Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Understanding The Human Behavior Behind Achieving Goals - With Dr. John Demartini

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

For full show notes, resources mentioned, and transcripts go to: www.drmindypelz.com/ep103/ To enroll in Dr. Mindy's Fasting membership go to: resetacademy.drmindypelz.com This episode is all about understanding how we can achieve any goal we want in our life. Plus, we talk about how we can take our health to a whole new level by using the law of attraction principles. Dr. John Demartini is a polymath and a world-renowned human behavior expert. He has over 4 decades of research across multiple disciplines. His work has been described by students as the "most comprehensive body of work", "an extensive library of wisdom" and "wisdom of the highest and most valuable order." Dr. Demartini's mission and vision is to share knowledge and wisdom that empowers you to become a master of your own life and destiny. He's an internationally published author, a global educator and the founder of the Demartini Method, a revolutionary tool in modern psychology. His education curriculum ranges from personal growth seminars to corporate empowerment programs. He shares life, business, financial, relationship and leadership empowerment strategies and empowerment tools that have stood the test of time. Please see our medical disclaimer. 

Don't waste your time on goals that aren't truly meaningful to. Don't waste your time on goals that aren't really priority. Don't waste your time on goals that your life doesn't demonstrate is truly important to you. Or you're going to self-defeat. You're going to keep training yourself out of what I say, I don't do. Where if you do something you do spontaneously, I don't need to have a goal when it comes to teaching and research and learning. I do it every day spontaneously.

Resetters, Dr. Mindy here. And I am on a mission to teach you just how powerful your body was built to be. This podcast is about giving you the power back and helping you believe in yourself again. Let's jump in. On this episode of the Resetter podcast, I bring you Dr. John D. Martini. So if you are new to Dr. D. Martini's teachings, you are in for a mind-bending conversation. This man has been teaching philosophy, human potential, and the, the law of attraction for many, many years, but he teaches it from a totally different angle.

So some of you may know Dr. D. Martini from The Secret. He, as you will hear in this discussion, has been a lecturer, blog writer for many, many years. And what I love about this conversation is we talk about the upside and the downside of achieving a goal. So what we see in our community a lot of times is that when people set a goal, they only think about how great it's going to be when they achieve the goal. But when they hit a bump with the goal, they end up derailing themselves because they had never thought of the downside. We see this all the time with fasting, where people want the weight loss, they want the

mental clarity, they want the healing that can happen with fasting, but they never think about the moment in which it may not be fun to fast or the body might give them a symptom that they don't like. And so Dr. D. Martini, I brought him on specifically to help us understand how we can achieve any goal we want in our life, how we can really take our health to a whole new level by using the principles of the law of attraction, but also navigating where these down moments may show up. And you will see, he actually pushed back on me on a couple of my beliefs that I have around goal setting.

It was so awesome. I always love elevating my thoughts. So it was incredible to hear him really push in on me when I spoke about some of the goals that I have in my life. And he gave me a whole new perspective. So this is such a rich conversation. It's so perfect for the new year. It's amazing discussion around how we can really move our life in a positive direction and create a

life of our dreams by looking at both the upside and the downside. So Dr. John D. Martini, enjoy and don't forget to go to his gratitudes at the end because, man, does this guy know how to create gratitude in his life. So season three here on the Resetter podcast, all about gratitudes. and this man has mastered gratitude. So enjoy. I have to develop that. So first of all, many people set New Year's resolutions based on transient voids that they want to fill.

So let's say they've gone and overspent their money during the holidays and spent more money than they ideally would have liked. And therefore, they feel that they're, you know, a bit of debt. So now they're going to go, well, I'm going to start saving my money now. And I'm going to be more conscious of what my spending is. Or they may have overeaten because sometimes they let themselves loose because they don't have accountability during that time. And so now they say, I'm going to go on a diet. So these are transient voids that drive a transient value.

Values fill voids. Fulfillment means filling full, something that's perceived is missing or empty. So when you have a transient void, which just temporarily occurs, which is out of routine during the holidays, and you set up a fantasy that you're going to now make that a whole year when in fact those voids will dissolve in two weeks, three weeks, because now you got your routine back and you get your spending back by the next month. They're likely to not be lasting objectives. And most people don't realize that if something is really important to you, it has a lasting void and lasting value. I, me, I had a desire to learn. And so there's no end to learning. So I read and study every day.

So it's an unending thing. But I might have a temporary, you know, I may not have gotten to work out for two weeks. And then I go, I need to go work out. So I have a temporary void. But every human being lives by a set of priorities, a set of values. things that are most important to least important in their life. And in this hierarchy of values that they have, which is fingerprint specific to them,

though two people have the same set of values, whatever's highest on the value, you're spontaneously inspired to do. Whatever is lower on the values, progressively lower, you need extrinsic motivation to get you to do. You need a reward if you do it, a punishment if you kind of thing. And anytime you need motivation,

extrinsic motivation, you get you to do something. It's not really important. important to you just think it is. When somebody says, this is really important to me, but then I keep procrastinating, I keep hesitating. It's not important. Other things are more important. It keeps taken precedent. So if you don't know what your real values are, you don't know what really is priority to you, you can often compare yourself to somebody else, think, oh, I wish I could be like them. Oh, I don't have that. Have a temporary void set up a fantasy of trying to envy somebody else imitate somebody else, which leads to kind of a self-depreciating limited belief system.

Anytime you set a goal that's not aligned with what you value most, you're going to decrease the probability of achieving it. So I tell people, don't waste your time on goals that aren't truly meaningful to. Don't waste your time on goals that aren't really priority. Don't waste your time on goals that your life doesn't demonstrate is truly important to you. Or you're going to self-defeat. You're going to keep training yourself out of what I say, I don't do. Where if you do something you do spontaneously. I don't need to have a goal when it comes to teaching and research and learning. I do it every day spontaneously.

