The Resilient Mind - Next-Level Success: Make Next Year Your Breakthrough Year - Jack Canfield

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

Jack Canfield is an American author, motivational speaker, corporate trainer, and entrepreneur. He is the co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which has more than 250 titles and 500 million copies in print in over 40 languages.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠Download Mindset App for free and listen to 5000+ of the World's Greatest Motivational Speakers and Thought Leaders: https://bit.ly/mindsetxTheResilientMind  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Next Level Success, Make 2025 Your Breakthrough Year with Jack Canfield. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Like y'all to do this with me real quick. Fold your hands like this and you can do this watching at home in your hotel room wherever you might be if you're watching this on a TV set. And notice which thumb is on top, your right or your left. And whatever that is, I'm going to ask you to unfold all your fingers and have the other thumb show up on top.

Okay, don't just move a thumb, but all the fingers are moving. Now, how does that feel? Uncomfortable, awkward, strange, yucky, yucky, wrong, not me, right? Now, what does your body want to do? Go back. Wants to go back, so let it go back. How's that feel? Most of you said better, Tom over here went, oh, like, I'm me again, right?

What happens is literally in life, this is what stops most people from being successful. One of the things is that they would rather be comfortable than do what's required. Anytime you do something different, it's uncomfortable by its very nature. Now, most of you remember learning to drive a car. You were probably awkward. You know, you forgot to hit the clutch when you hit the brake. But after a couple months, you're there driving with your knee. You've got a big Mac in your left hand.

You're breaking up a fight in the back seat with the kids with your right in. No big deal. But you have to be willing to go through that awkward, uncomfortable stage. And most people, unfortunately, won't do that. And so they get locked in what we call their comfort zone. So what I want you to do is to realize that life is an experiment. You have lots of responses that are possible. And I'm going to teach you some of those, new ones perhaps, that you can apply to your success.

So there's three kinds of responses. Number one is your behavior, what you do and say out loud. Number two is your thoughts. Number three is the images you hold in your head. Those are the only three things you have any control over in your life. what you say and do, the thoughts you think, and the imageries that you hold inside your head. So we're going to look at this whole area of thoughts for a minute. And I'm going to ask somebody to come up here and volunteer to do a little exercise with me.

It'll take about one minute. So, okay, great. What's your name? Marianne? Mary Ann. Very good. Come on up, Marianne. And I'd like you to turn around and face the group. Now, are you right-handed or left-handed?

Right-handed. Right-handed. Is your left arm okay? Any injuries going on here? Very good. So what I'm going to do is push down on your arm. I want you to push up, okay? So we'll see how strong you are.

Very good. You said your name was Marianne? Yes. So say my name is Mary Ann out loud. My name is Mary Ann. And then resist. That's a very funny last name. But let's say, so my name is Mary Ann.

My name is Mary Ann. And resist, good and strong. Now I want you to make up a name it's not yours. My name is Margaret. My name is Joe. Any name at all. And just say it and then I'll test your arm. My name is Kathy.

Say it one more time? My name is Kathy. And resist. What happened to your arm? It went down. Was it as strong? No. No.

My name is Mary Ann? Say that? And then say, my name is Kathy. My name is Kathy. And without any effort, it goes down. Now, see, when you lie, this whole set of muscles goes weak. Okay? Literally, the whole Michael Jackson trial could have taken about one minute, all right? And we would have known one way or the other. But see, the reality here is that your thoughts affect your physiology.

We just saw that. The brain wasn't designed to lie. It was designed to perceive truth and organized truth and express truth. Then things work. Otherwise, you're called psychotic or you're called a liar and gets in trouble. and so forth. So let's look at one of the lies we tell ourselves. I'd like you to think of something you always wanted to do, Marianne, that you didn't think you could. Like I can't sing, I can't bowl, I can't skydive, I can't start a business and run a family, you know, anything at all that feels true for you. Okay. Take me a minute.

