Paradigm Shift: An in Depth Explanation

(slow piano music) You know, I've been looking forward to making this presentation. I'm gonna share some information with you that it could change the direction of your life like night and day. And when I say that, I want you to really stop and take a look at your life.

Take an honest look at your life. I was thinking just before I started to make this, we have actually been conditioned to kid with ourselves, to lie to ourselves, to not really take an honest look at the results we're getting. I want you to take a real honest look at your results.

And when you look at them, ask yourself, "Am I living the way I really want to live? " You see, most people aren't. One of the first questions I ask a person that comes to work with me, I want to know what's the most they've ever earned in a year.

Now, I really don't care what the answer is, but I want to know what the answer is. Because, you see, if a person says the most they've ever earned in a year is $50,000 I know where their mind is programmed. Um.

. . If they tell me the most they've ever earned is $250,000 I know where they're programmed.

And then I want to find out what they want. And I know, then, what has to shift. Because their mind is programmed and if they're really going to live the way they want to live, they've got to change the program.

And if they don't change the program, then nothing really happens. Now, what I'm gonna share with you I've been studying for a long time. I'm going to put some PowerPoint slides right up here and on those PowerPoints, I'm gonna tell you a story.

And it's a story about me and it's a story about you, and it's a story about what we're capable of doing, what we're really capable of doing. You see, I started to study this information 54 years ago. In fact, last October, I started my 55th year of studying this.

Now, that's longer than probably many of you are living. Maybe longer than your parents have been living. But I've studied it every day.

I've become absolutely fascinated with this information. And as I go through this, I think you're gonna be fascinated with it. Now, I didn't always have this information.

Today I have a company that operates all over the world, earns millions of dollars. I've some wonderful friends and I live an interesting life. When I wake up in the morning, I know that I'm gonna be doing what I love all day long and I'm gonna be extremely well paid for it.

But you know, it wasn't always like that. I have to go back to 1961. And in 1961, a man gave me this book.

And that's when everything in my life started to change. The book is Think and Grow Rich and there was a huge shift in the direction of my life. Now, I'm not gonna be on here long.

Maybe, I don't know, an hour. But in that hour I'm gonna suggest that you could change everything in your life. You see, today can be the turning point in your life by making a simple decision.

But if you don't make decisions, you're gonna stay right where you are. We have to make decisions. If we're going to change, we have to change the direction that we're going and when we change the direction we're going then we want to make sure we're going in the right direction because if we're not, we're gonna go either backwards or we're gonna stay where we are.

Now, I had something pretty interesting happen. When I committed to study this material everyday, and follow proven direction, the change that took place was enormous. And you know what, it can be for you.

Now, there's one thing that you absolutely require if you're gonna make a big change and that's discipline. See, without discipline, nothing happens. Now, I've found that discipline is the ability to give ourself a command and then follow it.

Now, I'm gonna suggest as we go through this and I suggest you make some decisions. Don't look at somebody else and say, what are you gonna do? You see, what they're gonna do has absolutely nothing to do with where you're going.

It's what are you going to do. That's what really makes the difference. Now, I've worked with tens of thousands of people all over the world.

And I've watched some absolutely phenomenal changes take place. I've watched kids go from a C and D average to an honors mark almost overnight. I would have difficulty counting all the people that have gone from ordinary incomes to multimillion dollars.

You see, earning money is not difficult. It's just that hardly anyone knows how to do it. And for good reason, we can go right through our school system and no one ever teaches us how to earn money.

And for good reason, they don't know how to earn money. Now, is earning money all this is about? Absolutely not.

This is about living the way you want to live. Now, I've been traveling all over the world, I started to study this and great change took place and then I want to know why I change. And so I started to study from a different perspective, I wanted to know what happened to me, which I'll talk again about in a moment.

And so I began to study and then when I figured it out, got the dots to connect, all I wanted to do was share with other people. And everywhere I've gone around the world, I've found that people are essentially the same. Now, I've worked in China, I've worked in South America, I've worked in Australia, New Zealand, all over Asia, across all over North America, and certainly all over Europe and people are essentially the same, it doesn't matter where you're going, I don't care if you're in Shanghai, in Kosovo, or New York City.

