Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan - Confidence Classic: Rewire Your Brain to UNLOCK The Science Of Success with John Assaraf CEO Of NeuroGym

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

In This Episode You Will Learn About:  Strengthening the “neuro-muscles” to REWIRE your brain Banishing bad habits and creating good ones Gearing your mindset TOWARDS success  Transforming y...our life from the inside out  Resources: Website: www.johnassaraf.com  Read Innercise  Download the Innercise App Free Training here: sociatap.com/johnassaraf  LinkedIn & Facebook & Youtube: @John Assaraf Instagram: @neurogym & @johnassaraf Twitter: @johnassaraf Get 50% off your first box plus free shipping at factormeals.com/confidence50off with code confidence50off. Get 10% off your first Mitopure order at timeline.com/CONFIDENCE. Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at NetSuite.com/MONAHAN Head to AirDoctorPro.com and use promo code CONFIDENCE to get UP TO $300 off today. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/monahan Cancel unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster at RocketMoney.com/CONFIDENCE. Call my digital clone at 201-897-2553!  Visit heathermonahan.com Reach out to me on Instagram & LinkedIn Sign up for my mailing list: heathermonahan.com/mailing-list/  Overcome Your Villains is Available NOW! Order here: https://overcomeyourvillains.com  If you haven't yet, get my first book, Confidence Creator Show Notes:  Do you ever find yourself fighting with your own mind? I know I battle with insecurities, bad habits, and intrusive thoughts! But we have more control over our thoughts than you know! John Assaraf, behavioral neuroscience researcher, expert coach, and CEO of NeuroGym, is here to explain the EASY ways we can harness our brains for success. Join us as we delve into the fascinating world of the conscious and subconscious mind, explore powerful techniques to shift our mindset, and let go of disempowering thoughts, emotions, and habits. Are you ready to take the next step on your journey to greatness?

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Starting point is 00:01:27 creator. That's LinkedIn.com slash confidence creator to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. There isn't a person alive that's afraid of public speaking. Nobody's afraid of public speaking. They're afraid of what might happen if they speak in public and they're embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, judged, rejected, accept. That's what they're actually moving away from. Well, what if I shared with you that in that nanosecond, the chemicals that are released will only last in your body
Starting point is 00:01:59 for 90 seconds if you just stay present and focused on releasing the energy and motion. I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. That's a no-see. I'm ready for my close-up. Tell me, have you been enjoying these new bonus confidence classics episodes we've been dropping on you every week? We've literally hundreds of episodes for you to listen to, so these bonuses are a great way to help you find the ones you may have already missed. I hope you love this one as much as I do. I'm so excited for you to see our guest this week because you've met him before.
Starting point is 00:02:49 It's been a couple of years and I very rarely have someone on twice, but I'm so excited for you to re-meet John Asrath. He's a world renowned mindset and small business growth expert who has appeared on numerous shows like Larry King Live, Anderson Cooper, The Ellen DeGeneres Show. He's built five multi-million dollar companies, written two New York Times bestselling books, and appeared in 12 movies, including The Blockbuster, The Secret, and Quest for Success with Richard Branson. He is passionate in helping people tap into their brain superpowers so they shatter their limitations and achieve their life's biggest goals and dreams.
Starting point is 00:03:26 John founded myneurogym.com, which is revolutionizing mindset coaching and mental fitness. His cutting edge inner size app, which I can't wait to get into, helps people rewire their brain for unstoppable success. John's an avid meditator, father, husband, who loves to exercise and travel the world.
Starting point is 00:03:45 John, thanks so much for being here with us today. Heather, it's great to be back and you look fabulous. You look fabulous. And I was just saying that to you offline. I was saying, dude, give me your secrets. Tell everybody what you told me. Well, I've been a vegan for 10 years. I've stopped drinking alcohol 15 years ago. I used to be a sugar addict
Starting point is 00:04:08 and now I am no longer a sugar addict. So a little bit of clean, healthy living in California and exercising and meditating every day. Used to be feeling great at 62. So I'm just looking forward to another 10 or 20 years of just feeling and looking great. What I love about you, John, and I've been to your home, I've met your wife, like you really are living and breathing
Starting point is 00:04:30 the story that you're putting out there online, which I know for me, that is not always the case for everybody. But like I've seen it firsthand with you and even just you describing that right now, like your discipline, you do the right thing, you do the research. However, when we go back to your younger career, your earlier life, when your kids were little, and you're building these businesses, you didn't have this all figured out back then, did you? parents, not a great diet, a lot of stress, not enough money, disempowering relationship. So I didn't have really good models to follow. But I always wanted more I don't know what it was within me, but I wanted more of the good life maybe was, you
Starting point is 00:05:16 know, watching television like kids, you know, today and adults, we look on the internet, we see things that we want. And so I just wanted more and I got fascinated, literally 43 years ago with neuroscience and neuropsychology. I didn't do well in school, but I was really interested in biology and chemistry. And so I just got fascinated with this thing called the brain and our conscious and subconscious mind has been a study of mine now, literally 43 years. And I
Starting point is 00:05:43 discovered that we can all achieve more but it's harder than we think because we don't have the right process, not because we can't. And very few people were taught the right process to shift their mindset and to be able to, let's say let go of disempowering, whether it's thoughts or emotions or habits, which are so hard to break
Starting point is 00:06:11 in the absence of the right process. So I became really good at first using myself as a guinea pig to achieve a little bit of success in each area of my life. But then I started writing about it and teaching people through my books or my coaching, and they started to duplicate the results as well. So I knew that it wasn't about me, but it was really about a process that anybody could follow. So I've just been using it in my own life
Starting point is 00:06:39 for many, many years, because I wanna live an extraordinary life. I don't wanna live an ordinary life. And I'm willing to be disciplined enough, which is a little bit interesting because everybody's already disciplined to what they are disciplined to. So discipline is really a habit.
