The Resilient Mind - How To Prime Your Brain For Success - John Assaraf

Episode Date: December 16, 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.Download Mindset App for free and listen to 5000+ of the World's Greatest Motivational Speakers and Thought Leaders: https://bit.ly/mindsetxTheResilientMind 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 How to Prime Your Brain for Success with John Asaraph. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. I have an interesting story I'd love to share with you today. As you may know, I came from a pretty rough and tough background in my childhood, and I wasn't used to hang around with successful people or being part of the world of the wealthy. If I hadn't discovered how to retrain my brain to change my results, chances are I would have ended up in jail or the morgue. Now for me, I had a very successful mentor named Alan Brown, and Alan took it upon himself to show me many of the secrets that wealthy people understood. which allowed them to have what I think is almost a magical ability to set and achieve goals. And it can seem impossible to achieve those same goals to people who don't understand how the

process works. And so as part of my training, Alan had me do something, I think it's very interesting. What he had me do is he had me write down. One extremely specific goal. with a date associated with it of when I would achieve it. But then he asked me to do something that seemed, I guess, pretty boring since I was 19 years old and it seemed redundant to do it over and over again. But he had me read this goal every single day with my fingers scrolling on the words of the page. He told me to do my best to feel the words with my fingers.

Now, I know it may sound crazy, but he wanted me to feel the words. And he wanted me to imagine that what I had written down was true and that the goal that I had written down. One goal, one date was becoming a reality for me. So he had me in essence, read, put my fingers across the words, and see myself moving towards those goals. And what he shared with me is that when you see, read, and feel this goal in this way, you're actually sending an electrical signal to your brain, from your finger up your arm to your brain, which does what?

It makes you much more likely to achieve this goal. Little did he know that what he said would later be 100% validated by neuroscientific discoveries. Let me explain. There is a term in the brain research, a science field that goes like this. The neurons, brain cells, that fire together, wire together, What this means is that when you activate by hearing, seeing, running your finger on your goals, when you activate and wire the different brain cells together, they formulate a pattern. The more you reinforce that pattern, the more it becomes a strong automatic pattern in your brain

that causes you to think, feel, and do things differently so your reality changes. Now, on any given day, you have 30, 40, 50,000 thoughts popping up in your head. Some of these thoughts are caused by internal influences, such as your memories, your beliefs, habits that you have. Others are caused by external influences like text you, receive, Facebook, cell phones, traffic, bird flying across, you know, the sky, into your window. These thoughts cause your mind, and even mine, to be scattered all over the place most of the day with no clear direction or focus. And so if you think of your brain as an organ, right?

I'm going to pull my brain from right over here. I've got a brain, okay, right over here. It's not my brain, but it's a brain. If you think of your brain as an organ that you could put to work for yourself like a loyal servant, then what you also need to do is you need to direct it. And if you don't, it'll just wander all over the place with no idea what you actually want. So if your goals are scattered, so will your focus be. But as soon as you set a goal and choose to consistently, and consciously focus on it, your brain realizes that this is important to you.

And then what happens is it starts to automatically notice ways to bring you things that you want from the perspective of teaching how to focus on it. And this is one of the best ways to activate and create a new pattern in your non-conscious brain, which you've probably heard a million times. is where your real power is. When you set a goal that excites you, you're activating a part of your brain called the nucleus accumbens and the insula.

Now, this is closely related to the motivational center of your brain, which is responsible for releasing the feel-good chemical dopamine and even some adrenaline to get you going to achieve your goals and dreams. and this is like activating your go muscle. When you review your goal by seeing, reading, and emotionalizing, achieving this goal, you're in essence giving your brain clear instruction.

And specifically, when you repeat it over and over again, this goes from your conscious thinking brain to your non-conscious brain. And when you do this, for one day, seven days, 30 days, 60 days, you are basically differentiating that goal from the 30 to 50,000 other random thoughts you have daily. And when that happens,

you're using your brain by instructing it what to use the non-conscious power center for. So the question is, does this work? I studied at the Dominican University found the people who simply, and clearly write down their goals are 42% more likely to achieve them. Now, if you want to know something even more amazing, you can supercharge the process and the automatic neurological response

your brain experiences when you do this one thing. Ready? Find a big reason why you must achieve your goals. For example, You might have a goal to earn or get a specific amount of money. Let's say you want to earn $37,000 six months from now or $50,000 a year from that. The amount is irrelevant. Whatever your goal is, just by doing that and writing it down and reviewing it, you're more likely by 42% to achieve it.

