How To Make 2024 Your Best Year Yet | Joe Dispenza, Tara Swart, Eckhart Tolle

Introduction

if you’re in the process of creating a new life then it must mean then you must have a very clear intention of what that new life would look like, and that’s a function of the brain. And the brain is the architect; it is the builder. The frontal lobe switches on, and it’s the creative center, and you ask the question: “What would it be like to be wealthy? What would it be like to be healthy? What would it be like to be happy?” And your brain actually starts looking for answers, and the frontal lobe begins to access the association circuits in the brain that are connected to that question.

Imagination and Heart

So if you’re truly beginning to imagine whatever that future is, and you start falling in love with that future before it happens, it takes a function of the heart. And we’ve discovered, along with other institutions, that the heart has a very profound effect on our biology. Marry the clear intention, the function of a coherent brain with an elevated emotion, a function of a coherent heart, and you do that properly, and you start to change your energy.

The Power of Belief

Hey, it’s EV car Michael, and I watch these videos every day because I need them for motivation. Being around successful entrepreneurs every morning helps me believe that I can do great things too. It’s like your morning coffee but for your goals, kickstarting your day with a blast of positivity. So here is a challenge for you: try watching one video every morning for the next 30 days, and let’s find out together if they help you do great things too. If you’re in, leave a #believe in the comments below.

Manifestation and Synchronicities

So today, let’s learn how to make this year your best year ever. Enjoy. Is it possible? Then you start to see effects in your life. You know, things start coming to you instead of going and getting them. Somehow, you start seeing these synchronicities, these opportunities, these coincidences that begin to mysteriously appear in your life. Now, when that occurs, it kind of wakes you up like, “Huh, it’s kind of weird that that kind of happened. That kind of synchronicity is weird, like I didn’t really plan that, I didn’t really expect that.” That’s the awakening.

The Power Within

To prove to you how powerful you really are and in fact can begin to create events in your life. And instead of going out and going and getting them or having to do things to get them, somehow they seem to come to us.

Rule Number Two

Rule number two is follow your intention.

Intuition and Learning

With Dr. Tarus Wart Bieber: Intuition is the lessons that you’ve picked up along the way that you’re not conscious of, but they’re still stored in your nervous system. And so the less conscious you are of them, the deeper they’re pushed into the nervous system. So there’s a process called Hebbian learning, named after the neuroscientist Donald Hebb. And that is, it’s basically, you know, neurons that fire together wire together. But it’s that the things that you’ve learned today, like things that you’ve learned by speaking with me, that’s going to be very front of mind and kind of just in little pathways that are just kind of connecting up with each other. But stuff that you learned when you were five, like when you put your hand in a fire and it burnt you and you never ever want to do that again, that’s deep down, you’re not really conscious of that. But you know, and other things maybe that you don’t recall. So we believe that your wisdom gets pushed from the outer.

The Gut Instinct

cortex into the limbic system, which is the emotional system of the brain, into the brainstem, into the spinal cord, and into the gut neurons. And that’s why they sometimes call it gut instinct because it’s that feeling of knowing something but not knowing why you know it. But it’s actually to do with the fact that you have wisdom and experience that is embodied in you but you’re not conscious of it necessarily.

Rule Number Three

Rule number three is focus on the present moment with Eckhart Tolle. Do not be attached to the fruit of your actions, which of course simply means don’t look to the goal of what you want to achieve through whatever you’re doing now. Give your complete attention to the doing rather than where you want to get to through the doing. And that’s again a very important lesson nowadays because most humans don’t know that yet. They are always one moment ahead; they want to get there.

Living in the Future

You may find in your own life still a lot of the time you are not present moment-centered; you are focused on the next moment that you need to get to. So whatever you are doing at this moment is designed to get you to the next moment, and internally you project yourself away from what you’re doing now because the doing becomes a means to an end. This is very normal; everybody lives like that. Whatever they do is a means to an end, and in their mind, the end is more important than what they’re doing.

The Consequences

That is so habitual and unconscious that most humans don’t even know that is how they live, that they always live for the next moment, but they’re never completely in this moment. They also don’t know that by living in that way, they create frustration and suffering and stress and discontent. Basically, they’re condemning themselves to continuous discontent and to stress because if you ignore the present moment continuously—and ignore means you make it into a means to an end because the next one is so important that you need to get to—then you miss life completely. You miss the depth that potentially is there in life, and life becomes shallow because it’s all mental.