Starting point is 00:06:56 The question is, what are your habits that are easy for you to do? And so I just learned the process to be able to make change a little bit easier. Not easy, but a little bit easier. And so for everyone listening, everyone's like, Yeah, of course, we have some habits that we know are holding us back. But it isn't easy. And the things that I've done haven't allowed me to break them. What are some of the strategies that you share that help others make some habit changes? Yeah, so I think first ask yourself this question. Were you born with those habits? And
Starting point is 00:07:33 anybody who thinks they would go, no. So what is a habit? Like, what is a habit? And the answer from a science perspective, a brain science perspective, it's an automatic process that has a trigger, a behavior and a reward. It's an automatic process. So something triggers you to, let's say, wake up and go to the coffee machine or, you know, wake up and get dressed first, then go to the coffee machine. So we all have these triggers. It could be a sound, it could be a scent, it could be a color, it could be a person, it could be a scent, it could be a color, it could be a person, it could be a place, it could be a song, it could be anything, it could be waking up. And then we behave and then we get the reward of that behavior.
Starting point is 00:08:13 And what most people don't understand is they mostly try to change the behavior. And changing the behavior as much as it sounds really, really great, most of the time it doesn't work long term. And so the question is if the behavior isn't what I want to change, then what is it that I should be changing? And the answer is the first step is in the awareness of what is triggering that behavior. Because 95% of everything we think and feel and do, 95% is automatic, habitual. And so if I can become aware of the trigger, you know, I wake up, I go have a coffee, or
Starting point is 00:09:01 I wake up and I get on my phone right away. What if we can say in between the trigger and the behavior, I can insert something a little bit different. So I'll give you an example. Somebody wants to drink more water. What if we said, okay, so when are you most likely to drink? You know, when I wake up, I go have coffee. Take a glass of water and stick it
Starting point is 00:09:27 right by where you make coffee. So trigger, wake up, automatic behavior, go get coffee, but place something that you want to do right at the point of the behavior. So now you're gonna get a double reward. So the double reward is water plus coffee, activates the reward system in the behavior, so now you're gonna get a double reward. So the double reward is water plus coffee activates the reward system in the brain. You drink the coffee, you feel good, you get more focused,
Starting point is 00:09:51 you have a little bit more energy, boom, boom, boom, we got the reward. So now if I place this thing before the behavior, I can actually move the second part of it if I want to and still get the reward and replace water for coffee. That's just a simple neuroassociative conditioning mechanism that we could use to add a new behavior that's more empowering. Let's say we want to start to exercise and we don't have the habit of exercising.
Starting point is 00:10:18 Get your clothes out for exercise and let's say your running shoes. Place them where you normally get dressed and put those on first and do one minute or even 30 seconds of a new behavior right next to an old behavior that already has the habitual pattern. And all of a sudden you start to develop this habit of let's say putting on your shoes getting dressed and maybe doing 15 20 30 seconds of stretching it doesn't matter how small
Starting point is 00:10:51 the behavior is Once we add a new behavior in front of an old behavior We can replace the old behavior with the new one. So that's you know, if we want to add some what if you want to stop You know, let's say drinking alcohol you want to stop eating sugar. You want to stop, let's say drinking alcohol, you want to stop eating sugar, you want to stop a behavior or a habit? Well, the way I stopped sugar, for example, is I knew I had a sweet tooth and I knew that my brain was craving it and I knew I had a habit for it. And so I said, okay, what can I replace my sweet tooth with?