I've found that there's three things. You know, frequently, after a seminar, I'll sit around and I'll chat with some of the people maybe that were late leaving the room and I'll call them aside and I'll say, what do you really want? And I've found that not everybody wants to be really wealthy.

But what they do want, they want to eliminate any financial concerns. In other words, if they want to get a new car, they want to be able to get it. If they want to take a trip, they want to be able to take the trip.

Or if they see a sweater or a dress or a suit they like, they want to be able to buy it. They don't want to be wondering, am I gonna have enough to pay the mortgage? They want to eliminate financial concerns.

The second thing they want is they want to wake up in the morning and be excited about how they're gonna spend their day. See, a lot of people are tied up in traffic, going to a job they don't like, working for somebody that is possibly even incompetent. You've gotta spend your days doing what you absolutely love to do.

And the third thing, they want to mix with people who are really upbeat, who are enthusiastic, people that are becoming very creatively productive. Now, that is a pretty good way to live. You don't have any financial concerns, you spend your days doing what you love with people who are upbeat and creatively productive.

That's a good way to live. That's the way I live today. But it wasn't always like that.

No, it sure wasn't. I had a man sit down with me and he did essentially what I'm gonna do with you right now. He said, "Bob, I want you to take a look at the results you're getting in your life.

"Really take a look at the results. " And then he got me to think. He said, "How do results happen, Bob?

"How do they actually happen? " And I didn't know. He says, "Do results just happen?

" Well, of course results don't just happen. And this is where the man approached me back in 1961. He said, "I wanna magnify the results "that you're getting in your life, "really take a close look at it.

"Because," he said, "people are just falling short "in a couple of areas. " And he pointed out that we're only limited by weakness of attention and poverty of imagination. In other words, we gotta stay focused and we gotta use our imagination to build the kind of world we really want.

Now, I think that's what you want to do. That's what I want to do. I don't think you were looking for something to do when you sat down to watch this.

You see, I believe that you do want to improve the quality of your life. And a man named Reed Stanford sat down with me a long time ago, in 1961. And he put an R on a sheet of paper.

And then he put an H, he said, "Bob, that's happiness. " He said, "That represents health, "and that represents wealth. " Now, he said, "I want you to look at those three areas "of your life.

"Are you getting what you want to get? "Are you doing what you want to do? "I'm gonna tell you something about results.

"Results always tell the truth. "By their fruits, you'll know them. "Results always tell the truth.

"You can kid yourself all over the place, if you want. "But look at the results. "I have people, they all tell me how much they know "about this or about that.

"Take a look at the results. "The results tell the truth. "If you're playing golf, the scorecard, "the scorecard tells the truth.

"You see? "Now think, your bank account tells the truth. "Your sales will tell the truth.

"Your position in life, the health of your body. " And he looked at all these areas and he said, "Do you think I'm a healthy guy? " And I said, yeah, you seem pretty healthy to me.

He said, "Have you ever seen me sick? " I said no. He said, "Have you ever seen me broke?

" No. "You think I'm a happy guy? " And I said yeah, I mean, he was a healthy guy.

Happy, always had a roll of money on him. Well, he said, "You know something? "You're one of the most miserable people I've ever met," and I was.

And he said, "You're always sick," and he said, "You're always broke. " Now, he was being kind. I was earning $4,000 a year at the time.

But look at this, I owed $6,000. That is not a good position to be in. You see, if I had taken every cent I earned for 18 months and paid debts, I would have just broken even.

It was an impossible situation. He said, "Bob, why don't you change your results? " Do you know something?

I honestly don't believe that that ever entered my mind. I really don't. You say, well, it must have.

No, I don't think it did. I think I got up in the morning and I just went to work. I did whatever I was doing and hoping things would get better.

But never sitting down and talking to someone that really knew how to make it happen. If you want to fly a plane, you don't go to a barber and ask them how do you get the plane off the ground. If you want to learn how to dance, you don't go to a mechanic, you go to a damn good dancer.

