The School of Greatness - 296 How to Break an Addiction in 30 Days with Jack Canfield

Episode Date: February 29, 2016

"Going through anything alone is really difficult." - Jack Canfield If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, video, and more at http://lewishowes.com/296

This is episode number 296 with New York Times best-selling author Jack Canfield. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro-athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome everyone to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

And it's my intention to bring you incredible guests each and every episode or incredible ideas to move you to the next level in your business, your life, your relationships, your spirituality, wherever you're looking to go. That's the intention for this. And I continue to get so many of you that come up to me, that say hi to me on the streets or the message me online on social media that tell me your stories of transformation from the interviews

that you listened to that really helped you get to your next level. So if you are inspired by this podcast, if you're getting results in your life, please share them with me on my contact form at lewishouse.com. Send me a tweet, a Snapchat, leave a comment on our YouTube channel at YouTube slash Lewis House. Let me know how things are going in your life and your business because of the school of greatness podcast. You know, I meet so many incredible people, but I never know who's listening until you

reach out and let me know. So please say hi, make sure to follow me online and leave a comment wherever I post my information. So thank you guys so much for being a part of this community. And please share these episodes out with your friends to bring the greatness to more people. Again, this is lewishouse.com slash 296 for this specific episode. If you want to share this out with your friends. And we have all the show notes and additional resources on each show note page. Our guest today is Jack Canfield. Now, Jack is an incredible guy.

I've had him on before. There was an extremely successful episode. We'll have that linked up as well. And he knows what motivates, drives, and inspires people to do the impossible. He's a Harvard graduate with a master's degree in psychological education and one of the earliest champions of peak performance. He's also the education and one of the earliest champions of peak performance. He's also the co-founder of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series and author of The Success Principles. And we talk about overcoming addiction in this episode, specifically alcohol addiction. We just got a new book on, but this is all addictions and really how this affects our lives. And even if you don't think you have an addiction, maybe it's not alcohol related, you might

have some other addiction that you're not even aware of. But there are lots of people that are surrounded in our lives who do face addiction where you could support those individuals as well through this message. And some of the things we cover today are why you eat more when you drink alcohol, why that happens, the big myths behind drinking that aren't true. In fact, the opposite is true. How alcohol and sugar addiction are so closely connected. The subconscious fears that keep us from choosing sobriety, essentially sobriety in anything.

How to get your friends to support you in not drinking if you are drinking. Plus some crazy statistics about cancer related to drinking for women, and so much more about overcoming addiction. So I hope you guys enjoy this episode. It's going to be a powerful one. And again, make sure to share with your friends, lewishouse.com slash 296. And without further ado, let me introduce you to the one and only Jack Canfield. Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness podcast.

Super excited about our guest today. His name is Jack Canfield. Thanks so much for coming on, Jack. I appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. I love it, Lewis. Yes, and he's got a new book out.

It's called The 30-Day Sobriety Solution. I want to make sure you guys go check this out. It's out right now, and it's an awesome book. So go check book out. It's called The 30 Day Sobriety Solution. I want to make sure you guys go check this out. It's out right now. And it's an awesome book. So go check this out. It's how to cut back or quit drinking in the privacy of your own home. And Jack, for those don't know, he's also got another book called The Success Principles, how to get from where you are to where you want to be. We covered this the 10 year anniversary of this on another podcast and video. So we'll have that linked

up somewhere in here and linked up below on the show notes. This is an incredible book. I read this, I think it was eight or nine years ago, and it definitely was an inspiration for me. You're also a 40 or 50-time New York Times bestselling author for Chicken Soup for the Soul series, 500 million copies, I believe, sold. That's right. It's incredible. It's like, has anyone else sold that many copies of a book or books? I think maybe the Bible. The Bible. What about Harry Potter?

I think Harry Potter is right up there, but I don't know the exact number. Who knows? Yeah. But is it 40 times? Do you even know

the amount of times it's been on the New York Times? 47 bestsellers on the New York Times. 47 bestsellers. Different books. Yeah. Has anyone had more books

Well, and the most fun part is we had, at one time time we had seven chicken soup books on the New York Times list on one day. We have a Guinness Book World record for that. Amazing. And they only put 10 on the list, right? There's an extended list. Right.

That's unbelievable. Do you remember the other three? I don't. Okay. It was irrelevant. It wasn't that interesting to me. I was too excited about ours. Amazing. Cool. Well, you've got this new book out and I want to talk about a number of things, drinking and addiction with drinking, but also addiction in general, because I think

more people are addicted to things than we know about. We were just talking about how people are addicted to video games or eating a specific food every single day or just addicted to getting angry on the road every time they drive. They don't know how to be peaceful. Right. And so they're addicted to sex. They're addicted to television.

They're addicted to gambling. Working all day. They're addicted to alcoholism. They're shopping addictions. Yes. All kinds of addictions. So I think it's a really important and relevant topic for us. Even if you don't think you're not addicted to alcohol.

You were even giving me statistics earlier about how women – something about – give me a statistic with women and breast cancer. Even if you're not addicted or you're getting drunk all the time, but there's still – Well, we talk in the book about the 30-day sobriety challenge. about the 30-day sobriety challenge. And while this was originally written by myself and my co-author, Dave Andrews, who was a full-blown alcoholic who relapsed three times until he found the human potential movement and realized through my book and Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy and others that there were alternatives. He literally was driving his car and someone gave him a Tony Robbins tape and he said,

why aren't they teaching this in rehab? This is what we need to learn. And so he started applying all this in his own life. And as a result of that, got sobered and started the coaching program. We have an 80% success rate with that coaching program, which we turned into this book, which also as a book has an 80% success rate. And now I forgot your question. Give me the link with alcohol, drinking and women. So what happens is with the 30 day sobrietyety challenge, we're saying even if you're not an alcoholic but you just drink a lot, we know that excessive drinking is considered 13 or more drinks a week.

If you have three glasses of wine every night, which would be splitting a bottle of wine with your friend, your husband, whatever, you fall in that category. And we know that- So what's the difference between excessive drinking and alcoholic? Well, an alcoholic is defined as someone basically where they can't stop once they start. Often they'll drink until they pass out. Wow. Or they'll drink to where they become dysfunctional.

