The School of Greatness - Focus Your Mind So You Will Never Be Lazy [MASTERCLASS] EP 1370

Episode Date: December 30, 2022

Today’s Masterclass episode is all about how you can destroy laziness and improve your ability to focus. Four experts share their tips and strategies for how you can increase your level of productivity and find more fulfillment in your life.In this episode,Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology at Stanford, teaches about the double-edged sword of dopamine and how it plays a role in our ability to focus.Greg McKeown, best-selling author, and host of the podcast, What’s Essential, explains why the secret hack to productivity starts with forgiveness.Rich Diviney, former Navy Seal Commander and author, elaborates on the difference between discipline and self-discipline and how to achieve both.Joe Dispenza, an international speaker, researcher, and author, shares how rewriting the story of your past can heal your body and transform your mind.For more, go to lewishowes.com/1370Full Episodes:Andrew Huberman: https://link.chtbl.com/1204-podGreg McKeown: https://link.chtbl.com/1102-podRich Diviney: https://link.chtbl.com/1058-podJoe Dispenza: https://link.chtbl.com/826-pod

You have to be very judicious in your interactions with things that deliver pleasure. So the key is to take this dopamine system and set it up for you to be able to be motivated and focused. And the way to do that is to... Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a 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 to this special masterclass. We brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in. You mentioned dopamine a little bit. Can you talk about dopamine focus and motivation and how to manage our dopamine hits because it seems like every 30 seconds we're getting dopamine now, whether it's drinking coffee, having candy, social media, email pings, dings on the watches, whatever it is, it's a dopamine overload it feels like.

Yes. So how do we stay motivated and manage dopamine at the same time? Great question. Dopamine is the molecule of motivation. The molecule of motivation. Absolutely, I mean for years and years people thought dopamine was about pleasure, but dopamine is mainly about craving

and motivation and drive. Okay. There's a simple experiment that illustrates that, but I would be remiss if I didn't first mention two excellent resources for people that want to learn a lot about dopamine. These would be perhaps interesting people for you to talk to directly. The first is a book called The Molecule of More, which is all about dopamine. The author is Lieberman.

I don't know him personally, but I love the book. I wish I had written it. The second is Dopamine Nation, Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. And the author there is Anna Lemke, L-E-M-K-E. She's a medical doctor and psychiatrist and runs the dual diagnosis addiction clinic at Stanford School of Medicine. She's a colleague, I consider her a friend,

and she is world-class, second to none in all things dopamine as it relates to addiction. So wonderful reads. And so a lot of what I'm going to talk about is kind of paraphrasing elements from their book. So I want to be clear. So here's the experiment. Take two rats. You give them a lever they can press and they can get food out of that lever. They can get if the their cage is cold they can get all sorts of things that are great for a rat including a mate to mate with if they press this lever both rats press the lever just fine now you take away dopamine from one of those rats you can actually do that by using a toxin that

can kill off all the dopamine neurons. Okay. There's an equivalent experiment that's been done in humans, but it was a naturally occurring death of these dopamine neurons, much in the same way that Parkinson's destroys dopamine neurons. What you find is that both rats or both people still experience pleasure from food, from sex, from warmth when they're cold, from cool when they're too warm, et cetera. However, if you take that rat, both rats, and you move them one rat length away from the lever, so they have to just do a little bit of work,

little bit of work in order to press the lever, or you take a human who has no dopamine neurons or very little dopamine, and you make the pleasureful thing a little bit more challenging to get to, the ones with no dopamine do not pursue pleasure at all. That's just one example of what now are hundreds of examples in the neuroscience literature showing that dopamine is the molecule of pursuit, craving, motivation, drive, you know,

pick your favorite word. Dopamine is a good thing in motivation. Provided it's in proper levels. Yes, that's right. If your dopamine is depleted, you will feel not motivated. Now there's a double edged sword here because many things, as you mentioned accurately, trigger dopamine release. you mentioned accurately trigger dopamine release. Let's see positive comment, a compliment food, the more palatable of food, a really tasty chip compared to a slice of a potato that's, that's baked, but doesn't have anything on it. One truly releases more dopamine than the other. I could list off a number of things, but we have a baseline level of dopamine. Nicotine, for instance, increases that by about 50%. Gives you more dopamine.

Dopamine is released. You have two major dopamine pathways in the brain. There's one related to movement, one related to reward. Broadly speaking. There are others, but broadly speaking. The so-called mesolimbic reward pathway. And then the other one, we don't have to throw out names. But that will just confuse people.

But you have these reward pathways and dopamine is involved in movement. So nicotine, about a 50% increase. Cocaine, 100% increase, a doubling. Methamphetamine, 1,000 or even 1,000 fold increase. It's a huge increase in dopamine. That's why it's so addictive. So addictive, but what happens after that big dopamine increase is that the baseline levels of dopamine go below

what they were before. How low that drop is below baseline is proportional to how big the increase was before. That's why it's so addictive to stay on these things. That's right. Well, and that's why if you're getting lots of little dopamine hits from things, as we call them, you're going to feel kind of depressed and those things don't feel as rewarding anymore. Now, eventually the system can reset if you don't indulge. Let me give an example. This is a true story example. Out of respect for the individual, I don't want to reveal his name. uh in talking about dopamine someone i know um has a child um the kid is in his 20s he was a decent student excellent athlete really charming nice kid i've known him since he was little and he reached a point where his friends had graduated high school he went to community college and he kind of fizzed out of that he wasn't into that you know this resonated with my earlier story he was working a job but then he wasn't feeling like working.

And he was convinced he had ADHD and he was depressed. And he started taking off down the path of medication, which by the way, have helped many, many people. Most of the medications for ADHD, by the way, are drugs that increase dopamine. Because dopamine increases focus, it increases motivation, and it increases drive, essentially, the willingness to get into action in pursuit of goals, just like the rats that have dopamine or the humans that

have dopamine pursue, the ones that have depleted dopamine do not. So this guy, who is a real story, was struggling in a major way. So about three months ago, he was watching a lot of videos online. He was texting a lot. He was mainly playing video games, video games, video games, video games, but he wasn't really enjoying them as much anymore. And one thing you see with people with ADHD is they actually can focus if they're really interested in something. Why? Because their dopamine levels are elevated and they're able to focus. He heard about the dopamine system and Ana's work, and I talked to him and he decided to do what some people call dopamine fast, but for him,

that meant no video games. And he did two weeks of no screens, which at first I think was agonizing for him. Oh my gosh. It's now three months later. It's a little less than three months later, I'd say a little less than three months later, I actually talked to his parent today, working full time off all ADHD meds, has a girlfriend. I don't know if that's related or not, probably because he's got his life together a little bit more, which is an attractive future, as opposed to someone who's spiraling out, doing nothing, living at home, which frankly is an unattractive future, regardless of boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. He's very focused on his work. He's excited by things and he allows himself a short period of time each day where he plays video games and he enjoys them again, like never before. There is a simple explanation for this, which is that his dopamine system is reset. He's when you're constantly pursuing things, eating highly palatable foods, engaging in very stimulating anything,

any behavior that's very stimulating, there's a drop below baseline and it takes an increasingly great stimulus, high threshold stimulus in order to excite you. So if people are feeling bored, unmotivated, unstimulated, most of the time it's because they are overindulging in things that keep pounding this dopamine system, but the baseline of dopamine is going down, down, down.

Now there are a few hacks that can actually help, and Ana talks about some of these in her book. The main thing is if someone is engaging in any truly addictive behavior or substance, or a behavior that just doesn't feel like it's that great, but you're finding yourself doing it compulsively. Like, wow, what are some examples? Texting, Instagram. I limit my Instagram time to two hours per day, which itself just sounds like a lot. I'm a grown adult and I spend two hours on it, but I do a lot of work there, right? I'm trying to put

out content that's educational. But sometimes I think to myself, like, I'm a grown man. I'm spending two hours a day on Instagram. Well, that's a lot of where we spend our time now. But if you allow yourself four hours a day on social media, you'll probably find that you're scrolling, you're not even sure what you're looking for. Like what am I doing? I just wasted this time.