Starting point is 00:11:22 What can I replace it with? So I said, well, you know, I could get some protein and I could put some fiber with it, which would obviously, you know, expand. And so if my protein had stevia in it, which doesn't spike the insulin in my brain and in my liver, I can replace real, you know, maybe sugary cakes, cookies, ice creams or yogurts, frozen yogurts or vegan frozen yogurts that I liked with something healthier. And so now I'm using a replacement strategy. And then all of a
Starting point is 00:11:59 sudden, I'm not having sweets anymore. I've replaced it with a better habit and then I can wean myself off of that as well. So when we're using willpower, it's one of the weakest neuro muscles that we can use, especially after three or four o'clock every day. Why is that? Well, when we wake up, we're born with a certain number of attention units. And so we wake up, we get ready, we get dressed,
Starting point is 00:12:26 we go to work, we do our work in front of our computers, we talk to people, we take care of our kids, our husband, our wife, or whatever. And by the time two or three o'clock goes on, our glucose levels are really, really low. Willpower is tied to glucose in many cases. And our ability to concentrate and focus, okay, is way, way lower after three or four or five o'clock.
Starting point is 00:12:49 In the morning when we wake up, we have higher cortisol levels. So cortisol is like a little bit of rocket fuel. And so when we have cortisol, adrenaline, we can go, but then as that cortisol goes down and our focus, you know, gets diminished, it's harder to make the decisions that require willpower, the power to override a natural habit or propensity.
Starting point is 00:13:13 So there's a lot of these neuro mechanics going on that if we don't understand how it works, like, I'll give you an example. My team knows, do not book me, let's say on a call with Heather at five o'clock in the afternoon. I won't be as animated. I won't be as sharp. I won't be as congruent because, you know, I wake up at six thirty and by nine thirty, ten, eleven o'clock, I'm like, go and I'm like picking up the speed. So I do all my hardest stuff, the ones that requires my energy, focus and attention early in the day. That's why I exercise early. It's easier for me because I'm an early morning person to say yes to exercise early in the morning. If you leave me till four or five o'clock in the afternoon, I never exercise. If you say to
Starting point is 00:13:58 me, you know, meditate in the afternoon, easy, because I'm already like, okay, I'm more chill. So when we understand a little bit about how our brain's circuits, reward circuit, willpower circuit, fear circuit, stress circuit, anxiety circuit, focus circuit turns on or off, then we can start to manage our mindset a little bit better, manage our emotions, which is really the energy in motion. Is it a high energy emotional arc,
Starting point is 00:14:30 or a low energy emotional arc? And then that's what drives behavior. And so if I'm in a high emotional energetic arc, I actually want to move towards what it is that I want to achieve. But if I'm in a low emotional arc, I want to move towards what it is that I want to achieve. But if I'm in a low emotional arc, I want to move away from it because it requires energy and my brain doesn't want to expend energy. So those are some of the neuro mechanics of what we're dealing with. And I don't want this to be a neuroscience course, but we all have way more control, you know, of what's going on between our ears. And that's really what drives what we
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Starting point is 00:17:28 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. I love that you shared the importance or how our brain works around different times of the day. Cause when you were talking about working out, if I don't get my workout in the morning, and I love working out, it is not happening. I've had situations where work called for me to you know, there wasn't a window to work out. And I will say to myself repeatedly, you're going to work out tonight, you're going in for whatever reason. Well, now you're explaining why I don't pull the trigger. I and I know that about
Starting point is 00:18:03 myself. Same when you're talking about time of day at different things that may come up that need our thinking or problem solving. If my son asked me to find some random thing that he needs to find in the house and it's at 730 at night when he gets home from practice, I never can pull the trigger and figure it out and find it. I'm like, ask me again tomorrow morning at 6.30 AM when we wake up. I can find it in three minutes.
Starting point is 00:18:27 And he always says, I'm just not asking you to solve big problems anymore, mom, at night, because it truly just doesn't seem possible. And it's helpful to understand, okay, just take a hard pass on that in the future and let's jump into these hard things when the morning is definitely the time. For me, I'm with you.
Starting point is 00:18:42 For you. Now, there's other people who are gonna listen or watch this and go, oh my God, mornings, I'm a basket case. I can't even feed myself in the morning. Finding the coffee pot is hard. I used to be married to a wonderful woman who used to believe that if God wanted her to see the sun,
Starting point is 00:18:59 he would have it rise at noon. She would stay up till two o'clock in the morning and she would get more done from 9pm to two o'clock than she did before noon every day because she didn't want to get out of bed till 10, 11, 12 o'clock. And her natural cycle for her was that and we had a polar opposite schedules, you know, naturally, and we had to see if it would work. And it created some challenges in our former relationship.