They become the kind of person everyone goes, my God, you're slurring your words. You're not safe to drive. They get DUIs. Their boss has trouble. Like you need to quit coming to work hungover. Some people are drinking at work, you know, but pulling it out of their drawer. Gotcha.

But an excessive drinker is 13. If you drink six drinks a week, if you're a woman, you have a 40% higher incidence of breast cancer. If you drink up to 10 drinks, it goes up to 70% higher chance incidence of breast cancer. If you drink up to 10 drinks, it goes up to 70% higher chance of getting breast cancer. So just the health benefits, one of the things that's coming out of England is research that if you stop drinking for 30 days, much like I do a fast every quarter for two or three days, sometimes a week where I just drink vegetable juices or

vegetable broth or soup broth, whatever. And it cleans out the liver. It cleans out the kidneys. You wake up brighter. You need less sleep and so forth. And so we're saying just cut back. And what they're finding is people are living longer. It's clearing out their kidneys.

Arterial sclerosis is being reversed. You know, people are having all kinds of more energy. They're losing weight. I decided as part of this book that I would go 30 days. I'm a social drinker. I have three alcohol, well, four alcoholics in my family, my mother, my father, and my sister and my brother. And the reality is, and I have two children who are alcoholics as well. They're both sober and they've been in sobriety and all that for about eight to 10 years. But the reality is it skipped me for whatever reason. I didn't have a problem. I can drink socially, but I said, I'm going to quit drinking for 30 days just to be part of the book. I lost, I did it for two months in a row actually. And I lost 15 pounds and I did a little more exercise, which is one of the things we say in the book.

One of the challenges with cutting out any addiction, whether it's watching TV or whether it's drinking or whether it's playing video games for three hours, so you're not talking to your wife, you're not playing with your children, all the stuff, you're not doing your homework. Quitting smoking. You're not learning a language. All the things you could be doing that are useful is that when you stop, you have all this extra time. And at first, that can be a little disconcerting. But the reality is I needed less sleep. I was getting more done.

I started writing more blogs. I was spending more time with my wife. I was exercising more, which is one of the other reasons I lost more weight. exercising more, which is one of the other reasons I lost more weight. And when you drink, what happens is, and this is true with drinking drugs and marijuana, that you eat more, you know, because your willpower goes down. In other words, you go out and you're going to, I'm not going to eat dessert, but then you have two glasses of wine. Wow, how the hell I'll have dessert. And so you're eating all these extra calories and you're eating them. You weren't going to eat the rolls and the butter, but then you did because you had the two cocktails before.

So there's so many benefits that come from this. And then we say, if you want to, you can go back to drinking. What we're finding, if you do the processes in the book, because it says 30-day solution, there are 30 solutions on how to re-vector your life so that you don't desire to drink anymore. And so what happens as you start doing these, you find out that the craving for alcohol actually disappears for most people. And the craving for whether it's food,

most of the things that we do that are addictions are to numb out our anxiety, to numb out our pain, to numb out the memories of trauma, to numb out our discomfort around being with people in a social situation, the fear that I won't have fun, I won't be interesting, I'm more relaxed, I'm more fun. And that's the big myth is I won't have a fun life. What we're finding is people are actually having more fun because they start doing things like they take music lessons, they take guitar lessons, they go to Toastmasters.

Salsa dancing. Salsa dancing. Yeah, my wife and I just went to a country western bar the other night and was learning line dances. It was a kick. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Line dancing is fun. Line dancing is totally fun. The thing that blew me away is there's about, I don't know, 12 or 15 different ones that everyone does, and they all know all the steps.

They know everything. It's unbelievable. Well, we learn most of them, but not perfectly. Yeah, exactly. But when you come out, you're just high off the dancing. Yeah, yeah. I hear you. So why 30 days?

Why not a year or six months or 60 days? What's the point? Here's the deal. We say 30 days, there's 30 solutions. You could do it every other day for 60 days. You could do it every third day for 90 days. Some people are doing one solution a week for 30 weeks. day for 90 days. Some people are doing one solution a week for 30 weeks. And the reality is that what we found is that with our online coaching program that started this whole thing,

before we turned it into a book, in 30 days was enough to get people to where they didn't want to drink anymore, or they knew they could cut back, or they knew they couldn't cut back because they tried and said, no, I have to quit. And so each solution builds one on the other over time. And it's very systematic. It's like knowing the combination to a lock. If you know the numbers in the right order and the right sequence in the right way, the lock opens. You've got these lockers behind you. One of the big challenges for kids in school is remembering their locker number. Do you ever have that dream? This is a dream I had when I was 50 years old. I was back at my school and I couldn't remember my locker combination. Everyone's

opening their lockers and I'm totally lost. You're scared. Scared and then I think it's just somehow we've lost the formula for success. I think it's what that dream's about. Interesting. I like that. When you say 30 solutions... Let me just say one more thing. You said why not a year?

There are 30 solutions, but we're not saying you do 30 days and you're done. We're saying there's about 14 of these that you want to keep doing as a daily discipline after the 30 days to keep yourself on track. Can you give me some examples of a few of the solutions and what people would be doing? One of the things we do on the first day is an NLP technique where we want to basically associate drinking with negativity and pain and associate not drinking with joy and pleasure. Because most people associate not drinking with pain and drinking with pleasure. And so we look at your life as it is, as you're currently drinking and say, if you keep doing this for five years, what is your life going to look like in terms of your weight, your health, your job and career, your relationships, your kids, and so on and so forth? And mostly when you honestly look at that, it doesn't look all that great.

And so we have you visualize that and really see it and feel the feelings of it. And then we have you do the opposite and take it out five years, what would be happening in your life if you were not drinking and you were healthier, happier, exercising, spending more time with your kids, sober, writing your book, whatever. And so then we have you actually revisit that on a regular basis throughout the program so that by the end of it, you literally see that one of the big myths about getting rid of addiction is willpower. Willpower is useful. It takes willpower to sit down and do these lessons. But willpower is like if you do willpower alone and you don't deal with the underlying cause of why you're drinking, there's a why you're drinking. If you don't address that, and we address that through a number of exercises like the total truth process, the EFT tapping techniques.