Exactly, and what you're looking for is something to jolt that baseline. So you want to limit those behaviors, or in some cases, if it gets really severe, like it was for this individual, you want to eliminate completely for 30, 60 days. Ideally it's 30 days. Now this is the same prescriptive that they give alcoholics, heroin addicts, et cetera, that, but some of those drugs of course have actual withdrawal symptoms that can be problematic. You know, these days I'm not a pot smoker. I've never liked drugs or alcohol.

I kind of lucked out that way. But, you know, there's, and I'm not trying to demonize, I'm not passing judgment, but you know, cannabis for instance, is pretty prominent use. And a lot of people, the idea of 30 days without that is, I think they probably say they could do it, but it would be very challenging for them. But, and I'm not here to tell people what to do, right?

Then there's about drugs, alcohol, or anything. But the idea is 30 days of no interaction with that thing, person, behavior, I mean, all sorts of things, so that you can enjoy other things. I like to say, you know, addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. I like to say addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. And if I may, enlightenment is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. All of that hinges on this dopamine system. So you have to be very judicious in your interactions

with things that deliver pleasure, or else they will soon not deliver pleasure and they will diminish your pleasure for everything else that you interact with. So the way to think about this is just to set up constraints. And as I'm stealing Ana's words left and right, forgive me Ana, she has many more important things to say and she says them much more eloquently than I, but she says, you know, we don't give our kids chocolate cake for breakfast, but we sort of understand that

dessert comes at a certain time of day and after completing certain things but we for some reason we just allow ourselves to just dive into this immense dopamine sensory landscape of social media because social media isn't just comments you and me say oh like lewis put something up there's that that stuff's great but then there's also a lot of violent stuff politically intense stuff there's a lot of friction there's a lot of violent stuff, politically intense stuff, there's a lot of friction, there's a lot of joy. I mean, you're essentially going to the dopamine carnival. And so you need to restrict the amount of time.

And especially if you're somebody who wants to get work done and your work is not the social media, and I'm pointing at social media, but this could be anything, anything that you enjoy. Food, for instance, you don't want to overindulge in highly palatable foods, which is bad for us. We know this for a number of reasons. So the key is to take this dopamine system and set it up for you to be able to be motivated and focused. And the way to do that is to make the experiences around that thing that you want to be motivated to do a little less or a lot less exciting. What do you mean? This is why I don't listen to music these days or check text

messages while I'm in the gym. And sometimes I'll listen to a book or a podcast, but I really try and just be, just work out, including while I'm running. Why? Because these days we are layering in dopamine. We're getting dopamine from the energy drink we're drinking. Okay, big increase in dopamine. I forget the actual numbers, but I think it's 1.8 times increase. And some of them have L-tyrosine, which is a dopamine precursor.

Some of them have caffeine, which also increases dopamine and upregulate dopamine receptors. So you're getting it from the energy drink. Plus it's the video game you're playing. Plus, you're with your friends. It's just a dopamine soup, which sounds great, except that other things that you do afterwards are going to seem under stimulating. And you're going to think, I can't focus on this. So I also kind of wonder whether or not you were having trouble focusing in your class because the Canelo fight was that awesome. It was insane. It was. Yeah, he's amazing.

He's amazing. I am a boxing fan and crazy and he if you had to build a boxer, you'd build him like that just his head that his shape that yeah, the right and it was just like the roar of the crowd and the just the energy was amazing. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. There's a there's a beautiful story unfolding there with him. But so that could be it too. You know, there's a kind of a letdown. And so I think it's,

it may be helpful for people to understand that the postpartum depression that people feel after a big celebration is real. That's real. And if you just wait a little while, that system will reset. You don't have to necessarily wait 30 days, but if you just had a great party, you should expect that there'll be a long tail of joy, but then you might feel a little low, a little underwhelmed. So true, man. And if you're going to sit down and try and do work

and you're finding yourself not that focused, you might want to think about some of the behaviors that led up to that work. So I really try to get into my work in a focused way by making the period right before. It's a little boring, frankly, going outside, getting some sunlight, drinking my mate. It sounds like a pretty boring life, right? It's not like blasting a bunch of music and getting really amped up.

But I'm able to get a nice peak of dopamine during that work bout. And I think that's a functional dopamine increase. And then afterwards, yes, indeed, there's a drop. Now, there's some other hacks that Ana's talked about. And again, we can look to our friend Wim Hoff. Other people have done this, although this was happening long before Wim. There's a beautiful study published in the European Journal of Physiology showing that getting into cold water, so this could be cold shower, could be ice bath, could be any number of different plunge type things or an ocean or whatever that people want to use for anywhere from three to six minutes creates a 2.5 X increase in

dopamine that lasts many hours. So it's a unique stimulus because it's not like a spike and then it drops. It's like a long arc increasing your baseline dopamine increases alertness, feelings of wellbeing. Some, they did blood draws in this study. So these are real data, you know, they increasing your baseline dopamine increases alertness, feelings of well-being. They did blood draws in this study. So these are real data. It wasn't conjecture. They really know this. And there are some cases of people who were full-blown addicts or people who are struggling with ADHD who start doing regular cold water exposure three to six times a week, three to six minutes at a time, and discover that, wow, they actually can focus because they're getting that dopamine increase. Yeah.

That stuff is fascinating, man. It's really interesting, I think, to me, because dopamine, you know, coming up in neuroscience, I've been in the game a long time now, almost, you know, gosh, almost 30 years, but dopamine was always thought of as pleasure. But it's confusing because it's associated with pleasure, but it's not the actual experience of pleasure.

And immediately after sex, immediately after any powerful experience that's very pleasurable, dopamine system crashes down. What happens in the body when dopamine crashes? Well, there's an interesting thing that happens because there's a hormone called prolactin, which is actually involved in milk letdown for nursing, but is also increased in both men and women in anticipation of childbirth.

This is actually responsible for the so-called dad bod. Prolactin lays down body fat stores, tends to make people a little more sedentary, and this has been shown in humans and in animals. It tends to reduce libido and sex drive. And so if you think about, dopamine is a currency of motivation that biology has used for hundreds of thousands of years. So whether or not, we think about currencies like dollars

or euros or bitcoins or Ethereum, you know, we think about currencies like dollars or euros or Bitcoins or Ethereum, all of those actually relate to dopamine. Dopamine is the fundamental currency that we're all working for. And dopamine has this quality of making us focused on things outside our immediate experience. This is why people who are on cocaine or methamphetamine,

which is a really extreme version of dopamine increase they tend to be all about plans and action they're not sitting there thinking about how wonderful they feel in their own body whereas drugs like cannabis and uh psilocybin and drugs these are not drugs i recommend people use recreationally i i'm not passing judgment but i just want to be clear about what i'm saying and not saying that any drugs that increase serotonin tend to make people kind of still focused on their internal landscape, their thinking. It's kind of an internal reflection thing.

So the serotonin system and the dopamine system are kind of antagonistic to one another. And the prolactin system is associated with the serotonin system. So prolactin is kind of about, it's a mellowing out. And just to nail the point, there are many people in the world who suffer from schizophrenia, 1% of the world's population, a huge number, a very sad thing, psychosis, hearing things, et cetera.

And most of the drugs designed to treat schizophrenic psychosis are drugs that reduce dopamine. And oftentimes you'll see people on the street who are taking these drugs and they'll be writhing like this with their face. Sometimes men will have gynecomastia, they'll have breast development because these drugs block dopamine, increase prolactin and disrupt the motor pathways that are associated with movement. I say this for two reasons. One is it illustrates the relationship between prolactin, dopamine, movement, et cetera. But the other is to hopefully invoke a little bit of empathy for people that oftentimes we will see people who, if they're shouting and acting crazy, that's probably an unmedicated person who's bipolar or has schizophrenia. But if you see someone in their catatonic where they

are writhing and acting very strange, that's a person who's, we don't know for sure, but very likely is actively trying to treat their own psychosis to eliminate the voices and things of that sort. So I say that because I, you know, we have a big homeless population issue in California and elsewhere too. And oftentimes we see people acting crazy and we think, oh, they're, you know, we make this disparaging judgment. Everyone's prone to doing it, of course, but they're crazy. But oftentimes that those crazy movements and the things they're doing are the reflection of drugs that block the dopamine system. Gotcha. Yeah. So I don't mean to make it dark, but I think that there is a, you know, 1% of the world's population is a huge number.

