the ocean. This is based on wave theory. Let's say a five-foot wave is chumming along in the ocean, and it intersects with another five-foot wave just perfectly. That's sympathetic coherence, and it becomes a ten-foot wave. Now let's say there's a five-foot wave and a two-foot wave that intersect. It ends up being like a one-foot wave. That's destructive interference versus sympathetic coherence.
--:-- When we're looking at manifestation, we have to align all the members of the band, the orchestra, to create in concert—coherence. So it sounds good. It feels good. When we hear our favorite band, it's like, "Oh my God, this is like magic." There is no such thing as manifesting out of thin air. That's bullshit. Now, I've had things happen in my life that are like, "Oh my God, how did this happen?" It made no sense. There's this intelligent universe that we live in. We have this insanely brilliant genius brain that's worth $100 billion. Every brain, unbeknownst to most people, works the same. Like every car, electric or gas, fundamentally works the same—four wheels, a chassis, an engine, all the components. Functionally, it works the same. Do you know what the problem is? We have varying levels of driving ability.
--:-- You own your brain. You own a Mercedes, a Rolls Royce, a Bugatti. You have a Formula One car. How well do you know how to drive it? How well do you understand that you are an atomic structure and beliefs drive perspective, beliefs create a vibrational frequency, a state? That state emits a wave in this field I'm in. That wave that you and I release or emanate doesn't attract like a magnet. It's not how it works. It resonates, vibrates, and becomes known like a tuning fork instead of a magnet.
--:-- Have you ever seen tuning forks? You take the A440 key on a piano and you have a tuning fork that is tuned to the A440 frequency. You hit the piano, the tuning fork moves. If you hit the wrong key on the piano, the tuning fork doesn't move. Our job, starting with your beliefs, is to create at least one of the keys. My beliefs need to be in alignment with what I want to achieve. I can do that deliberately. That's part one of the equation.
--:-- Host: Yeah. And we want to get into sympathetic resonance, coherence versus destructive interference. There are four things that cause destructive interference for us humans who want to make more money, be healthy, have a great relationship, enjoy life to the fullest. I want to talk about those four things. I had one idea kind of hit me while you were talking. I want to run it by you and have you break it down. A lot of my friends, a lot of people that I run into—I coach a lot of sports—and you start talking to your other dads. There's a lot of anxiety in the world right now, and probably always. I don't want to just talk about this moment in time. Oftentimes, the way I imagine anxiety, and I know there's many layers to it, but in the context of what you've said: here's how you want to resonate in your language. Here's what I would, if I could put all my fears aside for a second, here's where I want to resonate. But based on how I've programmed my brain and how I'm currently resonating, that disconnect, that distance between how I'm resonating today and what I ultimately believe I could resonate or would want to resonate—that disconnect is anxiety, stress, depression. That's where so much of this negative stuff comes in. Maybe that's discussing it at a shallow level, but does that make sense?
--:-- Guest: I understand the bridge you're looking to make. Let's play this out. Let's go deeper than the surface. Anxiety is a feeling that I have. Does every stimuli create the same level of anxiety, or anxiety at all, in every human? No. Let's say this couple here has triplets. Will it create the same level of anxiety as this couple here who has triplets? No. So we could say, "Three kids, oh my God, it's creating so much stress and anxiety for me." And this couple who may have come from a home of eight kids go, "Three kids? That's nothing."
--:-- Let's understand that our brain is made up of three core networks. We don't need to get into those, but we have circuits. Easy to understand: motivational circuit, fear circuit, stress circuit. What causes your fear circuit to activate depends on your training and conditioning and the meaning in your biocomputer, your brain, at the subconscious level. The wars that are going on in the world, the political situation, the interest rates, the uncertainty in your town—for some people, it's too much for them to handle because they have not been trained to handle it.
