The Resilient Mind - Do These Things to Achieve Your Dreams in 12 Months - John Assaraf

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

John Assaraf is a renowned expert featured in the influential film and book The Secret, contributing significantly to its global success. He is the founder of NeuroGym, a company dedicated to using the latest in brain science to help individuals improve their mental fitness and achieve personal excellence.Upcoming Event: How to Manage Feat and Uncertainty in Tough Times (Register Today)Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to do these things every day to achieve your dreams in 12 months with John Asaraf. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. What happened for me personally when I was a teen between age of 13 to 17, I got into enormous amount of trouble with the law. I did a lot of unethical things. And I was getting myself in so much trouble. And I had one mentor that my brother introduced me to. His name was Alan Brown. He was a very successful philanthropist, entrepreneur. And he agreed to me with me for lunch one day. And he asked me, like, why are you doing these things? You seem like a nice young kid.

And I said, I don't know. I just want to make some money and I just want to fit in. He goes, but you seem like you're intelligent. Why don't you just use your brain's natural abilities? I go, well, listen, based on my education and based on what the teachers have told me, I'm not going to do very well in life. And I left high school in grade 11 thinking that I'm not worthy enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough. And this one man in one minute, in one meeting, changed my life. Because he asked me, what goals do you have? And I said, what do you mean what goals do I have?

I said, I want to go out this weekend to the bar. I want to have some good food. I want to find a nice young lady who maybe hook up with. And he says, no, no, but what are your bigger goals? And I didn't have any. So he actually sent me home. And he said, fill out these pieces of paper. And on the pieces of paper, it said, like, what age do you want to retire by?

Like, I was 19. This was May of 1980. I wasn't even started yet. They said, but just fill out these papers. So I said, I want to retire by the time of $45 with $3 million. I want to have a Mercedes. I want to have a house. I want to travel the world.

I want to have a great lifestyle. And so I came back on Monday, and he looked at it, and he asked me one question, and that question transformed my life. And he said, are you interested in achieving these goals? Or are you committed? And I stopped, and I looked at it. He was standing up, I was sitting at my desk there at his office, and I asked him, Mr. Brown. I said, what's the difference? And he said, if you're interested, you'll do what's convenient.

You'll come up with stories and excuses and reasons why you can't, and you'll use your education as an excuse, you'll use your stories as an excuse, you'll use the fact your father was a cab driver and was a gambler and never had any money. You'll use all of that as your reasons why you can't. He says, but if you're committed, you will do whatever it takes. You'll let go of your stories. You'll let go of your excuses. You'll let go of all the reasons you currently have that are formulating your identity of yourself. and you learn how to let that go and become who you are destined to become.

I had been in so many situations where I was so embarrassed and ashamed for myself and for my mother and father and here was a man who was kind, generous, caring, empathetic. He didn't talk down to me. He lifted me up. But then he also said, I can show you how.

If you are committed, I can show you how. And I had nothing to lose at that point. So the first source of shame when I was five, I moved from Israel where I was born to Montreal. And I had just started kindergarten in Israel. And then I was thrown into a class with 50 kids in Montreal in grade one. I didn't speak English or French. And so I felt stupid. I felt like I sat there, you know, looking up at the ceilings, bugging the other kids,

and was consistently reprimanded, consistently put it. the principal's office and then I was consistently you know brought you know to my knees with my parents my father was physically abusive which you know is challenge in itself his words weren't a way you know that he communicated hands and feet were his way of communicating and so when I did the wrong things that was the punishment and so I felt embarrassed that I wasn't smart enough that I wasn't good enough that I wasn't going to amount too much and And back then, school was, you know, my parents were trying to say, go to school, do well.

That's your way out of, you know, where we were living. That's your way out of this life that we're having, which wasn't a bad life. We had food on the table. We had a roof over our heads. How about there was always a struggle? And Mr. Brown offered me some hope. It really amounted to that. I offered me gentle, kind, love, and hope.

without embarrassing me, shaming me, or making me feel guilty. It was his demeanor of how kind he was. He was extremely successful. Real estate offices, real estate buildings, a wife, Lori, children, just kindness. You know, just raw kindness, there was nothing for him to gain from helping me. He didn't know me. But he just was kind. and it was one of the first times that there wasn't a hidden agenda

or somebody just putting me down for being a degrading human being or degraded human being. And he made me promise. If I took what he taught me, I'd teach it to others. When I was in my 20s, one of the things that Alan put me on a path to was personal development. You know, read a book a month, go to events, listen to cassette tapes back then of motivational stuff for motivation, for information, for information. inspiration for strategies, for tactics of what to do to lift, raise your level of skill and knowledge.