Starting point is 00:19:30 And my wife now, who I've been married to and together with for 20 plus years, is an early riser like I am. She goes from like 630 till 830. I go from about six till 10. And we have, you know have the same types of schedules. So it really is important to know your own rhythm and not try to change it if it's hard, right? Like not everybody needs to wake up
Starting point is 00:19:53 or can wake up at 5.30, but some people have to, and it caused them to be exhausted for the first part of the day. Like most kids shouldn't go to school early in the morning. They should have kids start school at 10 o'clock in the morning. I'm all for that every day. My son's saying, why do they do this to his mom?
Starting point is 00:20:09 I just need a couple more hours of sleep. He's living for the weekends just to sleep in. It makes no sense. Yeah. Well, tell me you talked a little bit about interrupting habits. One thing that I'm curious about and I know my listeners are. What about when a habit occurs that maybe like I'm taking a stage and I'm getting nervous and now that that happened one time that it starts happening again and it never used to happen before or for anyone listening that they're suffering from some
Starting point is 00:20:35 anxiety that's new that's popping up and they don't understand, how can you interrupt something like that? If anybody's watching us you're going to see behind me. And if you're listening only, then behind me are two photos up on my wall. Over my right shoulder, there's Albert Einstein. And over my left shoulder, there's Frankenstein's monster. And I want you to imagine that you have a Frankenstein's monster in your mind or in your brain, and you have an Albert Einstein, you know, that has phenomenal imagination and incredible smarts. Well, what happens with the Einstein part of the brain
Starting point is 00:21:08 is it can choose what we want. It can imagine a better future, can imagine people giving you a high five after you get on stage, or doing anything that might seem a little bit risky, like meeting somebody new at a cocktail party and talking to them, it doesn't matter. But Frankenstein's monster is another part of the brain
Starting point is 00:21:27 that is actually one of the most amazing parts of your brain that you need to learn how to love. And it's your early warning detection mechanism. Now, what is that? Well, imagine you're driving your car and all of a sudden you hear something beeping on your dash. You look around you and realize, oh, to the left of me, there's a car that's really close or to the right or behind me,
Starting point is 00:21:49 there's a car that's really close. And the radar picks this up and gives you a signal that there's danger, be aware. Do you love that or do you love that? Well, of course you love that because it's given you the ability to use a radar, right? To give you an awareness of your surrounding. Or what if you're low on gas, and you're on the highway, and you're talking to the kids, and all of a sudden, a light goes up on
Starting point is 00:22:11 your dash saying, stop and go get some gas. You like that, right? Because it's an early warning detection mechanism. Well, this one part of our brain, it's called the right prefrontal cortex, and the amygdala is wired. I mean, it is wired from hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to give you an early warning whenever there's any real or potential immediate danger or danger coming up that can cause you to get hurt mentally, emotionally, physically, financially, spiritually, any real or imagined scenario where this is so important right here, you might be embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, judged,
Starting point is 00:23:00 rejected, unloved, or disappointed. So when you're getting ready to go up on stage, and let's say you've done this a few times, like, you feel confident, right? You know what you're saying, but there's another part of your brain that says, well, what if they don't receive my message the way I want it?
Starting point is 00:23:18 What if I forget something? What if, and we usually will place a what if negative in the subconscious that gives the electrical signal to release the neurochemicals of stress, which is cortisol or epinephrine or adrenaline. So all of a sudden, our heart starts to beat, we start to narrow our focus and our brains think about all the what if negative stuff. And then what happens is we focus on that negative possibility that might happen in the future, but we're
Starting point is 00:23:51 feeling the neurochemistry of it right now. So I've often said, there isn't a person alive that's afraid of public speaking. Nobody's afraid of public speaking. They're afraid of what might happen if they speak in public and they're embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, judged, rejected, except that's what they're actually moving away from. Well, what if I shared with you that in that nanosecond,
Starting point is 00:24:16 the chemicals that are released will only last in your body for 90 seconds if you just stay present and focused on releasing okay the energy the energy and motion think about it chemicals are released in your blood it changes the vibrational field of your body that's why you say I feel stressed I feel anxious you say, I feel stressed. I feel anxious. I feel worried. I feel, right?
Starting point is 00:24:48 The feeling is our awareness of what's happening in our body. Well, what we know from a science perspective is that means that the sympathetic is the automatic reactive stress system. The polar opposite of that is the calm to respond system. So how do Navy SEALs get trained to stay calm under pressure or firefighters or astronauts or athletes at the Olympics?
Starting point is 00:25:14 How do they learn that in these stressful situations where those neurochemicals are rushing wild, how do they use that neurochemistry as their fuel to succeed? Well, most people are not aware that if they take, and I call this take six, come the circuit. And if I take slow, very, very slow, deep breath in through my nose, fill up my diaphragm, fill up my lungs. And then if I take my focus on my lips, and as I'm breathing out, I pretend there's a straw in my mouth, and I breathe it out as slowly as I can.