--:-- The only time the stress circuit, which anxiety falls into, is activated is when the demand exceeds your current capacity. Let's talk about capacity. Isn't capacity our ability to walk up one, two, or ten flights of stairs? Isn't capacity our ability to lift a five-pound weight or a twenty-five-pound weight, one time, five times, ten times? Anything more than the capacity is like, "Oh, right?" We can use physical fitness as an example. We can use money as an example. You're running out of money and you're like, "Oh my God, I'm running out of money. I'm not making enough money to pay the mortgage or the rent. My sales are behind, my productivity is behind. Oh my God, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress." Most people will feel that stress, and it'll do one of two things: it'll either fuel them, or it'll shut them down and they'll procrastinate, self-sabotage, freeze, or run away. Three things.
--:-- We know that there are neuromechanics that get triggered, and we always, always, always will revert to our training that has been imprinted and impressed in the subconscious mind, not the knowledge or information we have. I want to give you a personal case study on this.
--:-- Host: I spent a lot of time thinking about developing my mindset. This conversation is ecstasy to me. I like it. I could literally listen to you talk about these topics all day and I love how nerdy you're getting. It's amazing. I know the audience loves it too. Never feel like going deep on these topics is wrong. I like to position the questions at a shallow level because I think that allows you to draw in the way you want, but man, I love it.
--:-- Guest: I completely agree. Let me give you an example of training. I was trained, and I've learned this as I've gone, very poorly when it comes to money. Early in my life, I was trained by my parents. Great parents, but my money training, my relationship to money, looking back on it as an adult now, was very poor. Everything was limiting. It was always, "We'll never have enough. You'll never break free. You come from this tiny little town. Who are you?" My parents were living the best life they could. From where they came to where they got was amazing. But for me trying to get to the next level, it was starting in the negative in terms of mindset.
--:-- Guest: So what's been very interesting to me and what you just said is I've had physical issues, relational issues, all these different things. Through most of them, I was able to persevere, continue with a strong mindset, keep my good habits. Then recently I had an issue where I exited a company and then tried a couple businesses. Those businesses didn't work, or the ideas didn't end up being what I wanted to be. So I had this six or nine month period where all of a sudden no real income, or certainly not the income I was used to, was coming in. Not that I was going broke, but all of a sudden I had financial pressure for the first time in a very, very long time. It was like watching all these houses of cards crumble down outside of just the finance. It wasn't like I just experienced this in the financial space. All of a sudden my physical fitness went away and I stopped being as present a father. I looked around and I've corrected a lot of these things, but I looked around and I was like, "Oh my God, this one pressure that I did not have a good base of mentality for, it didn't just stay in that compartment. It spread out throughout my entire life." Now all of a sudden I have bad habits across the board. Maybe explain how that happens. Is that experience a common experience? How does that work?
--:-- Guest: Very, very common. In addition to having networks to turn on or off in our brain, we have associations. Some people might know what I'm talking about. Some people, when they drink alcohol, they like to have a cigarette. They're associated. Some people, after sex, they like to have a cigarette. I'm not a smoker and I don't drink anymore anyway because I used to drink too much and used all the neuroscience to stop. We have associations. Sometimes when we have a bad or negative or destructive habit, it has a house of cards effect. It affects other things. It's very, very normal because neural pathways in the brain are all connected together. Every brain cell has about 7,000 connections to other brain cells, but the cerebellum part of our brain has up to 100,000. So if there's a habit—a good habit, let's say around money or around success—and all of a sudden that is shattered, it is connected to so many more other areas in our brain that it kind of activates them. If we don't have the mental and emotional control we need, then they can be like a runaway train. Very, very normal.
--:-- Because we're human, we can learn. Have you ever heard of the TV show *Deadliest Catch*?
--:-- Host: Love it. I watched the first nine seasons. I think I watched every episode.
--:-- Guest: You see these hardened sailors. To be a captain of a ship on those seas, you've got to be the best of the best in the world. You're not going to make it out of a 50-foot swell with undercurrents, with 10 pounds of ice on your boat, with a skimpy dressed crew, and then the engine just broke and you discover there's a hole in the hull. It's only for the seasoned veterans. Why do I start off with that? Life is all about that. We have these sunny days where we can feed the seagulls as a fisherman with our t-shirts, and we have these days where death is at our door. What happens in our lives is these are the tests to get extra stripes from your five-foot wave to your 10, to your 15, to your 20, to your 30, to your 40.