The Illusion of the Next Moment

Because the next moment is always a mind formation, the next moment is a mental projection, the next moment is never a reality because it doesn’t exist. When the next moment comes, it’s not one minute; it’s now again. And then the next thing to do, of course, immediately you look to the next thing because you have become used to being uncomfortable with the present moment condition since childhood, to feel ill at ease in the present moment. “Oh, I should be doing something,” and doing implies some future projection. You can never be; you’re always doing.

Taking Action

Also, to make sure you’re actually taking action after watching this video, I’ve designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight all the lessons learned in this video, as well as pull out our three favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you’re getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there’s a link in…

Building Momentum

the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I’ll see you there.

Rule Number Four: Own Your Mornings with Mel Robbins

Rule number four is own your mornings with Mel Robbins. When you wake up, generally what the research shows is that your brain is primed to be able to focus for the first 4 hours of the day. The first four hours of the day tend to be, for most of us, the time of day when your brain has the most fuel and when your speed of processing is awesome and when you are able to direct your attention at what you need to be focused on. Okay, so now there’s a caveat to this. You can manufacture boosts of productivity and boosts of feeling like you’ve got a little bit more brain power. Number one, immediately after you exercise. So, if you have a burst of cardio, 30 minutes is what a lot of the research says, but if you have a burst of cardio, you will get a little bit of increase in fuel. Another thing that helps is getting outside. Getting outside when you start to feel your energy and your focus start to go empty, getting outside is another way to give yourself a boost of brain power. But generally speaking, everybody, you need to start to marry mornings with peak productivity. If you can own your mornings, if you can put that thing that matters to you first thing in the morning and make a little bit of progress on it, you are going to start to feel like you are more in control. You’re going to start to see yourself using your best brain power and your highest level of fuel at the thing that matters most to you.

Rule Number Five: Fix Your Environment with Robin Sharma

Rule number five is fix your environment with Robin Sharma. I think it’s really wonderful to have a great lifestyle. In the 5 a.m. Club, I share a lot of the ideas that have been very helpful to me in terms of building a beautiful lifestyle. It’s really important. Your environment, your ecosystem is going to drive your performance. So being around art, there’s a model in the book called joy as a GPS, releasing toxic people and populating your life only with people who fuel your joy. Going traveling, there’s a lot of good signs coming up that traveling boosts creativity. Prosperity is very…

The Importance of Lifestyle

important. You can do beautiful things for your family. So, I think living a lifestyle that inspires you and that is beautiful is so great for your craft and so great for your creativity and so great for your productivity. I think it’s really important to surround yourself with people who are curious and have high integrity and who stand for possibility and who are all about growing and doing their part to make the world a better place.

Rule Number Six: Be Patient with Gary Vee

Rule number six is be patient with Gary Vee. One of my favorite things to talk about is patience. I’m obsessed with it. I believe in it the most. I think it leads to very good behavior. I think impatience leads to, is often an indication of insecurity, rushing for success to show others, not themselves. And so for me, I push patience a lot. I’m stunned by how many people struggle with me pushing patience because they hear complacency. And I’m fascinated by people’s inability to balance words that may seem in contradiction. To me, I’m as ambitious as they come. I’m hungry. I’m sitting here today, and there’s not a person in the audience that scares me that they’re hungrier because I don’t feel fulfilled. I’m still super driven. I feel like I haven’t even started. And so I sit here hungry, but I equally impatient. You know when I hear about my life goal to buy the New York Jets, right? Like a lot of people now that I’m a public figure, like, “When are you going to do it? Next year? Next?” And it’s funny. I see all these people out in the open, it happened today at the airport in New York. A guy’s like, “When are you going to buy the Jets?” And I’m like, “32 years.” And like the disappointment in his face. And so I think people struggle to balance what may seem like contradictions. And I think in that there’s something important to dig into.