We can go into all that later. What happens is, we use this metaphor. You're driving a boat and you're going north and you want to go east. So the boat's on automatic pilot going north. And now we take it with, oh, power, we turn it to the east and we just keep holding this wheel like that and we're going east. But as soon as we let go of the wheel, what happens?

It's going back north. Automatic pilot takes over, we go north again. So we want to reprogram the automatic pilot instead of just the willpower of I'm not going to drink. You get to the point where I don't want to drink. I mean, I went through the 60 days I told you without drinking. And then I started drinking a little bit again. You know, I think when was it? Valentine's Day, just a couple of days ago.

And I woke up the next morning. I didn't feel as good. And I'm going like, I got 600 bottles of wine in my wine cellar. I'm thinking like, I'm not buying anymore because I'm not trying to keep drinking as much as I used to drink because it's just not serving me. And I wouldn't have been aware of that if I hadn't stopped, you know, having that glass of wine every night with dinner or whatever. So that's one technique we talked about. Another technique is getting in touch with your core values. We all have core values.

You know, it might be family. It might be adventure. It might be love. It might be authenticity. we all have core values you know it might be family it might be adventure it might be love might be authenticity and then look at what is my drinking doing to the expression of those core values well when i drink i'm ashamed i lie about it well there goes integrity out the window you know and i say i'm loving but then i'm taking money that i could be spending for my family and i'm buying drinks for everyone at the bar i'm buying hundred dollar bottles of wine for dinner

or 30 or you know thunderbird if it's annoying afford it whatever but the bar. I'm buying $100 bottles of wine for dinner or 30 or Thunderbird if it's annoying. I can afford it, whatever. But the point is I'm usually violating those values. And then we create what we call your 30-day sobriety vision. What do you want to look like 30 days from now? What's the outcome you're looking for? And we know that if we visualize every day the outcome we want, what happens is that the subconscious mind begins to figure out how to make that happen. Most people are not visualizing. Or if they are, they're visualizing the happy hour, can't wait to get to the bar, and visualizing, oh, when the weekend finally comes, I can kick back and get with my buddies and we'll get drunk and have a good time. I mean, this is kind of the college thing.

I have a 26-year-old stepson who's now just getting to the place where he realizes there's more to life than that. That's not working too well for me. He's working for a financial analyst company, and he's coming to work a little hungover on Monday. And his wife's saying, I think you're drinking too much. And he gets a little cantankerous. Doesn't get into the fights anymore, which he did in college. But, you know, he's going, I think I need to shift this. And so there's a way to begin doing that

you know to jump ahead in the book what the solution 13 is tapping and tapping is this wonderful technique yes where you tap on acupuncture points on the head and the chest and under the arm nick ordner has done a great job of bringing that to the the masses yeah well one of the things that's wonderful we have have a free companion website for the book. And literally that companion website is everything that used to be in a $1,000 coaching program. So for the price of a book, you're really getting a $1,000 coaching program for free. And what happens is we have Nick Ordner doing a tapping sequence for people. We also have a guy named Dawson Church who is one of Nick's cronies and friends and mentors.

And so they're both doing tapping. And you can tap on the anxiety that's making you drink. You can tap on the craving. You can literally disappear a craving. We took a group of people, had them have chocolate and take the little foil off the kisses, smell it, put it back down, glass of alcohol, and other things that people crave, sugar, candy bar, whatever.

And they're salivating, right? And after about seven minutes of tapping, they didn't want any of it. Wow. And you know when you get that craving for something? I need that chocolate or I need that whatever. For me, it's chocolate and candy and sweets. That's my thing. And here's the issue with alcohol.

Alcohol is basically fermented sugar. And so we're all addicted to sugar. We drink and eat way much more sugar. And so what happens for most alcoholics when they stop, they become sugar alcoholics. You go to a day-a meeting, everyone's eating cookies and donuts. They're replacing it with something, right? Exactly. They're replacing it with something that satisfies a craving.

And ultimately, we're saying sugar isn't really great for you. Not a wonderful thing. We're not – if you need sugar while you're cutting out alcohol, great. But sugar is also an addiction. It is. If you can cut that out, the weight goes off. It's a huge addiction. And Mark Hyman, I don't know if you know Mark.

Yeah, he's been on here. Yeah, he's a great guy. He's a good friend of mine, and he wrote a book on sugar. And literally, the moment you eat sugar, within a few minutes, you literally, there's brain cells in your brain that are exploding. You're killing brain cells. Not only with alcohol, we all knew that, but just with sugar. And you get that funny little headachy, not headachy, but kind of weird energy feeling in your head. That's your brain cells exploding. Wow. So what do you think is the number one reason people get addicted to alcohol or addicted to anything in the first place? What's the underlying reason for addiction?

Well, there's a discomfort of being in your skin without it. Meaning that if I had trauma, a lot of people drink because of trauma. And so we see a lot of people, they lose their job, their parents get divorced, you know, whatever. They get divorced. They get fired. They were outcasts at school. People teased them. You know, they were bullied, et cetera.

And so alcohol becomes a way to numb out that pain. For me and my family, you know, we just watched our parents drink. We thought when you're a grown-up, you drink. You know, when you're a grown-up, you smoke. So we'd all be out with fake cigarettes, you you know pretending to smoke because we want to be big and then when my parents would go away for the night we'd take alcohol and pour it in a glass and then we'd pour some water in so it looks like it's still there and then we drank it and it was like the worst tasting stuff in the world back then right but there was this warm feeling that came over you went oh i get it it

feels kind of good and then you're not worried about school you're not worried about your girlfriend not liking you the kids teasing teasing you, all that stuff. So it gets rid of those feelings of anxiety, discomfort, pain, awkwardness, not knowing what to do, feeling shy, all of that. And that's true for all the addictions, whether it's food. We get bad news, we go to the refrigerator, we eat ice cream or we chow down on carbs. I think we'll have spaghetti. And the same is with gambling. And some addictions are addictions to adrenaline. Gambling is why people get the adrenaline rush. Even though you're losing money at the slot machine, every time you win 96% back and they keep doing that until there's nothing left,

there's a rush. And when the bells ring and the lights are going off and all that flashing is going on, all those machines in Vegas are designed to do. Kids who steal cars, it's not the car. They ditch them. It's the adrenaline rush while they're doing them, not getting caught, sneaking around, illicit sex, all that stuff, watching porn, hoping you won't get caught. There's an adrenaline rush that goes with it. And so your mind is taking off this stuff. The problem is it's like you have a fire alarm up here, and it's making a lot of noise. And so you cut the wire. Now there's no noise. Ah, pleasure. The heroin rush, you know, the coke rush, the marijuana relaxing.