And a lot of people suffering from these things. 1% of the world's population is a huge number. That's a lot. And a lot of people suffering from these things. Is there a way to create effortlessness when you also need to work hard and be diligent in your practice and all these things? Or do we not have to work hard and it can be effortless in accomplishing what we want? effortless in accomplishing what we want? Yeah. Well, look, I mean, to me, essentialism was about rethinking prioritization, what really matters, and figuring out what is essential. Effortless is a cousin to that, and that's about rethinking simplification, which is that sometimes we just make getting great

results, breaking through to the next level, harder than it needs to be. So it's not saying, hey, you should never work and you should never work hard and you should never put an effort. I believe that you're supposed to put an effort. The point is, if you can't work any harder, you've got to find an easier path. And yet in a grind culture, sometimes people start to get burned out and their answer is push even harder rather than think different, think smarter,

find an alternative route. Rather than take pause, reflect, have a better strategy. It's more just go hard, hard, hard, spend more time, more hours on the thing as opposed to reevaluate simplification. Yeah, that's what it is. How can we do it more effortlessly in a simplified version, not just hard push, push, push? One of the things I think we can do is just, well, the book structure, the model is to have

an effortless state, like three concentric circles, effortless state, effortless action, and effortless results. And that's sort of like three books in one. Each of them can make your life and the results you get easier to get. You want to first remove all the complexity in your mind, in your heart that makes life more frustrating than it ought to be. I was just talking with Tim Ferriss and I asked him a question about this. I said, look, how much of your mental and emotional energy have you given on stuff that, you know, holding grudges, being angry, stuff that just got in the way of your success? And he said, look, from age 15 to 30, he said probably 60 to 70% of my energy was spent on

that. On being angry? At what? Himself, other people, the world, anything. And awful things that happened to him that he was angry about from when he was young. He's talked about this publicly now, of abuse that he'd been through and so on. But either way, he's making, his life is more burdened than it needs to be because he's spending so much of his cycles on this stuff that isn't actually propelling him forward or helping him achieve. His thought process, his energy on those things, right? Yeah. Spending a lot of time. That's right.

Just your mind, what you're processing, how you're feeling is just burdened. Burdened energy. Burning energy instead of getting you going forward yes and so simplifying your state i think is a is a huge return on investment if you can let go of a grudge if you can let go of something that you keep on you know draining you then you have there's just more of you on offer. And that's not through grinding effort. That's through just removing burdens. You don't have to be hauling up the mountain at all. Right. You know, the number two area is effortless action. That's effortless

state. The first one, effortless state. So you're simplifying all of your, you're basically all of that clutter that's in your mind. So it makes it easier to focus on what matters. Before we get to the second ring, how do people learn to let go of grudges? Yeah. How do they let go of resentment, anger, frustration about others and about the things they've done? And that's really hard to do.

You see my head, it's simple. I just let go. Just get clear minds. But, you know, people have been trying to figure that out for a long time. Yeah. So how do we, how did you learn how to do that? Well, one of the things that I've learned

is that specifically on grudges, is that we need to learn, like we have to ask an unusual question about grudges. And that is, what did we hire the grudge to do yeah as clayton christianson says with any product or service that you have you don't you don't you don't no one wants a six you know a six inch drill bit what they want is a six inch hole right yes you you there's a reason that you're hiring that product or service well you, you can do the same with grudges. Every grudge we hold, we hold for a reason.

We've hired the grudge to do something for us. Maybe we hire the grudge to make us feel powerful. See, I am one up. I'm above that person. See, they did this bad thing. I'm holding on to that. See, I'll show that I'm superior. We hold on to it for a sense of superiority. Or maybe we hold on it because we like that we get to tell

a story of being a victim. And people go, oh, yes, we get sympathy for doing it. Well, we hire grudges to do certain jobs. And what I think is that if we simply evaluate grudges, like we say, how are you doing in your job performance for me? Are you actually protecting me? Are you actually making me powerful? Are you actually getting people to build a stronger relationship with me? Or if you evaluate them, and in the book, there's a section specifically, one by one, you can do this, where you say, well, you actually find, well, actually, it's not making me powerful. It makes me more vulnerable. It makes me vulnerable with everyone because I'm carrying this wound still. I'm not letting it heal. Is it helping me to build relationships? No. If you pay attention,

you notice that when you tell these stories, you kind of have to find new people to tell them to because people get bored of it. Right. And so you're not building deeper trust relationships. You're actually kind of wearing them out along the way. And you can go one by one to suddenly discover that this is like a bad employee. We have a grudge is like, you've hired them to do this. They aren't doing any of those things. They're using you. Grudges use you. They burn you up. They waste you out. They make you weaker. And so just through this process, you start to find like, I'm ready to fire my grudges, ready to be free of it so that I can actually recuperate whatever the percentage is, 60 to 70% with Tim. Maybe it's different for other people. Get all of that back. And we can start putting that into the stuff we really

wanted to do in the first place. Yeah. Can you imagine? There's been different stages of my life where I felt like 10 out of 10 of positivity, of freedom of my thoughts from holding grudges or resentments or angers. And you feel like you're flying. And there've been many years of my life, many years, too many years, where I've held on to resentment, anger, frustration, a lack of forgiving other people. Right. Where you feel like you're at a six or a seven, maybe you get to an eight for a moment,

but then something triggers you and you're back into anger, frustration mode. And that really pulls me back into feeling tired, exhausted, drained, and burnt out. Typically, not from the effort I put into my craft, but in the effort I put into my mind, thinking about the things I don't like. Yeah, you've just, you've basically made the case for why effortless state is the first part of the effortless model. That's it exactly. You used, think of the language you used, you feel like you're flying. Is that not just another metaphor for effortless? I mean,

what would be more effortless than I'm flying? That's the idea. That's why, even though you would never think of forgiveness as a productivity hack, like maybe no one's ever written that, the productivity hack you need is to forgive people in your life. And yet, what else can you call it? If you could get back that much energy, that much of your own light and ability and capability, it's the best rebate available. There's a story that I came across in the research that I love of a man who was productive in his community. And then one day, he saw what he thought was a piece of string on the ground.

And it was a piece of string. He gets it. He's like, oh, I can put that to use. Puts it in his pocket. On that same day in the marketplace, someone else had lost a wallet and lost some money. And they thought that they had seen him pick up the wallet and take it. Accused him of it publicly. There was no way for him to prove his innocence.

And so the word went out. This person has acted dishonestly, dishonorably and so on. Now, at this point in the story, he has a choice. He can't prove his innocence, but he could have in this moment let go of the accusation of the harsh judgment. And he would have suddenly had all that energy back to be able to get back onto, well, what can I do something about? How can I serve? How can I make a contribution? How can I be successful again? But he doesn't. He gets fixated on it. Everywhere he goes, he talks about it. He nurses the grudge. He explains it's a piece of string. Don't you see it was wrong? A piece of string, a piece of string. People started laughing about this guy. All he ever wants to talk about is a piece of string and it makes him ill and on his deathbed final words of the story you know a little piece of string a little piece of string and this is how the story goes

now that is it's a fictionalized account but it it illustrates the point of where are you putting your mental energies if we put him on grudges if we put them on things that have happened we wish they hadn't happened or even on our own mistakes where we go, I wish I'd been different, we're beating ourselves up for past mistakes. We're just putting tons of effort on the things that will exhaust us and burn us out instead of moving forward to the things that really matter. So would you say that the things in our minds will hold us back from an effortless state and getting the actions and the results we want is the things in our mind first?