Starting point is 00:26:00 If I do that five or six times, take 60 to 90 seconds at most, we can actually in an fMRI machine, see the blood flowing away from the part of our brain, that Frankenstein's monster that's got activated because it's worried that you might get emotionally or mentally or physically or financially hurt. It calms down, the circuit switches, and all of a sudden the Einstein brain comes back online
Starting point is 00:26:32 to say, hey, hold on, you've practiced this. You know your stuff. The audience is great. They want you to succeed. I can do this, let's go. And you've just shifted your entire nervous system, your self-talk and your focus towards what you want versus what might happen that your brain automatically
Starting point is 00:26:52 is trying to protect you from it happening. So these are very, very, very sensitive circuits that get triggered like a light switch on or off. You're walking down the street, you're about to go off the sidewalk and all of a sudden you hear the tires, you know, of a car, maybe 30 feet away. And if you jump back on the street,
Starting point is 00:27:12 that's automatic because sound travels, okay, the speed of sound and your subconscious is processing this. And then it's activating neural circuits around cars coming really fast. Don't get off of the sidewalk, jump back on the sidewalk before you even had a chance to think about it. These are all subconscious processes that happen beneath our level of moment-by-moment awareness.
Starting point is 00:27:35 However, when we have a feeling of stress, we can be aware of that. We just have to listen to what we're saying. We have to pay attention to our behavior. We go, oh, hold on. Something's triggered the stress center of my brain. First, let me calm it down and let me turn on the circuit that allow me to respond in a calm way. So the stress circuit's automatic, but the calm circuit is deliberate. Wow, it's so simple yet so powerful. And I'm finding myself while I'm just sitting here
Starting point is 00:28:10 listening to them doing the breathing that you're talking about, because it just makes you feel so much better. And it's so calm. What about when you were talking about this? This is just personally, I want to know this. While you were talking, I was thinking about my subconscious because you mentioned that so many times and how powerful it is. I was thinking recently about something, an opportunity that I've been going through, a meeting with a different company, and we've had a series of meetings.
Starting point is 00:28:35 Every time before, John, super negative, like cringes, negative thought will pop into my mind. Makes no sense. I know it's my subconscious. It's not helpful at all. Like it derails me. How can you like ultimately get rid of thoughts like that
Starting point is 00:28:51 from even I know that it doesn't make sense. I'm like, this is crazy talk. Right. So where do thoughts come from? Were you born with a basket, you know, or a reservoir of thoughts from before another life? Were you born? No. So would you agree that our thoughts are like effervescent bubbles that are percolating
Starting point is 00:29:13 from our subconscious mind? Yeah, we probably get that visual. What if I shared with you a little technique with red bubbles and blue bubbles? Red bubbles are disempowering, negative, automatic, destructive, so it could be disempowering, could be negative or destructive thoughts. And we all have them, right? Because we've seen stuff on TV, we've read stuff, we've experienced stuff, we've witnessed stuff, so those thoughts are in our memory bank. But we also have positive stuff. Now, first thing, we have about 6,200 thoughts a day, new research. Not 50,000, not 75,000, about 6,200 during our waking hours.
Starting point is 00:29:57 Now, our brain remembers a negative, disempowering experience that we've read about, seen, watched, whatever, 10 times faster than it does a positive one. 10 times faster. So the memory is created faster around something negative and traumatic, for example. Traumatic is actually a thousand times faster. So it's in the memory bank.
Starting point is 00:30:22 And just like earlier I shared that behaviors have a trigger, so do thoughts. So let's say we want to achieve something. When we say, I want to achieve this, I want to make more money, I want to be in a better relationship, I want to start a business, I want to write a book, I want to travel the world, I want to leave my job and get a new one. We get excited because we activate the reward center, the feel good possibility network is, oh my God, that would be so great. But then right beneath that, the Frankenstein's monster goes,
Starting point is 00:30:50 Hey, hey, hey, let me share with you what's in this little bubble machine. Okay, that could be the negative thoughts around this. And it starts to percolate all these negative thoughts. So imagine that thoughts are just effervescent bubbles, positive or negative, empowering, disempowering, constructive or destructive, but they're just thoughts. What if you could just be aware of the red, negative, disempowering thoughts and just observe them and go, keep going? And what if you can just say, I'm choosing, now I'm going to be in a state of mindful awareness, I'm gonna choose what I want to focus on.
