Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - The Power of Creating a Miracle Morning Routine - With Hal Elrod

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

Welcome to episode 166 with guest Hal Elrod! This episode is all about the power of creating a Miracle Morning routine. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep166/. My guest is Hal Elrod. After surviving multiple near-death experiences and impacting millions of people through his books and speeches, Hal Elrod is leading a worldwide movement to elevate the consciousness of humanity, one morning at a time. He's the bestselling author of 12 books, most notably The Miracle Morning—which has over 10,000 reviews on Amazon, has been translated into over 35 languages, and sold millions of copies—he is doing exactly that.  His latest project is the brand new Miracle Morning Movie–a documentary that shows you how millions of people are transforming their lives, by simply changing how they start their day. Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

How you start your day sets the tone, the direction, and the context for the rest of the day. Hey, Dr. Mindy here. And welcome to season four of the Resetter podcast. Have I got a lineup for you this season? Lots of deep thinkers, a lot of brilliant minds, all with one focus to move the needle forward on your mental and physical health. So please know that this podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. And I want you believing in your body. I want you believing in your mind.

I want you believing in your spirit. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. Enjoy. On this episode of the Resetter podcast, bring you Hal Elrod. Now, I hope you know this guy, but if you don't, let me just give you a little bit of some insight into the conversation. You're about to hear and this beautiful human that is going to enlighten us all because this conversation was off the hook. He wrote a book called

The Miracle Morning. And you'll hear in our discussion, I had started to implement a whole morning routine that I really saw change my life. And then his book came out. And when it it came out, I was like, oh my gosh, somebody actually put into a book what I was experiencing in the morning, but he put it into a formula that we could all learn from. So I've been following his work for a while since that book came out. He's, you'll hear he's literally sold three million copies of that book, which for the authors out there to sell three million copies of a book is a pretty amazing task and tells you that he's on to a topic that people really want to hear. And so he brought me onto his podcast a couple of months ago.

We talked about fasting, of course, and I had to bring him on to you and bring him to all of you because his mindset is impeccable. And this is what I want you to gather from this conversation. It doesn't matter what you're suffering with in your life right now. It doesn't matter the hurdles that face you. What you're going to hear in this conversation is that it's your mindset that can point you in the right direction. Yet when we are in the thick of adversity, it is really hard to find the right thoughts to pull you in the right direction, to move you in that forward movement of

possibility and hope. And what you're going to hear from Hal is that he's got some concrete ideas on how we take adversity and turn it into our superpower. He goes through affirmations. I love what he says about affirmations in this that we can't just say something and hope that it's going to magically appear. He gives you a three-step formula on how to make powerful, impactful, positive affirmations that you will believe and will line you up with the destiny that you're trying to create for your life. He then was going to share with you some unreal stories of healing that, I mean, I can't, but I'm even in awe that he was able to keep the mindset that he kept in some of the darkest healing moments.

So if you are in a healing crisis, I want you to listen very carefully to what he did to keep his mind in the moving in a direction that pulled him out of a deadly diagnosis. And then at the end, we really dove into gratitude and how do we take obstacles in our life and really just shit that we've been given that we just don't like. and we want to overcome, how do we take that and put gratitude into those moments in order to, again, move us in a direction that builds us a life we want to live. So if you don't come out of this podcast, like ready to take on the world, I don't know what podcast I can bring you because Hal did it in such a beautiful way.

So excited to share this with all of you. I hope this will become a podcast that you actually come back to in your dark moments. Sometimes we have to brainwash ourselves with positivity to be able to see a way out. So if you love this, please come back and listen to it over and over again. Send it to friends. It's that powerful and I'm so excited to share it with you. Hal Elrod the Miracle Morning, here's a gift to you and anybody who listens to it. And I hope it really helps.

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So that's Organify. O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I-I-com forward slash PELS, P-E-L-Z. And you'll get 20% off. And we'll leave the link in the show notes. But really, seriously, give it a try. You'd be amazed. The other thing that I've been realizing with the green juice is just it gives me that security to know that I'm getting those greens in that I need for so much in my body as far as

hormonal production, as far as support of my adrenals and support of my health. So it's just a fabulous tool and I don't know where I'd be without it. So I hope you enjoyed as much as I do. So I'm just going to jump right in and Hal, Hal, I have to start off by just welcoming you to the Resetter podcast. I am so thirsty to have this conversation. So thank you for being here. It is such an honor, Mindy. Thank you for having me. And yeah, this is great. This is our second time talking in the last month, I think.

I know. I have really appreciated our conversation on your podcast. And for those of you listening, if you haven't, we'll link the podcast here so you can go listen to our conversation over on Howell's podcast. But here's what I want to tell you. So I have this really interesting insight with my morning routine that I did a few years back, that changed my life. And I think this was before your book came out.

because I had been having my own experience with changing up my day-to-day routine, getting up earlier, dedicating my life to the first two hours of my day was all about filling my bucket back up. And it changed everything in my world. And then your book came out and I was like, oh, my God, somebody else knows this. And I was so excited. So talk to me a little bit about the morning. And why is it that it's such an.

important time for us to dedicate to ourselves because that was what I found was I had to get up before kids. I had to get up before my husband. I had to get up before I went off to work and give to me first and then everything in my day worked perfectly. Why does that work? Totally. Well, first thing I want to say is if you are listening to this and you're not a morning person, do not turn this off. Don't tune out. I wasn't a morning person when I had the same realization that you just described, right? It was actually 2008. The economy had crashed. I was in a depression. I was losing my house being foreclosed on. I was out of shape. Like I was in a bad spot. And I heard a quote from Jim Rohn. He said, your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development.

