none of my mentors ever had me focus on perfection they had me focus on progress to just keep getting better little incremental gains every day every week every month every quarter and even when you move backwards a couple of steps what's the progress that you made in what you learned so i was taught that failure is an opportunity to learn and i was also taught to disassociate me being a failure from family [Music] [Music] hey everybody welcome to impact theory our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas
that will help you actually execute on your dreams all right today's guest is a wildly successful serial entrepreneur who has built five multi-million dollar companies including one that generated over four billion dollars in revenue he's also the multiple-time new york times best-selling author of the answer and having it all and he is widely considered one of the leading behavioral and mindset experts in the world and part of what makes him so extraordinary is that he has had a just crazy string of successes in multiple industries across absurdly divergent product lines his areas of expertise range
all the way from real estate and internet software to brain research and business consulting this broad spectrum acumen has seen him featured in eight movies including quest for success with richard branson and the dalai lama and the global phenomenon the secret he is also a much sought-after coach and speaker who's been featured in the new york times the wall street journal and on cnn and additionally he's been interviewed and mined for his priceless insights by such high-profile interviewers as larry king ellen and anderson cooper he's not one to sit back on his laurels and retire
however so despite the kind of repeated success that eludes all but even the most die-hard entrepreneurs he's launched yet another new company this one called neurogym that aims to use the most advanced technologies and evidence-based brain training methods to help people unleash their fullest potential so please help me in welcoming the man whose latest book innersize is poised to unlock your brain's hidden power the brain whisperer himself john assaraf thank you absolutely it's good to have you on oh it's so good to be here dude i want to dive right into the brain training so
it's makes total sense to me now as an entrepreneur why you would be so into like brain research and brain science and all that but i don't know that it's the most self-evident thing to the outside world why did you start there well i didn't start there what happened for me personally when i was a a teen between ages 13 to 17 i got into enormous amounts of trouble with the law i did a lot of unethical things and i was getting myself into so much trouble and i had one mentor that my brother introduced
me to his name was alan brown he was a very successful philanthropist entrepreneur and he agreed to meet with me for lunch one day and he asked me like why are you doing these things you seem like a nice young kid and i said i don't know i just want to make some money and i just want to fit in he goes but you seem like you're intelligent why don't you just use your brain's natural abilities i go listen based on my education and based on what the teachers have told me i'm not going to
do very well in life and i left high school in grade 11 thinking that i'm not worthy enough i'm not smart enough i'm not good enough and this one man in one minute in one meeting changed my life because he asked me what what goals do you have and i said what do you mean what goals do i have i said i want to go out this weekend to the bar i want to have some good food i want to find a nice young lady maybe hook up with and he says no what are your
bigger goals and i didn't have any so he actually sent me home he said fill out these pieces of paper and on the pieces of paper it said like what age do you want to retire by like i was 19. this was may of 1980. i wasn't even started yet i said but just fill out fill out these papers so i said i want to retire by a time of 45 with 3 million dollars i want to have a mercedes i want to have a house i want to travel the world i want to have
a great lifestyle and so i came back on monday and he looked at it and he asked me one question and that question transformed my life and he said are you interested in achieving these goals or are you committed and i stopped and i and i looked at him he was standing up i was sitting at my desk there at his office and i asked him mr brown i said what's the difference and he said if you're interested you'll do what's convenient you'll come up with stories and excuses and reasons why you can't and you'll
use your education as an excuse you'll use your stories and excuse you'll use the fact your father was a cab driver and was a gambler and never had any money you'll use all of that as your reasons why you can't he says but if you're committed you will do whatever it takes you'll let go of your stories you'll let go of your excuses you'll let go of all the reasons you currently have that are formulating your identity of yourself and you learn how to let that go and become who you are destined to become why'd
you listen to him like that's such extraordinary advice which i would have promptly ignored well i had been in in so many situations where i was so embarrassed and ashamed for myself and for my mother and father and here was a man who was kind generous caring empathetic he didn't talk down to me he lifted me up but then he also said i can show you how if you are committed i can show you how and i had nothing to lose at that point talk to me about that shame that's really interesting and you've talked
about growing into being able to talk about stuff very openly so what was the source of the shame how did it play out for you so the first source of shame when i was five i moved from israel where i was born to montreal and i just started kindergarten in israel and then i was thrown into a class with 50 kids in montreal in grade 1. i didn't speak english or french and so i felt stupid i felt like i sat there you know looking up at the ceilings bugging the other kids and was consistently