That's what I love doing. It's not work time. Just like you probably do the same thing. Oh, yeah. Obsessed. Nobody has to motivate you to do that. Motivation is a symptom, never a solution for human beings. So you need to find out what you're intrinsically driven to do and set goals that are

congruent with that and not compare yourself to other people because they have a different set of values. And anytime you're a cat trying to expect to swim like a fish, you're going to beat yourself up and you're going to think I have a limited belief. But the truth is that you have a very dedicated, very disciplined behavior in what's valuable to you. You just need to discover what it is and not compare it to somebody else. We're not here to compare ourselves to others. We're not here to put people on pedestals of pits. We're here to compare our daily actions to our own highest value and then stick to the priorities. If we fill our day with high priority actions that inspires, it doesn't fill up with low priority distractions and don't.

And we're automatically spontaneously discipline, reliable, and focus to achieve them. And we build momentum incrementally to build ever greater goals that are more congruent as we get to know who we are and live congruently and authentically according to what's really meaningful. Yeah. So if I have a health goal, and this is one thing that I've just seen in 25 years of practice, is people can set a health goal, but it's not their highest value. So let's use weight loss as an example. So I want to, let's say I want to lose 30 pounds.

And maybe I want to lose it for, because I want to impress somebody or because society says I should look a certain way. But it's not my highest value. Can I make it my highest value? How do I change it on the value ladder? Like, is there a way to improve? my values around what's right for my life? Yes, but let me share a story if you don't mind.

Oh, please. I was asked to do a reality TV show at Universal Studios a number of years back. And they gave me 12 people to transform the lives of two hours each in 24 hours. At 24 hours to transform 12 people's lives. Wow. And yeah, it was a very intense 24 hours. But what was interesting is there was a lady there, that was quite obese.

And she walked in right before we started filming. And she brought in and carried two giant boxes of food in. And she said, oh, I got everybody some food so we wouldn't start. And then went on to eat the entire two boxes. Wow. And she said to me, she says, you got to help me. I can't lose weight. You got to help me.

you got to help me. I just want to lose weight. I just went. And I looked at her and I said, ma'am, I'm going to be blunt with you. If you lie to yourself, you're not going to get anywhere. Every decision you make is based on what you believe will give the greatest advantage or participate. Right now, you consciously or unconsciously have more advantage keeping weight on and eating than you don't. So if you would like me to help you, I'm going to ask a very pertinent question. It's going to be seemingly illogical to what you think, but will help. I have a lot of you. I have a little. what exactly is the benefit you're getting out of keeping weight on and eating? It's just not. It's killing me. Look at me. It's a stop. Stop.

What's the benefit of getting out of keeping weight on and eating? And she paused for a second after dodging it a few times. Then she said, everybody in my family is very big. If I'm not big, I don't feel like I'm loved or part of the family. Yep, I've seen that. Write that down. Yeah, write that down. Okay. Now, number two, too. What's another benefit of getting out of keeping weight on and eating? She said, my sister is bigger than me. We used to fight like cats and dogs. I swore I would never be smaller than her because she couldn't push me around. Then she cried. I said, great, write that down. Now go, it's another benefit. And all of a sudden, she told me the story that was a really

interesting one. She said, I went on a really, really, really strict diet. I lost 45 pounds one time. When I did, I started to get a bit of a figure, first time in my life that I could remember. And she said, that a guy hit on me and showed affection. I never had a guy hit on me. I thought he was loving me. I didn't know he was just, you know, interested in sex. We made love the very first time first time I ever made love in my life and the next day I never saw him again and six weeks later I found out I was pregnant and I'm Catholic and I have this conflict if I have an abortion I feel I'm in hell if I keep the baby I'm with a baby I don't want I'm in hell I saw no alternative and I got the abortion now I've had that pain and suffering

because I'm now thinking I'm in my Catholic bringing, the Catholic guilt sign. You know, I'm bad. And I said, and then did you put weight on after that? She says, I did. I said, I never wanted to be in that position again. I never wanted to lose weight again. Because last time I did, it was the most painful thing in my life. I said, great, write that down.

Then she said, I'm in television. And you see me from my breast up. And my breasts are volumptuous. and my hair is thick and my skin is smooth. If I lose weight, they sag. And all of a sudden, I don't look as, my skin doesn't look as good. I said, great, what's another benefit? And I went through this process of going through the benefit.

And all of a sudden, I realized, wow, this lady has really has more unconscious motives to achieve and keep the weight on than she does in taking it off. So what we did is we had to go home that night and write down 75 benefits that she was getting for keeping her weight on. When she then realized this, she came back to the next day, she said, I really don't have a desire to get rid of my way to you. I said, no, it's time to wake up and face the truth about yourself and realize that that's what's happening. So now, she said, well, is there anything I can do about it? I said, yes, we need to find an alternative way, a viable alternative way of getting all those benefits, how to be part of the family without having to eat. how to be part of the relationships without having necessarily have sex and being set to set up for that. And come up with viable alternatives.

Then what we need to do is we need to find out what your actual values are. And we need to link all those viable alternatives to what your values are and stack up neuroplastically new pathways in the brain to see that I can get what I really want in life if I follow these new alternatives. Because you found one thing eating to solve all those problems. to prevent all those pains. That's ingenious. It's not wrong. You're not foolish. You've found a very strategic way of getting what you want through eating.

And it worked. It's avoided all these situations that are paying. So until we have viable alternatives, once we get the viable alternatives linked, then we can come in there and now associate the pain with the eating. Now we can come up with the drawback because until you have a viable alternative linked to your brain, if you go in there and show the pains of what you're doing and you don't have an alternative, that's even more scary. So you go right back to it.

So then we took the downsides of that. And there's never an addiction to something without a subdiction. And the subdiction is always a painful event that you're trying to avoid. And it's creating a dissociation and emptiness that you're trying to fill. And so I went through a 13-step process with her. And I did it outside the two hours time because I didn't have enough time to do it. And set her on a pathway. which then gradually, slowly, over about a 1.6 months, started dropping her weight until she got down to where she now knew had control her own governance.

She never had a problem. She had an unconscious strategy. People have unconscious motives and don't realize it. And then they try gimmicks. And they temporarily get a little high and they can discipline themselves while they're infatuated with the gimmick. But that wears off. Heedonic adaptation makes that wear off. And then they go back to the pattern. Amazing. So if I'm looking at a goal, what I just heard from that is I need to understand where I'm gaining from the place I'm in at. The current place, yeah. Because the goal may take away.