And I don't know what it was, but it clicked for me. Like if we're measuring success on a scale of one to 10, however you define success, fulfillment, freedom, finances, whatever it is, everybody wants level 10 success. I think there's an innate drive and desire within us to fulfill our potential to create the most extraordinary life that we can. But most of us wake up every day and life stays the same. And the reason is we wait till the last minute to wake up. I mean, you think about that. Like literally, everybody listening can relate to where you look at your schedule and you're like, okay, when's the first moment that I have to be somewhere, do something, take care of someone else or answer to somebody else, right? And then you go, okay.

And then what's the last minute that I could set my alarm for to not like get fired, have my kids taken away on and on and on? And there's another group of people that, like that you're a part of Mindy, right, that realize, oh, there's a better way. And here's why. So to answer your question very directly, here's why it's so important. How you start your day sets the tone, the direction, and the context for the rest of the day. if you start your day procrastinating until the last possible minute to get up you are starting your day as a procrastinator right you're literally think about the alarm going off and you're going oh no it's morning like that's the worst energy you're you know you're resisting life itself it's like hey a new day and you're like no i just would rather lay here unconscious for nine more minutes snooze right and so what what the miracle morning does is it allows you

you to start every day in a peak physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual state as a better version of who you were when you went to bed the night before. And I want to, I want to frame it this way. And it's funny, this recently came up for me. There are only two things that we have control over. Well, there's really, there's one thing. And then there's, there's, there's variations of it. The one thing is ourselves. That's all we can control. And since the pandemic hit in 2020, that which is out of our control, be it a virus or the government, an election, you name it, that which is out of our control has been amplified and magnified and thrown in our face and then from every direction, right? Neighbors, friends. I mean, it's so polarizing. And here's

what I want you to consider is that when you focus on things that are out of your control, you feel out of control. And when you feel out of control. And when you feel out of control, You experience stress and fear and depression and anxiety. And that's how most people start their day. And it's how most people end their day. And so if the only thing we have control over is ourselves, you can break that down into there's two parts. Number one is who you're becoming.

You have control over who you're becoming based on how much time you're spending in silence, which is the first practice of the Miracle Morning, right? The books that you're reading, what you're learning, the journaling you're doing, the self clarity that you're gaining, right? How you're, who you're becoming every day. That's the first thing. And the second is how you're showing up.

And when you focus on becoming the best version of yourself every morning and start your day, you're then able to show up as a better version of you for the people that you love and the people that you lead. And that's why the miracle morning and, you know, a morning routine in general, to me is so, so life-changing. Yeah. You know, there's so much of that that I really resonate with because when I decided to get up early, and what I did is I went from getting up at like seven to getting up at five. So I didn't just gently go into this.

I went two hours early. And why I did it is I found that I was walking around. My kids were very little at the time. I was working and balancing, you know, family with work. And I started getting stinking thinking. And so my brain was like, oh, there's never enough time for me. No, but there's nothing that I do in my day that is okay for me. And I started to find myself falling into a really weird pattern of thought.

And what ended up happening at that moment was that actually two of my closest friends had these dramatic life changes. They moved to new areas. And I watched when they moved to a new area, their whole mindset shifted because their routine changed. And all of a sudden, their lives could change, their marriages changed. everything about them changed. And I started to ask myself, you know what? I can't, I'm not going to move anywhere, but I can move my routine. So how about I just change my routine, get up, so I give to myself first. So I stop that, that pattern of thought. And then from there, let me see how my life changes. And I mean, hell, it was like within a couple of weeks that I could no longer say that I wasn't giving

to myself. I no longer could say I didn't have time because I had. I had two hours every morning. I meditated. I listened, read books. I infused inspiration. So you are a thousand percent right on that. Yeah. Well, a couple of things you said that I so resonate with.

Number one is I did the Miracle Morning for a few days getting up an hour earlier. And I wasn't a morning person. So like when I heard this quote from Jim Rohn, your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development. My epiphany was, this was 2008, by the way, at the height of like the Great Recession, which is why I like millions of Americans. my house is being foreclosed on. I can't pay the mortgage. I mean, right? My business is failing. And I heard this quote and I go, okay, if I want to achieve level 10 success in every area of my life, my health, my relationships, my finances, according to Jim Rohn, and it makes sense,

I need to develop myself into a level 10 person, like a level 10 version of me. I need to develop my habits, my mindset, my beliefs, my skills. If I want level 10 success, I've got to ratchet my level of personal growth up. And I'm like, when am I going to do it? And it's like you. I'm looking at my schedule. I'm like, I'm packed. Like I wait. And at that time, I woke up at 6 a.m. Right, to get ready for work. I started work at seven. And then I'd work until, you know, my eyes were bleeding. And I couldn't look at the computer anymore. And, you know, and I'd go to watch TV for an hour and go to bed, rinse and repeat. And so I was looking at the schedule, I go, when am I going to fit in this hour of personal development? And I'm like, and like, and like, my eyes kept getting drawn to 5 a.m.