Starting point is 00:31:28 Now, you and I have thoughts, but we're not our thoughts. But the thoughts that we grab onto and emotionalize and follow through on become dominant thoughts. Most people's thoughts are 70, 80, in some cases 90% follow through on become dominant thoughts. Most people's thoughts are 70, 80, in some cases, 90% or more negative, disempowering, destructive because of their childhood and their experiences. Now, if you've been in the self-help world where you read positive stuff, you're around positive people, you've seen people overcome health issues, financial issues, business
Starting point is 00:32:03 issues, relationship issues, whatever it is, you see that, then those possibility thoughts are there too. But negative and positive are always there. Our strength comes from what is it that I'm choosing to latch onto and increase the amplitude of the vibration with my focus and attention. So awareness is what gives us choice. And the choice is what expands through our decisions. So you're never going to be able to control 6200 thoughts, your brain is naturally wired to find the negative for survival, safety, avoidance of pain or discomfort. So it is a part of your brain you want to start loving. Now, Barbara Fredrickson did some research many, many years ago, and it's now known as the three to one
Starting point is 00:32:51 positivity to negativity ratio. For every negative thought that you find yourself like latching onto, stop, replace it with three positive thoughts. Now you start to tilt the ratio in your favor. So you have way fewer, what we call our automatic negative thoughts. You replace them with automatic positive thoughts, automatic negative emotion. An apts is what we call the first one.
Starting point is 00:33:15 A and these is what we call automatic negative emotions. Emotions are triggered in the subconscious mind to give rise to feelings. So if I have a automatic negative emotion or feeling, what does a Hollywood actor or actress do when they say to them, okay, scene two, take one. I want you to be angry in this role. And the actor or actress goes, what do you mean I can't go over there today?
Starting point is 00:33:41 I wanna go over there today. And they say, okay, act two, scene two, be super happy about. I said, wow, I get to go there today. I want to go over there today. And they say, Okay, act two, scene two, be super happy about it. I said, Wow, I get to go there today. I'm so freaking happy. What about act two, scene three, be really, really sad. I can't believe I've got to go there today. You can flip emotions on demand. It's just turning on a state in your brain. Now what happens with a lot of people is when they get into let's say a negative emotional pattern or a negative thought pattern, they hold on to it, and it hijacks them and then they reinforce it, and they think about what they don't want and they feel what they think about, and they reinforce the pattern, and now it becomes a habitual pattern. Instead of saying, okay, I had a shitty childhood.
Starting point is 00:34:30 I was traumatized. I was this, I was that. She did this to me, he did this to me. I lost this, I failed here. Great, okay, welcome to life. Now, how do I flip the switch? How do I flip the switch? Now, the control goes back to you. And if we give the control to
Starting point is 00:34:46 our thoughts, we're victims of it. If we give our control to our emotions, we're victims of the emotions. If we give our control to the past, we're victims of the past. And all we have is the present moment. And so now we can say, let me use my brain since I'm not my brain. Let me use my brain. I always have one on my desk to remind me it's like $100 billion organ that I own. I don't owe any money on this. It's mortgage free. Now, I just want to learn how to use it better. And we've built, you know, quantum computers for hundreds of billions of dollars that don't do what yours and my brain naturally does.
Starting point is 00:35:27 And contrary to most people's beliefs that don't know this, functionally, every brain works the same. Functionally, every gas car works the same. Functionally, every electrical car works the same. Functionally, every bike or trike works the same. So functionally, they work the same. Is it possible for me to be a better driver? Now we enter my domain of, well, how can I use my brain better? Great first question. Great first question.
Starting point is 00:36:00 So first thought, you weren't born with any beliefs. You weren't born with any fears. You weren't born with any self-image, and you weren't born with any beliefs. You weren't born with any fears. You weren't born with any self-image. And you weren't born with any skills. And you certainly weren't born with any habits. All of those things are nothing more than patterns that got reinforced in the brain. Some are constructive and lift you up and build you up.
Starting point is 00:36:22 Some are destructive and tear you down. Some are positive, some are negative, some empower you, some disempower you, all are just patterns. And no differently than you can renovate your home, you can rewire your mind. You can have an upgraded software, shall we say, like you upgrade your cell phone software
Starting point is 00:36:41 or your computer software, or you renovate your home or your bathroom, why not renovate some of the neural patterns using the latest in what is known as neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to create new connections and then reinforce them. So let's say you're out of shape and you're overweight by 20, 30, 40 pounds.