But the problem is there's still a fire. And just because you cut off the news that there's a fire, the problem is there's still a fire. And just because you cut off the, the, the news that there's a fire, the problem is the next morning you wake up, the anxiety is still there. The pain is still there. The trauma hasn't been healed. The rejection hasn't been healed. And you haven't learned the skills you need to handle the emotions of anger and fear and rejection and upset. You haven't learned the skills of creating a relationship that's fulfilling without having to be drunk to do it. And so that's the problem with the addiction.

It's a temp. See, someone once said, I think it was Gourmet, he said, the problem with addictions is they work. Right. That's why everyone's addicted. But they only work temporarily. And they work less and less often. And it takes more of the addictive substance to make it work, which is why you're now drinking a whole bottle of vodka at night instead of two drinks.

Or you need more sex or you need more gambling or you need bigger rushes to feel the getting rid of it. It seems like a lot of the things you're talking about with these solutions in here is almost a lot of the same things you talk about in Success Principles. They are. It's a very similar approach to getting what you want in life is also the same approach to overcoming addiction. Exactly.

They are. Originally, the title of this book was going to be The Success Principles for Alcoholism, you know, or The Success Principles for Sobriety. And then what we realized is the 30-Day Soriety solution just had a little more cachet to it. Of course, of course. And there's stuff in here that doesn't. I mean, there's some work from other people as well.

Oh, of course, yeah. But I mean, at the end of the day, it looks like you're talking about using the power of affirmations, confronting your fears. It doesn't seem like that these gimmicky thing, it's really addressing the core root of what everyone needs to do to achieve success in their life, but also to overcome any challenge. In this case, directly addressing it to alcohol, although

you could also write in the word over eating or anything there. But there are certain fears that go along with not drinking. I won't be fun. People at work, like if you work in New York in the stock market, everyone goes out and drinks at night. A good friend of mine who runs a company called Grocery Ships here in town walked away from $8 million in bonuses from Wall Street. And everyone was going, come on, drink, drink, drink.

And he knew he couldn't drink anymore. And everyone was like, give him a hard time. What do you wish? Come on, be a man. And so that's part of the culture. It is. And so it's going to affect my career. I won't know what to do when I'm out with the guys, you know, whatever.

But we teach people you can still go there and you order a club soda with cranberry juice in it or whatever and people get off your case because they think you're drinking something. But the point being that there's a lot of cultural pressure to do these things and most people don't have the tools. these things and most people don't have the tools. What we're saying is affirmations related to sobriety, affirmations related to getting rid of the addiction as opposed to just affirmations in general. And what people are saying, and you might know this too, Lewis, is that most people know these general principles now. Now they're saying, well, but apply them to me as a manager. Apply them to me being a good husband.

Applying to me being a world-class skier. I want it more niched now. Yes, of course. And so this book is an attempt to do that. Yeah, I love this. And for me, I've never been drunk in my life. I don't know if I've told you that, but I've never experienced what it feels like to be drunk on alcohol.

And then when I was in college, I played college football, and the same thing happened where every weekend after the games, all the guys went out and just got drunk and trashed at parties. And they were always pressuring me. They knew that I wasn't going to drink because I'd made a commitment for four years in college. I wasn't going to have a sip of alcohol because I wanted to have every advantage to be the best I could be in football. Yeah. But they still try to like give me every night. They would just throw drinks at me and I was like, no, I'm good. I'm good. I'm good.

And it's, uh, I can only imagine the pressures that people have with drinking from their peers alone. Yeah. Even if they don't want to, right. They're just like,

okay, well I have one and then it ends up being three or four because they want to make, they want to please their friends. So how do we set up our social circles so that when we do, we do want to go out and spend time with our friends, but when they're drinking or they're going out and having a few drinks, maybe we don't want to, but how do we have a conversation with our friends in a way that doesn't turn them off or make them

feel like you're better than them or you're too good to drink or something like that, but also so they can relate and understand and not continue to pressure you every time and say, just have one sip. Just try this. What's the conversation we could have with our friends? Well, for me, when I was doing my 60 days and what we recommended people in the book is to just say, you know, what I'm doing right now, I'm just doing a little 30-day experiment in my life to see how it works. And what I'm finding is, you know, I'm waking up earlier. I'm feeling better, whatever.

I'm just going to keep doing that for a while. And it's not about I'm not one of the guys. You're still one of the guys. You were still one of the football players. You still did well at what you ever did. Probably did better. And if you were to look back and say, take all those guys on a football team and see where they are right now and compare them to your success, I would bet most of them are not anywhere near New York Times bestseller, top 100 podcast, whatever. So Donald Trump never drank.

Tom Cruise never drank. Really? You know, we have a statistic. I can't remember all the names right now, but seven of the top ten grossing film stars of all time never drank. Wow. Yeah. And a couple of them actually did drink and quit.

Right. And the rest, Samuel L. Jackson was a terrible drunk, and then he stopped. And once he stopped, that's when his career took off and he's made literally hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, he's an amazing actor, plus his little credit card commercials. So there's a lot of research on the people that don't drink tend to do a little better. But I would say the conversation for me would be, I get it. You think I should be drinking right now. I'm not going to. Thank you very much. I'm really happy the way I am.

And, you know, just stop. It's not going to happen. Exactly. And just let people know. And what happens is people are going to press you like a teenager is going to press you over and over. Can I have the keys to the car? Please can I have the keys to the car? Come on.

And eventually you get that just doesn't lend the keys to the car. You know, it becomes a policy. Like, you know, I don't think many people are offering Donald Trump a drink. They know he doesn't drink and they respect him and they're just going to not do it. And we actually give some excuses you can give to people on the website too. They're a little more fun and sexy. But just generally, it's called, it's not against you, it's for me. That's a really good thing when you tell somebody.

It's not against you, it's for me? It's not against you, it's for me? It's not against you, it's for me. You know, when people say, can you do this? You say, no, no. And they say, well, you don't like me or whatever. You say, no, no, I'm not saying, it's not against you. I'm making a decision for me right now. I like that.