It doesn't matter what you wanna do. If you're gonna do something, go to someone who has demonstrated by results. Now, this guy had demonstrated he was happy, he was healthy, and he was wealthy.

And he said, "Do you ever read anything? " And I said, no, I can't read. Now, that wasn't true, I could, not well, but I could.

And that's when he introduced me to this book, Think and Grow Rich. And he said, "Bob, if you do exactly what I tell you, "and you study this book "and do exactly what the author tells you, "everything in your life will change. " Now, he said, "The man that wrote this book, Napoleon Hill, "spent his whole life putting this together.

"It contains the best thinking of over 500 of the world's "most successful people. " Listen, I've been reading this one now since 1961. Now, think about that, that's a long time.

He said, "He spent his whole life writing this. "I think it would be a very prudent move on your part "if you spent your life trying to understand and apply it. " Now, I don't know why, but I decided I would.

Now, let me explain where I was starting from. I told you, I was earning $4,000 and I owed six. I had two months high school.

Two months high school, that was my formal education. I had never had a half decent job. I just bounced from one job to another.

In the bar, working in the bar, in the Navy, out of the Navy, working in factories. I never had a half decent job. Now, I had every reason why I couldn't win, he said, "Bob, the reasons why you can't, "you gotta quit thinking of those.

"You gotta start thinking of how you can. " He said, "Do exactly what I tell you. " And so, you know something?

I decided I would. One year later, I was earning $175,000. My life changed like night and day.

You say, well, what were you doing? I was cleaning offices. And then I took it over a million dollars.

I started cleaning one office. I would anything honest to earn money. I was earning about $100 a week, and I got an office to clean, where I would wash the floor twice a month and I got $30.

Then I got another office, $65 a month. Kerby's Construction. Now I'm up to an extra 100 a month.

Do you know, in less than five years I was cleaning offices in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Cleveland, Atlanta, and London, England. Went right through the roof. Now, if you had asked me what I was doing, I couldn't tell you, I would say, I'm cleaning offices.

I'm reading Think and Grow Rich. But, you know, a lot of people were cleaning offices, they weren't doing what I was doing. A lot of people had read Think and Grow Rich, they weren't doing what I was doing.

I was trying to figure out how the heck did this happen. See, I had been raised to believe if you're gonna earn a lot of money, you're gonna be really smart. Well, I know I wasn't that smart, but I was earning a lot of money.

I was raised to believe if you're gonna have a good job, you have to have a good formal education. I didn't have a good formal education. I didn't have a good job, I owned the whole company.

And so I started to study, you see. I thought, I'm believing in lies, you don't have to be smart to earn a lot of money, there's people that are functionally illiterate, they can neither read and write and they're earning millions of dollars. There's people heading up large corporations, they've never been inside a school.

Now, this is, I'm not anti-school, I made sure all my kids went through school, I just changed the question, I didn't ask if they were gonna go, I asked them where they were gonna go. I'm mentioning this because I believe anyone can do anything if they can sit down and write it out on a piece of paper and then work at changing what's going on inside. In 1990, Joel Barker wrote a book, it's called Paradigms.

He said, "To be able to shape your future, "you have to be willing and able to change your paradigm. " Now, I had no idea what a paradigm was. And you might ask yourself, do you really know what a paradigm is?

Do you understand how the mind works? Because the paradigm has something to do with the mind. I know nothing about it.

But the man that encouraged me to study this put me on a track where I just kept going from one great mentor to another. I was living in Chicago at the time and I heard about a man in Vancouver. I was trying to figure out why I changed.

I had left my own business, I went to work with Earl Nightingale and Lloyd Conant in Chicago, and ended up being their vice president of sales. I would have gone there, I would have paid them to let me work there, I wanted to work with Earl Nightingale and Lloyd Conant because I wanted to study, I wanted to know why did I change. I knew I wasn't lucky.

And I heard about a man in Vancouver. Somebody said, "Bob, you should go and listen to him. " So I got on a plane and I flew to Vancouver.