Rule Number Seven: Keep Going Forward with David Goggins

Rule number seven, the last one before some very special bonus clips, is keep going forward with David Goggins. So, this is where the 40% rule comes in. People worst shape my entire life. I’ve been through Ranger school, Delta Force selection twice, three hell weeks, all this crap. This is the worst pain I’ve ever been in to this day. I’m 43 years old right now. Two years in the military, I’ve done 60 Ultra races, pull-up records, all kinds of stuff. This is the worst pain of my entire life to this day. But this is when I had to realize one thing. I had to break this humongous thing down to very small. All I put in my mind was, “Let’s not quit yet. I’m going to quit but not yet.” So, I sat there. I can’t stand up, so let’s get some nutrition. All right, I’m not dizzy anymore. Let me clean this crap off me. Okay, I need some food. I’m going to quit after I eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. All right, but not yet. Let me see if I can stand up. Stand up. Maybe I’ll quit. Let me see if I can walk to the car. There’s the car. It’s a one-mile track. I walked past the car. I’m not going to quit yet. I kept this mindset the whole time. I ended up doing 30 more miles. Did 31 miles. Truthfully, after that, did 101 miles in 19 hours. If you’re driving the car, the car may say 130 miles an hour. The factory puts a governor on it so it only goes 91. So, you’re sitting there wanting to race somebody. They have no governor. They’re fine. Boom, you can’t, because every time you get to 91, the car starts doing this, starts doing this. We put a governor on our brain, and the second we get to that governor, our body starts doing this. “Oh, this sucks. This is uncomfortable. No, no, no, no, no. Let’s go this way.” It starts giving you all these questions that we cannot answer. If you can’t answer the questions your brain is asking you, you quit. If you have the answers to those questions of why the hell am I out here and you give it a quick answer, the brain starts shutting up because it knows why we’re doing what we’re doing. I started figuring these things out in my life. So, we have this governor on our brain, and how you start pushing past that governor, start realizing your brain has the tactical advantage over you. Why? Because it knows your insecurities. It knows when you’re lying. It knows your fears. It knows everything about you.

Bonus Clips

What is it you’ve seen people do to turn up the heat to take things to the next level? So, I say two things. The first is just staying consistent on the thing. I don’t know how many times it took you to make a video before your channel started to take off. For me, it was a lot. You know, just… I had, I don’t know how many years, five years to get to 2,000 subscribers or something like that.

The Power of Consistency

just the only thing I had going for me was I just kept going, right? I wasn’t very good on camera. I didn’t have any strategy. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I felt insecure all the time. I was introverted and shy and not a natural entertainer, but I just kept going. So a lot of times, the answer is just keep going. Just stay consistent. Just make another one. Just make another one. And I think if you’re always focused on the next one you’re making and not so worried about, “Oh, my last one didn’t do as well,” or, “It wasn’t as good a thumbnail,” or whatever, like, “Okay, just make the next one. Keep going. There’s always another one that you’re going to keep doing.”

That’s the only thing that I had going for me in the early days. And a lot of times, it really is just continuing to show up. Because in the showing up, you will slowly get better. You might be naturally talented, amazing, but you will, even if you suck, you will get better. You will slowly get better at the skill, and opportunities will come to you if you’re in the game. But like, you don’t get opportunities if you’re just sitting thinking about the game. You gotta be there in the game. And a lot of times, we feel like we’re just striking out, and striking out, and striking out. But it’s like, it’s another bat. And then eventually, you get a hit, you know? And then you keep striking out, and you get another hit. And you slowly get better. You can play forever, right? I mean, it’s like, you can keep doing this. It’s not like in a year YouTube’s going to go away, and now you’re not going to be able to make it. So, just showing up consistently. And for me, it’s having a calendar, and videos have to go up.

This is something I talk to creators about all the time. Is for us, it’s a daily calendar. For somebody else, it might be a weekly or monthly calendar. But a video has to go up every day. Even now, how many years later? 15 years later, whatever it is. I still don’t 100% love any video that we release. I look at it like, “Oh, we could tweak that, and we could change that.” And that’s such a huge point, yeah. It’s like, we could, there’s always something that we can tweak and fix. And if you give me infinite time with it, I’ll keep working and keep working and keep working and keep working on it. But a video has to go up today, and a video has to go up tomorrow. So, we do the best that we have with what we’ve got. And then tomorrow, we release another video. And so, nothing gets in the way of the release schedule. So, we haven’t missed a video upload in over a decade. You can go on the channel, I guess…