I'm just experimenting with this. I'll let you know how it turns out. I like that. That's really powerful. Yeah. Huh. What do you think is one of the biggest challenges for people getting started with this process of actually saying, okay, I don't want to drink anymore. Maybe for years they've known it doesn't feel good, but they're afraid.

Fear is a big issue. Okay. Yeah. What's the thing they're afraid of? They're not going to have that crutch. They're afraid. Well, first of all, they're afraid they're never going to drink again. So would you tell people?

And that's a fear of people? Yeah. If you tell people you got to go to AA and AA says you never drink again, that's why a lot of people don't go. I mean, they don't go for other reasons, public shame. They don't go for something that's too religious for some people, whatever. But the big fear is I'll never drink again.

And if I never drink again, I won't have fun again. It's like life's going to become dull and boring. And I can tell you from my experiment, from my kids' lives, and from Dave, my co-author, you know, Dave coaches basketball for his daughters. He runs marathons. He is a speaker. He dances. He's a big football fan with the Denver team, which just won the Super Bowl, you know.

It takes his kids to the park every day. I mean, he's having a lot of fun. And he thought it would be boring because he had social anxiety as a teenager. And then when he went to college and he drank, all of a sudden he didn't have the social anxiety. He started having more fun, but it wasn't the fact that he wasn't drinking. In other words, nobody's not having fun because they have a deprivation of alcohol in their

system. You know, it's like, you know, you're not, you don't have depression because you have a lithium deficiency. Sure, sure, sure. You have depression because you're depressing, pushing down on feelings you don't have depression because you have a lithium deficiency. You have depression because you're depressing, pushing down on feelings you don't want to feel. So one of the things that does come up for people, and it's a valid fear, is that feelings are going to emerge and perhaps past memories are going to emerge. But if you know what to do with them when they do, which most people don't because we're a psychologically ignorant culture, we didn't learn this stuff in school.

Then it's scary. What do I do with these feelings? I feel like they overwhelm me. I can't, you know, whatever. My wife's father committed suicide when she was eight. And one night, four years into our marriage, she just woke up screaming, Daddy, don't do it. All of a sudden, all this pain.

If I'd loved my father more, he wouldn't have killed himself. If I'd have been a better daughter. And so did she want to feel those feelings? Absolutely not. But because I knew what to do with them, because there's ways to learn to express them through, we have a thing called the total truth process, where you go through anger, hurt, fear, remorse, and regret, unfulfilled I wants, and then what I do want, and then forgiveness. And if you know that model, you can get to forgiveness and love and release it. With tapping, you can release guilt. You can release shame. You can release fear.

And you can release pain, as Nick Ordner's new book, your reference, talks about. So if you have the tools, you know you can heal. If you go into the jungle without a gun, you're going into Africa without a gun, you're a little concerned. You're going to get eaten by a lion or hit by a hippo. But if you've got a guide and a gun, now you know you have the tools to survive in the jungle. Most people go into that jungle called sobriety without the tools they need. And most people can't afford the $30,000 a month to go to rehab. Most people don't want to take that time off work, especially if you're a solo entrepreneur.

You can't afford it. Most people don't want to take that time off work, especially if you're a solo entrepreneur. You can't afford it. We had one guy. He's one of the top sales trainers in America in the real estate world. And I won't mention his name because it's confidential, but he read the book when we did it in the beta test. And he had not been sober more than 12 days his entire adult life. Every night, drank until he passed out.

Totally ashamed. Didn't want anyone to know. When we sent him the book, he went and got a post office box so it wouldn't come to his home or his office. He wrote, he wanted two hours of coaching, so he did that. He wrote a check on a cashier's check so no one would ever know where it went. Wow. And that's how ashamed he was. That's why he could never get help because he could never go to AA. He could never go to rehab.

I don't even think his wife didn't want other people to know. And he's now been sober for four months, and he's lost weight. He's happier. He feels better when he's running his seminars. More people are coming and enrolling because he's more wonderful up on stage. He's having more fun, greater sense of humor. I mean, it's changed his whole life. Amazing.

And why do people love the AA approach or the rehab approach, and why do they not love it? And is there a support group that people will get when they go through this book? Do you guys have something like that? I have nothing against AA. AA was very helpful to my two sons for getting sober. AA, there are people there who care about you. They've been through it. They understand it.

They give you mentorship. Yeah, they become a sponsor for you. Both of my sons have now become sponsors for other people. There is a camaraderie. Going through anything alone is really difficult, any behavioral change. If you decide to go run every morning, it's so much easier if you know Bob's waiting downstairs at 630 outside your apartment. Then you've got the accountability. This guy's going to, where are you, Lewis? And it's easier. You're talking to him. Time goes faster, et cetera. So basically, AA has a lot of value, but a lot of people just won't go. And the other thing we talk about with

AA is you have to admit over and over. You have to say, in the beginning, you have to get out denial. I'm an alcoholic. But if you keep referring, if you keep affirming that for 30 years. Even 10 years later, 30 years later. Yeah, yeah. Not great. And the challenge with AA, and this was a friend of mine named Tommy Rosen who puts on Recovery 2.0, which is a teleseminar for recovery people. And he said when he got his 20-year chip, his sponsor hugged him and said, you're one in

10,000. And he said, only one in 10,000 people who join AA make it to 20 years sober. And he said, that's when I knew something was wrong. Something was missing. And when I would go to AA meetings with my kids, I would always want to jump up and say, God, let me run an exercise here for you. We could all do this meditation. If I could teach you how to breathe and relax, if we could do this thing where you forgive your parents, you could quit having this story about how you've been abused your whole life. You know, yeah, you were, but you need to let it go because this anger is killing you, you know?

And so they feel that anger and then they don't know what to do with it and they go out drinking again. They relapse and they relapse and they relapse. And then people feel ashamed to go back to AA because they've relapsed, you know, because they're supposed to be abstinent a hundred percent. So that's a challenge. And we know that 20, I think it's 29 million people have, they say they're in recovery based on a survey that said, did you ever have a problem with drugs and alcohol? And is it gone now? Yes. We only have 1.3 million people that belong to AA. So we know people are getting sober without AA. The problem with rehab is that you've got to – well, first of all, AA, somewhere about a 20%, if you can believe the statistics, recovery.