Like love is a really interesting one, especially, you know, the classic, the five people you hang around or the people you're going to become like. And if those are your favorite people and they have a life that is not congruent with health, then it's going to be really hard to step out of that. So if I'm setting a goal for the new year, then I need to understand where I may be benefiting from, I don't know, a better way, the discomfort that I have in my life before I even look at the goal. Would that be accurate?

I have to, the thing is, is every decision is based on what you believe at that moment is going to give you more advantage and disadvantage. Every decision. So your brain is a processing, a probability processing decision-making system. And it's based on subconsciously stored baggage that you've had in the past. Anything that you thought was painful, you have an instinct to avoid. Anything that's pleasurable, you have an impulse towards. So anything that's been associated with pain or pleasure stored in a subconscious mind.

And now if you want to make a change in your behavior, you're now confront. with all that subconscious stuff. So unless you can come up with more advantages of doing the actions that lead to weight reduction and the advantages of that are greater than the disadvantages and any pain that might surface in the process of doing it, all of a sudden I'll lose my loved ones. As long as there's more pain than pleasure doing that, if those pains are still more than the pleasures and advantage you're getting, you're still going to resist. Yeah.

So you've got to identify all the resistances you have, write them all down, and find out how doing this new action is going to assist you in those areas and your highest current values. And it's a science and it works, but it takes effort. And most people don't want to do the effort. They want to quick fix. They want to blame the diet or they want to blame this or they want to blame, you know, I can't eat. I have people that say I can't eat bread. I can eat 10 slices a day. I don't gain weight.

It's not the bread. It's the associations you've made in your mind. It's the associations. And so if you have an association, if I do this, this is going to happen. You're going to prevent yourself from doing it. So you need to stack up all the action steps that are proven to be affected. What are the advantages of doing that? And how are they going to help you fulfill your highest value?

And if something comes up that you're afraid's going to, going to occur, how is that going to help you fulfill your highest value? So you reduce the anxiety. Now you can navigate through that methodically, very carefully. And you have to take up, what's the next anxiety that could come up if all of a sudden you gain weight or lose weight. I had this one woman, she was an Irish woman, she was from San Diego area. She was a lawyer. She finished her law degree. She was becoming a lawyer. She finished her law degree. She started going to practice. And she started getting clients. And every male client, just about every one of them, bailed out on her.

So I said, she came to me. She said, I keep losing clients. I said, go ask the dog. I'll call them and find out why. And they said, you're attractive. My wife refused to let me have you as a lawyer. She goes, whoa, what an insight. So she gained weight, shortened her hair, frumped herself out, put on glasses,

picked up the clients. but now she's gained weight to keep herself less threatening. I said, wait a minute now, there's an alternative, a viable alternative. What's that? Refuse to see the client lest the spouse is there and make sure the wife is there and become friends with the wife. So they're backing you up and supporting the objective. She goes, I can't believe, but I didn't see that. So she immediately started to make sure before I can do this, I have to make sure I'm working with a family team if you're married.

or if you have a girlfriend. I want to make sure we're working as a team because I don't want them undermining us halfway through our project and put all this work in and not getting her and now have to charge you for it. So she started doing that. And once she became friends with the women,

the women were making sure the men were following through because they liked telling the men what to do. And then what happened was she didn't lose clients. She dropped weight immediately. And her hair grew out and let herself get sexy and didn't have any anxiety. Women are thinking, oh, she's using her sexuality to win for my husband. She knows how to manipulate that judge.

Yeah. Amazing. So, you know, something that resonates in that story for me and something I've heard that you said before, and I am definitely don't have this mastered in any way, shape, or form, is that when I set a goal and I see this with other people, I only see the upside of it. So I don't see the downside of it, nor do I really want to look at the downside of it. but you over the years and just listening to you, I hear you say over and over again,

you got to look at the downside. You got to know where that downside is. But sometimes you don't know until you're in the action of the goal or, you know, in the process, you're not even really fully aware of all the downsides. So the question I have is, one, how would we know what the downsides are? And two, what if you're along your journey and you're, you're, you, you've got like a fitness goal or a health goal and you're doing well and then all of a sudden a downside appears, how do you deal with it in that moment?

Okay. That's a really great question. And I love tackling now. All right. There's a difference between a fantasy and an objective. A fantasy is an assumption that there's going to be more advantages than disadvantages. And that's how you make decisions to avoid or seek. But in fact, in life, there's always.

an advantage and a disadvantage, no matter what you do. So we have the fantasy that we're going to get one side without the other, and we make a decision impulsively. The Stoics had a thing called meditating on the evils to anticipate what could go wrong in advance. You can't go to Mars. You can't launch a spacecraft into space without, they're about to launch the web observatory. When they put the James Webb Observatory on space, they hired 13 organizations. to find every possible thing that could go wrong with every engineer so they can prevent a multi-billion dollar fiasca. Interesting.

That they make sure that every engineering system has counted for that as much as possible. You don't go somewhere without taking in with foresight. See, we either live in hindsight and we go after an impulse, and then we find out the challenges, which are distressful because we weren't prepared. And we have a fantasy. Now the pain of the opposite and the challenges are distasteful. If you sit out and anticipate what could go, what could be an obstacle, what could challenges? And as you think of those and solve them in advance and prepare for them and find if this happened, how do I use it to my advantage?

And how will it help me get my goal? If you do, then when they do happen, you're not distressful. You just go plan B. And you're now transforming a fantasy of one-sidedness. A fantasy is a positive without a negative. an objective is something that has both sides. Let me use an analogy of dating somebody. You meet this girl or this guy.

And the first night you go, whoa, this is amazing. And you actually live in the fantasy, a survival subjective bias fantasy, that this is going to have a positive without a negative, a game without a loss, you know, pleasure without pain, peace without war, nice without meaning, kind without cruel, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. And the first few weeks, the first few weeks, it seems like it's going to last. But then after three months, you find out, now you start to discover the piccadillos and the challenges that you face with this person.