reprimanded consistently put in the principal's office and then i was consistently you know brought you know to my knees with my parents my father was physically abusive uh which you know is a challenge in itself his words weren't a way you know that he communicated hands and feet were his way of communicating and so when i did the wrong things um that's was the punishment and so i felt embarrassed that i wasn't smart enough that i wasn't good enough that i wasn't going to amount to much and back then school was you know my parents
were trying to say go to school do well that's your your way out of you know where we were living that's your way out of this life that we're having which wasn't a bad life we had food on the table we had a roof over our heads but there was always a struggle and mr brown offered me some hope it really amounted to that he i offered me gentle kind love and hope without embarrassing me shaming me or making me feel guilty what was it that he said that read to you as hope at that
point um it was his demeanor of how kind he was he was extremely successful real estate offices real estate buildings a wife lori children just kindness you know just raw kindness there was nothing for him to gain from helping me he didn't know me but he just was kind and and it was one of the first times that there wasn't a hidden agenda or somebody just you know putting me down for being a degrading human being or degraded human being and he made me promise if i took what he taught me i teach it to
others i think that you've become this really extraordinary example of rewriting your story yeah how did you get out from under the story that you would have had to have been forming if your father was abusive because now i know that you guys you're in in very regular communication oh yeah um so it just turned 88 where we yeah it's amazing so i forgave him 50 years ago what did that process look like i know a lot of people are watching this right now they are stuck in a story man like something happened to them
as kids or whatever's happening to them now they don't know how to get out from under that story and could never conceive of having a beautiful relationship you know that that they've re sort of re-explored and reimagined when i was in my 20s one of the things that alan put me on a path to was personal development you know read a book a month go to events listen to cassette tapes back then of motivational stuff for motivation for inspiration for strategies for tactics of what to do to lift raise your your level of skill and
knowledge um so i went to this event and i brought up this uh this uh challenge that i had with my father and the instructor said like when are you gonna forgive him i said never i'm never gonna forgive him [ __ ] that forgive him there's so much pain and the instructor said well if you're never gonna forgive him then you're the one taking the poison pill hoping he's gonna die or he's gonna be affected he says you don't forgive him for him you forgive him so you can move on i was like aha
number one and then he said why don't you ask your father why he did it whoa like why why was he like that and so when i mustered up enough courage on the phone with my father i said dad like how come you've never said i love you he says well my father never said he loved me that's not what a man says but you say to my sister says well that's okay to say to a girl or to a woman i said why did you hit me so much why did you it says because
you were being a bad boy i said but why didn't you talk to me like why didn't you just talk and he says well because my father hit me too i had to put you in your place i had to teach you the right way to stop the behavior and it was at that moment that i realized he just didn't know better he that's what he learned was the process to try and help me so he's not a malicious human being he's a kind loving caring man but he was taught to get compliance hit so
the pain will cause you not to do it again and in theory okay understand the brain signs today it does work in some cases but especially with with children even adults the physical and mental and emotional trauma that's created when somebody who loves you also inflicts so much pain to you there's confusion the neural network in the brain says i love this person my mother my father my best friend whatever and then there's so much pain associated now we have these patterns in our brains of this love and [ __ ] hate love and pain
and it's very very confusing but after this dialogue with him i started telling him i love you and it took three years i used to call him every week i started telling him i love you dad hang up i love you dad i hang up i love you dad hang up then once one day he says to me i love you too boy and then he has never not said i love you to me my brother or my sister since then wow that's really extraordinary what what was the mechanism you're so good at like getting
to the just raw how i pull this off i know you use vision boards which i definitely want to talk about accomplish boards which i think is really extraordinary and i've never heard that before and i think that's really really awesome too what board crap crap board to get to the crap board we definitely have to hear about that were you using the crap board to like reframe the story like how did um i did the crap board didn't come until last couple of years let me come back to the alan brown story when i
came back that following couple of days with my goals and he asked me committed or interested i said i'm committed shook my hand he then put me through real estate school for five weeks i graduated from real estate school may 20th 1980 and the only reason those dates are ingrained in my brain i passed the real estate test on my own without cheating wow so that was step one when i came back to the office he had the forms that i had filled out he says great sit down so i want you to read every
one of them every morning that you come in the office at 7 30 and i want you to run your fingers across them were these the goals of the those are the goals the goals that i had so you had me write my vision for health wealth relationships career business finances charity fun experiences everything every year of my life you had these documents he said i want you to read them every day and you're going to do it while you come into the office so that i know that you've done them and i want to