So I went to this event and I brought up this challenge that I had with my father. And the instructor said, like, when are you going to forgive him? I said, never. I'm never going to forgive him. Fuck that. Forgive him. There's so much pain. And the instructor said, well, if you're never going to forgive him, then you're the one taking the poison pill hoping he's going to die or he's going to be affected. He says, you don't forgive him for him.

You forgive him so you can move on. I was like, aha, number one. And then he said, why don't you ask your father why he did it? Like, why was he like that? And so when I mustered up enough courage on the phone with my father, I said, Dad, like, how come you even ever said,

I love you? He says, well, my father never said he loved me. That's not what a man says. But you say to my sister, says, well, that's okay to say to a girl or to a woman. He said, why did you hit me so much? Why did you? He says, because you were being a bad boy. I said, but why didn't you talk to me?

Like, why didn't you just talk? And he says, well, because my father hit me too. I had to put you in your place. I had to teach you the right way to stop the behavior. And it was at that moment that I realized he just didn't know better. That's what he learned was the process to try and help me. So he's not a malicious human being. He's a kind, loving, caring man.

But he was taught to get compliance hit. So the pain will cause you not to do it again. And in theory, okay, understand the brain science today, it does work in some cases. but especially with children, even adults, the physical and mental and emotional trauma that's created when somebody who loves you also inflicts so much pain to you, there's confusion, the neural network in the brain. So as I love this person, my mother, my father, my best friend, whatever, and then there's so much pain associated. Now we have these patterns in our brains of this love and fucking hate. Love and pain.

And it's very, very confusing. But after this dialogue with him, I started to tell him, I love you. And it took three years. I used to call him every week. I started telling him, I love you, Dad. Hang up. I love you, Dad. Hang up.

I love you, Dad. Hang up. Then one day he says to me, I love you too, boy. And then he has never not said, I love you to me, my brother, or my sister since then. Let me come back to the Alan Brown story. When I came back that following couple of days with my goals, and he asked me committed or interested, I said I'm committed, shook my hand, he then put me through real estate school for five weeks.

I graduated from real estate school, May 20th, 1980, and the only reason those dates are ingrained in my brain, I passed the real estate test on my own without cheating. So that was step one. When I came back to the office, he had the forms that I'd filled out. He says, great, sit down. I want you to read every one of them, every morning that you come in the office at 7.30, and I want you to run your fingers across them. The goals that I had.

So he had me write my vision for health, wealth, relationships, career, business, finances, charity, fun, experiences, everything, every year of my life. He had these documents. He said, I want you to read them every day. And you're going to do it while you come into the office so that I know that you've done them. And I want you to run your fingers across them as you're reading them. And then when you're finished one paragraph, close your eyes, and I want you to feel, what would it be like if that was true? So you got me to see it, to touch it, to close my eyes, and visualize it, and to feel it. So at the time, he didn't understand what he was really doing, but he was causing me to create new neural patterns in my brain that did not exist before.

The only success that I'd ever really seen was on lifestyles of the rich and famous. And I said, one day, I want a life like that. And so every single day for a year, I had to do that. And it only took 10 or 15 minutes. And there was also beliefs. You talked about what else was in there. He also asked me to write down, what would you have to believe about yourself in order to achieve those goals? I said, well, I'd have to believe I'm smart enough, but I don't.

He goes, I don't want to know what you don't. He says, what would you have to believe? Well, I have to believe I'm smart enough. I'd have to believe I'm deserving enough. I'd have to believe I'm worthy enough. I'd have to believe I'm capable of doing this. I'd have to believe these things. I wrote out a bunch of things and he added a few more.

He says, great, now I want you to record those things. And on your way to work and on your drive to look at real estate homes, because 19 getting into real estate, you listen to those over and over and over and over again until you can recite every single one of them. So he taught me the power of repetition. He taught me the power of looking at stuff, touching stuff, feeling stuff, seeing stuff, hearing stuff, memorizing stuff. And at the time I was 19, I said, I mean, I felt this was fucking ludicrous to me, right?