and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not a morning person. And I remember this quote from one of my mentors. And if you're listening, you might write this one down. It was so simple, but so profound. He used to always say, his name's Kevin Bracey. He would say, hell, if you want your life to be different, as obvious as this might sound, you have to be willing to do something different first. And I think for most of us, like, it's like, yeah, that makes sense, but we don't,

we just want things to change, but we don't want to change because change is pain. right but the crazy part is even though i wasn't a morning person i'm like all right i'm going to do it i wrote my schedule 5 a m personal development this wasn't it wasn't called the miracle morning on day one it wasn't a book idea like none of that but here's the crazy part at that time in my life i had been depressed for six months it was this downward spiral where i'm losing clients i'm losing money i'm going in debt at my house i'm trying to save it i finally can't you know i'm 30 years old my wife's pregnant like you know i thought i was living the dream i just bought a house a year and a half pariah right now i'm like about to move back in with my dad which i did um but that

first night i felt like a kid on christmas eve and if you don't celebrate christmas like think about like the night before a vacation when you're a kid or or like your first day back at school when you can't wait to see your friends like let me ask you this even if you're not a morning person was it hard to get out of bed on those days where you were so excited to wake up and that night i was like i can't wait to try this. And I woke up the next morning and the night before I had Googled, what do the world's most successful people do for personal development? And I was looking for one practice and I ended up with a list of six. It was silence, which is, you know, meditation or prayer, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading and scribing, which is a fancy word for journaling, but it's an acronym

S A-V-E-R-S, the Sabers. And I went, well, which of these should I do? Which is the best one? And there was no clear answer. And the epiphany was, wait, what if I just did all of them? What if I woke up an hour earlier and I did the six most timeless proven personal development practices in the history of humanity that the world's most successful people have sworn by for centuries? I go, that would be the ultimate personal development routine. Woke up the next morning.

I fumbled my way through it. Like, I didn't know how to meditate at that time. Affirmations felt super inauthentic the way I learned them online. Right? Like I'm going through these practices, but even sucking at them at the end of that hour, it's very similar to what you said, Mindy. I'm like, this is it. If I, if I start every day with this much clarity and energy and peace of mind and motivation and gaining new knowledge, it's only a matter of time before I become the person that I need to be to turn my finances around, to turn my life around. And the last thing I'll say on that is this. I was thinking one year because I, you know,

I had read the compound effect before and I was like, I'll get one percent better every day. And one year from now, I can have a totally different life. Yeah. And Mindy, it happened in less than two months. In less than two months, I more than doubled my income. I went from six clients, barely, I couldn't pay the bills with six clients. Two months later, I had 14 clients. So I had doubled my income, was above water.

Physically, I had an exercise in six months after a miracle morning and I thought, how could I go to level 10 fitness? I thought I'm going to run an ultra marathon. I'm going to run 52 miles. I've never run a mile, except for in PE class in high school, but I'm going to run 52 miles. And my depression didn't even take two months to go away. It was gone within a day or two, not gone.

But it was fading because I think one of the main causes of depression, and I'm not like a professional here, but it's hopelessness. If you lose hope, that's depressing. And because my income, no matter what I'm, I tried, kept going down and down and down, not to mention the economy. We're in the worst recession at that time in decades. I'm scared. Everybody's scared. But that very first day, I went, this is going to work. And so I wasn't depressed because now I had hope. I had clarity. This is the thing. And I went to my wife after the two month mark. I signed on two coaching clients that

day. And I can remember, I can picture meeting her in the hallway of our house. I said, sweetheart, I just signed on two more coaching clients. I've officially doubled our income. It's all because this morning routine. It feels like a miracle. And she goes, it's your miracle morning. And I go, I like that miracle morning. And so I wrote it my schedule miracle morning.

And then like one thing led to another. I taught it to my coaching clients. It worked for them just like it worked for me. And I thought if this worked for them and they weren't morning people and I wasn't a morning person that worked for me, the miracle morning, like I have a responsibility to share this with the world. And then I started writing the book and all the thing. But that's like the origin story of how it organically all just kind of came to be.

Amazing. You know, I think that there's two reasons that it works, the way it worked for you and the way it worked for me. And I'm sure for the way of, when did you say three million people have bought your book? Is that what you said? Three to four, four, somewhere in that range. Three to four million. That's amazing.

I can tell you as an author, to sell three to four million books is like, you know, hats off. my friend, that's pretty, pretty freaking amazing. But what I think happened for me is it was, and what I hear in your story is it was a pattern interrupt. And so if you go and you look at neurolinguistic programming, a lot of these old patterns we get stuck in that are no longer serving us become just like automatic reactions. And we don't even realize that we're in this stinking thinking or the way we're showing up every single moment of the day is actually building us a life that's adding to the depression and anxiety. So when I was, when I flipped my routine and I started getting up earlier, it, like, changed my nervous system and it kind of woke it up.

The second thing that I think, why it works, and I'm curious if you've done any research on this, is that if you look at when you go into sleep and out of sleep, our brains are a little bit in this theta wave state when we're coming out of sleep. And it's in theta waves that we are able to reprogram our subconscious. So I actually learned this from Bruce Lipton because he believes that from zero to seven, we get most of our conditioning is hardwired into our subconscious. And when he said that, I was like, well, that's really depressing. How am I, how do you undo that? And he said, well, affirmations. And I said, well, okay, but I'm, affirmations that I don't know like they haven't always worked for me and he said do you do them before you go to bed and when you get up in the morning because the brain is in the state of wave state so you actually have a door into the subconscious so i'm curious if that part of why it's so miraculous is you don't even realize that you are changing hardwired conditioning that may have been in there since you were seven years old yeah i think that's you know i talk in the book one of the

main things I talk about is reprogramming your subconscious mind. So what you just said. And if you're okay with it, I'd actually love to dive into affirmations. So please, please. Yeah. So again, so the, so if you're listening, the Miracle Morning, the savers is the process, right? These six habits, silence, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading, and scribing. I think affirmations are the most mistought, misused, and misunderstood form of personal development. And they're the most effective. And here's what I mean. The way we've been taught affirmations, there are two problems with the way that most people have been taught affirmations. Number one is we're taught to lie to ourselves essentially and tell ourselves that something is true that is not yet true that we want to be true in the idea that we're going to trick ourselves into believing that it's true.