i want you to run your fingers across them as you're reading them and then when you're finished one paragraph close your eyes and i want you to feel what would it be like if that was true so he got me to see it to touch it to close my eyes and visualize it and to feel it so at the time he didn't understand what he was really doing but he was causing me to create new neural patterns in my brain that did not exist before the only success that i'd ever really seen was on lifestyles
of the rich and famous i said one day i want a life like that and and so every single day for a year i had to do that and it only took 10 or 15 minutes and there was also beliefs you talked about what else was in there he also asked me to write down what would you have to believe about yourself in order to achieve those goals he said well i'd have to believe i'm smart enough but i don't he goes i don't want to know what you don't he says what would you have
to believe it well i have to believe i'm smart enough i'd have to believe i'm deserving enough i'd have to believe i'm worthy enough i'd have to believe i'm capable of doing this i'd have to believe these things i wrote wrote out a bunch of things and he added a few more he says great now i want you to record those things and on your way to work and on your drive to look at real estate homes because 19 getting to real estate you listen to those over and over and over and over and over
again until you can recite every single one of them so he taught me the power of repetition he taught me the power of looking at stuff touching stuff feeling stuff seeing stuff hearing stuff memorizing stuff and at the time i was 19 i said i mean i felt this was [ __ ] ludicrous to me right this is like what the hell am i doing here it's like there's like it was nuts but that first year at 19 i made like 30 some odd thousand dollars which was five grand more than my dad made as
a cab driver so i said something's working i just kept doing it i was too afraid not to so i kept doing it in the second year i made 151 thousand dollars five times now in the second year he started upgrading my knowledge and skills more so he started to say okay instead of doing this now now you're you've graduated to doing this and he taught me some upgraded skills and so the combination of training my brain at a young age with beliefs that i wanted to have he taught me the right habits to have
daily rituals you know for goal achievement versus goal setting that's interesting right so he said everybody sets goals either they write them down or they don't they have them in their head i'm going to teach you how to achieve goals it's really interesting coming from the guy that was in the secret and i love what you've talked about the difference between the law of attraction and the law of goya oh yeah yeah so what talk to us about that so the law of goya is is simply get off your ass so if you if you
if you if you think and you believe and you emotionalize you visualize and you create your plan for how am i actually going to achieve this so what do i need to do when am i going to do it how specifically how am i going to tweak it measure it and iterate it so that i'm consistently making progress i learned the value of progress versus perfection none of my mentors ever had me focus on perfection they had me focus on progress to just keep getting better little incremental gains every day every week every month every
quarter and even when you move backwards a couple of steps what's the progress that you made in what you learned so i was taught that failure is an opportunity to learn and i was also taught to disassociate me being a failure from failing for sure i want to go back to what you're talking about with beliefs and you said this is so cool you were talking about how you wrote down these beliefs and you were reading them over and you were doing what you're told and you're running your finger across you really allowing yourself to
feel it imagine it and your brain was screaming something at you my brain was screaming that's [ __ ] that's not true you're not successful you're not earning that amount of money you're not smart you're not this but i was also taught at the same time that when that happens first and foremost that's normal that's the old self and the old patterns trying to fight for their life and he said with repetition and emotion and consistency initially it's hard and you have to use conscious effort to create the new beliefs he says but over 30
days 60 days 90 days 180 days that new pattern that you're focusing on and paying attention to your brain basically says well i guess you really don't need those old patterns you keep activating these new ones let's just make these ones work and let's make these real yeah but i want to understand what happened and and with the even the law of attraction you know the i was taught the law of attraction you know i was 23 24 years old also at a real estate conference they're talking about this law of attraction thing that there's
this energy everything's made up of energy i am energy you are energy and my thoughts you know create this resonance between what i attract and what i don't i'm like oh god i like that [ __ ] you know like i want to attract more of the good stuff right um and so i i i bought in like i bought into stuff that just made sense to me but then i was a voracious student i want to understand how like explain to me how it works like if somebody tells me visualize i go why like
how does it work like if you ask me to visualize like why does it work like why should i invest my time on that versus something else if you're asking me to use affirmations like how specifically why how does it work if you're asking me to emotionalize well what's happening in me that tell me i need to create these false senses of feelings i want to know why it works and why does it work especially emotionalizing i think that's something that people hear a lot i talk a lot about embodying something really feeling it yeah