Dealing with Failure and Rejection

see when the last time we didn’t have a day of making videos? I think one of my first things in failure is don’t take it more personally than it actually is. And I’ll give an example of that. When I was applying to 40 companies that all rejected me before an interview, yeah, all I was getting was an automated response saying, “Your application will not go any further.” I can’t take that personally because they didn’t meet me in person. They didn’t have an interaction with me. They just saw my name. They saw I’d been a monk for three years. That resume is useless. I mean, what’s your transferable skills? Like, sitting in silence and stillness? Surprise, surprise, no one wants to hire a monk. And so they rejected you, but that’s not personal because they didn’t meet me in person. But what if they had met you in person? So that’s the first step. The first step is don’t take all failure. I’ll give you an example. Me and you, we reached out to countless guests to be on our podcast, who say no all the time, who say no all the time. But if I don’t hear a no from the guest directly, that’s not a no. Like, someone’s team can say no. Someone’s assistant can say no. Someone’s PR team can say no. But until they say no personally, it’s not a no. But when they do say no, then that’s a no.

Yeah, so then let’s move. How do you deal with that type of failure?

Yes. So, if I deal with a failure where someone meets me in person and gets to know me, “Jay, you’re horrible. I don’t want to deal with a monk ever in my life. I would never go on your show. I’m never listening to you. Never.” Yeah. Then, how do you deal with that type of… So, I’ve heard you say this. I’ve said it a couple of times. And I’m sure it’s been repeated a bunch of times around how I genuinely believe failure has feedback. Feedback. And so, for me, it’s like failure has the ability to actually tell you what you need to improve. Now, not to improve to get their attention. Improving to get the actions you want, the results you want.

Yeah.

And don’t make that about the who said no. Don’t try to use failure as a way to prove someone else wrong. What happens when we prove others wrong? When you prove others wrong, you end up trying to get validation and approval from them. And now, if they’re not impressed when you’re right, you lose again. So, you end up losing twice. And you spend all this time and energy, years maybe, to prove someone wrong. I’ve been there many times. And then you’re like, “I felt good for a moment, and then I feel empty again.”

Totally.

And that’s the thing about failure. And the second off is, you have to see failure as an improvement. If, if I’m completely honest, everyone who rejected me in my life up until now has made me more hungry, taught me so much more about myself, and made me up my game.

Yeah.

And I think if failure doesn’t make you up your game, it’s the same as losing in a sport, right? When you fail…

Please note that this transcription includes all words exactly as spoken, including grammatical errors, filler words, repetitions, and interjections.

Learning from Sports and Dealing with Rejection

“You’ve lost games and you’ve won games, you’ve been on the big stages. You didn’t have the skills, you didn’t have the teamwork. You guys weren’t hungry enough, whatever, communicating enough. There was something you were missing. So you go review the game film, you check the stats, you see what could I’ve done better, and you try to improve that for the next game. Yeah, and I think a lot of people can do that in life, but we’re so afraid to go on the next game of life. Like, I got rejected once, and it hurts so bad. How do people learn to overcome that pain of rejection? Yeah, to keep going, you know? In sports, luckily there’s a season. It’s like you might have 30 basketball games, after you lose the first two, you don’t say, ‘I’m just going to give up the rest of the season,’ you keep playing. Yes, but in life, a lot of people stop playing. Why? Yeah.”

“I think that’s great mental training too. I think Sports is great mental training because you have to show up to the next game even if you lost and you don’t feel bad that you don’t feel good, sorry. And one of the things before I dive into that question, one of the things that you reminded me of was ‘The Last Dance’ documentary. So there’s that season that Michael Jordan, everyone is in agreement that he is one of the best players to be playing, and they keep losing. They didn’t make the finals, right? They didn’t make the finals, they lost. And then they realized they need to get the team, and they need to find the, I think they bring in Dennis Rodman, and then they start bringing in all these other players that strengthen. Whereas if they would have just said, ‘Oh, we got the best player in the world, we just keep doing this,’ I’m not sure they would have got there, right? But the coach Phil Jackson and the team, they had to adapt.”

“So you’re saying why do we feel that pain in rejection and how do we deal with that? I think we feel that pain because we look at it, right? We look at it as a complete definition of us, right? We’re looking at it as that famous statement of like, you know, failure is an event, not a person, right? And I don’t know who said it, but it’s one of those statements that really clicks. Like failure is an event, not a person. Whereas we start thinking we are the failure, like we say, ‘I am a failure.'”