Yes, definitely. There's a little story about that where I was staring at myself dressed head to toe in a Stormtrooper costume. And I mean, I'm in a store of Halloween. This is an expensive suit. It's like a movie-quality Stormtrooper outfit. And as I'm staring back at myself in the mirror like, should I buy this? I'm like, how am I even here? For 30 years, without realizing it, I'd had this goal of buying a Stormtrooper costume. So when I reflect on it, it goes to like when return of the jedi comes out and my older brother says oh wouldn't it be cool to have a movie quality suit you know wouldn't that be great and i'm like this you know whatever 10 year old kid just

amazed by this like yes that would be cool forget about it entirely but here we are 30 years later still pursuing that goal it's still a part of me has been working on achieving this. Well, no part of me wanted that costume. I'm like, why am I even, what am I even doing here? Let's get out of this. I don't want this costume. And it became like a shorthand. My wife will say to me now, like, if I'm pursuing something that she's like, I don't know, that has a certain vibe about it, she'll be like, is this a stormtrooper? And I think you can use that for goals that no longer serve you, but also for grudges that no longer serve you. Could be relationships that no longer serve you. Could be any mental clutter, any assumptions that are simply like they were true to a point, but they don't serve you now. And one of those stormtroopers, I think, is the idea that any problem can be solved by working harder.

That alone is a really limiting idea. It'll get you only to here. It won't get you to there. So it's a good principle as far as it goes. But then we need to invert that question. Instead of saying, how can I work harder? We say, look, is there a more effortless way of doing this? that question. Instead of say, how can I work harder? We say, look, is there a more effortless way of doing this? And so as you rid your mind of this old paradigm, you open yourself up to a new

option, a new question. And suddenly, I mean, I almost think it's almost like magic. There's so many cool options once you're free of the idea that anything worth doing has to be exhaustingly difficult. Yeah. What was the thought process that stuck in your mind the longest that was the hardest to let go of? That when you let go of it, life became more effortless. Whether it be in your relationships or your career or whatever it might Yeah, I mean, one answer to that question is, well, I'll give you one answer, though, which is that the work, what's essential, needs to kind of be hard, drudgery, and then you've got separate to that play and fun, and that those two things are just two different categories. Yes.

They don't have to be, but we often divide them up. And so we just have the fun and the play separate. But what if the essential things can be the fun things? What if you can make the things that used to seem like drudgery into like fun rituals? Yeah. How do you make cleaning your laundry or mopping the floor or yeah cleaning the toilet a fun enjoyable experience or which is a specific example in my family uh cleaning up after dinner yeah so we we we have pretty good rituals around the actual meal time like we actually eat together i got four kids and my wife and i we will do like you know uh we'll do toasts for each other at the end of each day and like what's gone right today.

And we have some good rituals around this. But as soon as the dinner is over, my kids are just like gone. They're like, see you on the phone. They're like ninjas, man. They're just gone. It's like so silent. And like, where did they all go? Then I have the unenviable task of like, come back and pulling them all back. Where did you all go? Oh, no, I've got homework. It's hard to argue with that. Go to the bathroom. Okay, that's hard to argue.

And it's just this cat and mouse game to get them back in. So I'm like, okay, how do we make it effortless? And so we divide up the chores. So everyone's got a certain part of it, right? Many hands make light work. And we trained them on each piece. And I'm like, okay, we're going to set this up. We wrote it all down on a piece of paper where everyone can see it okay ready to start what happens nothing

chaos it is back to the same they're gone the next day they have gone like ninjas again and it wasn't until my eldest daughter grace added just a particular kind of music to the occasion that it became like karaoke there was was like classic Disney tracks. It was, I mean, she's a teenager. She's just turned 18 now, but it's just like sing along stuff that you can't not sing to all kinds of music. And it turned it into just like a little party.

And even now we'll start to do it. We'll have the same problems. As soon as someone puts on the right music, you all do it, you play. And it's like that now. In fact, I didn't think people would believe me, but the other day I wasn't even helping them. Music got put on, everyone all do it. You play. And it's like that now. In fact, I didn't think people would believe me, but the other day I wasn't even helping them. Music got put on. Everyone's doing it. I grabbed like five seconds of video and put it on Instagram just to like prove like it really

is like that now. So the idea is, one of the ideas that's hard to let go of is that essential stuff has to be the drudgery. You know, the important stuff is just hard work. Some things are just hard. And then there's fun stuff and that's play over here. But what if you make it, what if you combine those? What if you make essential stuff enjoyable? Well, then it becomes relatively speaking. And I would add into that and say, if you don't make the essential stuff enjoyable, then you will be burnt out. Yeah. Even if it starts out as like fun, like practice and sports for me, there were many different sports that I played growing up and some of them I burnt out on because it came, started to become a job where it was only like, you got to show up to practice, you got to work

hard. This is a business mentality now. And it kind of lost the idea of having fun. Yeah. When we're playing a game, but it's like the business of the game. Right. And you almost have to, so what could start out as really fun could turn into drudgery. Right. And what could be like this thing that I don't like could be this incredibly fun experience. Yeah. Based on the parameters you create for yourself.

I was a truck driver for many months. I got paid $250 a week as a truck driver when I was about 22, 23 years old. And I remember being like, this is miserable. This was not fun. This was not, you know, it was essential to just pay like for food for the week. It was not like the path of my life.

But it was a season of my life. And I remember saying, okay, I have an opportunity here. Like this is going to be happening for many months. I can either be in misery and pain for six hours a day driving a truck. Right. Or I can make the most of it. And I downloaded CD with salsa songs and I started visualizing myself while watching the road, but visualizing myself salsa dancing because I was learning

how to salsa dance at that time. Wow. So, I would imagine myself doing the moves and the dance and the steps and everything and it made the time fly, it made it more enjoyable. Right. I would also sing songs as well and just see like, okay, how can I make this fun? Even if people are looking at me like I'm crazy, singing along to myself but that made it more enjoyable where it wasn't like,

ah, I have to go to work and do this thing, but I had a great time and time flew. Now, I love what you're saying. And it really is sort of a lot of what I mean when I say effortless state. There's nothing so hard that complaining and whining about it won't make it harder. So some things in life, once you decide,

I'm gonna do this thing, I'm dealing with this. This is a responsibility that's important to me. I'm taking on. Now you just have to decide, do I want to do it the hard way or the easier way? Yeah, exactly. What happens when we complain and why do we complain so much? You know, I searched at one point when I was doing this research for like, just what are the easiest things to do in the world? Like just off the cuff, like what are the answers? And I remember that one of the first answers that people really agreed on was complaining is the easiest thing to do. Wow. So I thought that was very interesting. And I took on a little exercise myself with this and I was like, okay, well, that's not a great state to be in. A complaining state is going to limit my creativity. It's going

to make it harder for me to achieve. It's going to be harder for me to attract good talent and all the rest of it. So I said, okay, every time I complain, I'm going to say something I'm grateful for. I read this in the book. I like this strategy. Well, I like that you like it. What I noticed about it was that it didn't work. Well, what I noticed is not that it didn't work. I realized that I complained a lot more than I realized. Right, I read that too. How much were you complaining a day when you started that strategy? I don't know if there's a number for it, but I just found I would walk into a room and I'd be complaining.