It's so true. When you put it in those words, I'm like, yeah. You know, it's really you're, you're only hardwiring what you don't believe if you do it wrong. So yeah, go ahead. If you're, if you are struggling financially, you would be taught to say something to affirm something like, okay, just tell yourself you're wealthy. Just say, I am wealthy and just say it over and over and over until you believe it. Now, there may be some merit in that. It's probably better than saying, I suck.

I'm broke, right? But here's the problem. the truth will always prevail. You know the truth. So if you're saying I am followed by anything that is not factually true, then you are creating an internal conflict as if we don't have enough of them. Right. And you're fighting yourself.

And you're like, I am wealthy. And then you're subconscious like, dude, no, you're not. You're like, I'm doing my affirmations. I am a millionaire. It's like you're not even a thousandaire, bro. Like, what are you talking about? You're like, no, quiet, I'm doing. So the truth will always prevail.

That's the first problem. The second problem is we're taught to use this flowery passive language that produces a magical result independent of any effort. I'll give you another example. Let's say you check your bank account balance in the morning on your phone and you're going, oh, God, I'm negative. I'm negative again, right? Or I'm broke, whatever. Okay, I got to pull out my affirmations.

And you do these very popular affirmations that say, something along the lines of, I am a money magnet. Money flows to me effortlessly and in abundance. Oh, that feels good. Now, why do people, why has that affirmation stood the test of time? I don't think it's because it works. I think it's because it makes people feel better. It gives them temporary relief from their money woes. Because think about it, if you check the phone and you're like, oh, I'm negative, you go, I'm a money magnet. Money is going to flow to me effortlessly in an abundance. oh God, that feels so much better than the stress I was feeling a few minutes ago when I was focusing on reality, which is that I don't have money, but it's not going to magically flow into your life

because you're some sort of money magnet, right? And again, not discounting what we can't see. There may be some merit, but let me teach you what I believe and what, you know, the Miracle Morning community has adopted is a very effective, practical results oriented process for creating affirmations. Step one, there's three steps. Step one, affirm what you're committed to. In life, we don't get what we want because we want it. We don't get what we want because it magically attracts and flows into our life without us doing anything except for sitting on our couch and humming or visualizing or whatever. In life, you get what you're committed to. So saying I am wealthy when you're not wealthy is a lie. Saying I am committed to becoming wealthy.

that's rooted in truth. And it's also reinforcing the only thing that will make you wealthy, which is your level of commitment to getting there. So I'm committed to blank. Here's the way it looks in template form. If you're writing the affirmation, it's I am committed to blank no matter what there is no other option. And you affirm it with so much conviction that it becomes your reality.

And you become committed. I'll give you a quick. example. Six years ago, I was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of cancer and I was given a 20% chance of surviving, 20 to 30%. It was acute lymphoblastic leukemia. And in the beginning, I was afraid that what if I die? I had a seven-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son and the doctors are saying there was a 70 to 80% chance I was going to die in the next few weeks. And at the time I was in the hospital, my heart was failing, my lungs were failing and my kidneys were failing. This cancer attacks your organs very quickly. So I doubled down on a miracle morning. I doubled down on the savers.

I started reading only books on, you know, natural ways of healing cancer. But the most important tool was my affirmations. And that first step said, I am committed to beating cancer and living to be 100 plus years old alongside Ursula and the kids, no matter what there is no other option. And Mindy, whenever I felt the fear of what if, what if? if I do everything right and I still die? What if I left my mark with the miracle warning and I'm now's my title like, whoa, who knows? And I went, that fear is not serving me right now. That's not healing my body. Fear is a stress response. And so I would replace the fearful thoughts by pulling out my affirmations, which were on my bedside table. They were in my phone. They were in my car. They were ever,

I had multiple copies. And whenever I felt fear, I'd replace it with this unwavering faith. in my ability to heal and say, I am committed to beating cancer and living to be 100 plus years old alongside Ursula and the kids, no matter what, there's no other option. And I said it was such conviction and such passion and such energy that within a matter of weeks, there was no fear. It wasn't even part of my consciousness anymore. It was completely replaced. And you can apply that step one to turning your finances around, saving your marriage,

being happy if you're not like anything you fill in that blank with whatever activity habit result outcome that you're committed to you know i love that because again i feel like you and i must have known each other in another another part of our lives because i have used that with patients that i've been coaching back to health and when they're really sick i always say to them here's what you have to know is failure's not an option i do not fail when it comes to putting somebody's health back together again. So you can go ahead and have your doubts, but lean on my certainty when those doubts come in

until you get your own certainty because from the lens that I look at, the body heals itself and failure is not an option. We're going to stay committed to that. And it's interesting how that works to turn somebody's brain from that. But what if, what if? And it even takes me even to a little bit of a place of anger

that doctors, when they give prognoses, They think they're doing it out of respect for the patient, but they don't realize that it's messing with the way that their brains are thinking about the outcome of the condition they're in. So that's brilliant what you just said, Hal. I love, first of all, you and I could have an entire podcast on the health care system and healing ourselves and all the things. And I can get, you know, I'm not an angry person. I can get very angry when I think about how many poor patients are being given what I would call bad advice, right? Like when I asked my doctor, what part does diet play in my recovery?