“Have you ever spent any time wondering how does everything happen? How does everything happen? Why does the night follow the day? Why doesn’t the day follow the day? In fact, in some places, it does, but I spent a lot of time thinking about this fact. At times it almost drives me crazy. But right outside of my studio here is a Japanese maple tree. And there’s times of the year it’s absolutely beautiful. In the spring of the year, it has buds on it. Then the buds boom, and leaves pop out. And the leaves generally in the spring are a very deep greeny brown. They’re not a pretty looking leaf. But then they start to change. And over time, you don’t notice it happening, just one day you look and it’s a different color. And by Fall, the leaves are crimson red. They’re most beautiful. It is the most beautiful tree, and it’s right outside of my studio. I’m sitting here at my desk, and the camera’s around me, but out there is that tree.”

“You know, every fall, the leaves turn red. Every spring, they’re greeny brown. They’re not greeny brown in the fall and red in the spring, they’re always red in the fall and greeny brown in the spring. Think about it. Did you ever wonder why the tide goes way out, the tide comes way back in? I spent some time in the Navy in Canada, and I was down on the East Coast for a while, and I was near the Bay of Fundy. Do you know the Bay of Fundy has one of the highest and lowest tides in the world? It’s absolutely amazing. It goes way out and then comes way back in, same up around Prince George on the west coast. You go on to a ship, and you might be walking up a plank just right straight up, and you go off the ship. Sometimes going right down that ship goes way up in the air and it comes way down. Very high, very low tide. Now some places the tides not very big, they do have a tide, but not too high, not too low. Why is it so different one place than another?”

“You know why does the leaves change color? Why do they change color? You know why does the grass keep growing? Wouldn’t it be so much nicer if the grass just, you know, just stayed at a certain length? You wouldn’t have to cut it, but it would always look pretty. Do you think about this? Do you know that everything in this universe happens in an exact way, an exact way, not by chance, but in an exact way? When John Kennedy, the president of the United States, asked Dr. Werner Von Braun, who was the mastermind behind the Space Program, when he asked him, ‘What would it take to build a rocket that would carry a person to the moon and bring him back safely to Earth?’ Von Braun answered him in five words, ‘The will to do it.’ That’s it, the will to do it. He knew you didn’t have to know how to do it. He knew you had to learn how to do it, but you didn’t have to know to make up your mind you were going to do it.”

“Now, why did he say that? Because he understands the laws. Von Braun one time said, after years of studying the spectacular mysteries of the cosmos, he was led into a firm belief in the existence of God. And he said, ‘The natural laws of this universe are so precise that we don’t even have any difficulty building spaceships. We send people to the Moon, and we can time the landing with a precision of a fraction of a second.’ Now, he said, ‘These laws must have been set by someone.’ I see the laws as God’s modus operandi. But I’m going to tell you something, everything happens by law. When you and I get in harmony with the law, now, we should understand them, but when we get in harmony with the law, then I’m going to tell you, it’s just smooth sailing. Success happens. Probably be a good idea to understand, a good idea to understand the laws, wouldn’t it?”

Understanding Universal Laws and Brain Coherence

“I think about it, your life is governed by laws that are not man-made, so they’re not going to be man-changed. And if you study them and work in harmony with them, I’m going to, you’ll shock yourself with the good you can do. Now, I’ve been doing that for the last 58 years. I’m starting to get a reasonable grip on them, but I don’t understand them as well as I want to or would like to. But I’m going to study a little more today. You know, I get my trusty book out here. I have to talk to you about this book; that’ll be another talk. Study the laws, find out what they are, what they’re like, what are the laws, and then study them.”

“Win broadening your awareness starts to create brain coherence. And when the brain starts functioning in a more orderly and coherent way, and it begins to synchronize, and those different compartments of the brain start working together, there comes a moment where the two hemispheres of the brain start to synchronize into balance, and the union of polarity, the union of opposites, the union of duality is called wholeness. And now we are creating from wholeness instead of from lack or separation. And this is where it gets exciting because when a person does this properly, and they can practice it, our research shows that people can change their brain waves in one second, in 4 seconds, in 5 seconds, in 12 seconds, and 13 seconds, and 19 seconds. Why? Because they understand the process of getting beyond themselves. So why is that important for you? Because up until this point, whether you know it or not, you have been the process of practicing brain coherence, the first part of the formula.”