But when you write down three reasons why you must. achieve your goal, not want to, but must achieve your goal, your brain realizes, wow, this is really important. And when you turn on that motivational part of your brain, the motive for action is your why. Let me repeat that. The motive for taking action is the why. This is one of the many simple ways to start training your brain to automatically think feel and do more of what you want and less of what you don't want to do now you may have heard that if your why doesn't want to make you cry because it's so emotionally positive for you where achieving it is going to make you feel so amazing about yourself and your life and being proud and having meaning in your life

maybe you have the wrong goal or maybe you just haven't gotten fully associated with the deeper reasons why you want to achieve your goals. I remember my parents struggled so much when I was younger. There's an old saying that goes like this. There was always too much month left at the end of the money. And I remember my parents fighting about the lack of money in our lives and how they couldn't afford this and couldn't afford that. And I remember that I hated that feeling, but I hated even more the fights and the arguments that they had throughout my childhood. And I made a decision when I was very, very young, that I would never do that. But even more than that, I made a decision that I was going to be able to retire them in a way that they felt proud and meaningful and loved. And that was really one of my biggest reasons why when I was in my 20s and 30s and 40s

was to develop the skills and to be able to use my mind the right way to retire my parents. And thank God for me and my brother and sister. We've been able to do that. And my parents are in their 80s now. And the feeling for me of going back and remembering my why, one of my big whys, has transformed the way I think and feel. and how I achieve my goals and dreams. And so can you just associate for one minute?

Think of one big goal that you have. It could be for yourself or for your children, for your family or your extended family. What's one thing that you want to achieve? Get that in your mind for just a moment. Now, I want you to think and then feel why. Why would achieving that goal make you feel so phenomenal, why?

And what I think you'll discover is when you can dig a little bit deeper and find a big reason why, you'll find the motive for your actions. And that's just a really good tool to use any time, get totally emotionally connected to that. What I'd like to share with you is I love studying the brain. I love studying how this works. How does motivation work? How do the fear circuits stop us from achieving our goals, whether it's fear of failure or fear of success or fear of disappointing, you know, yourself

or fear of disappointing a loved one. And what I've done by studying the brain for the last 35 years and also connecting with some of the most brilliant brain researchers in the world is I've put together something called the Brainathon. And we've got seven of the world's leading brain experts who are really amazing at showing people how to number one recognize what may be holding you back. Is it self-doubt? Is it lack of confidence?

Is it lack of certainty? Is it past traumas you've had in the past? Is it your lack of knowledge or skills on how to really achieve your financial and life's goals that's holding you back? What are the mental or emotional resistance points that once you remove them, get rid of those as obstacles, would allow you to put your foot on the gas. and really just achieve more of your goals and dreams. Well, if you want to learn what I call

the evidence-based methods and skills to be able to take your foot off the break, put your foot on the gas, so you can not just set and have the big goals and dreams that you have, but you can have a clear path towards how to get rid of what is in your way and have a clear path to what you need to do to achieve your goals, join me and Dr. Sreeny Peeley from Harvard. Dr. Daniel Friedland, who's an amazing leader on self-leadership,

Dr. Evian Gordon, were the top neuroscientists in the world, Sharon Pearson, Mark Waldman, David Bach, a financial expert on how to, you know, manage your money better, how to get out of debt, how to retire rich automatically. Do you want to learn from some amazing people? Join me for our fifth annual Brainathon. It's an amazing day of free training where we will show you how to achieve every one of your goals. Here is what you need to do. I want you to come to the event for free, just sign up on this page and come with one or two of your biggest goals and dreams, the ones that scare you, the ones you don't know how to achieve.

And I want you to come prepared with one reason why you really, really want to achieve it. You do those two things, and I promise you, I, with my team, we will teach you how to achieve your goals and dreams. So sign up and really get ready to take your life to the levels and the heights you know within you, you are capable of achieving. And there's one more thing that I want to make sure you totally get and understand. Whatever challenges you've had in the past, whatever failures you've had, whatever circumstances I've, you created or happened to you. Whatever is happening right now that may not be working in your favor. I can almost guarantee you that based on what we've learned on the neuroscience, it's not your fault. And we will show you exactly why it's not your fault and how to let go

of any of the self-blame or shame or guilt that you may be feeling or have felt that it's your fault because I can tell you until you understand how this works and you understand that your conditioning of how you see and feel and think is really what's driven your behaviors and your results you will be blown away how easy it is for you to let go of the shame the blame or the guilt that you may be feeling about why you may not be further ahead in your life than you would like to have been by now. the Brainathon and you will be amazed at what you discover about yourself and how to take the shackles off

and achieve every one of your goals. Sign up and we'll see you on the fifth annual Brainathon. Hit this orange button right now and that'll be the first step to changing and transforming your life. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.