They start to drive you nuts and, you know, they start to challenge you. They start to give you, you know, these other things. And now all of a sudden you're starting to withdraw from the infatuation and starting to resent them not living up to your fantasy. And you didn't anticipate them up front and you didn't ask questions. so you allowed yourself to get enamored with this fantasy, and eventually come back into the center. And hopefully, after resenting a few of those things, you still sustain it and you keep the relationship going.

And eventually realize the person you really love has both sides. There's always something you can liken this, like this support and challenge, because maximum growth and development occurred at the border of support and challenge. That's been shown in chaos theory, biological theory, and ecological. You need both. So to expect a one-sided world is fantasy. but yet people do it.

But actually in long term, you find out that the person has things you like and dislike. You can't even like yourself all the time. You're going to like and dislike yourself. You know, you can't. It's delusional to think you're going to do that. So what happens is a goal is no different. A true objective by the word objectivity and philosophy means neutral.

A true objective isn't positive without negative. it you're anticipating the reality of what you're going to do. You're preparing in advance with foresight and you're thinking, strategically planning, what is it that could come with this and how do I solve an advance? So I'm prepared. So now it's not distressful. It's you stressful. So when you're pursuing challenges that you're inspired by that have meaning to you,

you have used stress, not distress. And you have a change in the cytokines and all the pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatories. They come into balance. So your body prepared. You're not distressed. you're used stressed. So by thinking in advance, what are the challenges that you might face and how do you solve them in advance and how can we use them to our advantage?

Once you see that everything is on the way and you're prepared for it, you're more likely to get it. I was coming down. I used to live in Trump Tower in New York. We lived underneath Donald where he lived on the top three floors. We were underneath him. And I knew Donald. I've lectured with Donald.

I've been in his office. I've known him for 29 years. He's a crazy guy. But we were coming down. the elevator one day, my wife and I and him, and we come into the lobby together, and there's about a dozen people waiting for him down there, and we're going on the way to have some sushi just down the street, which is on 50th, 53rd Street, 56th Street and 5th. So we literally go up to the corner, and we're listening to the conversation that Donald's having with all his little disciples,

and we're waiting at the light to go across the light, and we're hearing him. And then as he goes off, he veers off towards the plaza, we go straight. But he has, he has. He has. He has. He has, he I had 12 people with him, and each of them were a specialist to think of what could go wrong on the Hudson River Project. This is right when he was building the Hudson River Project. And so he said, all right, and one was a specialist in Indians, American Indian history. Oh, interesting. And I thought, this is interesting. He said, I want you to make sure that there's no burial grounds of Indian burial grounds where we're about to dig in this square.

He has a mile that he's going to be building buildings in a whole mile. I want to make sure there's no historical things that we start building, we start digging, and all of a sudden we're tied up for years on an Indian barrel ground at sacred. So we had a specialist in there to go and research to find out before we're in advance. Then we had a geologist. He had a geologist there to think of what are the geological formations in that area, what type of rock we're going to do, what type of drilling we're going to have to do, how are we going to break this rock up?

Because we've got to go down 10 stories into the rock. then he had somebody there that was anybody in the real estate there what are the possible people they're going to try to refuse to sell because some of the places aren't sold yet and how are we going to find out what their family is and what their what their psychology what their needs are what their income levels and how do we make sure that we get them to sell out so we can get that land I mean he was he had specialists on every possible challenge and obstacle that might be involved to build that. It wasn't positive thinking, let's go to Mars.

Alon Musk had to have probably 40 explosions costing billions of dollars with SpaceX in order to make it to build his company. And now he's having some more problems right now. He has to think in advance with engineers of what could happen and prepare for that or otherwise he's never going to get it off the ground. So the Stoic said to premeditate on the evils

allows you to reduce the anxieties and allows you to prepare more effectively with foresight instead of hindsight. And most people impulsively react, then afterwards they have hindsight. Oh, God, I can't believe this. I didn't see this coming. And boy, they're not prepared. And they're distressedful because they're wanting to hold on to their fantasy with a dopamine fix. So it's wise to have foresight more than hindsight, to live in your executive center instead of your amygdala, the desire center.

And to anticipate so you're prepared. So you actually go plan B, plan C. No problem. Plan D. Because you already know it's coming. You already have it there. What I find so... You will not... You will not know all of them. Right. But as you go, you don't want to stop anticipating now what could go off.

Yeah. Chris Hadfield, the astronomer, the astronaut, was being interviewed on London Rio. And they said, you know, they rehearse a thousand times. What could go wrong? If this happens, what do you do? Until it is automated so you don't have emotions. Emotions destroy achievements. Warren Bubba says emotions destroy wealth.

Until you can manage emotions, don't expect to be wealthy. Robert Green says, don't expect to be a leader if you can't manage emotions. That's a number one thing that stops people off is their amygdala because it's impulsive. It's great for survival, but not for goal setting. A goal setting is a foresight, not a hindsight. So the thing that catches me is the way I always understood law of attraction and, you know, you really launched your career, I think, as far as I know from the secret. And is that you always got to think the right thought. You got to think the positive thought and not think the negative thought. So when my amygdala kicks in and is like, hey, don't do that because you did that once before and this, this, this and this happened, my.

And my prefrontal cortex has known law of attraction. You can't, don't listen to the amygdala. Make sure that you are thinking about what you want, not what you don't want. So how do we wrestle that? Okay, that's a very good question. First of all, I'm just going to debunk the idea that thinking positive is the only way to do it. Can I share a story about that? Please.

I first got introduced to this. I was doing 350 speeches a year before I got the secret. The secret is just the last 15. Yes. So the secret helped me, but it didn't, it wasn't where I started. But first of all, the back in, when I was 28 years old, I had for 10 years from age 18 to 28, attempted to be a positive thinker. I read every book that was on self-help.

I mean, there wasn't anyone out there that I'm aware of anyway in the self-help industry, you know, that I hadn't read those books. And no matter what I did, I still had positive and negative. at positive times and I had negative times. And I had positive thoughts and negative thoughts towards myself and other people. And when I was really honest with myself, I'm going, you know what? I still have negative thoughts at doing this now for a decade. And I met, you know, I met Earl Nightgale and his brother.