I'd see my wife and, oh, how are you doing? Well, you know, this thing was a bit of a drag. That meeting took longer than I thought. And I'm like, why are you saying this? It's not even how you feel about your life. There's so many good things happening. But for some reason, I was in a habit of just starting with a complaint. You see your kids, there's always something to complain about. Well, why are you on that? Why aren't you doing this? Why haven't you cleared this thing up? There's an endless variety of complaints. And what I noticed was that the more I complained, the more there was to complain

about. And as soon as I introduced this new habit, what I was surprised by is how fast the state changed. Because you can't be grateful and complaining in the same moment. You can't be fearful and grateful in the same moment. You can't be angry and grateful in the same moment. I mean, it is a dynamic, powerful, catalytic thing. It's not just, for too long, we think of gratitude as being like, well, that's a nice, mindful man. Be mindful and grateful over there. But when you've got to go real stuff, that's not the real stuff. Gratitude is the real stuff. This is the way to be able to accelerate success in any area of your life. And it's instantly effective. So I found that as soon

as I would say I was grateful, I could see people's eyes light up. Just even my kids, my wife, it just brought a more positive feeling. So then we carry on with our kids. And I'm like, okay, my son Jack, one time I'm like, he complained. And I'm like, okay, give me three things you're thankful for. He says this, I'm so thankful that my dad wants to play this dumb game after I say something I'm complaining about. He says it just like that. We all laugh. It works even though he did it with the worst attitude ever. And by the time he's doing two and three, he's laughing and he's saying stuff and it didn't matter.

Gratitude is that powerful. And so I think it's like the fastest way to get ourselves back into an effortless state. And I learned about it first in the extremity of a family crisis. I found that this thing would help even in the direst of circumstances. Really? Yeah. circumstances. Really? Yeah. How do we train our minds and our body to be motivated towards a goal and not stay lazy? Yeah. Well, at first it's know thyself because we're all different. So one of the attributes I talk about in the book is discipline. And what I had to do with discipline was actively separate discipline from self-discipline. What's the difference? Okay, well, the difference is that self-discipline is internally focused. Self-discipline is about managing one's self,

and it has very little to do with external requirements. So you or I can decide to get in shape, for example, and we can change our diet, we can work out every day. The external environment doesn't have a lot of say in that, in us achieving that accomplishment. So self-discipline is about managing the internal. Discipline, the way I talk about in the book, is about achieving that long-term goal. These are those long-term goals that are going to take a while to achieve, and the external world has a say. So getting that promotion, writing that book,

becoming the famous singer, becoming a Navy SEAL, right? The external world has, starting a podcast, right? The external world has a say in whether or not you do that. And the discipline that is required to move through those wickets takes adaptability, it takes flexibility, it takes the ability to not get seduced by the highs, the successes, and not get crushed by the failures, and continue to move towards that goal.

And what I found was, because I'm a very un-self-disciplined person, I don't have a lot, right? And so I had to separate this because I've been able to achieve a lot of goals in my life. I said, what's the difference? Well, the difference is if you are overly, so those with very high self-discipline sometimes, this is not exclusive, but sometimes have trouble achieving long-term goals because the achievement of long-term goals often takes an ability and by necessity to march into the unknown, into uncertainty, which is going to throw you off routine and throw you out of certainty. The self-disciplined person, the very self-disciplined person, likes routine, likes certainty, right? That's how it's structure. I mean, that's what it is. And so moving towards a goal like that takes oftentimes being able to adapt out of structure,

you know, and say, well, I can't do that. Like I'm normal. I'd have to just go in. I have to go in unknowing, right? Now, the best, the most successful people are those who have both self-discipline and discipline, right? In terms of staying motivated for a goal, the way I would do it by knowing myself is I would, understanding I'm not a very self-disciplined person, I would simply try to chunk a goal into smaller pieces, right? So if I want to lose weight, you know, then I can say, well, that's why cheat days are actually good for me, right? Because I can say, okay, I'm going to take this piece of it and move. So I chunk my reward system in a different way. But I think the way one stays motivated towards a goal is highly subjective, but it would, through my thought process and my experience, involve one to actively map out a reward system that helps someone move through that.

Sort of creating a reward system first for the goal in order to help you stay motivated. Depending on how you show up. Not just say, like, okay, my goal is to achieve this thing. It's going to take me three years to accomplish it. Right. And that's the only reward I'm going to get in those three years. But how can I reward myself every day for an action I take every month for a milestone every year for getting closer. So focusing on the reward system. Yeah. And this is neurobiological because dopamine,

the neurotransmitter, you get hits of dopamine as a reward when you achieve things. There's many ways you get dopamine, but one of the ways is when you achieve things. So if you're able to effectively create a reward system that means something to you, it can't be kind of inert, right? So if I want to run, if I want to run a marathon and I can barely run to my mailbox, right? Then maybe buying some running shoes and putting them on one morning is enough of a reward system to get a dopamine hit. As someone who runs somewhat frequently, and you probably identify with this, just putting on our shoes one morning

is probably not gonna give us that dopamine hit. We gotta extend that task a little bit so that- If you've already accomplished a lot of something, you have to push beyond it a little bit. You have to push beyond it to get that reward system, so it becomes subjective. What would you say, 20 years as a Navy SEAL at different levels, and you were deployed how many different times?

Are you allowed to talk about that? Well, I mean, 13 and some change, yeah. Deployments between, what, six months and over a year? Yeah, I never did year-long, but anywhere between three months to six months usually. This is Iraq and Afghanistan? For the most part, yeah. And other places maybe you're not allowed to talk about. What would you say of that 20-year experience

was the most challenging experience for you? Was it something within a mission? Was it learning how to develop as a leader? Was it having a relationship with your wife during that time? What was the most challenging point for you? Yeah, the most challenging point for you? Yeah. The most challenging thing, ironically, wasn't the job because we were all so prepared for the job and we were around just the best people in the world. So the trust and the camaraderie was, to this day, I look back on it very fondly. So not the day-to-day job,

even just like the missions you went out on? Yeah, that wasn't challenging. I think if I were to say, you know, the first and foremost was probably having to leave the family. When you have to say goodbye to your family for a stint, you know, whether it's three months or six months or some folks are deploying for a year, right? That is a rough deal that not many people can capture. Not many people with families can capture that when you have to say goodbye to your kids and your wife for that.

You know, okay, we'll see you in however. And then to add on to that, understanding their stress, or at least my kids were a little bit smaller, but understanding my wife's stress, knowing that I was going someplace and she was dangerous. She couldn't get in contact with you.

Yeah, well, I mean, luckily with today's technology, contact was fairly easy. But we found, again, ironically, we found that daily contact was never a good idea because what happens is you establish a routine. You get comfortable. You get comfortable. So something happens. I'm working. I'm overseas in something.

I have a mission that goes long or whatever, and I don't get to call her that day. Well, suddenly she's worried. And it also makes time actually seem slower. Interesting. Yeah. So we decided we were only going to talk usually once a week. My son, who had a real trouble, and he was young. I mean, he was born in 05. So by the time he was two, he was having trouble with me deploying. Every time I went, it was rough on him. For him, we literally had to just decide I was not going to talk to him on the phone. It was too hard for him. He had to basically

forget me. Oh my gosh. He had to compartmentalize as a child in order to survive and not go depressed or be stressed. Because that's one of the attributes you talk about is compartmentalization. How do you do that if you're an emotional human being that you have these deep connections to your family and friends? How do you just detach in a sense and become more machine-like for a period of time and then allow yourself to feel deeply in

other moments. Well, it never goes away. I think the attributes, the way I talk about compartmentalization and the attribute is more surrounded by the way our brain functions and processes information versus, I'm going to block something out so I don't have to think about it. However, I think most team guys, SEALs, spec ops guys, have a very high ability to compartmentalize away from things, block out things that are painful. I know that about me. And I know that about my buddies. Because you have to.