This is like, what the hell am I doing here? It was like, it was nuts. But that first year, at 19, I made like $30 some odd thousand dollars, which was five grand more than my dad made as a cab driver. So I said, something's working. I just kept doing it. I was too afraid not to. So I kept doing it. In the second year, I made $151,000. Wow. Five times. Now, in the second year, he started upgrading my knowledge and skills more. So he started to say, okay, instead of doing this now, now you've graduated to doing this. And he taught me some upgraded skills. And so the combination of training my brain at a young age with beliefs that I've

wanted to have. He taught me the right habits to have, daily rituals, you know, for goal achievement versus goal setting. So he said, everybody sets goals. Either they write them down or they don't, they have them in their head. I'm going to teach you how to achieve goals. The law of Goya is simply get off your ass. So if you think and you believe and you emotionalize, you visualize, and you create your plan for how am I actually going to achieve this, So what do I need to do? When am I going to do it? How specifically? How am I going to tweak it, measure it, and iterate it so that I'm consistently making progress? I learned the value of progress versus perfection. None of my mentors ever had me focus on perfection. They had me focus

on progress to just keep getting better. Little incremental gains every day, every week, every month, every quarter. And even when you move backwards a couple of steps, what's the progress that you made and what you learned? So I was taught that failure is an opportunity to learn. And I was also taught to disassociate me being a failure from failing. My brain was screaming, that's bullshit. That's not true. You're not successful. You're not earning that amount of money. You're not smart. You're not this. But I was also taught at the same time that when that happens, first and foremost, that's normal. That's the old self and the old patterns trying to fight for their life. And he said, with repetition and emotion and consistency,

initially it's hard. And you have to use conscious effort to create the new beliefs. He says, but over 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 180 days, that new pattern that you're focusing on and paying attention to, your brain basically says, well, I guess you really don't need those old patterns. You keep activating these new ones. Let's just make these ones work and let's make these real. But I wanted to understand what happened. And with the, even the law of attraction, you know, I was taught the law of attraction. I was 23, 24 years old. Also at a real estate conference, they were talking about this law of attraction thing, that there's this energy, everything's made up of energy. I am energy. You are energy.

And my thoughts, you know, create this resonance between what I attract and what I don't. I'm like, oh good, I like that shit. You know, I want to attract more of the good stuff, right? And so I bought in. Like, I bought into stuff that just made sense to me. But then I was a voracious student. I wanted to understand how. Like, explain to me how it works.

Like, if somebody tells me visualize, I go, why? Like, how does it work? Like, you ask me to visualize, like, why does it work? Like, why should I invest my time on that versus something else? If you're asking me to use affirmations, like how specifically, why, how does it work? If you're asking me to emotionalize, well, what's happening in me to tell me I need to create these false senses of feelings? I want to know why it works. It has to do with circuits in the brain and neurochemicals that are released.

And so when we feel something, chances are that we're going to release dopamine in the brain, the feeling good neurochemical that activates the reward center of the brain. And Chancellor, if we feel that and we have this positive emotion around it and that neurochemistry is flooding our brain and our body with feel-good chemicals, we're actually activating the motivational center of the brain. And so when we visualize, when we set a goal, when we take an action step, when we emotionalize, when we read our goals, the initial flood of neurochemicals, dopamine, serotonin, feel-good chemicals, and then if we share it with a friend, oxytocin, those three neurochemicals, those are the neurochemicals of goal achievement. But then there's the other side of it,

the other circuits of fear, of stress, where norepinephrine, cortisol, or epinephrine, the stress hormones can be released as well. And so I'm fascinated. and I want to teach people the stuff that we've learned about beliefs, self-esteem, self-worth, fears, and the stuff that really holds people back. Because all the how-to, how to get healthy and stay healthy, we know. How do I build a business and sustain it? We know. How do I get into a relationship and make it success?

We know. We know most of the how-to for anything that anybody wants to do in this time frame that we live in. So the how-to is the easiest part of the equation. So the harder part of the equation is why am I not doing the things that I know I should be doing? And why am I not doing the things that I could find out easily how to do? So in this is going back sometimes, I think in 1992, we were stuck. But I knew there was more possibility. There was room for growth.