I met W. Clement Stone. I met, you know, positive thinking, Neil and Vincent Peel. I actually met these guys. I met Zig Zigler. I met Brian Tracy. I met all the people that were supposedly positive thinking people. I can tell you with absolute fact, none of these people are positive. They're human beings with both sides.

They're positive and negative. I had cases of every one of those people demonstrating their negativities and angers and frustrations. There is no such thing as a positive person. There's a human being. And when their values are supportive, they can be nice. The values are challenged. They can be mean. I'm not a positive person.

I'm a human being. I think that needs to be clear. Now, when you set a goal that is aligned with your highest values, you're more objective. And when you're more objective, you're anticipating both sides. And so your goal is realistically set. And whenever you're in your highest value, your blood glucose and oxygen goes into the forebrain. And the pulmonary nucleus of the thalamus filters all your sensory information. It's the highest end of the reticter activating system.

It filters it before it goes in the coroner. radiata into the telencephalon and cortex, it filters all the central information so you can literally select with an attention bias information that helps you get your goal. If you set a goal that's aligned with your highest value. But your expectation is not one-sided positive. Your expectation is grounded. I expect to have my challenges. I'm prepared for them and I see the opportunities and I'm not reacting to it. I'm not in avoidance mechanism in the amygdala. The amygdala always wants to avoidance wants to avoid pain and seek pleasure. The objective center, the prefront cortex, embraces pain and pleasure in the pursuit of a purpose. It's teleological. It's the one that goes after an objective.

So you have the highest probability of achieving something that you're willing to embrace the pains and the pleasures in the pursuit of than just positive thinking. I guarantee you, nobody on the secret, I know all of those people. They're not positive. They're human beings. and Rhonda went through all kinds of crazies when she came out with that movie. Yeah. That's why there was never a sequel to that. Right. I actually had, I interviewed her on this podcast, and she talks about that.

She actually went into a real dark place afterwards and then came out with. Yeah. She had all kinds of crazies hit her. Lawsuits. Yeah. There were three major lawsuits when the movie came out. That was that. She got taxes.

There was all kinds of stuff that was happening. So people have a fantasy. And the thing is, is the majority of people are living in their amygdala and they're responding with impulses and the mass market, people like to sell to the mass market. So they sell the fantasy. You know, the fantasy will be sold easier than the reality. Most people don't want to know the truth. They want the fantasy.

And that sells much faster. And so people sell the fantasy. But I made a commitment in life. I'm not here to sell a fantasy. I'm not going to do that. The Buddha says the desire for that which is unavailable and the desire to avoid that which is unavoidable is the source of human suffering. So anytime you try to avoid a pain and seek a pleasure, you're going to have suffering

because you're going to have an impassion that's not going to be obtained. But if you can embrace both sides in a relationship, in a real goal and in life, you're going to have a resilient, adaptable preparation for a reality of life. But people that are one-sided, they're not prepared for reality. And they get slammed by it. The more you're addicted to one, the more you get the opposite. If you're addicted to protection, you get aggression. Whatever you're addicted to, you get the other to break your addiction because you need to grow and you don't grow.

If everything supported your value, you'd be juvenally dependent. You wouldn't grow. And the challenges in life are making precocious and independent. You need both. Maximum growth occurs in support and challenge, positive and negative. So no evidence, there's no evidence. Even the global peace index on the planet has a balance of peace and war in the world. And every year it shows that data.

But people live in a fantasy and they want the fantasy. They'll buy the fantasy and people will sell them the fantasy. And people in the self-help industry will sell the fantasy and make a fortune off it. Even though people then suffer. And then they blame themselves thinking there's something wrong with them because they're not getting the one-sided world again. Yeah. Please, everybody who's listening out there, you don't need to get rid of any part of yourself to love yourself. embrace both sides of yourself.

Yeah. I love that. I love that. So how do you know what your values are? You know, like I'm listening to you talk and I'm thinking like one of my values in life is serving people. And, you know, I really am clear that I want my life to be of contribution to the world. I'm not here to take anything from the world. I'm here to give back to the world.

And I know that's probably a value of yours as well. So any goal that I set that is to help other people, I can handle the downside. But I love this idea that some of the goals I set when the downside happens, I'm like, yeah, okay, I'm out. I'm now onto something else. So how do I know what my values are? That was the fantasy. Right.

Yeah. Okay. So please first. I'm going to shatter something here. It's not going to feel comfortable. Yeah, go for it. That's why you're here. Go for it.

Okay, so watch us now. Let's say that we each of us have moments where we puff ourselves up and inflate ourselves with sort of a pride. And we also have moments where we deflate ourselves and minimize and put ourselves in kind of shame. And we exaggerate and minimize ourselves. We go back and forth. Each of those are personas. They're not our true self. They're personas and masks we wear. Puff ourselves up, beat ourselves up. When we puff ourselves up, we tend to do towards narcissism. And when we beat ourselves, we tend to go towards altruism to compensate. Narcissism is compensation for pride of the past, hidden agenda of the future. Ultra business compensation from shame of the past, hidden agenda of the future. That's basic psychology. Now, the second you puff yourself up, you want to get something for nothing. The second you beat yourself up, you want to give something for nothing. But the second you're actually in a state of equanimity, authenticity, and equity with somebody else.

because if you puff yourself up and look down on people, you're going to want to take. If you minimize yourself and exaggerate people, you're going to want to give. But if you put those into balance and have equanimity within you and equity between you and other people, you want to have sustainable fair exchange, which is the only thing that contains the secret to fulfillment in business and in economics and in relationships, etc. People want to be loved for who they are, not their personas. So if they don't live authentically and do a sustainable fair exchange, change with people, they don't keep relationships. Now, in business, when you do a service, you want to get paid exactly what you feel it's worth. And when people pay for something,

they want to get exactly what they think it's worth. So if there's a fair exchange, it's sustainable, and they want to continue to do business. If somebody tries to get something, nothing, or try to give something for nothing, the person giving something for nothing is eventually goes, them and I deserve more than that, the person who gets something for nothing, feels that they got something for nothing, feels guilty. Nobody wants to do business with them. So nature automatically feeds a feedback like a homeostat to get us back in equilibrium way of sustainable fair exchange. So I'm not a giver.