Because war sucks. And at the end of the day, the mission has to be accomplished. So if something gnarly happens on a mission, you can, and at the end of the day, the mission has to be accomplished, you know, so if something gnarly happens on a mission, you can't sit there, these movies that show these extended scenes of people, you know, mourning when their buddy goes down or whatever, like, oh my god, you don't have that, but no, you don't have that time, you know, you have to win the gunfight, right, because if you don't, then all of you won't make it home, right, so you have to, and I think the training allows you to do that. The training is so intense

and so kind of, so effective that it requires you to compartmentalize, you know, training teaches you to compartmentalize. You become very, very good at it. Now, that could be a detriment in a relationship. So I think those of us who were able to recognize that actively try not to do that with our families. And so it becomes much more of a precision tool versus a frenetic thing that just happens without us having control over it. What was the moment that was the scariest for you

when you were deployed? Where you thought like, I may not make it you thought like I may not make it or our team may not make it or this is a really bad I guess you're training for bad situations all the time but was there ever a moment you were like I don't know if we're gonna get out of this no I was I was fortunate not to have that moment I say that I say that with immense gratitude because I know there's a lot of friends of mine who didn't have that, can't say that, they had those moments where they said that. But no, I was fortunate enough to be always in a position and my team was always in a

position that we had prepared, planned and executed in a way that was highly effective so that when things went wrong, because things always go sideways, we had near complete control or we understood the pathways we needed to go throughout. But I say that also, this comes back to compartmentalization. One of the things that you have to be able to do when shit goes sideways is to not focus on that thought you just brought up. The focus is not, oh my God, I don't think I'm going to get out of this. The focus is, how do I get out of this? So the mental acuity attributes, which are situation awareness, compartmentalization,

task switching, and then learnability. So that's how information is coming in, how we're processing it and prioritizing, how we're switching between the necessary tasks, and then how we're learning from our decisions. So I talk about the parachute malfunction in the context of that. But ultimately, to even be able to do that in the first place, it requires a forebrain dominance in the sense that you're not letting your autonomic system take over into a fight-flight response, and you're able to think through stress, challenge, and uncertainty

in the sense of saying, okay, what can I control right now? And this is where trust in your teammates comes in because now I have a team. I mean, I can say this with great pride and gratitude. I can remember literally walking in areas, you know, overseas and thinking, man, this is a bad area. This is sketchy. And having complete and utter faith, right? Because I was around, because I was with my teammates. I was around people who just, I trusted. I knew that if something went wrong, we'd be able to handle it. And so I think that's a necessity when you do this type of stuff. When you're going out on a mission, what's the process like of preparing for that

mission? Are you planning more for all the things that could go wrong and how to get out of that situation? Or is it planning for here's exactly how we would like it to go right, but let's also have an exit plan or a plan for when things go wrong? What do you... It's the latter. You plan the mission as you'd like it to go, and then inside of that planning, you put together, you build contingencies within each factor. So when this doesn't go as planned, what are the three ways to get out?

Yeah, so you know, just like any athlete would understand. So a quarterback coming out of a snap would say, well, I have two or three or four plays I can fall back on, depending on how this line shapes up, right? You have the same thing. This is where experience matters. You do it over and over again. It's okay. Well, as we're coming in on insertion, there's a few things that could go wrong. So if this, then that, if this, then that. And you kind of do that throughout a phase, throughout the phase planning. But then there's what we call the 80-20 rule and that is you you get to 80% of certainty and then you recognize that 20% is just out of your control and that's where confidence comes you say if something happens outside that 20% we will we will figure it out because we're not gonna figure out everything and and it's you know

Murphy's law will dictate that something happens that we haven't thought of so you so you prepare yourself to deal with uncertainty. How do you train your mind to deal with chaos in the moment so that you don't freak out and freeze up, but you actually turn on a level of focus and attention towards achieving that goal? Yeah. So I think we're predisposed, each one of us, to what I've called, Huberman and I both have called this, is the autonomic set point. At what point do we start flipping into an autonomic response, into fight-flight, where our system starts taking over and our forebrain starts coming offline? If you and I use boiling point as the average, most of us might be average, there are those who start really freaking out at like 190. So 212 is the average. At 190 degrees,

they're starting to freak out. There are people who it takes till like 230. To boil. To boil, right? I think that the guys who make it through that training are predisposed to have a higher set point, first of all. In other words to when bad things start to happen we tend to slow down and start thinking through it versus get all hyped up it's funny it's funny you know uh i live in a neighborhood and in my neighborhood there's four other navy seals in the neighborhood there's you know one across the street one down the road must be nice well it is nice you know hey because they're great dudes and it's great they're great neighbors.

But I remember my wife once saying, she said, hey, I'm so glad these guys are here in the neighborhood. I was like, why? She said, because if something went wrong, I know I could go to them and they'd act like you act. And I said, well, tell me. I said, because if something happens,

they would immediately calm down and they'd start working the problem, right? And so I think we show up predisposed. Training to it is difficult, you know? And I think, so here we're actually working on some stuff to help train, have to help teach people to do that. But it comes down to understanding your own neurology, and it comes down to understanding that, you know, here's how you have to think through situations under stress, and then it's going to be about putting yourself into deliberate stress to practice that. You can't practice this type of thinking if you're not

in stress. You need to put yourself in that. What are some things civilians could do to practice stressful moments on a daily basis where it doesn't hurt them, but it's actually preparing them? I talk about every day, I think you should be experiencing some type of pain, something that's uncomfortable. Seeking discomfort, whether it be through a 10 minute workout, whether it be through a longer run, it doesn't matter what it is, an uncomfortable conversation. We should be doing this every day

in a structured environment that allows us to grow. What do you think are some ways we could do this that's not putting us in harm's way or physically hurting ourselves? I can't answer that because it's so subjective. I can give some ideas and you think are some ways we could do this that's not putting us in harm's way or physically hurting ourselves? I can't answer that because it's so subjective. I can give some ideas, and you just gave some. I mean, some people are very social people. So starting a conversation with a stranger is a piece of cake, right?

For me, that would be hard, right? Starting a conversation with a stranger would be hard. So that might be something I do. Giving a presentation. Public speaking for people is tough. Public speaking for people is tough. So volunteering to give that presentation is a great way for a lot of people because that makes them anxious. So working out for some is like, for some people, they've developed a system where that pain point of working out is something they highly enjoy.

So they're not practicing it. So someone should look at their own makeup and ask themselves what fright. Well, and fear, again, it doesn't have to go all the way to fear. Fear is interesting because it's actually a combination of two things. It's a combination of uncertainty and anxiety. You can have each one of those and not have fear, right? So if you are anxious but not uncertain, that would be, I have to give this presentation on Monday. I hope it's good. I'm nervous about it, right?

That's, you know, but there's nothing uncertain about it. It's Monday, it's at two o'clock. I know what I'm gonna do. I'm just, I'm nervous about it, okay? Uncertainty without anxiety, well, that's every kid on Christmas Eve, okay? I mean, so, but it's when you combine the two that you start to generate fear. Well, the idea is if you have fear,

if you have uncertainty plus anxiety and it's starting to manifest into fear, the key is to understanding which of those two factors can you buy down. Okay? Buy down? Buy down, which means decrease. Anxiety can be decreased internally. It's an internal response, right? So things like some of the tools Huberman talks about, visual tools, breathing tools, you can begin to shift your physiology out of your sympathetic into your parasympathetic, come off of the autonomic response system. So that's how you can start kind of buying down anxiety.

Uncertainty is largely external. That means something around you, outside of you, you don't understand. There's unknown. The best way to do that and the way we do it in spec ops is we control what we can control. Some people have referred to it kind of control your three-foot world. But it doesn't have to extend. It's not a three-foot thing. It's what in this moment can I control?

And then take control of that. Because then you are grabbing onto certainty. You're taking what is uncertain, you're grabbing onto something certain. As soon as you've controlled that, as soon as you've moved through that, then you have to make another decision. What's the next thing? This is basically kind of stepping through, stepping through this challenge. So you can start to practice coming off of fear or moving through fear by kind of understanding

both of those pieces. What do you think is the greatest lesson you learned throughout the 20 years for yourself that has helped you not only during that, but also after being with the SEALs? I think it's not fearing the unknown. It's the idea that when you go through something like that, you understand that, hey, I could pretty much do whatever I'd like to do. And I know that even though I don't know how I'm going to do it, I know I can figure it out. If there's enough interest, if there's enough passion, right? I'm not interested in becoming a pro football player. So that's off my list, right? But I was interested in writing a book. And that was a whole new process for me.

When I left the Navy, I started public speaking. I did not like public speaking at all, right? I did not like it. But I knew it was an edge that I wanted to conquer, you know, and say, okay, well, let me work through the things to conquer this edge. Kind of like your philosophy. I think it's a really, it's not only a deep one, but it's profound. Because if we are consistently moving, deciding what our edges are, moving towards our edge, and then getting there, then we are growing. Because guess what we're doing at that point? We're looking for the next edge.

