The Resilient Mind - Reprogram Your Mind For Success - Les Brown

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Les Brown is a dynamic personality and highly-sought-after resource in business and professional circles for Fortune 500 CEOs, small business owners, non-profit and community leaders from all sectors of society looking to expand opportunity. Book: ⁠You've Got To Be HUNGRY: The GREATNESS Within to Win⁠Take 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 Reprogram Your Mind for Success with Les Brown. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. The things that you get in life, you know, Frederick Douglass said, we might not get everything that we fight for, but everything we get, it will be a fight. And I love the quote that life is a fight for territory. and once you stop fighting for what you want, what you don't want will automatically take over.

Like Dr. Alfred Golson, who has since passed, was a very unusual guy. And he told me, he said, Mr. Brown, you have cancer. I said, can you give me a second opinion? He said, yes, and you're ugly too. I said, oh, my God. So I didn't have chance to have fear because those three words, you have cancer,

three of the most feared words in seven different languages, I saw it as a fight. And from that time to this time, you know, my PSA was 2,400, and that's after prostate-specific antigen, and now it's below zero. And metastasized in seven areas of my body, which was a good thing,

because seven is my lucky number. Okay, so it, No, I never was fearful that I was going to die from it. And I think I read something by Dr. Norman Cousins. He wrote a book called The Biology of Hope. And he talked about the fact that when something happens to you, you don't deny it. You defy it.

And I was defiant that I'm going to beat this. I'm going to handle this. That there are people who many times when something happens to them, that they embrace it from a place of fear, and it takes them out. And Elsie Robinson said, things may happen to you and things may happen around you, but the most important things are the things that happen in you, and you have to stand up inside yourself and deal with it and handle it. So fortunately, that never bothered me, but I had Sada Capain.

That had me speaking in unknown tongues. and I was in a wheelchair for several months, speaking from a wheelchair. And it was something that I dealt with that frightened me, will this ever end? It was 24 hours. I lost a lot of sleep. It was exhausting going from all types of specialists

in and out of the country. And just one day, it stopped. And I'm glad that I'm past that, you know. I just, I feel like when you go through some stuff, you tell some certain things that you don't want ever to see or get it. That's what I ought to ever see or get. But fear has not been the biggest challenge that I've faced with the things that I've been dealing with in terms of my health.

The easiest thing I've done was to get out from under the labels and to live the life that I live. The most difficult thing I've ever done was to believe that I can do. What's the difference? The difference is that when you don't know what's impacting you, and it's something that's holding you down and you're not aware of it, the great anthropology as Margaret Mead was in a restaurant in London, and a guy was serving her and said, there's several Americans here tonight.

And she said, is that right? Yeah. So let me know when you serve them dessert. I'll tell you exactly how many are here. He said, oh, you couldn't possibly. And so he came back and said, okay, I've done it. And she got up and she walked around. And she came back and she said, they're around 25 here.

And he looked at the roster. How did you know that? Say, in America, we eat differently from you when we eat a dessert. You eat it from the crust toward the tip. We eat it from the tip toward the crust. When you eat a slice of pie, how do you eat yours? Definitely, yeah, from the tip back to the cross for sure. Yeah, okay.

And so there are things that when you, in my situation, you live in a dominant culture that is designed to destroy your sense of self and your belief in yourself. And you have to learn ways in which you can begin to connect with this power that you have within yourself to handle where you are. The key is to be constantly in a perpetual process of discovering the truth of who you are and fighting constantly to look for ways in which you can escape the inner conversation. I speak to audiences around the world and I train speakers as well and I tell

them that when you speak that there's an objective that you want to achieve when you speak to an audience because how people live their lives as a result of the story they believe about themselves. You as a speaker, when you speak in this program, when people see you, what you do is distract, dispute, and inspire. You distract people from their current story with your guests and the questions that you ask through the process of the ongoing questioning and the way in which they respond and the things they have learned, you dismantle their current belief system and inspire them to create a new chapter with their lives. And so, but that's an ongoing process of constantly interrupting that conversation,

what psychologists call your self-explanatory style, because life is going to beat up on you in so many ways. And many things, they come back, you know, negative thoughts and how you feel about yourself. They don't die. They come back once you stop doing the maintenance work on your mind, listening to motivational messages, going to seminars and work. workshops, spending time quietly listening to the still small voice within. Who am I really? Is this really me? Am I giving my best?