I'm not a taker. I try my best to sustain fair exchange because I'm into service with fair reward. I don't want reward without a quality service. I don't want a service without a reward. And if you don't define the rewards and declare it up front in the service and negotiate it, you'll be guessing of what the rewards are. And eventually, that's like bartering and bartering is inefficient. So you want to be up front and truly what you want and what you want to give and make sure it's negotiated and it's fair.

And if you do, you have sustainable fair exchange. And that's more fulfilling in a relationship. It's more fulfilling in a business. You're more likely to build your wealth, more likely to have less brain noise in the brain because narcissism and altruism leads you with noise in the brain. And because it's personas. Everything that's going on in our physiology, psychology, and sociology is trying to get us authentic. And an authentic goal is an objective, not a fantasy. Got it.

Amazing. So I've heard you say before that when you're going along in life and there's like you're having a great, I think specifically the story I heard you say is if you have a great day, get ready because the opposite side is going to be coming. I heard this years ago from you that the opposite is going to show up for you, that we're always on this polarity. And recently I was doing some research. on dopamine. And one of the things that I discovered was that with dopamine, when we go into this

molecule of more and we have this anticipation of something really good about to happen and then it happens, that there'll be a recalibration where there'll be a down moment because you've got to bring that dopamine back down because you can't sustain that dopamine high. Heedonic adaptation. It's called hedonic adaptation. Okay. So, yeah. So explain that. Because, again, I'm a lemonade gal. I'm like, let me find the good. I'll keep going there.

And what I'm learning from this conversation is, hey, you know what? Sometimes it's good to not go there and understand. But what do I do when I have a good day? Do I go, oh, no, I may be in for something. It's not causal. It's not if I'm feeling good. I then will later feel something bad. It's not that.

That's causal. Okay. Wilhelm Wands, who is the earliest psychologist, like with William James, they're the founders of psychology. He said that there are sequential contrast and simultaneous contrast. Sequential contrast is when you are subjectively biased and you have a false positive on the positives and a false negative on the negatives or a confirmation bias on the positives and a disconfirmation on the negatives

and you're now infatuated. You're seeing the positives, but you're blind to the downsides. Your intuition is whispering, trying to point out the downside, but you're ignoring it. You're impulsive, shutting out your intuition. when you do, then all of a sudden you then later over a week, you start discovering the downsides. Now, they were there the whole time, but you are blind to them. Yes.

And so you look like, it looks like there's a sequential positive and then negative. You were just blind. Whenever you're unconscious and you're blind, your intuition is trying to point out the unconscious to make you fully conscious. But your impulse is overriding your intuition. And so your impulse to, I got to have that is a subjected biased survival mechanism that was designed to be able to capture prey and to get the adrenaline running to get that prey that you want to eat or to avoid that predator that you want to get away from. So those are automatically setting up a subjective bias as a survival mechanism to skew and distort

reality. So we end up thinking there's one-sided worlds. And that's why people sell in that area because most people function. Yes. So that's why fantasy sell more than objectives. But intelligent people know that. Porphyry in the third century, Neopatonic philosopher, warned against that. He said the intelligent people know not to go after one-sided things,

but the unintelligent are always vulnerable to the fantasies of the afterlife, the heaven in the afterlife, and the hell if you don't, and all that punishment reward mentality. The cold burden on a moral development showed that the lowest level of moral development is punishment reward mentalities. And then you finally go to a individual subordination to individual authorities, mothers, fathers, preachers, teachers, teachers, subordination to collective authorities, you know, moray's traditions and conventions and eventually transcendence where you finally realize that none of those moral hypocrisies are where life is. Those are all just traps of the amygd so most people are trapped in that amygdala trying to avoid something like that instead of seeing

both sides. So the wise individual says, I'm infatuated. That's a sign I'm blind to the downside. What are the downsides of this? I was at the Ritz Hotel with my wife many years ago and we were there and Boris Becker and his girlfriend was there and the Prince and Princess Japan was there. There was only six of us in the restaurant, my wife and I. And you couldn't not hear the Prince and Princess. They just got married. They came over to France to go on their honeymoon. And they had a 500-page document. And this seems so unromantic to most people who are ignorant and want the fantasy. But they had a 500-page document in front of them at the dinner table. And he was turning to pages and asking her questions and writing notes and she was turning the pages and asking questions and they're getting to know each

other. What about this situation? How do you handle this? And I'm getting to know each other. So they didn't let just their amygdala and their emotions run their passions. They allowed their mission and reason along with the passions to mix. And I watched that. And Becker was infatuated. He was enamored with this African girl. And that was short-lived. They're still together. Now they're the emperor. So this is 30 years ago almost. So I saw that they used their executive function to develop a long-term relationship and to learn how to communicate what they valued in each other's values. And that's a different thing. Most people don't, oh, I don't want to do that.

I just want the pleasure. I want the media dopamine fix. Yes. And that cost people. A media gratification costs life. Long-term vision and foresight pays life. It's same thing with investments. Same thing in business.

Seneca said the Roman poet, he says, you measure an individual by their most distant ends. How big a space and time horizons do they live in? If it's immediate gratification, they're not going places. Yeah. And they're going to be impulsive. They're going to be run extrinsically by the outside world like prey and predator. But the person has a long-term vision.

They're the ones that live intrinsically. And they create their world instead of react to their world. They're designers, not duty people. Amazing. Okay, what do we do when we hit the goal? and like you're striving for something. You hit that moment. You've gone through the ups and downs of it.

