The Resilient Mind - How to Train Your Brain to Get What You Really Want - John Assaraf

Episode Date: July 15, 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 How to Train Your Brain to Get What You Really Want with John Asaraf. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Yeah, when I was a kid, I had a lot of my own challenges. I didn't have confidence in myself. I didn't believe in myself. I had some big challenges, you know, with the law and getting to trouble in school and getting to trouble.

outside of school and I was really fortunate when I was 19 years old I met a wonderful gentleman who was very successful with his family was very successful giving to charities he was very healthy he was very gentle and kind and he really wanted to do good in the world not just for himself but to make the world a better place and he started to teach me that the reason I was getting into trouble the reason I wasn't getting great results was what I believe about myself.

And he taught me the power of my beliefs. He taught me the power of what I do every single day matters. He taught me the power of the intelligence in the universe that I could utilize my brain, like a radio, you know, sends a signal out into the universe. He said, you could send a signal out using the power of your thoughts. He says, but you're also capable of receiving information, just like the great inventor,

the great inventors, whether it was Albert Einstein, whether it was Edison, Michael Angelo, any of the great inventors, they had these ideas that came to them, and they were just normal human beings, but they took advantage of the messages that they were getting in their hearts and their intuition. And so he taught me some of the power of the brain, and by using what I learned, I learned that I could achieve a lot more than I ever thought was possible when I was used. younger. And so now I want to take what I've learned for, you know, 33 years and teach it to other people to make the path for them a little bit easier. He was actually a client of my brother. My brother's a tennis pro, and he used to play the professional, you know, pro circuit.

And when he came back from playing the pro circuit when he was in his, you know, early 30s, he got a job at a tennis club. And this man was one of his clients at the tennis club. And my brother said, hey, listen, you're getting in a lot of trouble. And maybe if you talk to this man, he can help you. And so I went to meet with this man and he asked me, you know, why do you think you're getting in trouble? I said, I don't know. I was getting to a lot of trouble and I was doing some very dangerous things that I could have either died or gone to jail for. And when he started to share with me, to teach me that my entire reality was based on what I believed was real, and what I believed was true about myself, about what's possible, and that I

could change that, that's when my life started to change. And he said, if you start to change the way you think and you start to learn every day for one hour to upgrade your knowledge and your skills, and then you take action every day on the things that are the most important instead of all the different things that you can do, it says if you focus on doing three to five things every day towards your goals, he says in one year, you'll be at a totally different destination. Three years, big distinction. Five, ten years, your life won't be the same. And I was tired of living a mediocre to less than mediocre life. And so I said, listen, you seem to have a good plan and a good path. You're making millions of dollars. You're giving a lot of money to charity. You're happy. You're

healthy, you've got a great family. I want that. He said, if you want that, follow the blueprint. Don't try to figure it out. Just follow the blueprint. And that was another lesson that he shared with me is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. If you want to fly right now, you don't have to figure out how to fly. You know, there's already a blueprint for how to generate or create an airplane. So if you want to be healthy, there's already a blueprint. If you want to make more money, there's already a blueprint. If you want to buy real estate or the stock market or start a business and grow a business, there's people before us that have already got the blueprint. And all you have to do is paint the numbers inside the box. And then you can use your creativity.

So I just became a very good follower for a long time of things that worked. And when you follow things that work, it's like having the combination to a safe. If someone gives you the combination to a safe and they tell you turn this way a little bit, from this way. a little bit, turn this way a little bit, turn this way a little bit, then open it. You can have access to it, but most people don't look for the combination, and then even when they get the combination, they try it in the wrong order. And so I learned at a very young age, thank God, you know, to at least follow the initial plans. Then if you want to get creative, then you could add your creativity, your genius to that as well. Sure, the first thing that you have to ask is

what are your highest values? So for me, for example, my number one highest value is God, my number two values my health, my number three values my family, my number four value is contribution to the lives of others, my number fifth value is fun. So every day when I wake up, I think about what am I doing today to connect with God? For me. Just for me. It doesn't have to be any. It's not religious.