And I only asked him that to kind of test him and see where he was at. And he goes, it doesn't matter as long as you do chemo. And boy, did that make my blood boil when I was in the hospital cafeteria, watching these cancer patients dragging their IV tower around with a 32 ounce big gulp soda in one hand and pizza and cake and another. And I'm going, your doctor told you it's okay to eat that. And they're feeding it to you in this hospital cafeteria. so frustrating so and by the way i will say this um two things number one and if anybody's listening

to this i want to i want to give you a little affirmation to add on to this when i had cancer and i was given a 20 to 30 percent chance of surviving and like you said the doctors think they're just managing expectations but what they're really doing is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that the person's going to kill themselves mentally and emotionally and spiritually because that's what they think's going to happen um the day that i was diagnosed with cancer and given a 20 to 30% chance of surviving. My wife was a wreck, understandably. She was in tears. I said, sweetheart, I know you're scared. I said, I'd be lying if I didn't say I was a little scared. I said, but, but I have unwavering faith that I will beat this cancer. And I said,

here's the statistic that I'm telling you. The 20 to 30% is based on everybody that has a fear-based mindset that eats a bad diet that takes no responsibility for their recovery and gives it all to the doctor. I said, I'm telling you, sweetheart, there's a 100% chance that I will be in the 20 to 30% of the people that survive this cancer because I will do everything in my power mentally, physically, logistically, emotionally, spiritually, relationally to beat this cancer. So I'm going to be amongst the people that do it, right? And if you're listening, you create your own statistic. You create, And Mindy, I love that you as a doctor are giving people exactly what they need, which is that you can beat this if you choose to beat it, period, right?

And I think what's really important for people listening is it is important when in the beginning to retrain your mind, you might have to hang around some certain people. Like, you know, listen to your podcast, listen to my podcast. Like you have to brainwash yourself to make sure that you stay in the, that vibration. Otherwise, the doubt of the world, the doubt of the doctor, seeps in. And the minute you have doubt to your point, now the outcome's not looking good for you. So certainty is important. This is my layman's explanation for everyone with I have no qualifications. I am not a doctor, nor do I, you know, play one on TV, all that. But our body has, correct me if I'm wrong,

but I believe we have trillions of cells, right, like 40 trillion or something. And here's my Laman's explanation. They are, they have no opinion. They are impartial. They just do whatever we tell them to. They respond to whatever we feed them. through our mental and emotional state, we are either telling ourselves, like if you're living in fear of dying, you're saying, oh, I'm going to die. And your cells go, oh, okay, I guess that's what we're doing. If you say, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm going to live. Now you have 40 trillion cells that go, oh, okay, I guess that's what we're doing. And I, you know, I had Dr. Bernie Siegel on my podcast a year or two ago.

I read his book while I had cancer, love, medicine, and miracles. He was a cancer surgeon that did over 3,000 procedures, I believe. He said the one thing that every patient that healed themselves had in common, including those that had very deadly cancers that they shouldn't beat, their mindset was, I'm going to live. There's no other option. He said that was the common trait, right? So listen to Mindy, listen to me, listen to Dr. Bernie Siegel.

The second step in the affirmation. So number one is affirm what you're committed to. Number two is affirm why it's a must for you. Now, language is important. If it resonates more for you to say affirm why it's deeply meaningful to you. So why it's a must, why it's meaningful, why there's no other option. So this is where the rubber meets the road, right? Simon Sinek made why very famous.

The why is what fuels are a bit. our drive to do whatever it takes to follow through the commitment. So here's what my affirmation looked like when I had cancer. So I'm committed to beating cancer, you know, yada, yada, yada. Step two, I'm committed to beating cancer for Ursula because I promised her forever and a day. I'm committed to beating cancer for Sophia and Halston because they need their daddy's love, guidance, and leadership. And I'm going to play with their grandkids one day.

I'm committed to beating cancer for my mom and dad because they don't deserve to lose another child. My sister died when I was eight. I'm committed to beating cancer for myself because damn it, I deserve to live a long, happy, healthy life. And last but not least, I am committed to beating cancer for the millions of people who are themselves battling cancer or some other disease and may not have been blessed with the knowledge and resources that I have. and I can help them on their journey to healing. So, Mindy, when I read those four or five bullet points with just as much passion and conviction and meaning, it fueled, I'm like, you know, dropping F bombs,

like, F, yeah, I will do whatever it takes for those reasons. Did you ever doubt? So did you read these in the morning? And I assume you did. And when you read them, did you ever, go, I don't feel this today. Like you're reading them, but there wasn't the most of the other. Okay.

In the beginning, I was, because here's the thing is I created these affirmations to replace fear with faith. And when I say faith, let me give context. It's a very loaded word. You can place your faith in whatever you place your faith in. Meaning if your faith is in God or a higher power and you believe that God will heal you, then that's where you place your faith. I'm talking about faith in the outcome, right?

Faith in your ability to heal, your ability to follow through, to do everything in your power. So when I say faith again, you can place it wherever you want. If your faith is in your pinky and you're like, because of this magical pinky, I will, you know, make a million dollars or I will achieve this goal or I will beat cancer or I whatever. So where you place your faith is only consequential in the negative if it's in something that is variable. Like it's in your lucky shoes and then you lose them. And now you're like, oh, God, right? But if it's in a constant such as yourself, such as God, it's in a constant that isn't going to get lost or stolen or fall away, you know what I mean? Put your faith wherever you

want. But but, but so I was in the beginning, there was fear because I was thinking practically. Like, for example, Wayne Dyer died of leukemia and I went, well, shit, if Wayne couldn't beat it, he's pretty evolved. You know, I'd say I aspire, you know, to evolve to the point of where Wayne was. If he died, then I thought, well, maybe he died because he was ready to die. I don't know, but I'm like, well, am I ready to die? So there was this mind, you know, storm in the beginning. And then I got clear on what's going to serve, what's going to give me the best odds of healing? And I decided it's unwavering faith in the possibility of me healing. That's what's going to give me the best chance.