Only 20% of people go, keep going. 20% of people go to AA, keep going. Yeah. Gotcha. And that number is suspect because we don't know how clear it is. But let's give it to them. Rehab, 15% to 30%, and that's also suspect because there's no real long-term longitudinal studies. You're talking about recover or 15% to 20%?

Recover, that's what they say. Rehab. But we have 80%, 79.5% to be exact recovery rate after five years still sober from the first coaching program. And now after the book, it's when we did the beta test, four to five months still sober from the first coaching program. And now after the book, when we did the beta test, four to five months still sober. So the reality is that with rehab, you go there and rehab has some challenges. There are some good rehab centers, like there's good therapists and there's bad therapists. But a lot of rehab centers, especially the ones with places like Malibu and places, they're basically real estate investment opportunities.

I'm going to buy this big mansion. It's worth $6 million. In 10 years, it'll be worth $12 million. And you're going to pay my mortgage every month because you're charging me $30,000 for the 12 or 15 people there. And the staff, other than your therapist for a week, once a week for a therapist, once a week for a counselor,

you have a 12-step meeting every day, maybe a yoga class, maybe get a massage. Now you got like 13 hours left. What do you do the rest of the time? What do you do? And you're sitting around with other people who have these addictive challenges. It's like prison where the prisoners are like, you don't know how to be better prisoners, better criminals. And so they're bored. And you've got really lovingly dedicated people who are young, who've been through rehab, who now want to help, but they don't have the skill sets they need.

So one of the things we're saying with this book, if you're a rehab counselor, get a copy of this book. Start doing this stuff with the people in your rehab center. If you're an addiction counselor, Bridget Lank, who's an addiction counselor, she's a psychotherapist up in San Rafael, is building a whole program around this book. She said, oh my God, this is what we need.

This is what people need. They need a systematic approach. And that's the thing. If you don't have a system, you know, you went and you played football. Your coach had a system for exercise, for training, for fitness, nutrition, practice, plays, all that kind of stuff.

And if your system worked, you won games and you won championships. And better systems beat bad systems. Right. And so this is a system. And as we said earlier, you could apply this to overeating. You could apply this to pretty much any addiction you wanted.

I love it. And I'm curious to, to know about the difference between cutting back and cutting out cold turkey. Yes. Is there a better approach to say, you know what? I drink every night two glasses. Maybe I'll just start with cutting back to one glass a night. Or is it better to, you think it's more effective to cut out cold turkey?

Which one's the way to go? Whether I'm talking about drinking, smoking, whatever it may be. Two aspects to that. Number one, if you're drinking a lot, you quit cold turkey, you could have seizures. So you should see a doctor. If you're the kind of guy that's drinking like, you know, 12 beers a night or half a – yeah, every night, there is a possibility of DTs, delirious tremens. So you want to check with your doctor, do a blood test.

We tell people that in the first chapter. If you're a casual drinker, a couple of drinks a night, we think you could just stop. And we encourage you to do that. When I do my Breakthrough to Success training, which is a seven-day training, I tell people, you're not going to drink for seven days. I want you sober here every morning. You're paying way too much money to come in here with a hangover. And if you can't show up and do that, you've got a drinking problem. So it's better to stop.

But we tell people in this program, we give you a week to stop. And, but we don't want you doing this program while you're drinking because you won't get the value out of it. At the end of 30 days, you can assess whether you want to start to try to casually throw another, you know, maybe drink once. And we, we find five to 10% of the people that go through this program can quit. But those were, those were the people in the beta test who were serious alcoholics. So we haven't tested it yet with people that are just drinking a couple of drinks a night and want to

cut back. With that, it might be 20 to 30% could cut back. According to the statistics, only one out of nine, nine out of 10 excessive drinkers can actually cut back. Only one can't. So it could be that cutting back is a possibility. But we want you to do the program sober. And then at the end, if you feel like you want to introduce drinking again, try it. But if you do it the first two times, you get drunk again, you're not a candidate for that. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

And what's the difference between thriving in sobriety and just staying sober? Let me just say one more thing because we talked about different addictions. There was a Harvard psychology professor, William James, famous psychologist who said, when you're trying to change a behavior, it's best if you go cold turkey, like you're going to stop smoking, stop drinking, whatever, or you're starting a new habit. Make a public declaration. So now everyone around you says, hey, wait, you said you were stopping drinking or you weren't going to eat sugar anymore. You said you were going to exercise and you're not, you're just sitting here being a lounge lizard, you know, whatever. So, and then have an accountability partner. So on our website, cause you mentioned earlier about support, we have a forum. We have over a thousand people

in that forum right now, chatting with each other every day, talking about day nine, what comes up for them and how they're dealing with it. And the support is there. Plus, we have a psychologist who goes in every week and responds to questions for people. And Dave's wife actually is a psychologist. And I go in and comment and give people support and encouragement and answer questions. And it's really important not to try to do this alone. So we would say if there's someone else you can do it with, great. If you want to do it alone because of the shame factor and you want to hide it, that's great. But if you can find a buddy. And when we're doing a 30-day sobriety solution for – or a 30-day sobriety challenge for normal folks who are not excessive drinkers, partner up.

We have one woman who is the graphic designer for the book and things. And she said, well, I was reading the book, deciding what the graphic design should look like. And I decided I was going to start a book club on this. And so I got 12 women. We're all not drinking. We're up to 25 now. We were going to do it for a month. Now we decided we're going to do it for a whole year.

Because I realized wine time was about five when the kids were driving me crazy. I'd have my two glasses of wine, but then I was like kind of not really there for them and my husband for dinner. I didn't really want to cook. So now what I do, I go down in the basement to be a little bit, it's a fitness instructor and a yoga teacher. So I go down and I work out for an hour. I'm spending more time with the kids. I feel better. I'm writing a book. You know, she's like doing all this stuff now. And so she's got 25 people all in a support group supporting her without some of the negative overlay of AA where you feel like you have to go in and tell your drunk. We call it your drunk-a-log. People go and tell about the terrible how they got drunk and lost their job and stuff like that.