Starting point is 00:37:02 And today, today, you say, okay, I'm going to start to see myself making healthier decisions. I'm going to see myself, you know, taking one minute a day to just stretch, just to start, I'm just going to stretch, I'm going to take one of my meals, I'm going to eat one meal healthier. That's all. And you did that for 30 days. Do you think that you might start to develop some slightly more empowering thought patterns? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:37:35 Behavior patterns and habits. Yeah, so what we wanna understand is when we shift just a little bit, we activate brain cells, those brain cells that fire together start to wire together. And so now we can add more time, more intensity, more complexity while we develop a new habit of thinking positively. While we develop a new habit of seeing ourselves achieve our goal. Now we can accelerate what we do, because we now have a new habit of seeing ourselves achieve our goal. Now we can accelerate what we do, because we now have a new habit of doing let's say something empowering. And at first, we
Starting point is 00:38:11 want to reduce it to the ridiculously small, make it effort hyphen less, make it stress less, make it thinking less, right. And when we do that, we start to create a new pattern. I often say that first we build the simple habit, then the habit will build us. So how do we develop a habit? You want to start flossing your teeth? Floss one tooth today, floss one tooth tomorrow, just one tooth today floss one tooth tomorrow just one tooth boom put it down less than three seconds every day take out your flossing string just leave it by your toothbrush before
Starting point is 00:38:54 or after you brush your teeth preferably before floss one tooth just commit to doing it for 30 days it takes about 66 days to develop a new empowering pattern. And so for 66 days at least, all my clients will tell them, give me 100 days. Give me 100 days. Floss one tooth. I guarantee you by the end of 100 days, you'll be flossing your whole mouth and you'll be doing it morning and night.
Starting point is 00:39:16 But don't focus on that. Focus on one tooth. So reduce it to the ridiculously small so you do not have any neural tension to say no. You sign up for something, forget about it after the trial period ends, then you're charged. Month after month after month, the subscriptions are there, but you're not using them. In fact, I just learned that 85% of people have at least one paid subscription going unused each month.
Starting point is 00:39:48 Thanks to Rocket Money, I can see all my subscriptions in one place and cancel the ones I'm not using anymore. And now I'm saving more. Who doesn't want to save more money? Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. See all your subscriptions in one place and know exactly where your money is going for once.
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Starting point is 00:40:49 When you think about businesses growing their sales beyond forecasts, like Mr. Beast or even a legacy business like Mattel or my business, sure, you think about a product with demand, a focused brand and influence driven marketing. But an often overlooked secret is actually the business behind the business making the selling and for shoppers buying simple. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet and the not so secret with ShopPay that boost boost conversions up to 50% meaning way less carts go
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Starting point is 00:42:08 Shopify.com slash M-O-N-A-H-A-N. This Valentine's Day, don't settle for a boring grocery store card. Say hello to America's most personalized Valentine's Day card brought to you by Moon Pig. Moon Pig lets you celebrate your unique love story in a way that's as special as your Valentine. Add your favorite photos, ones where you both look good, of course. Cute stickers, handwritten messages, or even a video to relive your best memories together.
Starting point is 00:42:39 And here's the best part. Your first card is free. Yes, free. Just head over to get yourself a Moon Pig card at www.moonpig.com slash us slash confidence and use code confidence at checkout. So what are you waiting for? Make your Valentine feel extra special because everyone deserves a Moon Pig card this Valentine's Day. And today yours is free. today, yours is free. John, two years ago, when we were talking about your book,
Starting point is 00:43:14 Inner Size, I thought, unbelievable, you're changing people's lives, you're empowering people with these incredible tools that are next level that I had never heard of I wasn't aware of. Now today, over the last two years, what you've built and what you've created is mind blowing and has already impacted hundreds of thousands of people. Can you get into a little bit about this next gen inner sizing that you've created? Yeah, so, I mean, since we understand more
Starting point is 00:43:40 about how the brain works today, we know that if I speak, you know, positively more often than I speak positively more often. If I feel a sense of gratitude, I feel more gratitude. If I take inspired action, I take inspired action more and more and more. And so I started to develop, you know, these inner sizes that my clients paid me
Starting point is 00:44:01 as much as $25,000 to create one inner size sequence for them. If they're a professional athlete or a CEO, we focused on using a variety of science based techniques to activate and reinforce positive thought patterns and empowered self image, self worth, self esteem and empowered habitual pattern to achieve goals and to take action. And I just built an entire series for health, wealth, relationships, careers, sales, entrepreneurship, leadership, relationship, so that people can
Starting point is 00:44:36 get the right mindset with the right emotional control and the right habitual creation. And I just developed my inner-size model that I've had literally hundreds of thousands of people inner sizing daily, just like people exercise to strengthen their muscles. Well, I've coined this term called neuromuscles. And so for example, are your beliefs, you know, strong or weak? Well, why not call them like a muscle, your muscle,
Starting point is 00:45:04 your belief muscle is strong or weak. And since we have belief muscles around what we can achieve and what we can't or whether we're worthy or not, why not just upgrade that? Are your habits strong or weak, empowering or disempowering, constructive or destructive? Yeah. Is your self-image, self-worth, self-esteem,
Starting point is 00:45:22 can that be considered a neuromuscle that was developed for your whole life? Yeah, well, can we develop a new more empowering neuromuscle or take an existing one and make it stronger? Well, of course, we can. The question is, well, how do I do it? Well, we can do it through self talk, through learning how to talk to ourself in a more empowering way, we can do it through self-talk, through learning how to talk to ourselves in a more empowering way. We can do it through our awareness of our emotional state.