So I'm going to put all of my eggs in the bat, whatever is going to give me the best chance. The what ifs don't serve me. Right. Filling myself with fear and doubt, that doesn't heal. me. It's that unwavering faith in the ability to heal. So in the beginning, it was, I was trying to replace the fear with faith, but after a few weeks, the fear was gone. It would rarely come to visit, and I'd pull up the affirmations, but I read them every morning and every night. I, I bookended my day with my commitment to beat cancer, the reasons why. And then step three, affirm which actions you

will take and win. Which actions you will take and win. That's where the rubber meets the road. That's where the results are generated, right? If you affirm what you're committed to and why it's a must for you. And then you just end going, oh, I did it. I did my affirmations. That doesn't, you have to actually clarify which actions are you going to take. If you want to write a book, you can't say I'm committed to it and here's why. And then that's it. It might not get written. you've got to go, so therefore I'm going to wake up an hour earlier. I'm going to write every day from 7 to 8 a.m. Six days a week or, right?

You've got to get clear on what you're going to do and when. And when I had cancer, the third step of the affirmations, it was, I'm going to combine the best of Western medicine. And side note, I had reached out to two of the best holistic oncologists in America. And they said, how neither us nor any holistic oncologists can help you because of your cancer. It is so fast acting that you're, he said, your oncologist wasn't exaggerating.

You have a week or two to live before your organs shut down. Because I didn't want to do chemo. I am, I'm very holistic, very natural. And I told my oncologist, I don't want to do chemotherapy. Can you support me naturally healing this? And he said, Hal, your heart is failing right now. Your lungs are failing. Your kidneys are failing.

He said, if you don't start chemo tomorrow, I'll give you a week or two to live. But that's it. and I thought he was, I don't trust, right? I figured he was scaring me into chemo, you know, and so I'm like, my poor wife is breaking my fingers under the table, holding, you know, like holding back tears. And I said, Doc, can I have 24 hours to do my own research? And that's where I reached out to these oncologists. They said, how, you know, we can't, this type of cancer, nobody is naturally going to

put their reputation on the line. Like, you know, and so I'm like, well, if they're not going to help me, I'm going to do. So here's where I landed, though. I committed to do chemotherapy, which, by the way, because my cancer is so aggressive, it's one of the most aggressive chemotherapy regimens. I did 650 hours of chemotherapy in seven months. Oh my gosh. But I said on day one, I went, I'm going to relentlessly research every holistic healing modality. And I'm going to implement all of them as if that's all. all I was doing. I'm going to detoxify my liver from chemotherapy. I'm going to build my immune system. And I think that's the greatest lesson for people that, you know, if you know someone that has cancer, if you're listening to this, or you have cancer, or it ever shows up in your family, I get that doing it all natural, most people aren't going to do it. And I realized, oh, if I would have

gone all natural, I would have actually had less influence to help people because they're, you know, they're not going to listen to me over their doctor, but here's what I'm telling you if you're listening. I know this is a slight tangent, but I feel like it's so important. Do the chemo. If you're going to do it, that's on you. Do it.

Do whatever you're going to do. You and your spouse, whatever you decide. But for the, please do every holistic practice available to you. Your doctors, unless they're a holistic doctor, they will, unless you're blessed with a doctor, Mindy, they're probably going to know nothing about any of those modalities. My oncologist is considered one of the best leukemia doctors in the world. He told me diet doesn't matter. He knew nothing about juicing or supplements or vitamins or ozone sauna or coffee innemas or lymphatic massage or all the

other practices that I did on my own. So please take responsibility for your healing and don't delegate it to a doctor, unless it's Dr. Mindy because she's got your back. No, here's something interesting on what you just said. And I think this is something that I know I have not discussed on this podcast and is really a consideration when you are riding that line between more traditional, conventional approaches to your health and a more natural alternative approach. Because to your point, I think they both have benefits. As much as I will always slant to the natural, I am always being open to

what might be there in the conventional and the more traditional. And here's what I know and what I just heard and what you said is if you choose to do something like chemotherapy, then go all in in your belief that that is going to help you. It's when we do something like chemo or an antibiotic and we're like, oh, I see it with antibiotics all the time. People are like, I don't know if I should do it. The doctor's kind of scaring me. I guess I'm going to do it. And then we do it. And we're incongruent with the decision, and that is now creating dis-ease in the body. So what I just want, I don't want people to lose sight of what you did is you said, okay, I'm going to do it. I'm not just going to do a little bit. I'm going in and do all of it, but I'm also doing natural.

I'm going in with both, and I am clear that that is my path. There was no uncertainty. The minute you put uncertainty in it, you've lost part of the healing magic, don't you think? Yes, and, yes, and. So I will say there, I wish there was no uncertainty. certainty, but I was so resistant to chemo. But again, that's where affirmations come into play. The reason affirmations I feel like are the most effective form of personal development, right? A, if you follow those three steps, what you're committed to, why it's a must for you,

and what actions you'll take and win, those are affirmations that are rooted in reality. They are practical. They are actionable. They are results oriented. In the simplest form, an affirmation is nothing more than a reminder. That's it. even if you don't follow that formula. Like, by the way, my affirmations, that formula is for every goal I have in my life.

My financial goals are following that formula. My marriage goals follow that formula. But I have all sorts of answerary affirmations. It'll be a quote from a book and I'll be reading a book and I'll go, ooh, that quote, that sentence. I need that as a reminder. I need to live that. So it goes into my affirmation. My affirmation is like four pages long now.

They're always evolving and I'm trying to delete and add. But the point is, it was my affirmations. My natural thought was, I don't want to do chemo. This is poison. But my affirmations that I read every day reminded me how. Yes, and the chemo is poison. However, you need to affirm that your body is intelligent enough to direct the chemo to the cancer to kill it while preserving your cellular health so that your body can thrive.