It's just for me. Then what do I need to do every day to make sure that I'm healthy? What I need to do every day to make sure that my family and my dear close friends or part of my family that I have the relationship that's rich. Then contribution. How do I use my passion, my gifts, my stories, my things I've not done well, I have done. How do I share that with the world? And in doing that, I feel good. And then I have to have fun. And so if I do those five things every day, then at the end of every day, I've had a great day.

And if you have a lot of great days, then you end up with a really great life. And that doesn't mean that you don't have ups and downs and things that don't work and trouble that happens and things that come up, but if you keep your focus on what's important, then the rest of the stuff is really inconsequential. And there isn't a hundred different things you have to do. There's two or three things in each one of the areas that's important to you. When you do those every day, you're so far ahead of the curve. So I have daily rituals. So when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is I do a gratitude exercise where I ask my myself, usually in bed, what am I most grateful for today?

And usually, you know, I'm grateful for my health. I'm grateful for my wife. I'm grateful for my children. I'm grateful to be alive. I'm grateful, you know, for my family. I'm grateful to have experiences. I do that eyes closed and while I think about that, I feel it. And so the feeling starts every day with a great feeling. I start every day with a great feeling. Yeah, I have an internal dialogue. I see images of the things that I'm thinking about and that just takes me two minutes, just two minutes when I wake up. And then I go to exercise to take care of my body. And so I do a variety of different things. I hike, I bike, I work on aerobics, I work on strength, I work with weights. I do whatever it is, I just do it to give my body the physical exercise.

So then in my gym, I have two things. I have a vision board. So I have my vision board for my physique and my body and my health. But then I also have in my gym something called an achieved board. So I have in my gym, in my home gym, I have a place where I sit. And before I start my meditation, I look at my vision board from the past. Okay. So I get connected to the different things that I've been able to achieve,

and I remember every day when I set my mind and my focus to achieving goals, I can achieve all of my goals. Right, but what I also do is I reinforce. Most people focus on what's not working. This isn't going well. This didn't work. I want to remind myself every day of look how many things I was able to accomplish. By being clear, by being passionate, by using these rituals,

so before I go into my meditation, which is with my eyes closed, I look at my achieved board. I get emotionally associated with it to remind myself that when I set my mind to achieve something, I can do it. And then I look across, because I have a mirror in the gym, and I look across and I say, I love you just the way you are. And I said, I accept you just the way you are. With all of your skills and passion and faults and insecurities and doubts and fears,

I accept you just the way you are. And I smile and then I close my eyes. And I do about a 15-minute meditation. Wow. And in my meditation, sometimes I have no thoughts where I'm just one with the universe and everything. Other times I'll just follow my thoughts and I'll just pay attention, be mindful of where are they going this morning? Where are they going today? So I'll follow my thoughts and I'll just follow them.

Other times I'll follow a thought and say, release that one. And follow another thought and say, release that one. So I'm teaching my brain that I'm in control of my brain. See, most people don't realize that they are not their brain, that their brain is an organ. No different than your heart, no different than your legs, no different than your hand. And since we're not our brains, we can learn how to use the different parts of our brain. And so I've been doing many, many years of studying on the brain.

And if you don't understand the different parts of your brain, that's like having a sports car in your driveway, but you don't know how to turn it on, or you don't know how to change the gears, or you don't know how to put on the radio, you don't know how to turn the heat on. Yes, you have a powerful machine, but you don't use it. And most people, not because they're dumb,

it's because most people have never been taught how powerful their brains are. and for a simple reason that we haven't really known how powerful is. We've had ideas, we've thought about it, but for the first time in the history of our species, hundreds of thousands of years on the planet, we're finally in the last 10, 12 years, able to look a little bit inside the brain.

And there's more circuitry in your brain than there isn't all the telephones connected in the whole world. There's more circuitry, in your brain, then there are stars. And so when you start to go, wow, there's some real power within me. And if I learn how to use it a little bit better, maybe I could be happier, healthier, wealthier, have more purpose, have more meaning in my life. And when you ask yourself, what do most people want? Well, I want to know that my life mattered. I want to know that I'm loved, or at least liked.