That's okay. Kind of confident. Okay. You got one? Okay. Can you say it out loud? I can't swim in the ocean out too far. I can't swim in the ocean out too far. So say it again. I can't swim in the ocean out too far.

And notice what happens to your arm. Now say I can swim out in the ocean as far as I want. I can swim out in the ocean as far as I want. One more time. I can swim out in the ocean as far as I want. And resist. Notice what happens now. You're twice as strong.

So what happens is when you say I can't, you actually weaken yourself, you weaken your resolve, you actually change your physiology, become less resourceful. You're less capable to actually do the thing you're saying I can't. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Do two more quick things with me.

close your eyes and remember a failure experience in your life. You're not going to have to share it with anybody, just to yourself. But you set a goal and somehow it didn't work out. And when you can remember such a time, just nod your head. You got one? Okay. So I want you to visualize what you saw at the moment you knew it wasn't going to work. There's the pink slip, person slamming the door, whatever it is.

And when you have that image, just imagine, just nod your head. Okay. And notice what happens to your arm. Now open your eyes. Did you eat any meals today? Yes. Name one thing you ate. Um,

chicken sandwich. Chicken sandwich. Okay, good. You brought your agent with you. Okay. A friend. All right, so now close your eyes and remember a time when you had a success experience.

You set a goal and you achieved it and you were really proud of yourself. You remember such a time? And vision, what you saw then. Make a real clear picture and you had of what you saw when you knew it was a success. Okay. And resist? No, it's really good and strong. I want you to do one last thing with me.

We'll talk about what all this means. I want you all to look up at her, look at Miriam, and I want you to think a negative judgmental thought about her. Just make one up. I don't like you, you're an idiot, whatever. And give her that look. Parents give their kids when they're disappointed in them, and I want you to resist with all your strength,

and notice what happens to your arm. Can't do it. Now smile at her and send a positive thought, wow, she volunteered in front of all these people to go up there with Jack and resist. Can you feel the difference? Yes. So what happens here is when you,

you say I can't, when you lie, when you focus on your failures instead of your successes, and when you surround yourself with people who are judgmental, rather than encouraging and empowering, it actually has a physical effect on you. So that's how powerful thoughts are. We see that our thoughts affect us and other people's thoughts affect us. So we have to be very careful where we place ourselves and who we hang out with and who we surround ourselves with. Give Mary Ann a hand for coming up here.

Thank you very much. So partly here, we've just done this thing. This is called a kinesiology demonstration. Kinesiology is a fancy term for muscle testing. And one of the principles here is you have to eliminate the phrase I can't from your vocabulary. I can't. I wish I were able to. I'll try.

Those are all ways of saying I'm not capable. And they're very insidious and it's part of our culture. I actually teach people to wear a rubber band. And if they say something negative about themselves, they just snap themselves when they're aware of it. Not like to really hurt yourself, but just to raise your awareness. In my company, if anyone says I can't or we're not able to, we can't get that done by Friday. You know, they'd say something like, well, we'd need eight people to do that. Well, great, call the temporary agency.

It can be done by Friday. And if they'd say something negative, it costs them a dollar. We'd find them. We'd put it in a jar. And at the end of the month, we'd give it to charity. Well, we stopped doing that after a couple years because no one was doing it anymore, because the culture shifted because of that focus. Henry Ford said whether you think you can or think you can't, either way, you're right.

Why is that? Because if you think you can, you will try. And if you try, you're probably going to pull it off. And if you think you can't, you won't. And if you don't try, then you're not going to get it done at all. Make sense? Okay. Maddie Christensen was a kid I interviewed for our book.

Imagine this picture. He has no leg from the knee down on this leg, no leg from the knee down here. Two prosthetic devices that he's got. His right arm is just a normal prosthetic device. And his left arm from the elbow down is a prosthetic device with a lacrosstic appended to the end. he is the pitcher on his Little League baseball team, and he could use that to catch the ball.