but why does it work right great question it has to do with circuits in the brain and neurochemicals that are released and so when we feel something chances are that we're going to release dopamine in the brain the feel good neurochemical that activates the reward center of the brain and chancellor if we feel that and we have this positive emotion around it and that neurochemistry is flooding our brain and our body with feel-good chemicals we're actually activating the motivational center of the brain and so when we visualize when we set a goal when we take
an action step when we emotionalize when we read our goals the initial flood of neurochemicals dopamine serotonin feel good chemicals and then if we share it with a friend oxytocin those three neuro chemicals those are the neurochemicals of goal achievement but then there's the other side of it the other circuits of fear of stress where norepinephrine cortisol or epinephrine the stress hormones can be released as well and so i'm fascinated and i want to teach people the stuff that we've learned about beliefs self-esteem self-worth fears and the stuff that really holds people back because all
the how to how to get healthy and stay healthy we know how do i build a business and sustain it we know how do i get into a relationship and make it successful we know we we know most of the how-to for anything that anybody wants to do in this time frame that we live in so the how to is the easiest part of the equation so the harder part of the equation is why am i not doing the things that i know i should be doing and why am i not doing the things that
i could find out easily how to do let's talk about that so in your real estate company you said i'm giving everyone the same training they're reading all of the same books and yet they're not getting the same results and it wasn't like oh well the smart people are doing better than the dumb people you said sometimes it was people that you were like god in real life this guy's not that bright but he's crushing so what ended up being the difference between the people who didn't do anything with the information and those that did
so in this is going back sometimes i think in 1992 we were stuck um but i knew there was more possibility there was there was room for growth and i wanted to figure out if the stuff that i did in the 80s when i was a kid you know that broke free would it work with some of my agents and so we took 75 agents randomly agents said hey do you want to get into a six-month program to like retrain your brain your subconscious brain around your beliefs about what is possible for you to achieve
around your habits of what you have to do in order to achieve that and we focused on retraining their subconscious mind and so for six months they had to go through a process of listening to certain audio tapes reading reading certain materials every day and following the process of training their brain specifically their subconscious brain which controls 95 to 98 of all of our thoughts emotions and behaviors today and within six months that group increased sales by 100 million dollars jesus 100 million dollars i said holy [ __ ] right this is working and so
we started to teach some of what we teach now in neurogym actually now we have the technologies we have the systems that are far better than what we did back in the 90s and we went from 1.2 billion to 4.5 billion a year and it wasn't because we taught them any more skills to be real estate agents we taught them how to change the way they thought about themselves we taught them how to change their habits our agents who made 750 000 or more were in front of a client 75 of the time and we
asked all the agents that weren't in front of more clients like why are you doing that like why aren't you in front of people that are going to help you earn more income oh well we're busy doing this and doing this and doing this and they had stories and excuses and reasons why and so part of the work that i love to do now is is really help people understand what is your story like what's the story you're telling us because we all have a story we have a money story a relationship story a health
story we have a story for everything and then that story keeps recreating our lives over and over and over again and we have beliefs that support the story we have habits that support the story we have people that support the store we have systems that support our story and so my question i always ask people who would you be with a different story talk to me about set points that was something really interesting in what you talk about around the stories and things that we carry that i found really interesting sure so maxwell maltz wrote
a great book many many years ago in the probably the 70s called psycho cybernetics right and maxwell moss was a surgeon who performed surgery on people and what he noticed is even after plastic surgery that he performed on people some people didn't see any change in their faces and it was visible to everybody else but not to them because they had a map of what they thought they look like yes so we all have a map of reality we have a map of what we think we look like and any deviation on the physical level
to that map to that visual representation we have in our brains that doesn't match the map your brain deletes or distorts it so when we were working with real estate or when i worked with business owners in addition to upgrading knowledge and skills if you think about how let's say income we have set points for how much income we earn so whether it's 10 000 a year or 20 or 50 or 100 or a million it doesn't matter we get this set point and then we behave the way we need to behave and we feel
what we need to feel to earn that income and over a period of time it becomes part of the brain's default mode network so we develop set points for everything and so if the set points in the brain and there's a psycho-cybernetic mechanism in the brain a control and response mechanism in the brain and it's our brain why not learn how to reset the set point and so now we're looking at what technologies are available to help help reset that what evidence-based methods are there to set that or to reset that and so when we