I want to know that my life has got some kind of purpose, you know, or I don't have a real great existence. And so when you start to realize that you have so many gifts on top of the challenges that we all have, everybody has problems, everybody has things they're insecure about, they don't have confidence around, they don't have certainty, but that's everybody. So the key is to understand that, you know,

we have an amazingly powerful tool that creates our reality, and we're able to teach it to look for and find what we want it to create. So reality doesn't exist outside of here. We're in the field of everything, and we can teach our brain to see things that we didn't see before. We can change our habits. We can develop, it's something we call deliberate conscious evolution. So we could deliberately choose to evolve ourselves.

Where in the past, we thought that, you know, you have to wait a thousand years, or ten thousand years, or a hundred thousand years to change. Oh, that's old school thinking. We can change now. We can change the neural patterns in our brain, the software, just like a computer software. You know, we have, you know, our body is the hardware, our brain is the operating system, and then our beliefs, right, are the, is the software, and our habits are the software that runs everything, gives us the results. Yeah.

And we're finally learning some techniques and tools to tweak the machinery better. Well, all of the latest research shows that it takes an average of 66 days. In the old days, it used to be 21 days, but that's just because of, an old book back in 1970s called Psycho-Sibernetics, and that was Maxwell Maltz. He noticed that when people had facial reconstruction done through plastic surgery, that even when they looked in the mirror after the surgery,

they didn't see a change. And it took about 21 days for them to start saying, oh, wow, okay, I can see some differences. And he realized that it wasn't the eyes that see. It's the brain that sees. And so the brain, shifts through repetition. So when we talk about how do we create rituals or how do we change habits that last, the first thing is to have a different expectation than I'm going to change in a

day or a week or in 21 days. Whenever I try to change anything, my number one rule is 100 days or I don't even start. So if I want to, let's say stop caffeine, it's a 100-day commitment. So first I make longer-term commitments and then I design a plan to retrain my brain around the expectation of following through. I make pre-commitments in advance. So if I say, let's say I'm going to stop drinking coffee. I say, okay, I'm going to stop drinking coffee. I say, okay, I'm going to stop drinking I commit to it for 100 days, and then I write out, well, what will you do in the morning when you wake up and you want a coffee?

What will you do when you're at a restaurant with friends and everybody's having a coffee? What will you do? So you counter any of the behavior when you know the trigger is going to happen. Every habit has three parts to it. There's something that triggers the emotion. There's the behavior, and then there's the neurology,

And there's the neurological and biological reward. So when you understand the habit part of any ritual, you understand that because we are conditioned a certain way, we're going to have a trigger, whether it's a flower, whether it's waking up, whether it's a girl or a guy or children coming home, it triggers a response in the brain or reaction in the brain. If we change the behavior over the course of 100 days, we'll still get the reward, and if we pre-commit to what we're going to do

when we say, maybe today I'll have the coffee and tomorrow I won't. Maybe today I'll have the pizza or the dessert and I'll catch up tomorrow. Well, if you pre-commit in advance that you're not going to take that action, then that's step one. Step two is when you have the trigger, if you interrupt the behavior for one or two or three or four minutes, you interrupt the neural pattern in the brain also.

So you come up with strategies when I feel like having a coffee or dessert or the pizza or the croissant. Okay, then here's what I'm going to do instead for five minutes and that way I can interrupt the pattern. If you do that long enough, you'll start to develop a new neural pattern, you'll start to develop a new behavior, and if you do it for at least, you know, 66 days, preferably 100 days, you'll start to develop a new way of thinking and being and doing that will overshadow the other pattern in the brain. Very interesting.

Yeah, so there's a psychology behind it, but there's also the neurological processes of the brain. And what happens is our brain doesn't like change. Yeah. So any time that there is change, the brain see, it feels uncomfortable. As soon as it feels uncomfortable, it'll send signals to the motor cortex of the brain. It'll send messages and we'll start to rationalize. We'll start to tell ourselves, well, I shouldn't do it because of this.

Well, maybe today's not a good day. Well, I'll start today, you know, but I won't continue to. till next week or, you know what, I really don't want this. We start to talk to ourselves. And when we understand what the brain does, whenever we try to change, then we can start being in control of the brain, and we can override the automatic responses. There's something called automaticity.