His team, with him as the pitcher, went to the New York State finals in Little League. He wrestles, he plays basketball. How many of you, if you'd been born with no arms past the elbow and no legs past the knees, would have thought that baseball was your career? But Maddie went for it.

I can tell you story after story. I met a kid named Kyle Maynard last year. He wrote a book called No Excuses. We were over in Ireland together. He has no legs past the knees. He was the number two wrestler in the state of Georgia, his senior year in high school and now wrestles for the Georgia State University Wrestling Club, wrote a book on Oprah, can type 150 words a minute with the stubs of his arms,

he can eat with a spoon. I mean, he's the most amazing guy. And we say that, and when I hear that and I look at these people, I think, what's my excuse? What story am I telling me that I can't do something when these people can do that? And I tell you that, hopefully to inspire you to realize you can do anything, there's nothing you can't do. And all those people that are out there that are doing anything, that you go, wow, that's great is just a model for you that says this is possible. And if they can do it, I can do it.

He said to me when I was interviewing me, he said, you have to give up all of your excuses. He said, you have to become solution-oriented. You have to move in such a way that you're always solving a problem. He said, it was just a problem to be solved because he was so passionate about what it is that he wanted to do. Some of you have seen Tony Robbins on television, and he tells a wonderful story that we put in our first chicken soup for the soul book of being in New York. He sent his staff out. He said, I want you. to go find a van because I want to take some food, put it in some baskets, about 30 baskets of food, and we'll go give it to the homeless people up in Harlem. So they went out to rent a van.

He came back a couple hours later from some radio interviews. There's no van. He said, where's the van? He said, Tony, there are no vans for rent in New York. They're all being used. It was Thanksgiving weekend. They'd all been rented up. He says, well, why didn't you just go get one from someone else? He said, Tony, people own them. They're using him. He says, come on. And they went out on the street. And the first van that came by, Tony jumped out in front of it like yes. It started going like that. Now, Tony must be, I don't know, seven foot, eight, ten, whatever. He's big. And he said, I learned something about New Yorkers that day.

He says, they don't stop. They speed up. So he said, that strategy wasn't working. E plus R equals O, we need a different response. So he went to where the cars had to stop, called a traffic light. And then he'd knock on the window, and they'd roll it down. And he'd say, hi, I'm Tony Robbins. You may know me from TV.

But even if you don't, what we're trying to do is rent a van. And, you know, find a van. We're glad to pay you to rent it. And we'd like to just get some food and drive it up to Harlem and give it to some homeless people. And they would all say, you know, I don't want to go to Harlem. It might not be safe up there. And so this went on for a half hour.

And finally, Tony staff said, Tony, give it up. It's never going to happen. We're not going to get a van. Let's go eat dinner. And Tony said, that's a terrible attitude. We are going to get a van. It's just a numbers game. Well, another half hour went by.

And Tony knocked on a window of this one van. The window went down and told him a story. And the guy said, jump in. And as he jumped in, the driver reached over and picked the hat up off the seat that Tony was about to sit in, the passenger seat, put it on his head. said Salvation Army. Turns out the guy was the head of the Salvation Army, Captain John Runn, for all of New York City.

And they went and they bought the food. And he said, look, there's a worse place even than harmless, called the South Bronx. Let's go there. And so they went and took 30 baskets of food to people living in these, you know, literally abandoned houses. And he said, we lifted a lot of lives. He said, but more importantly, I raised the consciousness from my staff that day. And they realized there's always a van in New York City. But let's look at what some of the principles are of success that are contained in that story.

Number one, Tony had a clear intention. You must know exactly what it is you want. You have to have a goal. You have to have a vision. Number two, he had a positive expectation. He fully expected to get it. Pete Rose, the great baseball player, said, he was interviewed once. He said, when you go up to bat, how often do you expect to get a hit?

He said, every time. He said, if I'm not expecting to get a hit, I shouldn't be standing there. And you don't always hit it, but you're going to come from that expectation level. He never gave up because he fully expected the result was going to happen. It was just a matter of time. Number three, he took action because a lot of times you have great ideas. I was just here today.