take let's say visualization right and you start to see yourself even if the picture is not clear in your mind of achieving the next level of your success whether it's releasing weight and keeping it off getting into a relationship that you love and are happy and whether it's to make two or three or five times more money and live a certain type of lifestyle that allows you to do the things that freedom with having money allows you to do if you start in your mind first and you impress that through conscious efforts into the subconscious
mind it then causes thoughts and emotions and behaviors so i like to work from the outside in and from the inside out so use both i want every advantage it's interesting so i've heard you now a few times and the first few times it didn't really make my radar but you always say release weight you never say lose weight yeah what do you do when you lose something look for it yeah i don't want to look for weight that i've lost i want to release it i like to use language patterns as well that are
gonna empower me versus disempower me uh self-talk is so critical and so i'm consistently paying attention to how am i speaking to myself am i speaking to myself in the kind motivating empathetic compassionate way or am i consistently self-deprecating and putting myself down i used to think a lot like when i was younger i'm not good enough i'm not smart enough i'm not worthy um those thoughts uh and you know lots of fear fear of being embarrassed fear of failure fear of being ashamed and i still have the thoughts every once in a while especially
when i'm setting new goals those come up holy mackerel they come up so freaking fast are you smart enough to achieve that are you good enough to achieve that even when i got into really diving deep into the brain science and even my new book i had i was petrified to release my book it took me two years to write it because now i'm entering another whole domain of neuroscience and neuropsychology with world-renowned experts that i've worked with for years but now here i am putting myself out there with hey this is neuroscientifically correct so
i had to make sure that it was and but there's a lot of fear but i understand what the emotion of fear is it's a subconscious trigger that causes this feeling that i don't like and it's a ghost signal for me not a stop signal for me that's interesting what do you mean by that well fear is an emotion emotions are all triggered at the subconscious level they release neurochemicals that causes a feeling we are consciously aware of feelings that are triggered at the subconscious level the feeling is the end point of the human experience
in the physical body and so when you have something in your brain that that a neural network says well what if this book comes out and you fail what if it's not good enough what is scientifically not correct what if what if what if my brain is going to process that the same way as your brain and everybody else because that's everybody's brain is the same the mechanism of how the brain works it's einstein's brain hitler's brain genghis khan's brain tom bilyeu's brain john acetate all the same functionality so if you understand the mechanics of
what's supposed to happen then you say okay great when i feel this then what am i going to do so i like to use an analogy of a car you're driving a car and you're talking to a friend of yours and a light pops up on the dash you don't take a hammer and hit a light it's a signal something's happening in the in the in the engine in the trunk in the in the tires something's happening emotions and feelings aren't uh positive or negative they're empowering or disempowering to varying degrees if you don't understand
them and so if you think about fear right how does a firefighter go into a burning building when there's this enormous adrenaline and an epinephrine you know that could stop most people dead in their tracks they learn here's the feeling it's normal do you have the knowledge and the skills and the preparation to deal with this in a safe way go if you don't now you retreat so we have this phenomenal brain right it's it's genius abilities we can't figure out how to replicate it anywhere with billions of dollars but we are getting some of
the user's manual now so when you feel fear what should you do i teach the first two inner sizes that i teach every one of our students number one is called take six calm the circuits so if you have this unpleasant anxious fearful emotion energy in motion right and it's unpleasant and the breaks have gone on if you just take six deep breaths in through your nose out through your mouth like you're breathing through a straw you will deactivate the stress response center which means blood is going to go back to the left prefrontal cortex
the einstein part of the brain can actually think through this problem because what happens when the stress response center is activated blood goes away from that into the fear response so you have epinephrine cortisol adrenaline to be able to get you out of the situation it's part of our instinctual brain part of the reptilian brain the first part of the brain that was developed was that then the mammalian brain the limbic system then the neocortex the thinking brain so when our brain has this signal of oh my god you might get hurt you might lose
this you might get in trouble you might be embarrassed ashamed ridiculed judged et cetera that part of the brain is going to get activated so if you take six deep breaths first calm down calm the circuits first then do inner size number twos called aya aia the first day is for awareness what am i thinking right now what am i feeling right now what am i sensing right now what is my behavior right now to you thoughts feelings sensations awareness of behavior what's my intention right now that's the i well my intention is to move
forward i want to do this great what's one very small action step that you can take now the reason you want to take one small action step is one small action step your brain can handle if it's one small step towards it the threat response goes away but if you focus on the end game right away you're going to get that rush and that instant trigger of the fear response stress response so the first thing you want to do is learn how to manage your mindset and what you focus on learn how to manage your