And automaticity states that anything that I repeat over and over and over again over a period of time will go from conscious effort, deliberate conscious effort, willpower or persistence, and it'll become automatic. So we just have to know how long that is. And some things take a week, some things take 60 days,

some habits that people have for 20, 30, 40, 50 years take 200 days. And so you start off with a 100-day window. And you ask yourself, am I willing to give a little bit of effort for 100 days to remove this destructive either thought pattern or destructive behavioral pattern in order for me to have something greater and better than what I have right now? Yeah, if you think about this, one of the best examples that I ever came up with is

imagine if I give you a Hollywood script right now. Okay? And I say to you, if you learn this script for the next six months, I will give you $10 million to be on stage to deliver that. We're going to film you. And if you're amazing, you're going to have a chance to win an Academy Award. What will you do with the script starting to do? I start to learn.

You start to learn. You start to read it. You start to emotionalize it. You start to practice it. You start to do everything possible to become something that's in writing. Something that came out of somebody's head that they wrote a script for that you don't have any idea what it is. But if you made a commitment to becoming that person and you rehearsed it and practiced it every day, Every day, you wouldn't get it right the first day or the first week.

Or the first month. Or the first month. But if you knew there was a big payday, emotionally, spiritually, financially, and that people would go to the theaters and love to watch it and they'd laugh or cry or be sad and be happy because you were able to take them on a beautiful emotional roller coaster ride, then you would become that role. most people are interested, they're not committed. And the difference is when you're interested, you do what's convenient and what's easy,

but when you're committed, you do whatever it takes. When you're interested, you do what's easy and what's convenient for you. But when you're committed, I'm going to get that result. You put everything into it until you get the result. And so I always ask all of my clients, are you interested in achieving that and stopping that, or are you committed and you'll do whatever it takes? Because ultimately, people have to make a decision

what they want to trade their life for. Because every day we're trading our life for the people that we associate with, for the business or job that we have, for what we eat, for the health, for the enjoyment, for the fun, for the experiences. And you have to ask yourself, Is my life worth trading for that?

If it's not, today's a good day to stop. But most people don't think that they're trading their life, you know, for something. They think that, you know, oh, there's tomorrow and there's next week. Really? Well, I have, you know, evidence to prove otherwise that we have no idea, you know, when the last breath will be. Yeah. So let's trade our life. every day as it's the most important thing in the world.

And not from an ego perspective, from a humble, grateful perspective of, wow, I get another day to live and to enjoy. It can be grateful for that. But then to respect it. See, respecting your life means you're going to trade it for things that you feel are worthy of it. Most people, you know, ask themselves the wrong question. They ask themselves, you know,

am I worthy of the goal and the dream that I have? And they should be asking themselves, is that goal, that dream that I have worthy of my life, change the question. And if you say, yeah, I'll trade my life for that, good, then go and do that. And you mentioned something before that I want to just touch upon, if you have a big enough reason why you want to achieve something, you'll do whatever it takes. Yeah. But if your reason isn't big enough, your excuses will be. No matter what has happened to us in the past, whether it's a traumatic event, a failure,

somebody who's hurt us, a mistake that we've made, we have to, we have to, we have to, to understand that the way that our brain works is it does as much as possible to move away from anything that could potentially hurt us. So the first thing that your brain does is keep you alive. But the second thing that it does is that it keeps you away from hurting yourself. Whether it's real or imagined, your brain will move away first, protection mechanism first. So if you've had an experience from the past where you've made a mistake or you've disappointed yourself, you've disappointed other people, your parents, your parents, your teachers, your brothers, your sisters, your coworkers, your brain is always looking for associations and similarities in what you want to do that might lead to the same disappointment or the same pain that you've had before. And as soon as it senses any type of correlation, it lights up the part of the brain that remembers the past and brings all of your past into the present moment so you feel it and projects the possible negative consequences into the future. As soon as that happens, your motor cortex shuts off, the part of your brain that takes action and the motivational centers of your brain.