--:-- I have been where you just experienced so many times in my 44 years of being in business that now when it happens, it's like a storm. I know the mindset. I know the emotional regulation. I know the resourcefulness that I have to become in the absence of resources. These are the stripes we get. But the question becomes, is it the condition, the thing that's happening, or is it my responsiveness or reaction to it? Untrained people say, "Oh my God, this isn't working and that's not working, we're running out of money, and negative, negative, negative, negative, negative." That creates a negative state, creates a destructive coherence pattern. When we have a destructive interference or coherence pattern, then we not only see and feel and think and behave in those terms, that's what shows up in our environment because of resonant matching.
--:-- Here's what a trained captain of his life does. He's aware of the conditions, the circumstances, and the stuff. He's aware with 1% of his brain, and he's focused on solutions with 99% of his brain. "Here's what's happening, or what's happened in the past, and he did this, and she did that, and the market did this, and the president did that, and this guy won, and she lost." They focus on that. That's the average person. Zero training on mental focus and emotional regulation. They don't know it, but a hundred trillion cells vibrate, oscillate, attract, resonate at the level of their thoughts and emotions. Emotions is the energy in motion of my molecular structure, atomic structure called a body.
--:-- If I'm focusing on what's not working, what's wrong, why did it happen, what could—like, if you remember, I said Frankie's monster. Frankie goes, "Well, what if? What if I lose my money? What if I can't make the payment? What if I'm embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, judged, rejected, abandoned? What if?" Negative, negative, negative, negative. Frankie runs the show of negativity. In those moments of crisis, and by the way, this is part of our right prefrontal cortex, the genius part of our brain, you need Frankie on your team. But in those moments, we have to shift over to the Einstein part of the brain. That is known as the left prefrontal cortex.
--:-- For those of you thinking, "What's he talking about, these parts of my brain?" We have different parts of our brain. It works synergistically, and either you know how to deliberately turn on or off the different parts of your brain, like you know how to turn on your car, put it into park, reverse, drive, or neutral. You know how to turn on your radio, turn on your headlights, use the gas and the brakes, fill your car up with gas. Shouldn't you at least know some of the basics of how to use your brain better, since it's worth $100 billion?
--:-- So, in the state of awareness of the situation, regardless of why it happened, we want to focus our Einstein brain, the CEO, executive director of our entire lives, on solution-oriented focus. "Okay, great. What can I do about it? What are the strategies? What are the tactics? I'm going to go to ChatGPT or Claude or Mistral, and I'm going to put the problem and the situation into ChatGPT. I'm going to ask it to act as a PhD-level expert in this type of problem. I'm going to ask it to analyze it for me, give me step-by-step options of what I could do, then bring me a step-by-step plan of how to navigate through this." Could I do that in five or less minutes? Yes. Even if you don't have the knowledge or the skills, there are tools available right this second to help you overcome mental, emotional, physical, strategic obstacles that are in your way. But you may not be skilled at how to do that, or you may not have that as a default habit of "this is what I can do now."
--:-- Here's the question we want to always ask ourselves: If I have a financial problem right now, a business problem, a sales problem, a marketing problem, an employee problem, a husband problem, a wife problem, a kid problem—can I, if I was serious and committed to a resolution, right now, like literally in five minutes, come up with some solutions? Yeah. Solutions exist, but they don't exist for the people who are focusing on all the negative stuff and allowing their feelings to control their thinking, their focus, their awareness, and their whining, bitching, and complaining about the problem more than they're focusing on the solution when the solution exists. This is what I call responsibility.
--:-- You're either reacting or you're responding. Most people react, react, react, react, react, and reinforce, react, reinforce, and recreate more of the same. You may not be aware that you're doing it, but that is what you do because we repeat patterns. Why am I learning this at 43? Because we have a stupid system. That's why I started my company NeuroGym. My NeuroGym is to help people understand that most of us—listen, my father was an alcoholic gambler. He beat the shit out of me and my brother, not my sister. Money, like he was no money at the end of every day because he'd go gamble it. I learned money was scarce. I learned that we always had food on the table, always had a roof over our heads, but my parents always fought about lack, scarcity, limitation. We were conditioned and trained by teachers in school that didn't understand this, in grade school, high school, university. We never learned about the latest advancements in the last 10, 15 years about the human brain and about me and about you and about all the different things that we've learned. It wasn't anybody's deliberate fault, but it was the society conditioning that caused us to think, feel, and believe certain things. It caused us to have certain skills or not have these skills. Either we were fortunate or led into this personal development arena, developing myself. In order to develop myself, I first have to understand a little bit more about myself.