“And so when you open up your awareness in your next meditation, I’m going to ask you as if you had no eyes, no ears, no body to feel, to smell, to taste, as if you were just an awareness. I’m going to ask you to sense this Blackness, and I’m going to ask you to sense its depth. I’m going to say, how far can your awareness go into endless space, and all I want you to do is sense its infinite depth. I’m going to ask you to become aware that there’s infinite Blackness on both sides of you, and all I want you to do is broaden your focus and to sense it, to feel it, to stay connected to it. And the act of opening your awareness and sensing space slows your brain waves down. I’m going to ask you to become aware that there’s Infinite Space behind you, and the act of sensing that Infinite Space behind you causes your brain to start to fire more orderly. We’ve measured this thousands of times.”

“And as if you were just an awareness in that Blackness, I’m going to say to you now, it’s time to become nobody, no one, no thing, nowhere, and no time, and take your attention off of everything known, into invested into the unknown. And like investing into a bank account, the longer you linger in the unknown, the more you create possibilities in your life. And if you find your mind returning to your body, to your pain, to your drives, to your emotions, to your habits, to thinking about certain people or objects or places or things in your known predictable reality, to thinking about the familiar past or the eventual future, simply become aware that your attention is on the known, investing back into this three-dimensional reality. Stop, relax, return back to the present moment, and unfold back into possibility into the Blackness.”

“You say that we have to master the concept of the present moment. What does that mean? Well, there’s so much talk about the present moment and being present in the power of now, but most people spend the majority of their life, 95% of the time, either living by some past emotion or some past habit or anticipating the future based on the past. And so we’re very rarely in the present moment. And paying attention is being present, and it’s a skill just like anything else. The more you practice it, the better you get at it. So think about it, if feelings and emotions are the end product of past experiences, and you can remember experiences better because you can remember how they feel. If you wake up in the morning and you have to search for the familiar feeling called you every morning, and that feeling is unhappiness or frustration or…”

The Impact of Emotions and Consciousness

“Lack or insecurity or fear. The moment you get in touch with that emotion, you’re starting your day from the past because the emotion is a record of the past. Now, if that emotion is connected to memories that are mapped neurologically in your brain of certain people at certain places at certain times with certain things, then the moment you feel that emotion, you associate that emotion with the past memory. Then you’re activating circuits in your brain from the past. So if how you think and how you feel creates your state of being, and thoughts are the vocabulary of the brain and feelings are the vocabulary of your body, then your entire state of being is in the past, and most people are living in the past. So their body is their unconscious mind, and it doesn’t know the difference between an experience in their life that creates an emotion and an emotion that they’re creating by thought alone. To the body, it’s exactly the same.”

“So those emotions start driving people’s thoughts, and if they can’t think greater than how they feel, and feelings have become the means of thinking, and they believe that their thoughts have something to do with their destiny, then they’re thinking in the past. So they’re creating more of the same life and by the same means. If they wake up in the morning and they come back to their senses and they start out with the same routine that they did yesterday and they’re going through a series of routine habits of going to the toilet, making coffee, eating breakfast, taking a shower, driving to work the same way, then we could say for the most part, a person’s future is nothing more than a replication of the past, and they’re not in the present moment. And if they keep doing that over and over again, that becomes a habit, and a habit is a redundant set of automatic unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that’s acquired through frequent repetition. The habit is when you’ve done something so many times, the body has become the mind. So for most people, their body is dragging them into a predictable future, and they’re on autopilot based on what they’ve done in the past, and they’ve lost their free will to a program.”

“I think anybody who is alive right now, who is engaged in life, has noticed a quickening taking place. In other words, everybody feels like more things are happening in a shorter amount of time. So there’s an acceleration, and time is a construct in our mind. There’s no circuitry, there’s no hardware in our brain to be able to understand time. It’s a construct based on our past and how we predict the future. But information is so readily available in our world right now that in an age of information, ignorance is a choice. So you don’t need an authority to gain information any longer. You don’t need a priest, you don’t need a governor, you don’t need a doctor, you don’t need a teacher. You can access information at your fingertips. So then, as you begin to discern the information with discernment, the proper and right information, you begin to develop some type of empowerment because all of a sudden you’re seeing possibilities that you never saw before without that. So you wake up, you become more aware.”