emotions because they drive your behavior more than anything else because we move away from pain and we move towards pleasure but we move away from pain a thousand times faster and pain wires in the brain faster for survival mechanisms so purely from a neuroscience perspective just understanding self once you understand okay this feeling is normal okay what should i do take six con the circuits ayah and now you can start being progressive and make progress towards what you want now while you're in the you know in the uh what am i thinking feeling it's a
chance to be aware and the biggest gift we have as human beings is our awareness because awareness is what gives you choice and choice is what gives you freedom most people are living their lives in a reactive state automatic reactive state because of these set points that we talked started talking about so we're in this repetitive cycle over and over and over and over we react to the same things we behave the same way we eat the same foods we dress the same way just to maintain that homeostasis and comfort zones and we've never been
taught like when were we taught as kids like here are your six core emotions here's the way you deactivate you know your stress center or fear so here's how you activate your imagination center here's how you have more focus here's how you develop a new belief here's how you develop a new habit here's how you release one we haven't been taught that we've been told they're important things but we haven't been given the tools and then we haven't practiced the tools enough to be able to make them part of our unconscious competence brain so how
do you do some of those things i mean that was a pretty extraordinary list and i'll say beliefs releasing beliefs habits releasing habits like that is really interesting so what is a belief i mean think about what is a belief and let's go to again i just like to go to the neuroscience fields because just my passion now is a belief is nothing more than a group of cells that have been connected and then reinforced and we have two types of beliefs we have beliefs that whatever i'm going to stop you there because that's so
important yeah and so different than i would have expected i think when people hear belief it is believing something that is true which did not enter into your definition no we believe whatever we believe is truth for us but it's not the truth that's really interesting right but we have been conditioned uh if we go back a little bit to um what we talked about earlier about you know when you were a baby when you were born what belief did you have zero goose egg zero not one and so you learned what to believe and
how to even formulate your beliefs chances are from parents teachers brother sisters television maybe when you read some books right and we behave based on what we believe so we might be behaving our lives away based on false or inaccurate or disempowering beliefs so if a belief is a neural pattern in the brain then we probably have some good ones empowering ones useful ones and chances are we have some that are not useful not empowering and not worthy of the geniuses that we all are so the question is is it possible for me to develop
new beliefs that i don't believe right now the answer is yeah yes what does that process look like so the process is you can read new beliefs to life and so if you listen to beliefs that are empowering over and over and over again and you emotionalize them and you visualize yourself actually acting out those beliefs and you learn how to pay attention to that little inner critic that says that's [ __ ] that's not true that'll never come true that's not you if you learn and you remember that that little voice is there to
consistently keep you in this homeostatic place and it's there to protect the beliefs that are there now the latest research shows that to develop you know a new pattern takes between 66 days and 365 days how do you help people be consistent long enough to form that like when people talk about oh it takes 28 days to form a new habit it's like okay i can get my head around that but when you start talking about 100 days 365 days it gets pretty daunting for adults yeah it does um so you have to use intrinsic
and extrinsic motivation so you have to start everybody off well why is it important for you to be able to develop these new beliefs like what will your life be like if you had them right now what would your family life be like you have to give them a benefit that's greater than the switch cost that's interesting right so the switch cost is something that our brain resists the only human that likes change is a wet baby every other human being is resistant to it because safety first and homeostasis and energy conservation so we are
biologically wired not to want to change so we have to deliberately coax the brain into motivational reasons emotional reasons you have to have intrinsic reason why must you do this and so you can use pain as a frame as well so if you don't then are you okay with your life being like this at this age in five years and 10 years and 20 years and if you're okay with that then you're you're not a candidate for change but if you're committed to letting go of the old so you can create the new and you
create motivations every day that's where the power is remember earlier progress not perfection so anybody can do one minute or or 10 seconds so if you can start to formulate a habit a daily habit a weekly habit it doesn't matter how long it is if you can create that space in your brain that on this day at this time this is what i do and you do that repeatedly that becomes a habit and it takes those 66 days or so for a simple habit that you have to consciously do to then the habit doing you
and that's why they say we are all creatures of habit because habits run themselves their subconscious programs just run themselves most people don't take the time to become aware what are my empowering habits what are my disempowering habits and then the next question is well how do i release this one and how do i strengthen this one or create a whole new one and what we're looking to do is build empowering habits that then run run their course i love that all right one thing i'd be remiss not to ask you about before we go