At the end of the seminar, when the guy got on the stage, I knew that he knew what he was talking about, there was just such certainty in his talk. And so, at the end of the seminar, I said, I would like to sit down with you for a couple of hours. And he said, "You know, I'd like to probably sit down "with you for a couple of hours," but he looked at his watch, "I gotta get outta here.

" And I said, I gotta go now, too. He said, "Where are you going? " I said, I'm going back to Chicago.

"What are you doing out here? " I said, I came out here to hear you speak. Now, I think he was impressed that I had traveled so far to listen to him.

So he said, "Look, I'm not going in Chicago "any time in the near future, but I'm gonna be in Toronto. " And I said, I'm from Toronto, I'll fly over, I'll meet you over there. And so, the two of us sat down in the Skyline Hotel.

And we were there, we were supposed to be two to three hours, we're over there for about three days. And he and I were as thick as thieves right up until he died. Now, he introduced me to this idea that I'm going to introduce you to.

And what I'm going to show you is without question the most powerful idea I have ever learned. And if you don't understand this, the odds of you making great changes are very, very slim. I want you to look at the mind and then look at paradigms.

But let's personalize it. Let's look at your mind and your paradigm. Now, let that drawing represent your mind.

That, by the way, is the most valuable concept I have ever learned. There's the conscious mind, the subconscious, and the body. The conscious mind is the thinking mind.

Did you know that the average person does not think? Did you know that thinking is a subject that's not taught in school? You say, "Everybody thinks.

" Hardly anyone thinks. I remember Earl Nightingale used to say, "If the average person said what they were thinking, "they would be speechless. " Do you know what we do?

We confuse mental activity with thinking. That's not thinking. Listen to what most people are saying.

They'd never say what they're saying if they were thinking. Watch their behavior. They'd never do what they're doing if they were thinking.

Back in 1981, I picked up a paper by my doctor Lawrence Rampell, listen to what he said. Thinking is a skill which can be learned just as we learned skills such as typing and playing the piano. Few public schools offer courses devoted expressly to teaching thinking, rather we are expected to learn and teach thinking as a byproduct of learning mathematics, reading, history, science, a trade and so forth.

And we do learn a lot about thinking in that way. The trouble is we learn our thinking skills in bits and pieces and we never put it together as an overall picture. If asked to describe what all is required in order to think effectively, most of us would be at a loss to give a complete account.

Thus, we are unable to assess our own thinking skills or systematically teach the skill of thinking to others. Well, it's with your conscious mind, you think. This is also what we call the educated mind, and I'm gonna come back to that, 'cause I'm gonna show you just how far off track we get with that.

Now, this is where our intellect is resident. And it's the intellectual factors that give you the ability to be the creative ability. You say you're created in God's image.

Well, that's where the creative faculty comes in. You know, intellectual factors, you have perception, the will, reason, imagination, memory, intuition. Now, the subconscious mind is quite different from the conscious mind.

That's what we call the emotional mind. See, the conscious mind can think, so therefore you have the ability to choose. You literally choose where you're going.

Now the choice may be unconscious but it is a choice. You have the ability here to accept or reject information. When we see something come on the news about the economy, the economy is taking a dive, say, maybe for them or you, but not for me.

You've got the ability to reject information. Somebody starts to tell you a bad story, reject that. Now think, you have the ability to accept or reject in your conscious mind.

You have the ability to originate ideas in your conscious mind. You can originate any idea you want. Now, your subconscious mind has no ability to reject, it must accept.

And here's something else, whatever is placed in the subconscious mind is gonna dictate your world, it really will. And your imagination, or your subconscious mind, cannot differentiate between what you imagine and what's real. So if you imagine something happening and you get emotionally involved, it's actually starting to happen.

You may say, well, that's ridiculous. Well, the Wright brothers didn't think so. Ed Hillary didn't think so, Steve Jobs didn't think so.

Think about it. Thomas Edison didn't think so. Alexander Graham Bell, see, we listen to them and think, well, they're different, no, they're not different.

They're exactly the same as you and me. Now look here for a moment. I've given you the basics about the mind, now let's look at this.