It just shuts off. And what it does, it either fights it, it freezes so that you are paralyzed, or it makes you run away the other way. So that's one part of the brain that works. But if you understand that when that happens, you have an emotion. And it might be an emotion of fear, fear of disappointment, fear of success, fear of failure, fear of abandonment, fear of rejection. There's 50 or more fears that we have as human beings. that we're always aware of in the environment. And if you realize that those fears are possible,

but they're not certain, what we have to teach ourselves is to be aware that those are possible, not certain, but then to flip the switch to the left prefrontal cortex part of the brain, which is really the brain that comes up with solutions. It's the brain that comes up with directions, instructions, stress,

and tactics on how to make it happen instead of all the things that could go wrong. So we have different parts of the brain that are responsible for different functions. Most people don't know that they can switch from this part of the brain to that part of the brain. They could lower the amygdala part of the brain that's responsible for fear and the emotional response of fear in the brain that sends epinephrine or cortisol, neurotransmitters in the brain that we feel in our body. And then we feel these neurotransmitters in our body, then we think about what we're feeling,

and then we feel more about what we think about. And if that's what we only focus on, then it keeps perpetuating the exact same cycle. Right. Yeah, there's a term in the neuroscience field, in the brain research field, We call repetition compulsion. So we have a compulsion to repeat things over and over and over again.

Whether they're good or bad, it's irrelevant. So we will just keep repeating stuff. Even when we do things that don't give us the result that we want, we become addicted to that result in that emotional state in our brain and in our bodies. So if we repeat that over and over and over again, we become addicted to that emotional state, and then we just repeat it because it becomes automatic. So the key is to first become aware.

And we developed our company at Praxis. We developed a process called the 5R process. And the first R stands for recognize your thought patterns, recognize your emotions, recognize your behaviors, and ask yourself, are they going to move me towards what I want or away from what I want? You recognize, just become more aware. And then instead of reacting to what you don't like, you learn how to respond. That's the second R.

So recognize, then respond, hmm, can I change this? Can I change the meaning of this? Can I change the emotion of this? can I change anything about this that is destructive? And the answer is yes. The third part is to reframe anything that doesn't work for you. So whether it's a person, a situation, a circumstance, how can you reframe it?

Look at it from a different point of view so that it doesn't have the same meaning anymore. And one of the things that we know is the meaning that we give anything. determines how we feel about it. The meaning we give it, nothing has a meaning independent of our own thoughts and meanings. So can we reframe something,

look at it a different way, emotionalize it a different way, so that we can use it as opposed to it using us? The fourth part is when we're feeling a negative or destructive emotion. Can we, through, breathing exercises, through reframing, release that emotion, because every emotion is a wave. So there are six main emotions that we have. There are sub-emotions as well, but we feel fear,

anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, etc. And those cause us to feel a certain way. So is there a way for us to release the unpleasant emotions? There's not good or bad emotions. They're Pleasant or unpleasant. Yeah. And that comes from directly from one of my dear friends, Dr. Joan Rosenberg, who's an emotional mastery expert. And so when you think about, is this emotion pleasant? Yes, okay, good, let's do more of that.

Is this emotion unpleasant? Okay, well, what's causing it? Usually what's causing is something from my past that is telling me that whatever is happening, if it's a unpleasant emotion, usually it's a memory from the past versus reality. And so when you learn that emotions last 90 seconds to a minute and 20 seconds, two minutes.

And if you just observe it and feel the emotion, it's like a wave. Feel the emotion without getting into the reaction of the emotion. Observe it. Now you're in control of the emotion. emotion. Now you're learning to surf the wave instead of being hit by the wave. And then the fifth part is now to retrain your brain. So recognize, respond, reframe, release, and now I want to retrain my brain to have a different thought pattern, a different emotional response and a different behavior so that I change the pattern in my brain so it doesn't happen again. And if you do that

one time, five times, ten times, twenty times, the same thought or the same emotion or the same circumstance won't have the same power to cause you to freeze or run away or fight. Now we're starting to get in control of our own brains, our own emotions, and now we can start to use the spiritual side of our being, the higher side of our being, to move towards the greatness that I think is within every human being. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.