Am I just reflecting what's around me? Because all of these various things affect how we show up in life. And so having a strategy to continuously find ourselves reaching higher. Robert Shula had a book is not very popular, but I loved it. It's called, peak to peak, U-P-E-A-K to P-E-E-K, because you're constantly reaching higher to find out and discover your better self. Richard Wright said it best. He said, the impulse to dream has slowly been beaten out of me through the experiences of life.

So when you live in a culture that is designed to destroy your sense of self, where you are marginalize, where you have a feeling of a feeling of. being hopeless and powerless and you're terrorized. I remember going downtown with my mother. And I saw a water fountain. I think I was about five years old and I ran and I drank from the water fountain. All of a sudden, she grabbed me by the neck and said, don't you ever do that again and start punching me in the back of my head and my face and got me down on ground. It's punching me relentlessly. And I said, Mama, please. It's me, Mama. It's me. It's me with this crazy look in her eyes. And then a white policeman came and he had a nightstick in his

hand. He was hitting it in his left hand. He said, okay. All right. You beat that little nigger boy enough. Now I won't have to beat him with this nightstick. And he walked away laughing. And my mother broke down his side at crying and saying, Leslie, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I said, Mama, why'd you meet me like that? She said, this water fountains are for white only, son. And if that carpet hit me with his nightstick, he would have to kill me. I'd have fought him till he killed me, and I'd left you and your brothers and sister by themselves to raise themselves.

I'm so sorry. And the book, called Learned Optimism. Seleman talk about the fact that between ages, zero and five, we determine what's available to us and what's not available to us. And so that was a defining moment. I knew. There are certain things I could not do, certain places I could not go. They used to have signs on Miami Beach that said Jews, dogs, and colors not allowed. And so now you have to operate within the constraints of the dominant society and the things that they have created for you.

And it's a challenge to see yourself beyond that and to work to get outside of that even after those laws of change because that has become so much a part of you, you unconsciously operate within the parameters of what has been put in place. like you go, you're driving on the expressway, the four or five, and you'll get off on an exit that you weren't going in that direction, but you unconsciously did it because you've done it so many times, that many people, because they're not making a conscious, deliberate, determined effort to think outside of what life has thrown at them, they end up doing the same thing over and over and over again. Einstein said the thinking that has brought me this far has created some problems that this thinking can't solve. And so through relationships, through reading, through studies, through goals and dreams, beyond your comfort zone, it allows

you to begin to live out of your imagination as opposed to out of your history. Disney said, the imagination is a preview of what's to come. And so as a kid, I dreamed a lot about taking care of my mother. I used to go with her to work, to, to, clean homes and she kept her children and she cooked for these wealthy families. My mother could bake a sweet potato pie so good. You couldn't eat it with your shoes on. You had to take your shoes off so you could wiggle your toes. And I used to look at these big beautiful mansions and said, Mama, what is it, Leslie? When I become a man, I'm going to buy you a big, beautiful home just like this. Oh, you don't have to do this. I said, I know, but you didn't have to adopt us either.

You did. And so I'm here with you because of two women. One gave me life, the other one gave me love. God took me out of my biological mother's woman, placed me in the heart of my adopted mother. And because of her example and my love for her and the passion that I felt in my heart, I've got to do something to make her proud. I've got to do something to put myself in position to be able to take care of. of her, that drove me. Nietzsche said, if you know the wife of living, you can endure almost anyhow. Well, just think about if you were an immigrant and you're watching television and you see people who can come from white cultures with no problems whatsoever, like the president's in-laws, but brown people coming from other countries, they're separated from their children and

and put in cages, and there's a silence. There's not millions of people protesting and saying, this is not who we are as a country. This is inhumane. I believe that all of us have a responsibility that we want to live a life that will outlive us, the work that you're doing. There are people that you will never meet,

whose lives that you've transformed, that you're living a life that will outlive you. Just think about the fact that this program has given a lot of people hope, and there's hope in the future, and gives you power in the present. Every 40 seconds, someone commits suicide. But because of something you say or some guests that you've invited, and as they share their story, you interrupt that story of being hopeless and powerless.