So I would sit there and meditate and I would say, God, thank you for the chemotherapy, killing the cancer, and thank you for my body being strong enough to survive, thrive, and live to be 100 plus years old throughout this entire process, right? So it was a yes and for sure. I'm not like bulletproof where I just am like, I had no inner conflict about it. I had a ton of inner conflict. And all and I realized that I need to be at peace with it. I need to be grateful for it doing its job while I'm also, you know, aware of get off it when I can on and on and on.

But who knows, if I wouldn't have done it, I might not be here. So I did the best of both worlds, you know, and I live to tell about it. Where does gratitude, you talked about being grateful, where does gratitude fit into creating a life that you want to live or a body you want to live in when you're maybe in a health state where you're not feeling so grateful about. about it. Where do we have to shift our perspective from resentment and frustration that our body or our lives are in a certain place and shift that into gratitude? And how do we go about that? Because sometimes it's really hard to make that shift. Yes. So I am writing a, my next book is called The Miracle Life. And the, so the savers were the formula in the Miracle Morning. The ABCs are the formula in the Miracle Life, keeping it really simple. It's, it's,

accept life exactly as it is. Be grateful for everything. And I'm just giving this as the framework. And then choose your optimal state of consciousness. So imagine if you go through life and you accept life as it is. So you don't get angry that this happened or that happened. You just are at peace with life. Then you go beyond just being emotionally neutral and at peace.

And you actually go further into gratitude. And so it's be grateful for everything. And that's, to me, gratitude. If you only use it for the positive things, it's got very limited power in your life. There's a scene in the Miracle Morning movie. So we started filming after the book came out, we started filming a documentary about this movement

that was happening around the world and all these people that were changing their lives of the Miracle Morning. And then we also interviewed a bunch of like famous authors about their morning routines and this whole thing. Well, halfway through the, filming, I got, I was diagnosed with cancer and I called our director. I said, Nick, you'll never believe this. I'm in the hospital. They're giving me a 20 to 30% chance of surviving this cancer.

The movie is on hold. I, you know, I just got to focus on surviving for my family, you know, and he, you know, he, we talked for a while and then he said, Hal, look, I hope, I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way, but there's two things. Number one, I believe you're going to be this cancer and number two i don't want to put the movie on hold i actually want to come to the hospital and i want to film you beating cancer because i think it will inspire countless people with because he's we've known each other for a decade he goes i know your mindset i know how you're going to approach it and i want to capture that in real time so there's a scene in the movie where they had they had had to give me chemotherapy in my spine, right? And that, you know, the thought of that, I'm like,

that sounds terrible on every level. Well, the woman missed the target and she injected it into my nerve. And it created the most horrific, unbearable migraines for 11 consecutive days. I've never been in so much pain. And at one moment, moment, I handed my dad my cell phone and I said, my dad was my caretaker in the hospital for a year. I said, dad, I want you to film this. This is the low, I've never felt worse in my life. And I keep recording these video blogs of like, hey guys, you know, have a positive attitude. Yes, I have cancer, but I'm still grateful. I go, I want you to capture this moment. And little did I know that it would be in the documentary. Like I didn't even think about that.

But when you watch the documentary, you see me bawling my, I'm in, I can barely talk. My mouth is shaking. I'm in so much pain. And I'm saying, I want you guys to understand, I am grateful for this experience. I am grateful for every moment because if it doesn't kill you, it does make you stronger. And to me, every adversity is an opportunity to learn, to grow, to become a better version of ourselves. And because of that, you can be grateful for it. And it's so often said, hindsight's 2020.

Like, you know, one day you'll look back and you'll be grateful that you had to go through that and who you became. And I go, why wait until some future point to experience the benefit of the adversity you're facing? Why not live life in a lens of unconditional gratitude so that even when you're crying in pain, you're doing it through a context of, I'm grateful because God, this is a moment. the hardest, most painful thing I've ever been through. And I'm so grateful that it's happening because I know that on the other side of it, there's a better version of myself. So that's my view of gratitude is it's everything. There's never a moment. Literally, Mindy, there is never a moment in my life that I'm not grateful. Never. There's nothing because I'm grateful for it all.

Yeah. Well, if you can be grateful in that moment, you can be grateful in any moment. And I think, I can't wait to see the movie. I haven't seen the movie. And I just, I am so in love with people who have trained their minds to overcome adversity, to use adversity to their life advantage. And that, I can't wait to watch that because that's incredible. I will tell you when the pandemic hit, one of my friends posted something within the first couple of weeks. We were all in quarantine. And he said, I can't wait to see who I'm going to become on the other side of the. this. What is this pandemic going to do to me? And I got to tell you, I was so inspired by that that I actually kept that mantra throughout the whole pandemic. And my life is so much better because of the disruption that the pandemic created for me. And through that whole movement of us going into like fear and oh my God, when are we out of this? I just kept saying, oh, my gosh, who am I going be on the other side of this. And wow, am I happy with what it came out of that experience? So I think you're really like if we can all dive into the heart of that moment of adversity and flip it,

now there's nothing life can give you that's ever going to shut you down or put you in the wrong direction, don't you think? Totally. And here's what I want, I want to leave or give people this, this thought that life's going to do what life's going to do. you can either be at peace while life's doing what it's doing, happy and grateful while life's doing what it's doing, or you can be miserable and stressed and fearful, right? Like, the only thing you can control is your inner world, right? It's who you're becoming and how you're showing up every day. And without going into too much detail, this whole mindset for me started when I was 20 years old. I was in a car accident. I was head on by a drunk driver at 70 miles an hour. I was found dead at the scene. I broke 11 bones. And I came out of a coma, six. stage later and I was told I would never walk again. You're like a cat. You got nine lives. Yeah, I know.