--:-- I say to people, "Who are you?" You'd say, "Well, I'm Ryan." I said, "Well, no, that's your name." I'd say to you, "No, no, like who are you?" "Oh, this is who I am." I go, "Well, no, that's your body." We didn't say body is coming to work today. We say you. What makes you up? You can say, "Well, am I my brain?" No, you have a brain. "Am I my heart or liver?" No, those are pieces of the whole. Most people don't have this healthy, spectacular respect for the creation. I don't care what you believe created you or me or everything, but whatever that is is in me and is in you. 300,000 years of resiliency, grit, overcoming famine, lack of resources, lack of food, lack of water, shelter—everything we've overcome, all of it. It's in your DNA. It's in my DNA. And you think you can't come up with how to make $10,000 a month? Are you kidding yourself? You think you can't build a company when we know every how-to? You want to stop drinking alcohol? You can do that. You want to stop eating sugar? You want to have a better diet? You want to have a better relationship?
--:-- Guest: All the how-tos available. We're lacking some fundamental frameworks that I believe everybody should be taught. When we understand these frameworks, it starts with having a real understanding of and a humble understanding, right? Like, "Oh my god, our creator put that much brilliance in me, that much ability in me." Yeah, that's why you're dreaming. That's why you're trying to figure out how to fulfill more of your potential. How you're finding out, "Why am I stuck? Why am I... What's causing this tension within me to want more, to be more, experience more, have more, give more?" There's this tension within you, and that spirit—I call it spirit, not religious—this intelligence that is begging to express itself more through you. But there are obstacles that specifically create destructive interference between your fullest potential and what you are displaying right now. My job, for me, is to discover more of how to do that. That's what I've been studying for 40, literally 40, 45 years now. That's what's taken me deep into the neuromechanics of understanding how my brain works so that I could use it better.
--:-- Host: I love how deep you go into the neuromechanics and the neuroscience, because I think like probably everyone listening, probably like yourself at a certain time, we've lived that shallow version of personal development where we're just looking at the tactics of things that successful people do and trying to mimic them without an understanding of why we're doing these things, the impact of them, why our brain or body tells us to not do that thing that we ultimately know could be good for us.
--:-- A book that opened me up—my personal development journey really began in 2017. I'm going to tell the story. I had a health moment. It opened my eyes to the fact that I was basically living on a whim, just things happened to me or didn't happen to me. And I was like, "Well, I'm a hard worker, so everything will be okay." Obviously that's not always the case. A book that opened me to this was Michael Singer's *The Untethered Soul*. Great book. I've always had this idea that God puts us into this body with a max level of potential, a completely uninhibited version of you that does the thing you were meant to be here for in the truest sense. Our goal through all the challenges and obstacles that life presents us with is to get as close to that version of us as we can possibly be.
--:-- For a long time, what I struggled with was my brain telling me, or my body, hearing this voice in my head saying, "Ryan, you came from a shitty little town where you could leave the doors open at night because the criminals lived there, they didn't steal from there. Who are you? You've never had money, you don't know anybody," blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. When I read that book, I got this understanding—the very shallow, high-level version is: you are not your body, you are not your mind, you are your soul. That voice in your head is not you. They're inputs, but they're not who you are. When I grabbed onto that idea, I said, "Wait a minute, I don't have to listen to that voice that tells me it's a Tuesday and I had a tough day, so I need to pour myself a cocktail. I don't have to listen to that voice that tells me my wife is giving me shit and doesn't appreciate me because she had a bad day and sniped at me when I got home." All of a sudden, I started to go, "Wait a minute, I don't have to be that version of me." I didn't know how to do the things that you know how to program to do, but it was like all of a sudden I got exposed to this concept.