It's much more a positive kind of approach. If someone's got an addiction and they know they have it, they've acknowledged it, whether it's drinking, smoking, sex, something, workaholic, whatever it may be, even fitness addiction. You know, there's people that work out all day. Yeah. We have people addicted to plastic surgery. Of course. Yeah. There's all sorts of addictions.

When we realize, okay, there's an addiction that I have that I want to end and I want to move on to something more positive in my life. And I'm sure you probably have this in here, but is there a process you think that everyone should follow in the morning to get them ready for the day and at night to get them ready for the day, specifically focusing in on that addiction? Yeah, you want to get up in the morning, and you want to visualize going through the day with not doing the addiction.

There's something we call the evening review at the end of the day where you close your eyes and you say, where could have I been more on purpose or more on focus for this commitment I have? Oh, you know, you did that thing, you did that thing, you did that thing. And so it's just checking in, checking in, checking in. You want to program your day. Schedule your day. What are your activities going to be?

The problem is, see, if something shows up at 5 o'clock and I'm bored and I don't have anything to do, I'm in trouble. And there's this thing called decision fatigue, and there's also something called compassion fatigue. They first learned this where they were doing federal, in prisons where they're doing parole boards. In the morning, 70% of the people who were up for parole got paroled. In the afternoon, it was like anywhere between 10% and 30%, depending on the prison. People got tired of making decisions. They just, oh, screw it. I'm not getting out.

Wow. And so what happens is as the day goes on, your willpower wanes. Willpower is like a meter. And so in the morning, if you're going to do an exercise, if you're adding exercise into your day, do it first thing in the morning. Put your shoes and your running shoes. You have to trip over them before you go into the bathroom. And if you have a partner. Wear your shorts, your workout shorts to bed.

To bed. There you go. There you go. And then having that accountability partner, someone else you're doing it with. You can be my accountability partner for this. I call you every day and say, okay, here's what I'm going to do today. This is my rule. And at 5 o'clock, I'm going to do this exercise or I'm going to go do a solution in a book or I'm going to play my guitar for an hour, whatever it is.

And we give people 101 alternative activities that bring joy into your life other than drinking in one of the chapters. So you can pick one every day and do it or you pick one and stay with the same thing every day. And then one of my favorite ones is listening to comedy albums i mean there's so many great comedians now you go to go to itunes and download a comedy album just laugh and laughter secretes endorphins in the brain endorphins a natural opiate you don't need to drink if you're laughing you know um and so laughter is is really important so laughing is great and you can do laughter yoga have you heard of laughter yoga no laughter yoga is really cool it's developed by a. And you can do laughter yoga. Have you heard of laughter yoga? No.

Laughter yoga is really cool. It was developed by a doctor in India. And he gets people like, and I teach it in my seminars now in the morning. It's like a little warmup exercise. And you just start laughing. See how you start to laugh right along with me? And then you do these stupid things like milkshake laughter.

You go like, pretend you're making a milkshake. You go, mm, mm. And then instead of drinking it, you just throw're making a milkshake. You go, mm, mm. And then instead of drinking it, you just throw it on the other person. You go, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. And they're throwing theirs on you. Stupid stuff. Right, right. But now you got 50, 60 people all laughing together.

But I can wake up in the morning and just laugh or I can listen to a comedy thing in the morning and laugh. The other thing is you want to do a gratitude exercise. One of the things we found, and we were kind of surprised by it. We knew it was important, law of attraction, all that. But one of the top things when we asked people what was the most important in the book, gratitude. People basically, a lot of them drink because they think their life sucks. But when you really start realizing that half the world lives on $2 a day, your life doesn't suck that bad. And we have, look at all the technology that you have in this office here and the people that are supporting

you and the fact that someone made this table and someone printed that book and Steve Jobs gave you the computer you got there and it works really well and you can communicate with people in Singapore. And you can just literally go around the room for five minutes and just appreciate everything. It gets you blissed out. So that's a really good thing to do in the morning as well. I love that. Oh, and meditation and breathing.

Do you have a good breathing? When someone's feeling overwhelmed, and they're like, I really want to drink this right now, or I really want to eat this, or whatever it is. Well, do the cravings, do the tapping. But Andrew Weil, do you know Andrew Weil? No. Andrew Weil is one of the greatest integrative medicine doctors

because of his big white beard. I've met him a couple of times. Anyway, he teaches this thing. It's called 4-7-8 breathing. And what you do is you start by exhaling. You go, get all the air out. Then through your nose, you inhale to the count of four. And then you hold for the count of seven.

And then you hold for the count of seven. And then very slowly through the mouth, exhale for the count of eight. You do four of those. I just did one. I already feel a little more relaxed. And a little more energized. That kind of like funny feeling in the head. Sure. So you do four of those and it calms you out.

So again, why do people drink? Well, I'm going to have a difficult meeting, you know, or I had a little stress at work today or I'm going to go home and my wife's going to be on my case because I forgot to clean the garage, whatever. Just do that breathing sitting in the car before you get out or before you walk in the meeting or before the person comes in the door. There's a great quote. I'm going to butcher it, but it's something like, master the art of breathing and you

have the strength of 10 lions or 10 tigers or something like that. I've heard something like that, yeah. You know, I feel like, you know, we focus. It's interesting. Someone else said recently, I think on the podcast, you know, we can go however many weeks without food, however many days without water, but we can only go a few minutes without breathing. And yet we don't focus enough of our attention on breathing and mastering breathing.

We just, we're just going to breathe. Well, Fritz Perls, who invented the Gestalt therapy, one of the great breakthroughs in therapy said that anxiety is simply excitement without enough breath. In other words, you know, I'm about to go give a speech. That's exciting. But if I start holding my breath and we always say, don't hold your breath, you know, we say, just breathe. Take a breath. Take a deep breath.

We've known this forever. Take a deep breath, right? It calms us down. It's one of the reasons people smoke. When you smoke, you irritate the alveoli in the lungs, which requires you to then go and breathe deeper. And the nicotine certainly helps, but the other thing that's helping is the deep breathing. And so basically, you look at any athlete, before they do like a 100-yard dash, they'll do some almost like a deep yogic Kundalini yoga breath breathing to build up a store

of oxygen, and then they'll dive into the pool or whatever. So it's both energizing and relaxing at the same time. There are many breathing techniques, but we love this one by Andrew. Wow. Yeah, it's good. So for someone who, you know, who is this for this book specifically? Is it for people that are only addicted to alcohol? Is it people who have friends who are addicted?