and not wanting to be here anymore. And because they took the time to watch, you create an experience. Oliver Windor Holmes said that once a man or woman's mind has been expanded with an idea, concept, or experience, it could never be satisfied to going back to where it was. And so at the end of the program, at the end of one of your presentations,

there are people who, because of you, their lives would be transformed, and they will become a pencil, as Mother Teresa would say, in the hand of God, and start writing a new chapter with their lives. That's the reason why you design this program, you're in your team, for them to do that, that they have to expose themselves to something that will give them a different vision of themselves. And in addition to that, they have to put themselves in a community of what I call OQP, only quality people. A gentleman who dramatically transformed my life, I was a junior at Bugatti Washington High School in Miami, Florida, and I went in his class looking for another friend, and he said, go to a board and work this problem out for me. I said, sir, I can't do that.

He said, why not? I said, I'm not one of your students. He said, do it anyhow. And the other kids started laughing, saying, he's Leslie. He's D.T. And he said, what's D.T? His brother is smart, but he's the dumb twin. And I said, I am, sir.

And he came from behind his desk, and he pointed at me, he said, don't you ever say that again. Someone's opinion of you does not have to become your reality. And he taught me three things. He said, if you want to become successful in life, young man, he said, number one, you've got to change your mindset. He said, you don't get in life what you want, you get in life what you are.

Number two, practice OQP. only quality people. You earn within two to three thousand dollars of your closest friends. I found that out. I left all my broke friends. I say, y'all got to go. Because I used to be so broke,

I passed a bank and tripped the alarm. And the third thing, he said, develop your communication skills, because once you open your mouth, you tell the world who you are. He said, those are three major things that you want to work on, that will liberate you from living in Liberty City, living in poverty

and over town. It will help to escape out of where you are right now, because I see you watching me, and I know you want more. I can see the hunger in your eyes. That's why my book is about to come out call, you got to be hungry. You get hungry by finding something that's you, I believe that all of us are born unique, but most of us die copies. You've got to find out what is it that turns you on, what resonates with you. One of the things that I realized and what allowed me to become successful as a speaker, the speaking industry has been hijacked by people who speak to sell, and it's okay to do that and make money. I speak to change lives because somebody spoke.

and change my life. So this is my passion. This is my drive. This is something that I feel in my heart. And so the key to that hunger-driven life is a hard-centered life. I didn't do what I'm doing for years because of my programming,

because of the culture in which I was raised in. I would see other people with degrees and PhDs and MBAs and credentials. I don't have and I convinced myself I couldn't do it. But Mr. Washington, on that day, we became friends. And he taught me not only someone's opinion of you does not have to determine your reality. He said that you have to work on yourself and you have to have an unstoppable attitude and no excuse is acceptable.

And you've got to make it a priority, a non-negotiable in your life and hold a constant vision of what it is you want to achieve, see it accomplish, and go all out, find a way to win in spite of the setbacks, in spite of the disappointments, in spite of your failures. I tell people, when I'm giving presentations, you will fail your way to success. I have a saying is, life knocks you down, try and land on your back, because if you can look up, you can get up. And so those experiences of going after goals that's beyond your comfort zone and having relationships that will challenge you and surrounding yourself with coaches and mentors

who can take you to a place within yourself that you can't go by yourself because you can't read the label when you're locked in the box. And so those experiences, they challenge you to go to that next level and continue to move forward in your life doing new and exciting things that I has not seen, ear has not heard, nor is in the heart of mankind what God has in store for you when you live a hard-centered life deciding that you're going to live a life that will outlive you. You're going to live a life that counts a life that will build a legacy and change the planet. You know, Har's man said, we should be ashamed to die until we've made some major contribution.

to humankind. And so my goal is to make a major contribution to humankind. I am a father of 10, five boys and five girls. I'm suing the people who came up with the rhythm method. The rhythm don't work. You know, I've got rhythm, but the rhythm method does not work. Okay? And I have 15 grandchildren and four great-grandsons. And so every day when I get up, my mindset is, what is it that I can do to touch and impact somebody's life today? Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.