--:-- I guess my question to you—and I would love for you to break down at least one or two before we finish here, I know we're coming up on a number of the deconstructive ideas—the reason I started this show was exposure. I just wanted to expose myself and others to the ideas that you're talking about because I've found through positive exposure, as I've been able to get, my world has just expanded. There's more love in it, more optimism, more energy, more connection because you start to get exposed to things. This is a very long-winded way—and it's my podcast, so I can do whatever the fuck I want—of saying thank you, because I love this shit. With all that being said, unless you have any comments on that, I would love for you to start to break down at least a couple of these frameworks and then maybe let everyone know where they can get more of them, as I'm sure you have a resource on it as well.
--:-- Guest: It really is the reason I started all my body of work. When I was a kid, I used to lift a lot of weights to get myself stronger, so I'd have muscles and be faster and stronger, more attractive. But as I had many challenges when I was younger in life—between 13 and 19, I was involved in street gangs, robberies, drugs, selling them, using them, alcohol. I mean, you name it, I did it as a kid. I started to learn around getting my mindset right from a mentor who was very, very well read. His name was Alan Brown, and he showed me how to refocus, reuse this brain of mine. Because of him, I was able to build my first company with 1,200 salespeople, 85 offices, and four and a billion in real estate sales a year—from a kid who left high school in grade 11 and failed English and math. So I get the shift.
--:-- The first part of this, and I'm so happy you realized you're not your thoughts. We have thoughts. The research as of about two years ago says we have approximately 6,200 thoughts a day. 6,200, not 50 or 25,000 or 700. 6,200 is the new scientific fact for now. Unfortunately, most people have 80% of their thoughts that are negative. That's 5,000 negative thoughts a day. Most people have 5,000 negative thoughts a day, focus on the negative thoughts, and they reinforce those. They don't refocus on, let's say, the 1,200 positive ones. They focus on the negative ones, and they reinforce more negative ones. As a result, 90% of their thoughts this week will be the same next week because they're reinforced thoughts.
--:-- Let's see if we can wipe the slate clean. We can say, "Okay, I'm not my thoughts. I'm not my brain. I'm not my heart. I'm not my liver, my lungs, my body, or anything like that." Let's say, "I have a soul." I call it spiritual, this intelligence in me. I have other faculties like emotions. I have a mindset that I could focus. I have this physical body that moves into action or procrastinates or self-sacrifices, whatever it does. I can say to my body, "Jump," and I could jump. I can say, "Move your arms right and left," and I could do that deliberately. But that's not how our bodies work. Our bodies work based on the conditioned, subconscious programming that we've had since birth.
--:-- Let's wipe the slate clean and say, "Okay, if I was committed to a new level of success, a new level of me, is it possible?" Let's start with, is it possible if I was committed? Let's say, "I guess it's possible. I may not know how, but is it possible?" Yep, it's possible. We say, "Okay, if I wanted to start using my brain better and knowing what we know about the brain, what would be the process?" The first thing I would say is, why don't we come up with a vision of what you would love your life to be like? Let's break it up into career or business—what results would you love? Health—and I like to break down health into spiritual, emotional, mental, physical, financial health. You could put wealth there too if you want. So health, physical, we could put wealth separately, relationships, charity, fun and experience. You say, "If I could wave a magic wand, I could design the life of my dreams. What would it look like?" We leave our Frankenstein monster brain behind and we just use the Einstein imagination brain of what do I want? What would I just love? We write that down.
--:-- We go, "Okay, now let's assume that that's the end destination." Like we're going to go on a trip together. We want to go to Antarctica. Great. Let's get some pictures of Antarctica. Let's say that's the destination you want to get to in a year or two or three. That's the ideal state. Now we come back and say, "Okay, that's the vision." Then we say, "Okay, here's where I am today. Here's my current reality." My reality is my reality. This is what is now. Whatever is now is not because of what you just did this second. It's because of the things you did or didn't do in the past. So we don't worry about what we did or didn't do in the past. We just want to learn from it and be aware. So my health results are this. My financial results are this. My business or career results are this. We just want to look at a snapshot of current reality, like we're looking at an x-ray—no emotion—but the x-ray will reveal, am I on the right track or not?