are the three boards so vision boards accomplished boards and the one i don't know about the crap boards so crap board so vision board for seeing what you want the accomplish board for reminding yourself that you've got a lot to that you've accomplished so you feel good and the crap do you actually put up images of things you've accomplished uh-huh yeah yeah i have them in my closet in my home uh encased uh on the floor like on the floor so that you don't look at them no i look at no so i look at
them just because i i i sit down and put on my shoes i want to look at them every day interesting yeah on my um i have i have this ritual as well i do something called brush and prime so on my bathroom mirror i have my goals that are on my mirror so that as i'm brushing my teeth i'm priming my brain to see my goals in front of me every morning and every night i love that right so that's priming your brain which is a whole other topic we can have and then the
accomplishment boards reminds me whenever i look at the stuff that have accomplished i go that wasn't easy there was a lot of ups downs highs lows failures you know times i thought i'd quit and i didn't so it's to remind me to go through the times that i don't think i'm going to be able to achieve those things and then the crap board stands for conflict resistance accomplishments and procrastination so what conflicts are are happening right now that i need to resolve um what resistance is in my way is what are my resistance what in
front of me is it resisting right now and then accomplishment as well is to remind you that you can get through stuff and then procrastination is what's causing me to procrastinate so if you create a crap board as well you have that in front of you and then you can create a game plan for what am i going to do about it what am i going to do about the conflicts what would you put on a board for conflicts is it a picture of a person oh it could be a person that you're having conflict
with it could be uh something you're trying to figure out that's conflicting uh whether it's in your company a department uh whether you're having conflicting thoughts of should you do it shouldn't you and there's uncertainty any conflicts that you are experiencing is going to create neural dissonance in your brain it's just going to create chaos in your brain and so if you take it out of your head and you put it on a sheet of paper you can look at it and now you're one step removed from what's happening in your brain and so um
the more you can be in coherence it's the equivalent of being part of a band that's in harmony that every player is just like oh man this just sounds so good well the more you can be in coherence the more you're going to be in flow and the more you're going to take action the more chaos there is in the brain neural chaos whether it's because of emotions you're lacking something there's conflict as resistance the more you can get it out into the in front of you and open and say well what's causing this the
easier it is for that einstein brain to say okay maybe i could do this maybe i can do that but i can also call a friend or a mentor or a coach or i can research it makes total sense all right before i ask my last question yeah tell these guys where they can find you online you can find me online at myneurogym.com johnasaraf.com on my facebook fan page on instagram on twitter those are nice those are the main ones all right and then my final question what's the impact that you want to have on
the world oh um on my my epitaphs he lived he loved he gave he had fun i always thought that if there's a way that i could somehow use my life in a way that i can make somebody else's life a little bit easier to live either through knowledge or understanding or love or a process then my life has been worthwhile and so i just want to make i just want to make a difference and i'm one of the people that doesn't believe that there's anything wrong in the world everything's unfolding exactly as it should
uh there are many things not to my taste uh that i don't understand but i just want to make the journey as good as i can for as many people as i can that's beautiful yeah john thank you so much for being on the show it was really incredible guys done guys when i say dive in i mean dive in somebody that really takes the kind of time and care that he takes to understand how the brain works and be able to make it digestible for people so that you can put it to use in
your own life i think it's really extraordinary that so much of this was born from a moment of kindness between him and somebody who'd been there who then made him promise that he would do the same in kind and the fact that he's given so much of his life to doing that to understanding how things work how habits work how beliefs work and there's even more that you'll find on him talking about those beliefs which i think is really extraordinary i think is one of the most foundational things about the human experience in terms of
trying to be successful is understanding what the beliefs are that operate in your brain and the fact at first when i heard that he was in the secret i was like oh god the law of attraction freaks me out so the fact that he has the law of goya and that you at the end of the day have to get off your ass and do something that's when i knew that we were spiritual twins and that i was going to be really into this guy so i'm telling you there's so much power in what he
talks about it's a no bs approach to how the brain works how you can rewire it how you can prime yourself to do really extraordinary things so dive in i think you're going to find some amazing takeaways that you'll be able to put into use in your life immediately to extraordinary effect all right if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care my friend awesome thank you that was incredible everybody thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already
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