And I wanted to figure out if the stuff that I did in the 80s, when I was a kid, you know, that broke free, would it work with some of my agents? And so we took 75 agents, randomly agents said, hey, do you want to get into a six-month program to, like, retrain your brain, your subconscious brain around your beliefs about what it's possible for you to achieve, around your habits of what you have to do in order to achieve that, and we focused on retraining their subconscious mind. And so for six months, they had to go through a process of listening to certain audio tapes,

reading certain materials every day, and following the process of training their brain, brain, specifically their subconscious brain, which controls 95 to 98% of all of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors today. And within six months, that group increased sales by $100 million, $100 million. And I said, holy shit, right? This is working. And so we started to teach. Some of what we teach now in NuroGim. Actually, now we have the technologies. We have the systems that are far better than what we did back in the 90s. And we went from $1.2 billion to $4.5.5 $25 billion a year.

And it wasn't because we taught them any more skills to be real estate agents. We taught them how to change the way they thought about themselves. We taught them how to change their habits. Our agents who made $750,000 or more were in front of a client 75% of the time. And we asked all the agents that weren't in front of more clients, like, why are you doing that? Like, why aren't you in front of people that are going to help you earn more income? Oh, well, we're busy doing this and doing this and doing this and they had stories and excuses and reasons why. And so part of the work that I love to do now is really help people understand what is your story?

Like, what's the story you're telling us? Because we all have a story. We have a money story, a relationship story, a health story. We have a story for everything. And then that story keeps recreating our lives over and over and over. And we have beliefs that support the story. We have habits that support the story. We have people that support the story.

We have systems that support our story. And so my question, I always ask people, who would you be with a different story? Sure. So Maxwell Malz wrote a great book many, many years ago in the, probably the 70s, called Psycho-Cybernetics. And Maxwell Malts was a surgeon who performed surgery on people. And what he noticed is even after plastic surgery

that he performed on people, some people didn't see any change in their faces. And it was visible to everybody else, but not to them. So we all have a map of reality. We have a map of what we think we look like. And any deviation on the physical level to that map, to that visual representation we have in our brains that doesn't match the map, your brain deletes or distorts it. So when we were working with real estate or when I work with business owners, in addition to upgrading knowledge and skills, if you think about how, let's say, income, we have set points for how much income we earn. So whether it's 10,000 or 20 or 50 or 100 or a million, it doesn't matter. We get this set point and then we behave the way we need to behave and we feel what we need to feel to earn that income.

And over a period of time, it becomes part of the brain's default mode network. So we develop set points for everything. And so if the set points in the brain, and there's a psychosoibernetic mechanism in the brain, a control and response mechanism in the brain, and it's our brain, why not learn how to reset the set point? And so now we're looking at what technologies are available to help reset that, what evidence-based methods are there to set that, or to reset that. And so when we take, let's say, visualization, right, and you start to see yourself, even if the picture's not clear in your mind of achieving the next level of your success, whether it's

releasing weight and keeping it off, getting into a relationship that you love and are happy, and whether it's to make two or three or five times more money and live a certain type of lifestyle that allows you to do the things that freedom with having money allows you to do, If you start in your mind first and you impress that through conscious efforts into the subconscious mind, it then causes thoughts and emotions and behaviors. So I like to work from the outside in and from the inside out. So use both. I want every advantage.

I want to release it. I like to use language patterns as well that are going to empower me versus disempower me. Self-talk is so critical. And so I'm consistently paying attention to how am I speaking to myself? Am I speaking to myself in a kind, motivating, empathetic, compassionate way? Or am I consistently self-deprecating and putting myself down? I used to think a lot of it. When I was younger, I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not worthy.

Those thoughts and lots of fear, fear of being embarrassed, fear of failure, fear of being ashamed. And I still have the thoughts every once in a while, especially when I'm saying, setting new goals. Those come up, holy macro, they come up so freaking fast. Are you smart enough to achieve that? Are you good enough to achieve that? Even when I got into really diving deep into the brain science and even my new book, I was petrified to release my book. It took me two years to write it. Because now I'm entering another whole domain of neuroscience and neuropsychology with world-renowned experts that I've worked with for years. But now here I am putting myself out there with, hey, this is neuroscientifically correct. So I had to make sure that it was.

but there's a lot of fear. But I understand what the emotion of fear is. It's a subconscious trigger that causes this feeling that I don't like. And it's a ghost signal for me, not a stop signal for me. Well, fear is an emotion. Emotions are all triggered at the subconscious level. They release neurochemicals that causes a feeling. We are consciously aware of feelings that are triggered at the subconscious level.