Or if you're not addicted to alcohol, but you have some other addictions, can they get this as well? And what would it apply to them? I think it's for anyone addicted to alcohol, but you have some other addictions, can they get this as well and what it would apply to them? I think it's for anyone addicted to alcohol for sure. A lot of people are buying this for their fathers or mothers or brothers or children, their sister, their employees or employer or whatever.

But also, it's for any addiction. I mean, we don't talk about other addictions. We say in the bin again it will apply, but we're just going to use alcohol over and over. But the other thing it's for is the social drinker who wants to just get a little more energy. This is the fast track to success.

In other words, most people, like you in college, you said, I want to get the most out of these four years. I'm not going to drink. And I know when I'm running a training, I never drink. I never drink 36 hours before doing something like this or if I'm going to go on TV. Why? Because alcohol stays in your system for 36 hours before it's totally flushed out.

And if you drink consistently, it stays for longer than that because it gets stored in the fat cells. One of the things fat cells do is store toxins that the liver can't process fast enough. It's like putting things in banker's boxes. And then when you stop drinking, it goes, oh, now we have time to run those banker's boxes through the shredding machine and detox. So it's for anyone who wants to get healthier, lose weight, ultimately be sexier. Because I will tell you, if you're a woman and some guy comes, hey, baby, you want to come home with me tonight? That is not sexy.

You think you're sexy. No. But you're not. We have a little poster that we found that's in the book. It says, dear wine, you were supposed to make me sexier, funnier, a better dancer. I saw the video. We need to talk.

I like that. That's funny. Okay, so make sure you guys go get this book. You can get it anywhere books are sold. You can also go to jackcanfield.com. I think you can opt in to get some extra video training you have on this as well. There's a number of free bonuses you can get.

Jack Canfield dot com. Final few questions for you. Not necessarily related to the book, but what I ask everyone at the end of my interviews. I'm not sure if I asked you last time, so we'll see if the answers change. First one is, what are you most grateful for in your life recently? Recently,

I'm most grateful that my wife has had a major internal shift in her consciousness. She was very judgmental for a long time of how much time I worked and spent on the road doing what I do because I'm passionate about it. And she's working with this Buddhist meditation teacher. And through these practices she's doing called prostrations, where every morning she goes down and then goes out like this and then comes back and surrenders her life to Buddha. You could surrender your life to Christ, but just a higher power. And she has to do 111,000 of these in a year. And she's up to like 22,000 of them. She does like a couple hundred a day.

And all of a sudden she's now become this total support system for me. She's like, I get what you're about. I love you. I love the life you've created for me. She's like, I get what you're about. I love you. I love the life you've created for me and our family. And I want you to be successful. And so that has just stopped. And that is like a huge gift in my life.

Wow. That's awesome. That's a lot to be grateful for. Thank you. I love that. Let's say in many, many years, it's your last day. And it's a very happy, healthy, joyful experience. All your friends and family are there but for whatever reason the 100 new york time bestsellers you have by then

have been erased all the work you've created is gone all the videos audios everything and um they say we have nothing else to remember you by except for this piece of paper and pen we want you to write down the three things that you know to be true about everything you've learned. The three truths. This is going to be the thing that you leave us behind that we're going to remember and apply to our lives forever. We can't read anything else in this. What would be the three truths for you? Choose love, not fear. Anytime you're afraid, just what would the loving action be? For myself, for other people, for the animal kingdom, and for the planet. What would the loving action be? Have more fun.

You should be enjoying the ride. Joy is your feedback system at your own course. So have more fun. Have more joy. If you're not having joy, take a deep breath and figure out where the joy would be and go for it. And the third one would be really appreciate, well, of everything, but certainly appreciate the people in your life more, you know, express that and be grateful for what you have. I love that. That's great. Thanks. Before I ask the final question, I want to acknowledge you, Jack, and I think I did this

last time, but I want to acknowledge you again for your consistent commitment to serving the world. I know you're out there. You're passionate about what you're doing. You're training people on a lot of different topics without overcoming addiction, but also teaching people to become the best version they can be, teaching people to be trainers. You have a lot of different programs and classes going on, and I'm just so inspired by your commitment to continually doing the work. Thank you. You've done so much, but you continually use yourself as a channel to serve so many people. And I want to acknowledge you for the incredible gift that you are to the world.

Thank you. I appreciate that. You're welcome. And I will say back to you the same thing. You're doing it for your generation in a way that's beautiful. So I feel that we're a kinship. We're brothers. Yes, I appreciate it.

Thanks. And the final question is, what's your definition of greatness? Oh, wow. You know, for me, when I hear the word greatness, I think of somebody or a team of people who are committed to excellence, who are committed to fulfilling some higher purpose that makes a difference in the world. And it doesn't have to be building schools in Africa. It could be being the best football player so we all can watch the Super Bowl and really enjoy it, you know.

Or it could be the best helmet maker so fewer concussions happen out on the field. But someone who is committed to really being everything they can be, to, you know, as Bertrand Russell said, you know, getting to the end of their life and there's not one little bit of wax left in the candle that they have been fully used up and burned up in the service of some higher ideal. Jack Canfield, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.

My pleasure, Lewis. Thanks for having me. There you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please share it with your friends. LewisHowes.com slash 296. There you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please share it with your friends, lewishouse.com slash 296. Go ahead and share that out. And also leave a comment on the blog back at that link. Let me know what you thought about this, if you found it valuable,

and maybe the most interesting thing you heard today in this episode. Go ahead and leave a comment there. Also, make sure to check out all of Jack's stuff, his book and everything else. It's all back on the show notes. And I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. We've got some incredible guests coming up each and every week.

We've got some great people coming on. I'm so pumped for you to get more inspiring people in front of your ears so you can listen to what they have to say. And I do my best every single day to improve my skills to become the best interviewer I can possibly be to get the information out of the people I bring on that they don't share anywhere else. It's my goal to get them to open up in ways that they would never open up on any other interview or even in person. So hopefully you

guys acknowledge that and can see and recognize that I'm going to continue to give you my best and make you better in the process. I love you guys. I hope you enjoyed this. You know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. Thank you.