--:-- So here's where I am, here's where I want to get to, and we say, "Okay, if I want better results, different results in health, wealth, relationships, career, business, finance, and I say 90 days from now, what would an ultimate result be that if I achieved that result, I would feel proud? I would feel like I'm having impact and influence in my life or my kids or my wife or my neighborhood or the people that follow my work at church, wherever. What would be a result?" I'd go, "Yeah, that's so good." So we start setting some goals for 90 days from now. We say, "Okay, that would be great. What about 60 days from now? What about 30 days from now? What about just one week from today?" I'm going to set some goals, and I don't have to know how to achieve it yet. I'm just setting the goals.
--:-- Then I come back and I go, "Okay, to achieve my goal for this week, what would I need to believe in order to make that a reality?" Would I need to believe I'm smart enough, I'm good enough, I could do it or I could learn how to do it? Would I need to believe that I need help and I could find the help—online, offline, a friend, a family member, a coach, a consultant, something? What would I need to believe about the possibility of it being done and about me doing it? Write it down. Write down what you would need to believe. So we start off with the beliefs. What would I need to feel in order to be motivated? What would my state, my physical state, need to be? I'd have to be confident. I'd have to be certain, even though maybe I'm trepidatious and I don't know. I'd have to feel this. So I'm going to have the vision, the goals. I'm going to have the beliefs, the emotions.
--:-- And here's the magic in manifestation. If you've ever heard of the law of attraction, there's also a law nobody has ever talked about in great detail. It's the law of Goya. G-O-Y-A. Nobody is teaching this law except me, as far as I know. It is like the magic dust to achieve your goal. It's the law of Goya. You ready? Get Off Your Ass and take action. Do the right thing in the right order at the right time. Not any action. I don't want you being busy because you'd be busy doing the wrong things or you could be highly inefficient. What should I do today at eight o'clock till nine to move me towards that goal? What should I do from nine to 10:30 to move towards that one or two or three goals? What should I do at 10:30? Break. Great. Put a 30-minute break on your calendar. 11 o'clock, get back at it. What should I do for lunch? What should I do at one o'clock, three o'clock, five o'clock? What should I do tonight? Give me a perfect fucking day that when you finish that day, you're like, "Yeah, holy mackerel, I'm moving towards that." Celebrate. Reinforce that pattern.
--:-- You know what most people cannot tell me when I ask them? I've taught over a million people. They can tell me some of their goals. Show me the plan. Show me a plan. Show me your flight plan. Show me details. You want to lose weight, put on muscle, get in great shape? Great. By when? Show me your sleep pattern. That's deliberate. Show me your eating pattern. Show me your exercise pattern. Show me your rest pattern, your rejuvenation plan. "Oh, well, I was going to go to the gym like three times this week. And if I could go to sleep at 10:30, that would be..." They don't even know what they should be doing in a methodical, detailed, professional way. So they are playing the game of life as an amateur. Here's the problem: you play the game of life as an amateur, it's like a hobby. It'll cost you like a hobby. Play the game like a pro. You get praised in public for what you practice in private. You know what most people are doing? They're just fucking around playing life at the kindergarten or grade school level, but they dream of these pro-level results. They're delusional. They don't realize that they are creating their destructive interference patterns over and over and over again. But worse than that, they are reinforcing it, and that is their habit and their identity now.
--:-- John, I could talk to you for three more hours. This has been incredible. MyNeuroGym, I want to drive everyone there. MyNeuroGym.com is great. If you want to start doing this work, go get my Innercise app and my Innercise book, Innercise.com, or go to the App Store—I-N-N-E-R-C-I-S-E. I have 600 brain training audios with all the right methods, with world-renowned experts in mindset and mental fitness, in videos, and it's so inexpensive to do it.
--:-- Host: Guys, if you don't remember, you're driving, just scroll down into the description or comments, and we're going to have links to all this stuff. I can't express to you how important this conversation is. I can't wait to listen to it again. I've been an enormous fan. I didn't want to nerd out on you at the beginning, but I'll tell you now that we've had a chance to spend an hour together. I absolutely adore your work and the way you approach things. Thank you so much for your time today, John.
--:-- Guest: Ryan, thank you so much. And thank you to everybody who's watched and or listened.