A guy was talking about, oh, we were talking about horseback riding. And he said, you know, they'd be neat if they made those gel things. They put in the feet to put on the saddle of horses because your butt gets sore when you ride a horse. And I said, that's a great idea. And he just passed it off. I said, no, you ought to do something about that. How many times have you had a great idea, didn't do anything about it? And then a year later, someone did something about it, made a lot of money, got the promotion, et cetera.

So when you have the idea, the inspiration to act, it's time. act and you don't have to know it perfectly. You know, you can drive from here to California, wherever you might be, assuming you're not in Hawaii, by going west. And what happens is that you don't have to see the whole route. You only need to see 200 yards ahead of you. At night you can drive just with your headlights,

and the headlights keep moving with you. And your goal in life is to, like, get in the game. You don't have to see the whole blueprint. You just have to see the next steps, the next steps, the next steps. And if you keep taking the next steps, eventually you get to where you want to go. Does that make sense? And then he persevered.

he never gave up. Some people give up too soon. You know, we were rejected by 144 publishers when we did chicken soup for the soul. Most people don't know that. What if we'd have stopped after 100? Said, well, this isn't going to happen. I wouldn't be standing here talking to you today. We just kept on going until we got the result. Took us a year and a half to sell that book, but we sold it. Now, the last thing is called law of attraction. We believe that when you are vibrating at the level of 100% expectancy that you're going to get something, it's already a done deal. you know, piece of cake, no big deal. We're going to win this thing.

We're going to get that contract. You know, I'm going to make this thing happen. Then what happens is the universe literally responds. We're going to talk about this a little more later. Now, who is the most perfect guy to come in a van for Tony? Could anyone be more perfect than the head of the Salvation Army? He knew all the places in New York and was committed to doing this. Well, they had to wait for an hour because he wasn't there yet.

See? So sometimes when you're doing this, you're putting on the vision of this should happen by this date. It's okay to set goals like that, but sometimes it takes a week longer, a year longer, whatever. But law of attraction says if you'll just hold the expectancy, like attracts like, if you say, I want to be a millionaire, but I don't know anyone that would ever teach me how to do that, or I want to buy a car, but I don't have any money, then what you're doing is saying, it's like calling up Domino's Pizza and saying, send me a pizza, and calling him up a minute later and saying, never mind.

It's like, you know, you've got to create the space mentally to hold this vision that you've got. And that requires expectation and then knowing that the perfect thing is on its way, just as it was in that situation for Tony. In the success principles, I write about a woman named Catherine Lonigan. Catherine Lonningin went off to college. She wanted to be a writer, and she took her first writing class, and she got an F. And she went to see the teacher and said, why did I get an F? It says, because you can't write. She says, well, I'm on a scholarship here to be a writer.

I came to be in the creative writing program. I was the editor of my yearbook, editor of my school newspaper. I wrote a plate. It was performed in high school. They told me I was gifted. He said, well, you're not. He said, you know, if you stay in my class, you're going to flunk it. If you flunk my class, you'll lose your scholarship. And she said, well, what do I do?

He said, I'll make a deal with you. If you promise never to write again, just, you know, history papers stuff, but you're not going to try to be a writer. I'll give you a passing grade. You'll keep your scholarship, change your major. So she did. I called it. She made the deal with the devil.

Fifteen years later, she's down in Texas. They're making a movie at the next town over, and down where she lived in Texas, you know, people would show up at the gas station after it rain just to see the oil slick. It was kind of boring there. So she said, wow, they're making the movie. Let's go. So everyone drives over and everyone's talking to the movie stars.

She's talking to the writers saying, you know, what's going on? What's happening? And why are you interested in us? Why not the movie stars? Well, I always wanted to be a writer. And the guy said, BS, if you wanted to be a writer, you would have written. She said, I was told on good authority I couldn't write. He was a Harvard professor visiting our campus that year.