The feeling is the end point. of the human experience in the physical body. And so when you have something in your brain that a neural network says, well, what if this book comes out and you fail? What if it's not good enough? What is scientifically not correct? What if? What if?

My brain's going to process that the same way as your brain and everybody else's brain, because everybody's brain's the same. The mechanism of how the brain works, it's Einstein's brain, Hitler's brain, Genghis Khan's brain, Tom Billion's brain, John Astor's brain, all the same functionality. So if you understand the mechanics of what's supposed to happen, then you say, okay, great, when I feel this, then what am I going to do? So I like to use an analogy of a car. You're driving a car and you're talking to a friend of yours and a light pops up on the dash.

You don't take a hammer and hit a light. It's a signal. Something's happening in the engine, in the trunk, in the tires. happening, emotions and feelings aren't positive or negative. They're empowering or disempowering to varying degrees if you don't understand them. And so if you think about fear, right, how does a firefighter go into a burning building when there's this enormous adrenaline and epinephrine, you know, that could stop most people dead in their tracks? They learn, here's the feeling, it's normal. Do you have the knowledge and the skills and the preparation to

deal with this in a safe way? Go. If you don't, now you retreat. So we have this phenomenal brain, right? It's genius abilities. We can't figure out how to replicate it anywhere with billions of dollars, but we are getting some of the user's manual now. So when you feel fear, what should you do. I teach the first two inner sizes that I teach every one of our students. Number one is called Take Six Calm the Circuits. So if you have this unpleasant, anxious, fearful emotion, energy in motion, right? And it's unpleasant and the brakes have gone on. If you just take six deep breaths in through your nose, out through your mouth like you're breathing through a straw, you will deactivate the stress response center, which means blood is going to go back to the left prefrontal cortex, the Einstein part of the brain can actually think

through this problem because what happens when the stress response center is activated, blood goes away from that into the fear response so you have epinephrine cortisol, adrenaline, to be able to get you out of this situation. It's part of our instinctual brain, part of the reptilian brain. The first part of the brain that was developed was that, then the mammalian brain, the limbic system, then the neocortex, the thinking brain. So when our brain has this signal of, oh my God, you might get hurt, you might lose this, you might get in trouble, you might be embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, judged, etc., that part of

the brain is going to get activated. So if you take six deep breaths first, calm down, calm the circuits first, then do inner size number two is called AIA, AIA. The first A-I-A is for awareness. What am I thinking right now? What am I feeling right now? What am I sensing right now? What is my behavior right now?

So, thoughts, feelings, sensations, awareness of behavior. What's my intention right now? That's the I. Well, my intention is to move forward. I want to do this. Great. What's one very small action step that you can take? Now, the reason you want to take one small action step is one small action step your brain can handle.

If it's one small step towards it, the threat response goes away. But if you focus on the end game right away, you're going to get that rush and that instant trigger of the fear response, stress response. So the first thing you want to do is learn how to manage your mindset and what you focus on. Learn how to manage your emotions because they drive your behavior more than anything else because we move away from pain and we move towards pleasure, but we move away from pain

a thousand times faster. And pain wires in the brain faster for survival mechanisms. So purely from a neural science perspective, just understanding self, once you understand, okay, this feeling is normal, okay, what should I do?

Take six common the circuits, Aya, and now you can start being progressive and make progress towards what you want. Now, while you're in the, you know, in the, what am I thinking feeling, it's a chance to be aware. And the biggest gift we have as human beings is our awareness. Because awareness is what gives you choice and choice is what gives you freedom. Most people are living their lives in a reactive state, automatic reactive state because of these set points that we start talking about.

So we're in this repetitive cycle over and over and over and over. We react to the same things. We behave the same way. We eat the same foods. We dress the same way just to maintain that homeostasis and comfort zones. And we've never been taught. Like, when were we taught as kids? Like, here are your six core emotions.

Here's the way you deactivate your stress center or fear. Here's how you activate your imagination center. Here's how you have more focus. Here's how you develop a new belief. Here's how you develop a new habit. Here's how you release one. We haven't been taught that. We've been told there important things, but we haven't been given the tools.

and then we haven't practiced the tools enough to be able to make them part of our unconscious competence brain. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.