We see this with health all the time. And then you take your eye off of it. And all the second is the second you think you're successful, you're on your way down. Success, the perception of success is a depurposing feedback. And the perception of failure is a repurposing feedback system. And that's why dopamine and, the amygla, the idea of searching for success and avoiding failure is a dopamine response,

not an executive center. Executive center is a man on a mission or a woman on a mission. Emission is missing the ions. Passion is passing to one ion to the next. Passion means to suffer. I tell people that you go to study the etymology. It comes from the etymology of poti and passio, which means to suffer. So people don't realize that their amygla is a source of suffering because you're striving

for that which is unavailable. a positive without a negative, and you're trying to avoid that, which isn't a thing, imagine a magnet, I give you a magnet, and it's positive negative. I said, all right, I'm going to get only the positive pole of the magnet. Well, you'd be spending the rest of your life looking for a positive pull of a magnet without the negative pull. You can't do it. James Clark Maxwell got to know, he developed his four partial differential equations to try to defend that and show that. You can't get positive without negatives, part of it.

But people live in the fantasy they do. So when people live in a fantasy, they end up with nightmares. Yeah. And they end up with anxieties and phobias and all kind of stuff because every time I do this, this pain comes there. But when they actually realize that life has two sides and embraces those two sides and prepares for them and sets a real objective, they don't have any, you know, angst about it because they've already thought that and I see it. And I see how it's going to serve me and it's on the way. And I have a realistic expectation. Imagine if I was dating you.

I don't know, we were dating. And I said, I have an expectation. You'll always be nice, never mean. Always kind, never cruel. Old people never rather. Always generous and just enjoy. I'd be angry and aggressive. I'd be blaming you and betraying you, feel betrayed.

I'd be criticizing and challenging you, despair and depression, a desire to exit and escape, and I'd be frustrated and futile. I mean, I would have the ABCDs and negativity on you in seconds because I have a complete delusion about who you're going to be. Yep, yep. And if I expect you to live in my values instead of your own, I'd also have a delusion. And that's what people do. They live in a delusion all the time and then they wonder why their life sucks.

Yeah. Yeah. Mind blowing. And you actually are giving me so much insight as I watch people step into fasting because they see these incredible results that people get, but they don't realize that there can be some downsides to getting there. So you actually gave me a higher perspective and how we can support and help people through the process of fasting.

So, and you have your own fasting. I just want you to tell a little bit of what you told me before we got on about fasting, because you have gone through many years of going into some deep fasts, and I'm kind of curious in those deep fasts what if you had any spiritual insight, what the process was like, what you were searching for. Well, my original pursuit of fasting came because I had strychnine cyanide poisoning as a teenager. And Paul Bragg, who I had the opportunity of me, who wrote the book, The Miracle of Fasting,

and who had started and encouraged, you know, health food stores across America and helped Jack Elaine and Steve Jobs and many other people inspire their lives. He inspired me one night. And I learned from him about the fasting. And he told me, he said that, you know, if you have streaked iron and cyanide poisoning, if you fast, it's stored in the fat tissue.

So if you reduce the fat tissue and have autophagia and detoxication from the liver and the kidney and the skin and things, you could remove those contents by fasting. So I started fasting. I first fasted on a three-day fast. Just water, just a water. That's what you told me. It seemed to go very smooth.

I even surf the whole time. Amazing. I didn't miss a day of surfing. I had plenty of energy. I still had muscle mass. No problem. So I started to do fasting. I left Hawaii.

I hitching back to Texas. I started to go back to try to go back to school. And I started doing fasting. I went to Wharton and I went into the library there. And I found the memoirs and my experiments with truth by Gandhi. And because I knew he had fasted. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to study everything about this man. And I learned I got an exercise from him of writing down everything that you eat and drink during the day.

What are your psychological and physiological symptoms and any insights you got? And I started doing it every day. And I started to fast and I noticed that as my, I had strict nine symptoms, which is, or cramps and contractions and spasms, kind of like a Joe Cocker thing. And I noticed that as I fasted, they started coming down, just started coming down. And it's okay, I had more governance. I noticed that my, my sensory awareness was more acute. I noticed my presence when I was reading was more absorbing. I noticed and I started reading anybody that had fat anything to do with fasting I started reading

about it anything to do with that and I found some of spiritual people doing it you know gurus and and some of them were experimenters and scientists I everything and anything I could get my hands on I devoured it whatever I could find it wasn't an internet in those days yeah and I found Shelton and I found you know lots of people that were done fasting and I did a long fast I did a 35 day fast and I did it under the supervision of one of the biologists at the school and I actually jogged during that time and outran the track team I outran the track team yep they beat me at the beginning they had muscle mass and they beat me just left me in the dark on the takeoff but after eight miles they petered out and I was like a perpetual motion machine and I was just getting going and I was

drinking water and not even sweating hardly so I beat them on the long haul they beat them on the short haul. And then I realized, wow, that's interesting. And I don't even have muscle mass. And I started to, I went on 35 day fast. And by the time I was done, I was not losing any weight. It was stabilizing. My metabolism stabilized. And I thought that's interesting. And I had moments of crisis, blood sugar drops. And then I realized how to breathe. And I did these little exercises I'm breathing. And I noticed that I would recalibrate the pH. And I all of a sudden, I was back on the on the track again. And so I would do periodic fast. And at one year, I did literally only ate 100 days.

It was mainly grapes and things. It's crazy. And people thought, well, you're going to die like that. Had this other doctor said, you're going to die. And he died on the day he thought I was going to die, which I thought was interesting. He just had a premonition of his own death. But then I started to have the symptoms started to go pretty well gone. And so I started going back and eating vegetables.

And I started adding nuts. And I started adding, you know, a bit of dairy. and some yogurt, and I started putting myself back into a more moderate diet. And then I just did periodic fast after that. But I'm today, I can hold my hands steady. That wasn't possible when I was 18 years old. And I don't have any spasms today. It's crazy.

So that fasting was a very useful tool for me. And today I just periodically fast. I'm not a religious faster, but I do fast periodic. I have done two this year. And I did one about three months, four months ago maybe, for just three days. And sometimes I'll do a three-day fast. And it helps autophagia. It helps you center yourself.

It's great for meditation. It's great for reading. I find it a very, very viable tool. But it's not necessarily, it doesn't necessarily help your libido. I can't say it helps my libido. I didn't. No, it's not a libido enhancer. Yeah, I didn't find myself passionate.