He said, that's BS. He said, what I want you to do is go write something. Send it to me. I'll tell you if you can write. I do it for a living. So she goes and writes a book, sends it in to him. He sends it to an agent in New York, and they publish it. Her next book was called Romancing the Stone.

The book after that, Jewel of the Now, both made into movies with Michael Douglas and Catherine Turner. So what's the deal here? 14, 15 years of her talent wasted because she bought someone else's evaluation of her. My friend Terry Cole Whitaker says, she wrote a book called What You Think of Me is None of My Business. you know, do not let other people's evaluations of you control you, okay? It's just an E, your responses, thank you very much. You keep pursuing your passionate dream, okay? Now, in other principles, you've got to drop out of the Ain't It Awful Club.

What does that mean? It means you have to surround yourself with positive people. We saw when Maryam's arm went down up here when you all did negative thoughts about her. And how many of you think about this? Where do you spend your time? Is it with positive people or is it with negative people? It's to be very careful about where you put yourself. Jim Rohn said, again, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

Who do you spend the most time with? They're a mirror back to you at what level your life is actualizing at. If your friends are victims and their lives aren't working and their marriages don't work and they're not making money, that's a reflection back. If you're working out with people and hanging out with people that are at a higher level, then that's a reflection back. And what I teach people is always try to get with the people that are the next level up. You're making $50,000 a year.

You want to make $100,000. Find some people making $100,000, spend some time with them. however you have to do that. You know, if you want to be more spiritual, go to some spiritual retreats where spiritual people hang out. Get in their space. Learn what they do, how they think, etc. We had a story in the second helping of chicken soup for the soul.

Carl Coleman's driving to work when his car collides with another woman's car and they get out and she's crying. And he's like relieved. This is a minor fender bender. Why are you crying? She said, you don't understand. This is a brand new car three days from the showroom. How am I going to explain this to my husband?

He said, well, I'm really sorry about that. But we need to get your registration, your driving. driver's license, your insurance record, so we can, you know, exchange that data so we can file our accident reports. So she goes into the glove compartment of her car, opens up the manila envelope and everything's in. And on top of that, there's a message written in handwriting by her husband, and it said, in case of accident, remember, honey, it's you, I love, not the car.

See, the women all go, oh. The men are thinking, yeah, right, I don't know about that. But why do we all go, oh? We all go, oh, because that's what we want in life. We want someone to love us more than anything else, especially things, vases that have been in the family for three generations, the white carpet, your special sweater or whatever. And when we know that we're loved unconditionally, then you feel safe. And when you feel safe, you get creative. And when you get creative, you come up with ideas that can quantum leap your success.

So that's why it's so important. Number two, success principle that's really the core principle here is decide what you want. You can't get from here to there unless you know where here is and there is. If you have a GPS system in your car, all you have to do is type in the address, it knows where you are from the satellites in the sky, and it plots a course. Your brain works the same way. The problem is, according to the research, less than 10% of Americans have written measurable goals for the year. In some cases, I've been in the companies where less than 3% of the people did. Less than 10% of high school students are ever taught how to set a measurable goal.

This is a failure in our education system. You know anyone that got divorced because they didn't know the seven exports of Brazil or the five causes of the Civil War? No, but they didn't know the communication skills. They didn't know how to set goals for their relationship. So many things we're not learning in our education that we now need to learn in these kind of courses. General Wesley Clark, who I interviewed, said, it doesn't take any more effort to dream a big dream than it takes to dream a small dream.

So if you're going to decide what you want, go for what you want, not what you think is possible. Most people hone down their dream because they can't see how they can do it. And I'm saying to you, dream as big as you want. In fact, big dreams are exciting. Big dreams attract big people. If Martin Luther King said, I'm going over to a supermarket in Mississippi, I don't think a whole lot of people would have gone down there with him. But when he said, I want to end racism in America, that was a big dream.