Today, you're here being inundated with information in your conscious mind from radio, from other people, from TV, from newspapers. And you have the ability, because you have a reasoning factor, you have the ability to think and you can say, I don't want that information, I'm not accepting that, and you can cause it to go away. But you know something, we don't do that.

Not only do we not do that, we don't even think about it, we don't even think, why? We leave our mind wide open and what goes right in, what did we say about the subconscious? It has no ability to reject, it must accept.

Why do we do that? Because we're programmed to do it, that's why we do it. That's our paradigm.

How did that happen? How does this happen that we go around leaving our subconscious mind wide open? Because it's what's going in the subconscious that dictates what you do.

Well, let's look at it for a minute, let's close it here and open it over here. Now, I'm hoping you're paying attention to this, 'cause this could be worth millions to you. It can cause you to live in a healthier body.

It can cause you to build your business. See, this is you as an infant, not today, this is you as an infant. And what's going on?

Whatever is happening around you goes right into your subconscious mind, and it just keeps going in over and over. See, you're programmed genetically. That's why you look like your relatives.

That's a little particle of energy from mom, a little particle of energy from dad, came together, and that was the nucleus of you. And 280 days later, you made your debut in the planet. But you have all that DNA, mom's and dad's.

Going back for generations, you're genetically programmed. Many of your beliefs have just been passed from one generation to the next. And many of them are absolutely ridiculous.

But you see, your self image is formed when you're in your little life. When you don't even have the ability to think. Now, self image is just one idea.

A multitude of ideas are a paradigm. Look at the people we're surrounded by. Robert Heinlein said, "In absence of clearly-defined goals, "we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia "until ultimately we become enslaved by it.

" Now think about that. "In absence of clearly-defined goals, "we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia "until ultimately we become enslaved by it. " Now think of the number of people that you know that are enslaved to daily trivia.

They talk about nothing, they never accomplish anything, they get the same results. If they're short of money now, they were short a year ago, they were short a year before that. They're forever getting the car on payment, the idea of going and writing a check is just out of their mind.

Why? Well, you see, that's probably what the people are doing, that we're surrounded by as we were little kids. And the ideas that just keep going in over and over again form the paradigm.

A paradigm is nothing but a multitude of ideas that are fixed in the subconscious mind. And so, here we are, as hard as it is to believe, 20, 30, 50, 60 years later living exactly the same as we were programmed when we were little kids. Do you know that most people on welfare are fourth, fifth generation welfare recipients?

It's rather strange. Now, what do we do? Well, we leave this situation and we go to school.

What will school do? Well, let's look at it. School gave us valuable knowledge.

However, school never taught us anything about paradigms. Therefore, we frequently do not do what we already know how to do. Now think.

Superior knowledge. Think about it. Inferior results, what does that do?

That causes confusion and frustration. Now think about this for a moment. We've got great knowledge but we know nothing about the paradigm.

So, watch here. Here is the drawing, there's the model, there's all the knowledge we got in school. We've got it packed in there.

But you know something? It doesn't equate to the results we're getting. You're gonna find absolutely brilliant people getting very bad results.

You're gonna find people that are brilliant, they know exactly what to do, but they don't do it, why? It's the paradigm that controls the behavior. Now listen, I've studied this for over half a century.

I have no formal education, I had no business experience, I earn millions of dollars. I'm 81 years old, I've got more energy than most people that are 21. I have a sister-in-law that says, "He's 81, "he looks about 60, and he acts like he's about 30.

" She had that down pretty good, because that's just about the way it is, why? It's because I understand how to use the mind. Now, look, if you want to change your results, if you really wanna change the results, there's something that you gotta do.

You've gotta know how to change the paradigm. And if you don't change the paradigm, I don't care what, nothing's gonna happen. You find people going back to school 'cause they think, "If I got some more knowledge.

" No, you're not short on knowledge. We're short on behavioral patterns. And that's really what we have to do.

(gentle inspiring music) Check us out at proctorgallagherinstitute. com for tips, tools, and resources.