And that's the growth process, is continuing to move to our edges and then finding the next edge. I mean, you say you don't like public speaking, but don't you have to speak to your teams and guys? Yeah, but that's not public. That's like, you know, that's the guys. So it's not the same. It's different.

It's different, yeah. It's different. There's a lot more. When you're, you know, and when you're in the military, That's the guys. It's different. It's different, yeah. It's different. There's a lot more. And when you're in the military, there's no expectation of great articulation or humor or intellectual. What's effective? What's effective? Get it done. Here's the word. All right, go.

And that's what's appreciated, too. No one wants you to sit there and pontificate. It's like, hey, guys, this is what's going on. So there's a directness that's appreciated and required. But that's not public speaking. What do you think was the hardest lesson you had to learn through your 20 years? Something that you were struggling with or challenged with or you kept repeating until you finally learned the lesson? Yeah, I think the hardest lessons, the hardest lesson, maybe not one,

the hardest lessons were just around leadership, what it takes, what leadership take, what it takes to be a leader. Because again, being a leader and being in charge are often conflated. They're not the same thing, okay? What's the difference? Well, anybody could be in charge.

As an officer, you know, in the military, I was pretty much in charge of something all the time. It didn't make me a leader. You don't get to call yourself a leader. It's like calling yourself funny or calling yourself handsome. Someone else makes that decision. You can't designate yourself that way. Someone else decides whether or not you are a leader. And that's done through the way you behave in that position. So if you're in charge and you're behaving in a way that causes someone to make a decision, okay, this is the person I would lead. I mean, if we think about the leaders in our lives, the people who we consider leaders in our lives, it's not because they

were just in charge of us. In fact, we could probably think of people who we would follow into hell and back and they have no place in the hierarchy of our lives, right? They are just someone who just they've behaved that way in a way that's made us kind of endeared to them. So the attributes I talk about in the book in terms of leadership attributes are all attributes that actually cause behaviors that typically cause people to look at others as leaders. What are the behaviors that most human beings admire the most that we want to follow that person or be inspired to be led by something that they're sharing

or involved in, a community, a movement, whatever it may be. What are the three or four main behaviors that they have and we should be developing if we want to be better leaders? Yeah, well, I talk about five in the book

in terms of the adverts. The first is empathy. Okay. And again, I would say this, there's not an exclusivity in terms of what someone will decide because there are people who will look at... Subjective, right? It's a subjective thing. Again, it's someone's choice as to whether or not they think. So empathy is one. Selflessness is another. And this is not just... So let's just back up here.

Empathy, not just I know how you feel, I feel how you feel right I can I can put myself into your shoes and And I were in it that reflects in the way I communicate with you and I care about shows that you care about another human Being what is the best way to to show that I mean give me an example as opposed to saying I know how you feel How do you feel empathize showing you feel how they feel well first deep listening and so so So we owe so listening to another person, but true, like deep, full-on listening. I am hanging on every word listening. Oftentimes we listen to people

and one of two things is happening. Either we're thinking about what we're going to say next, or we're thinking about how what that person is saying relates to our lives. And it's not from a malicious standpoint. It's really because we're trying to relate. So we're trying to say, okay, you're thinking about how what that person is saying relates to our lives. And it's not from a malicious standpoint. It's really because we're trying to relate. So we're trying to say, okay, you're talking about football. I'm thinking, okay, wait a second.

I played football in eighth grade. Maybe I can talk about that. We're late, yeah. But what I'm doing is I'm not listening to you anymore. I'm making what you're saying about me. So what deep empathetic listening is, I have like a whiteboard in my mind. And as I'm listening to you speak, if something pops onto the whiteboard I erase it and I move on I just keep on listening you know that is if you do if you if you

empathetically listen like look into someone's eyes attentive behavior facing each other you are going they're going to feel cared for because you're exchanging now there's an exchange going on there's serotonin being released there's there's oxytocin being exchanged, or at least released, and all these kind of these bonding chemicals, right? So that type of listening shows someone you care about them. Empathy is a little bit tougher for some. Some people are just wired. We know some people are wired to be. My wife is extraordinarily empathetic. I mean, she really feels other people. I mean, I am not. I've had to really try to develop empathy.

It's something that she's taught me. Information was the thing that stimulated thought, stimulated new ideas. And as we learn new things, we make new connections in our brains. So as we begin to add new stitches into that three-dimensional tapestry in our mind, we're beginning to cause

our mind to function in new ways. But the key then is to apply it, to personalize it, to do something with it. And 10 years ago, when I got in front of an audience and talked about the application, nobody wanted to step outside that philosophical, theoretical, intellectual realm, right? Because doing something means you're going to have to change something about yourself. Painful. theoretical intellectual realm, right? Because doing something means you're going to have to change something about yourself. Yeah, you're going to get uncomfortable, right? And I think we're in an age of information. And in an age of information, ignorance is a choice. And because of technology, we have access to so much content. And information creates awareness. And awareness is consciousness. And you can't have consciousness without energy there they work together so there's an energetic change I think

that's taking place in the world right now where people are so informed that old models old paradigms are beginning to break down whether it's the medical model or the religious model the education model journalism the economy you know politics it's all beginning to come to the surface because something else has to come out. And I think that one of the things that people are realizing is that you don't have to be a Buddhist monk to do this or a nun with 40 years of devotion. You just got to understand the formula.

And just like any skill or anything you learn, you got to go from thinking to doing to being. You got to take knowledge, you create the experience, and if you keep doing it over and over again, you start getting a skill or you start getting wise about how to do it. And you know that you know how to do it. Well, in the last 10 years, we have assembled a scientific team. And let's see if you can really make significant brain changes. I don't want those changes to just be in your mind.

I want them to be in your brain. I want to be able to see before and after pictures to say that person has a significant change after a traumatic brain injury or anxiety or depression or a cyclic mood disorder or a stroke. We want to see that there's been significant change at the same time let's measure your brain in real time and let's look to see what that transformation process looks like and in the discovery Lewis of that process we gained so much knowledge about what that

transformational process looks like in other, I can tell you without a doubt that if you're analyzing your life right now within some disturbing emotion, that 100% of the time you're going to make your brain worse. If you think about your life. If you're stuck in an emotion, like you're frustrated, you're angry, you're fearful. Resentful.

Resentful and you're thinking within that emotional state. In other words, you can't think greater than how you feel. That means then you were thinking in the past because those emotions are a record or residue of the past. So we see people in the process of change that are analyzing in duality or polarity. That kind of drives the brain into higher states of arousal and further away from true change. So we've done thousands and thousands and thousands of brain scans and we now know that

there's a formula to create greater brain coherence, greater brain efficiency to make your brain work better. And when your brain works better you work better at the same time It requires a clear intention and an elevated emotion to begin to change your energy and to change your life and nobody Changes until they change their energy, right? So then how do you get a person out of resentment frustration? into joy and freedom if Why would they feel grateful or joyful or free if the experience

hasn't happened so most people are spending the majority of their life waiting for something out there to take away their emptiness or pain or the resentment in here well if they're they're waiting their whole life in separation or lack then and and we create reality then the lack is driving certain thoughts which is creating more separation and more lack. So teaching people then to begin to condition their body emotionally before the evidence takes place in their life is breaking a significant habit, right? So instead of living by cause and effect, now we're beginning to cause an effect. So the moment you start feeling whole and grateful, we now know your healing will begin at that moment. The moment you start feeling worthy and abundant, your wealth is coming. You're generating a certain amount of energy, a certain amount of wealth.

How does someone feel worthy though if they've always been told they're not worth it? Yeah, well so let me- Or that's the story they tell themselves. Like, I'm not worth it because she didn't say yes when I asked her on a date. Because he broke up with me. Because I got fired. Because my parents left me. How am I worth it when there's so much evidence or story around a negative thing? Well, let's stop telling the story of your past and let's start telling the story of your future.