“So the knowledge creates awareness, awareness creates consciousness. Consciousness and energy are connected. So there’s a change in energy globally going on with the world now that knowledge and that change of energy has effects on paradigms that are no longer a vibrational match with that new level of consciousness. So you see political systems unraveling, you see economics, economic systems unraveling, they’re uninspiring, they’re unraveling, they can’t sustain themselves with this new energy. You see journalism, the environment, education, religion, medicine, it’s all unraveling because something greater has to come as a result of a change in consciousness. Now, no victims here because you and I negotiated from a soul level to be here at this time. This is the time we’ve been waiting for. This is where it’s happening in the Milky Way. This is it’s happening here because there’s a true coming of a new consciousness. It’s not one person that’s coming, it’s a group, it’s a collective consciousness that’s emerging, and emergence is one mind, one heart.”

“And the way you control people is you give them misinformation based on emotions. You control people by controlling their emotions. And media and television and advertisement is a great seduction that people can watch the news and get really angry, then change the channel and watch a football game and get very excited, then change the channel and watch a sitcom and laugh, and change the channel and watch a drama. And you can change your emotional state because of technology. So then it means then most people are relying consciously or subconsciously on things outside of them to make them feel a certain way. And so my interest is to provide the proper content of information scientifically to people so that they reason that this is actually possible, then to give them the opportunity to experience that philosophy and get their behaviors to match their intentions as many ways as I can.”

“Now, if I do that properly, people are going to have new experiences. The experiences are going to change the circuitry in their brain. Learning makes connections, but experience enriches connections. The end product of an experience is an emotion. So when you start feeling worthy, when you start feeling a love for yourself, when you start feeling a love for life, when you start feeling truly grateful, the moment you feel that emotion, you’re teaching your body to understand what your mind has understood and living in stress is when your response to the environment causes you to activate the…”

The Role of Trigger Moments and Habits

“Autonomic nervous system, and when you activate that autonomic nervous system, a branch of it called the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight nervous system, is mobilizing all of the body’s energy, all of the body’s resources for some danger in the outer environment. Are you with me still? And it mobilizes all this energy to prepare the body to do one of three things: to fight, to run, or to freeze and hide. And so the mobilization and tapping all of the body’s resources causes the heart to race, respiratory rate to increase, pupils to dilate, digestive juices to shut down, blood sent to the extremities, the immune system dials up then dials down. We mobilize all this glucose to have the energy to be able to run, fight, or hide.”

“Now, in the short term, that works really well. All organisms in nature can tolerate short-term stress. The human beings were a little bit more complex. Sometimes it’s not the predator that we’re afraid of; it’s the person sitting next to us at work. Sometimes it’s the news. Sometimes it’s a reaction to someone or something. And the constant knocking the brain and body out of balance causes that imbalance to become a new balance. And now the person is headed for some type of breakdown, some type of disease, because no organism can live in that state, an emergency state, for an extended period of time.”

“I know you all have big goals, big dreams, big aspirations, just like I do. You’ve got ambitions to become an amazing person, to build your career, to create, to contribute, to give, to be an awesome human being. But all of that is impossible without great habits set up. If you don’t have routine and structure set up in a way that will keep you on track, then you’ll fall off. And having new goals without new habits is kind of like having a new car without wheels. Habits are the wheels; they’re the things that make you able to achieve the goals. So you’ve got to have good habits. But the challenge for most people isn’t that knowledge. I mean, you know you need to have good habits. It’s you can’t keep the habit going, right?”

“Have you ever started at the new year, you’re going to get healthier, and you start that habit of working out more on a more regular basis, and then it goes away? Or you say, ‘You know, I’m going to be more kind, more patient, more awesome to my partner, my lover,’ and you start being nice for two or three days, and then on the fourth day, you’re a jerk. You know? And you’re like, ‘What happened? I said I was going to be nicer.’ It’s that you didn’t set up the most important thing you needed to maintain a habit. So what’s the biggest secret I’ve learned in almost 20 years in this field? It’s so simple, but most people don’t have it. It’s called trigger moments. You have to set up trigger moments to activate your habits.”

“What do I mean by that? Well, let’s say you want to become a better person. You know, you want to become more kind, more patient, more loving with people. Now, you can just set that intention or write that down in your vision or your journal or set up on a vision board that you look at once in a while. But in day-to-day life, it’s not enough. You need things to trigger you, to remind you to be that particular kind of person, right? It’s almost like if you could have a little angel speaking in your ear all day long to tell you what to do and how to be, you’d obviously become better. Well, that makes sense. Well, let’s use that idea. Let’s use that idea by setting up alarms on our phones that trigger us to do the very things we need to do.”