It inspired a lot of people to want to play. A great personal sacrifice to themselves because it was big enough and worth doing. Walt Disney said, if you can dream it, you can do it. Which means that you're never given a dream that comes out of your own desire place that isn't something you have the capacity to fulfill. You may have to learn some new skills, you may have to partner up with some people, you may need to learn some, you know, how to access some new resources along the way. But all of that is possible if you'll simply dream the big dream, because the dream doesn't come unless the capacity to achieve it comes with it. Does that make sense? Okay.

So trust your dreams. Now, there's seven dream categories or vision categories that you need to focus on to create a balanced and fulfilling life. Success means having all of this stuff. want to walk you through these. Number one is financial. What are your goals for your money? How much money do you want to make? How much net worth do you want to achieve? How much money do you want to have when you retire? If you own a business, you have cash flow goals, you have money and reserve goals, you have profit goals, et cetera. And so we need to have goals clearly set in that arena. Number two, business and career. What's my ideal vision for my business or my career or my job?

You know, I was a high school teacher. And at a certain point, I realized I wanted to teach teachers because I just thought I could impact more people. Then I became a teacher-trainer trainer. I trained people how to train teachers. Now I'm teaching, you know, on television, around the world. So it kept growing. The goal changed.

But it was always like, you know, what is it that I want to be doing with my life in relation to my business and career? Number three, fun time and recreation goals. One year, our fun time goals, my wife. And I was learned salsa dancing. This past two years I've been learning to play the piano. My goal is to play J-Su Joy of Man's Desiring as well as Bach could have played it when he wrote it. I'm not there yet, but I'm working on it.

And so, you know, one year was to go to the Eiffel Tower. We took our kids and we walked up as far as they let you walk, which is about two-thirds of the way up there. Number four, health and fitness goals. These are things like weight you want to achieve, cholesterol levels. Maybe you want to run a 10K or a marathon. There's just so many possibilities in that arena. Maybe you want to, you know, have your waist come in by a couple inches. You want to grow some hair back.

I mean, there's just a number of things you can decide about in that arena of health and fitness. Number five, relationships. What would your ideal relationships look like? One year, I decided I didn't have enough male friends. So I created this thing called Boys Day Out. I read this article about Kenny Rogers, the singer, and he brought all these athletes down to his ranch in Virginia, and they would spend a week playing all these different games, tennis and soccer and basketball. And I thought, well, I can't do that, but a day, a month would be cool.

So I asked a bunch of guys that had controlled or schedule lawyers and psychiatrists and people like that. And we created this day. We would do guy things. We'd pitch pennies, throw baseball cards, play soccer, go to the racetrack, do ice hockey, broomball. I mean, you name it. We attempted to do it. And it was really a lot of fun. And all of a sudden, I had the guy energy that I needed in my life.

Instead of just complaining about not having it, I said, what's my goal? I want this many men, friends. And I set out to create it. Number six is personal. And this is just things you want to do because you want to do them. You want to write a letter and get it published in the needs. newspaper. You'd always wanted to act in a play just because you thought it'd be cool or record a song. Or this could be where your personal growth goals, your spiritual growth goals are. You know,

you want to reach enlightenment before you die, learn to meditate, you know, get to know a closer walk with God, whatever it is for you. That's that arena. And finally, contribution and legacy. What is it that you want to leave to the world? What's your vision of your contribution that you leave behind? You know, we've planted over a million trees through our work we do. We've given over three and a half million dollars in the last couple years to all kinds of charities, limbs for kids that have lost them, child abuse, prevention, so forth and so on. So we picked five or six areas. We said we want to make a difference there.

Habitat for humanity, we built some houses and so forth. So what is it you want to do? Pick one thing in your vision and go for it. Now, if you had success in all these arenas of your life, your life would be balanced. Your life will be fulfilling. And here's the neat thing. Nobody can tell you what you should want in any of those. areas. It's what you want, not what your mother, your wife, your pastor or anyone else

says you ought to have, but what do you really want to achieve in your vision? Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.