Starting point is 00:45:50 We can do it through observing our behavior, which leads to the results that we have. And so I just developed this entire series of inner sizes. There's about 500 that I've developed already just in the last two years. And it is transforming people's lives from the inside out. So we know that the subconscious mind is the power center of the brain. But most people don't know how to access it. And then you know, how do I let go of the old stuff? And how do I create and reinforce the new stuff? And even though I used to talk to people about mental contrasting and first or third person
Starting point is 00:46:28 visualizations or self-talk and planting the right seeds through their self-talk into their mind, very few people wanted to do the work to create it for themselves to actually do it. So I just did it for them. That's what Inner Size is is all about and the Innersize app that we created. The app is incredible. I'm gonna link everything in the show notes below for everybody to gain access, but it's unbelievable. What it literally is next gen of this incredible book that in all of the science that you've worked so hard
Starting point is 00:46:59 to create, you've got all these proven results, you've helped hundreds of thousands of people. But now to see these success stories and to see this catalog of more than 500 different inner sizes that you have, like you said, on these very specific topics, sales, relationships, self-love, mindset around money abundance, and to see the stories and I've participated in some of your live events that you've had to hear these people firsthand. And I've gone through the inner size myself. It is such impactful work. I encourage everybody. I know that you've had to hear these people firsthand. And I've gone through the inner-size myself. It is such impactful work.
Starting point is 00:47:26 I encourage everybody. I know that you've got another live event coming up, the Rewire Your Brain for Unstoppable Success event. Can you tell us when that is? Sure, we're doing it October the 14th on a Saturday. And what I decided to do is instead of talking about it with everybody like we are today, we're actually gonna do an experiential event
Starting point is 00:47:44 for, I don't know, two or three hours on October the 14th. And we are actually going to, of course, I will teach people, I will show people what's happening in their brain, but we're going to actually experience a bunch of inner sizes to actually help people rewire their brain right there so they get some immediate results. And for those who want to continue with inner sizes, they can make a decision to do that then. That is incredible. And that's going to distill anyone who's wondering, well, what is this inner sizing? You're going to be able to see it live.
Starting point is 00:48:15 I'll be there October 14th. This is definitely something you don't want to miss. There is nothing bad that will come out of this. All you will do is be rewiring your subconscious to benefit you. And hundreds of thousands of people have had this success. I'm in the app. It's incredible.
Starting point is 00:48:32 John, where can everybody find more information about the event and how can they sign up? Well, two things. Number one, the event is free. So I'll be doing it. I'll have a bunch of guests with me. And I'll give you the link to put in the show notes for everybody, and they can sign up. And when you attend,
Starting point is 00:48:48 we will actually not just be talking about it, but we will be taking the inner sizes and doing them live together so you can experience it and feel it right in the comfort of your own home, whether it's on your mobile phone or on your computer or on your tablet. And we're gonna have some fun.
Starting point is 00:49:04 We'll have a chat room open so we can talk and discuss. How do you experience health from the inside out? How do you experience unshakable self-confidence and an unstoppable mindset from the inside out? How do you really, like not just talk about it, but how do you really feel that you are unstoppable? How do you really shatter a limitation that you have about with how much you can earn or what kind of relationship or business you can have?
Starting point is 00:49:32 Well, those are all limitations, which are nothing more than neural patterns in the brain. You weren't born with these limitations. You weren't born with these obstacles. How do you feel fear, which is natural, and how do you use the neurochemistry of fear to actually fuel you taking action instead of freezing, sabotaging, procrastinating, you know,
Starting point is 00:49:54 and playing small? We'll be discussing it and actually doing it on October 14th. We'll start at nine o'clock Pacific, 12 o'clock New York, and I think that's five o'clock in London free And it'll be fun and you will have a breakthrough on that day. Do not miss this event free event He's taken out all the barriers to entry John. Thank you so much for doing this everyone I will see you there October 14th. The link is in the show notes below John Please keep taking all of your information all of this work
Starting point is 00:50:23 You're doing to make the world a better place and just keep going. We so appreciate you. Thank you so much. It's so great to be with you again. All right, guys, I will see you there October hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably something will happen. No one succeeds alone. You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it. I'm on this journey with me.

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