I got like six or seven more lives. I'm not sure. A week after I came out of the coma and I was told I would never walk again. My femur broke in half. My pelvis broke in three places. And the doctors called my parents and they said, we're concerned with how we believe that he is in denial because he's always smiling and laughing and telling jokes. And they go, that's not normal for a 20 year old that's being told he's never going to walk again. They said, we think his reality is so painful that he checked out. Can you talk to him get down to the bottom of how he's really feeling? He should be sad and scared and angry and depressed.

My dad comes in that night, tells me the doctor's concerns. He says, how are you really feeling? I know when your friends are here, you guys are joking and laughing. And he goes, but like at night when you turn the lights off and you're just in your head and you're thinking, it's okay to be sad and scared and angry, depressed. These are normal feelings. The doctors say you need to admit how you're feeling. And I said, Dad, I thought you knew me better than that.

He said, what do you mean? I said, remember I live my life by this thing called the five minute rule, which says it's okay to be negative, but not for more than five minutes. The idea is when you feel, when you find yourself getting upset, I'd set a timer for five minutes. And I'd give myself five minutes to bitch, moan, complain, cry, whatever. when the timer goes off, I would say, can't change it and acknowledge, I can't change what happened five minutes ago. So I have a choice between two options.

I can be at peace or I can be miserable. I can be miserable that it happened, upset, angry, frustrated, or I can accept it exactly as it is and be at peace. And I said, Dad, if I'm in a wheelchair the rest of my life, I've decided I'm going to be the happiest, most grateful person you've ever seen. seen in a wheelchair because I'm in a wheelchair either way. The only thing I get to a choose is how do I experience every moment in my wheelchair? And if you're listening right now, I want to ask you, what's your wheelchair? What's the experience in your life, past, present, or even that you're worried about in the future that you've allowed to determine your mental and emotional state.

I'm here to tell you that you don't have to let your circumstances determine your mental and emotional state. You can determine it. And so you can even be in the most difficult circumstances of your life and go, okay, this is what's happening. I can't change it in this moment. It is what it is. I've got to get through it. So therefore, I'm going to choose to be the happiest, most grateful version of myself I've ever been while I endure the most difficult time in my life. And the Miracle Morning to me enables you to read affirmations that remind. mind you, then sit in silence and meditate on that feeling, visualize it, exercise, read something that affirms it, journal what you're grateful for, right?

Like, that is the practice that you know from experience every day allows you, even if you have a bad day of the day before, you get to wake up into that me time, that sacred time to become the best version of you and start every day at your best. Amazing. Oh my God. I could talk to you forever, Hal. love the way you think and I know you've got to go pick your kids up so let me finish on this on this thought I have two two questions I ask everybody this season we're really diving into self-love and the first one is what's your self-love practice somehow I'm thinking it's tied into the morning and the second question is what's your superpower and I think we all just witnessed your superpower

but I'm gonna let you answer those two questions yeah yeah thank you yeah so I mean my miracle morning is my self-love practice you know one of the books I I read years ago was love yourself like your life depends on it. And I really integrated that into my miracle morning. I literally have a section of affirmations that are my self-love affirmation, right? In bold, it says self-love and then colon. And then, you know, there's like a few sentences that affirm how I love myself, that I love myself unconditionally, that I give myself grace, that I'm always doing the best I can and that I deserve just as much love as I give to my children, if not more, right?

Like to put it in context and realize the way I love my kids, can I love myself that way? And that helps me to create that context. And then the superpower is, it's what we just talked about toward the end there. It's choosing my experience. I don't mean my external experience. I can't always choose that.

I can only choose my internal experience. So I can choose that no matter what's going on around me, I get to control what's going on inside me. I choose to be at peace. I choose to be happy. I choose to be grateful. I choose to serve others. I choose to be a source of love and light.

And nothing anyone else does or says, no matter how rude or mean or whatever, it doesn't change who I'm committed to being in every moment of my life. Oh my gosh. I got chills. That's a mic drop. How do people find you, Hal?

You're just such a joy to talk to. Oh, thank you, Mindy. Miraclemorning.com is the hub. You can watch the movie there. You can buy the books. You can download the free Miracle Morning app. You can join the community, which is a Facebook group with 340,000 members from like 100 countries that wake up.

They'll support you on this Miracle Morning journey. Yeah, miracle morning.com is the hub for all of it. Amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you for your time. And again, thank you for being such an incredible example of what's possible when you really commit to putting your mind on the right thing. So just super grateful for you.

And we got to do this again. I'm down. We'll do it live because this was really, your enthusiasm is infectious. And it, you know, I feel more filled up. Do you do in person? Do you do in person interviews? We're starting to. Yeah, we're going to.

That's our next step. So I will, I will invite you up. Quick, I'll give a quick insider or information for your audience and for you. So I am currently writing the Miracle Morning updated and expanded edition. It probably won't be out for like eight months, six months, eight months, something like that. So, you know, get the, get the edition now. But it's going to have the miracle evening chapter, the miracle life chapter. I'm rewriting the entire book.

So I'd love to come back on and like revisit this when we do that. Yeah, please reach out. You're welcome back on anytime and let's do it live and we'll go in. I love in person interviews. I love that. I'm going to make a note of it. I love you. I love your energy.

I love the stand that you take for healing for people naturally, right? Yeah. So I'm just, I'm so grateful that we got to connect again. And can't wait for the next time. Agreed. Thank you, Hal. Appreciate you. Ditto. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.