I wasn't passionate by that. No. I was more missioned. I was a missionary, not a passionate. Yes. And I noticed that that was. that was great for my long-term goals. And today, you know, I'm not a passionate guy. I'm an inspired man, a man. I'm very inspired by what I do. But I'm not passionate. I'm not an impulse

instinct guy. I think it through. I, I, my, most of my, what I do is strategic. And there's, and some people don't like that. They think, well, you know, you're, you're anticipating things. I said, I know, you like to just impulse and then run your head into a wall. And I like to think things through and keep in the flow. And I have a pretty inspired life. I'm delegated everything other than what's most important me, teach research and write. And I travel full time. So I get to do what I love every single day serving people in fair exchange. So that's, that's fulfillment. If you don't design your life the way you want, you're going to be in your amygdala. And that's where you're going to be overeating and under eating and overeating and over eating and yo-yoing yourself instead of actually

just doing it. There's a thing called the licensing effect. I don't know if you've presented out of people. The licensing effect is an interesting thing to study. If you do something you feel proud of and successful. You automatically give yourself permission to do something you're ashamed of that's unsuccessful. And so if you do something like work out and you're going, okay, now I've worked out, now I can eat chocolate and drink wine again and overeat. And the licensing effect is a homeostack to try to keep us back in center. And the farther you move away from the center and the more you're doing it to get a pleasure instead of a purpose, the more volatile you become. And I see this very yo-yo syndrome in dieters quite often. But

Amazing. Amazing. I'm going to have to go research that one. Let's finish up with this. So I love your fasting story, by the way, because I think there's so many reasons we can fast. And I resonate with everything you say. And there's so much insight you gain. So this season for my podcast is going to really be built upon gratitude because, gosh, we've been through a couple of years of a lot of tumultuous times. And I think it's a great opportunity for us all to ground in gratitude. So do you have a daily gratitude practice? that you use or you seem like maybe you're the type of guy that's just in gratitude all the time. No, no, no one's in gratitude all the time. That's that you know. There we go. Okay, there we go. Good. Yes. I'm worried. But I do have the largest collection of gratitude, a journal of gratitude than probably anybody I've ever met. It's 27,000 pages. So it's a very large document. And I have it literally right in front of me here. I could pull it up actually. But what I do, do is I write down every single day what I had the opportunity to do and what I'm grateful for. And that may be, in fact, your interview will be on that list.

I'll write and they had the opportunity to be interviewed by someone so that had the opportunity to do this, writing this article, had the opportunity to write forward of this book, had the opportunity to meet with this person, had the opportunity to listen to this lecture, had the opportunity to yesterday I did whitewater rafting in Costa Rica and a river. You know, every day I write down what I had the opportunity to do. I got to meet with who I had dinner with lunch with or whatever. And I documented each day those gratitude. I just show you a few if that's a value.

I don't know if you want. No, no, it's all good. No, I believe you. My imagination is. But I just said it. But I do this every day, a little bit every day. And it could be 10 minutes. It could be 20 minutes, 30 minutes even, depending on what I had an opportunity to do.

And so I was told I was born on Thanksgiving Day. My birthday was on Thanksgiving last week. So a week ago. So I was told by my mom, if you count your blessings and you're grateful for what you got, you got more to be grateful for. I wrote a book called Count Your Blessings for that because it was for my mother before she died. And I'm a firm believer that that's gratitude is a sign that you see the hidden order in your apparent chaos. See, most people think there's a superficial gratitude when things support your values,

oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And when things challenge your values, screw you, screw you, screw you, screw you, screw you, kind of thing. That's not where it's at. When you can actually take the chaos side, when you have the challenge and find out how the challenge serves you and how it's serving your values and how it's breaking your fantasies of one-sidedness and getting you grounded in what's actual, now you have true grace. And true grace is when you actually appreciate the order, the hidden order in the apparent chaos. That's when you actually have grace. And that is the one that opens the heart. And that is the one that opens inspiration and enthusiasm and certainty

and presence in life. And that's where the transcendental awareness comes, where you transcend the amygdala's volatilities and you allow yourself to be the angel, not the animal, if you will, the transcendental, not the imminent. Amazing. Well, I could listen to you all day. And it's definitely on my bucket list to attend one of your seminars sometime soon. I've had several of my colleagues that have talked about how transformative you are. And just in the hour conversation here is amazing. How do people find you? If they love this information, they want to dive into your work. I mean, you're so prolific with all your information. I, yeah, I just simply go to Dr. Demartini.com. And if you go there, I would encourage anybody who wants to set real objective

to go on and do the value determination, demortini value determination process. It's free. it's private, and it's a 13 question there. It's 13 questions to ask yourself. Help you determine what really is valuable. Because many people say, yeah, I want to be financial pennant, but then they keep spending money on consumables that depreciate. And they lie to themselves. Yes, I really want a relationship.

But yes, I'm unconsciously making sure I protect myself from the wounds of my past, not really want a relationship. This is basically making you look at what is really important to you. And the first time you do it, I guarantee you're probably going to lie. to yourself. You're going to write down what you think it should be. You ought to be, got to be, have to be must, all the imperatives in your life from all the outside authorities and fantasies. But do it again. And make sure you do this method until you get a tear of gratitude for you. Look at what's really important. What does your life really demonstrate that's important

to you? Not to fantasy, but what your life demonstrates. Because your words mean nothing, your actions mean everything. What does your life demonstrate is truly important to you? By defining that and getting clear on that and setting objectives that align with that, you change your life. Because if you don't fill your day with high priority actions that inspire your day is going to fill up a low-party distractions and don't. So to get a hold of me, just go to my website, take advantage of it. There is, I've written for 1,530 different magazines around the world. There's magazine articles. There's podcasts. There's newspapers. Yes.

Videos. There's YouTube. You could spend the, you'd have to believe in reincarnation as a boonist in a human in order to keep up with this. So much on there. Yeah. Well, you're definitely going on my gratitude tonight when I go to sleep. So Dr. DeMartini, thank you so much. This has just been a personal pleasure. And I know that my listeners are going to be knocked out by what you have to say.

So so grateful for you. And how you've shown up in the world. The world is definitely a better place with you in it. So thank you so much. Thank you. And thank you for the opportunity to be on your show. Thank you. Of course.

Uh-huh. 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.