And people who aren't defined by a vision of the future, for the most part, are left with memories of the past. Your brain is a record of the past. It's an artifact of everything you've learned and experienced in this moment. So most people wake up in the morning and they start thinking about their problems. And those problems are memories that are tattooed in the brain that are associated with certain people and things at certain times and places. So the moment the person wakes up clean slate, they start thinking about the problems they're thinking in the past. If you believe your thoughts have something to do

with your destiny, well, there's a possibility that your past is gonna be your future. Every one of those problems has an emotion associated with it. So then the moment you start recalling the problem, you start feeling unhappy. Now your body's in the past because thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body and how you think and how you feel creates a state of being. So people

reaffirm their identity based on the past, right? And it turns out that the redundancy of doing that conditioning only requires an image and an emotion. Most people are unconsciously conditioning their body into the familiar past, into the known. So now if you're in the familiar past and in the known, you're going to crave the predictable future. That's the known as well. And there's only one place where the unknown exists and that's the eternal present moment.

That's the sweet spot of the generous present moment so you got you got a labor to get that person beyond the emotions that keep them tacked or anchored to the past and yes it takes an effort to do that but if you keep working with the formula you'll reach that elegant moment where there's a liberation of energy and now your body as the unconscious mind the objective mind is not believing. It's living in the same past experience 24 hours a day because you're liberating the body from that emotional state. So you ask the person, why are you so unhappy? Why are you so frustrated?

Why are you so resentful? The moment you ask that, their brain is going to associate that emotion to a past event. To a memory. To a memory. That's because they have nothing to look forward to in their future So if you're not being defined by a vision in the future, it just means to me that you're more in love with your past Then you are with the future So how do you teach people to believe in a future that they can't see or experience with their senses yet?

But they've thought about enough times in their mind that their brain has literally changed to look like the event has already occurred the latest research in neuroscience says that's absolutely possible we know that and how do you teach a person to select a new possibility in their future and begin to emotionally embrace that future before it's made manifest to such a degree that their body is their unconscious mind is believing it's living in that future reality in the present moment and they're signaling new genes in new ways ahead of the environment now to their body begins to change to look like the

event has already occurred we've proven that that's possible now think about this so the more you think about your desired future, the joy, the gratitude, the feelings you want to have that are more positive, the more you think about it as a future thing happening, the more your body shifts now. Exactly. So your body is believing it's living in that future reality in the present moment. Now think about this. From some condition in your life The more altered you feel inside of you the more you narrow your focus on cause and the brain freezes an image and takes a snapshot And that memory now is embossed in the brain. It's branded in there

So then people think neurologically within the circuits of those past experiences And they feel chemically within the boundaries of those emotions and the stronger the betrayal the stronger the trauma the more the body's living in the past right so then so how to reverse that so now if you truly got passionate about a future we've all done this you get a wild idea in your mind and you start holding on to that vision and you're preoccupied with it all of a sudden the thought in your mind becomes the experience and you start feeling the energy of the future. Now, the stronger the emotion you feel from that vision, the more you're going to pay attention to the picture in your mind and now you're remembering your future. And vice versa, the stronger you pay attention to the feeling of the past pain, you're going

to create the pain in this moment. Exactly. So then, so it requires a coherent brain and we now know that there's a formula for that. And we've got beautiful research to show that people can do it. They just have to practice. And it requires a coherent heart because resentment, frustration, impatience creates a very incoherent heart. And when that heart becomes incoherent, you stop trusting yourself. There's no energy there. You stop trusting in your future. So then if there's physical evidence in your brain and body,

physical evidence to look like the event has already occurred, it's quite possible you'll be thinking neurologically within the circuits of your future and you'll begin to feel chemically within the boundaries of that emotion of your future and how you think and how you feel is your state of being and Now your state of being is living in the future instead of the past now the moment you disconnect from the emotion of your future because Traffic or some co-worker or your ex or whatever people come up with? Now you're back to the energy of your past and now you're gonna start looking for it we're analyzing why hasn't it happened well if you're feeling the

emotion of your future why would you look for it because you would feel like it already happened and that is the place where the magic happens so then you can't just do this get up and then return back to your old state of being you got to maintain that modified state of mind and mind. How do you maintain it when life happens? Well, let me finish. If I punch you in the face right now, how do you maintain it? Well, of course, of course. I mean, we all take blows in our lives.

And we all react emotionally. But the question is, how long are you gonna react? Right, right. So then, if you can't mediate and regulate your emotional reactions, those emotions linger for days. That's a mood. Years for some people.

Mood. And then months, temperament. Years, personality trait. So then the person's personality is literally based on the past. But they don't know that because they're doing it over and over again. It becomes a subconscious program so now if requires a coherent brain and a coherent heart then we have to train people how to self-regulate so we've done thousands and thousands of measurements we've partnered with the

HeartMath Institute to teach people how to create and sustain heart coherence how do we do it well besides going to your workshop what's the simplified version I'm sure it takes more time than… Well, it really doesn't. It really doesn't. It just requires getting still, closing your eyes, putting your attention on your heart, changing your breath so that you move into the present moment. And when you slow your breathing down, you slow your brainwaves down.

When you slow your brainwaves down, now you're accessing your autonomic nervous system. So then you train a person how to open their heart and feel an elevated emotion and it takes a little practice. And just like a flower that takes time to bloom, it takes a little bit of time. But if you work in trading the resentment, the frustration or the impatience for gratitude, appreciation and thankfulness and you keep at it They'll come a moment where that system switches on and now you're feeling grateful for no reason at all That's that's not a bad thing because gratitude the emotional signature of gratitude means Something's happening to you Something has happened to you. You're receiving something or you just receive something

So your body then when you're feeling gratitude is in the perfect state of receiving so then that means then you'll accept believe and surrender to the thoughts equal to the emotional state of gratitude if you're living in resentment you're living in fear you're living in impatience you could say I'm healthy I'm healthy I'm healthy and wealthy and wealthy and with all you want and that thoughts gonna stop right at the brain stem and never make its way to the body because the body is... Because your heart's not feeling it or because why? Because you're feeling resentment and that thought isn't, that thought is not consistent with the emotion of resentment. Resentment has a different set of thoughts, right? In other words, once you start opening your heart,

it begins to move into coherence. It begins to produce a measurable magnetic field up to three meters wide. Now, that's frequency, that's energy. And all that energy, that frequency, carries information, carries an intent. So then when you're feeling gratitude and your heart is open, you're broadcasting energy into the field. A frequency. A frequency. You lay the intent of

the thought of your health or your wealth. That frequency can carry the thought of your wealth. It can carry the thought of your health. If you're suffering, you can't, suffering does not carry, that energy does not carry the thought of your wealth. It carries a different set of thoughts. So then we're teaching people how to self-regulate. Because if you're going to believe in that future that you're imagining with all of your heart, it better be open and activated. Right, right. And you better know how to self-regulate.

And you have to know the moment you disconnect from the energy of your future because of some circumstance in your life and you lose that feeling if you're practicing it on a daily basis with your eyes closed then the next level is to be able to open your eyes and do it right in the moment and be able to self-regulate and change the frustration from some experience in your life back to the energy of your future now that Requires great awareness and great effort but if you have a community of people that are practicing this on a daily basis and They're connected to their future because that's where they're in their mind is They begin to want the future

More than the emotions of the past. So we've done enough measurements now, Louis, to know that we can teach people how to do that. And we have evidence that people can sustain it for 45 minutes to an hour. It's a skill now. They know that they know how to do it. So now they have brain coherence and heart coherence. Well, once the heart begins to become orderly and coherent, it acts as an amplifier and

it drives energy to the brain. So now the brain is getting more energy once the heart is open. And then you're thinking different set of thoughts. And those thoughts produce different chemicals for you to feel more of that. And here comes nitric oxide from oxytocin. And then all of a sudden your heart literally starts to swell. I hope today's episode inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a rundown of today's show with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me, as well as ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on

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