“This is going to be so basic; you’re going to laugh. And then I’ll also tell you how I’ve literally taught this to Fortune 50 CEOs, and they said it was the one thing that changed their life the most dramatically. So let’s start with this. Let’s have a goal in mind. Let’s say you want to become more present and calm throughout the day. Again, you could write that down on a journal, ‘I’m going to be more present and calm.’ You could meditate in the morning, say, ‘Today, I’m going to be more present and calm.’ And you can start out with good intentions, but those fall apart without a trigger moment set up throughout the day to remind you that. So what if you did this…”

Introduction

What if you just set up on your phone three alarms during the day with a label that said, “Close your eyes, take 10 deep breaths,” in it? Remind yourself to be calm. So let’s say you’re going through your day; it’s crazy, right? It’s 10:00 a.m. and all of a sudden, Bing, your phone goes off. You look down and it says, “Close your eyes, take 10 deep breaths.” And then again, it happens at 2:00, and again, it happens at 6:00 p.m., and again, it happens at 8:00 p.m. What’s going to happen? You always look at your phone, don’t you? It’s going to go throughout the day; you’re going to forget. And the funniest thing is, I’ve had so many people do this worldwide; we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people I’ve taught to do this, hundreds of thousands. And they tell me all the time that that changed everything. And you’ll think once you set it up that the next day you’ll forget about it. No, that alarm will go off; you forgot you set the dang alarm. There it goes off in your face; you’re like, “All right, I’m trying to be calmer and more present, close my eyes, take 10 deep breaths, reground myself. Here we go.” You can’t do it once a day; you have to have moments throughout the day that trigger you to enact the new behavior. I know this makes sense to you, but it’s a challenge for a lot of people because they never set those things up.

Example 1: Calmness Trigger

So what if you did it with an alarm? So for example, for me, on the opposite spectrum, I don’t want to just be calmer and more present. I want more energy throughout the day. So here’s what I do. One of my big trigger moments is every time my butt hits a chair. I don’t care if I’m on a plane or I was like where we’re shooting here. I wrote a lot of my books here; I wrote the Motivation Manifesto here; I wrote The Charge here. And if I’m going to write, my butt hits the chair. I grab my phone; I open the timer, and I set 50 minutes. Now, at 50 minutes, the timer goes; it starts buzzing, and I look at that, and I go, “Oh, that’s my trigger to get energy.” So I stand up; I go get some water; I take a glass of water, drink it down; I do some stretches, and I do some exercise, just really briefly. Or I’ll go for a walk, whatever it is. But I’ll do something that usually takes just 2 to 5 minutes. Then I’ll sit back down; I’ll set that 50-minute alarm, and I’ll work. And what that does is every 50 minutes, it triggers me to change how I’m physically moving. It changes my attention so that throughout the day, I’m continually refreshed. So I never have that 2, 3, 4:00 time where I’m like, “Ah, you know why? Because I’ve triggered my day so that my energy is maintained throughout the day.” Makes sense, right?

Example 2: Health Trigger

This could be as simple as, let’s say you want to be healthier in your life. Okay, let’s set up some trigger moments for you in this way. Let’s say every time you drop off the kids on the way back to the house, you stop at the grocery store and get some fresh produce. That’s just a trigger; it’s like, “Okay, did one thing, drop kids off; now, tied to that, triggered from that action, drop kids off, is go to the health food store.”

Example 3: Morning Routine Trigger

Or let’s say you want to get healthier in the morning. One of the easiest ways to help people maintain a better exercise program is this: set a trigger. You wake up in the morning; your first action is to drink water, put your exercise shoes on, might get dressed if you were naked, just saying. So you get dressed; put your shoes on; you go downstairs or you go to the gym, and that’s the trigger. You woke up; you do these actions; nothing interrupts those actions; that’s the action. And you have to have those set up.

Doorframe Triggers

One of my other favorite trigger moments to set up is doorframe triggers. What do you mean by that? When you walk into a new room, have a psychological trigger go off in your mind that you’ve associated with that doorframe. So let me give you an example. If I walk into my house at night, if I’ve been working all day and I’m going to walk in, I’m going to see my lady. I have it so that whenever I walk through the doors of my house, three words repeat off immediately in my mind because I’ve done it so many times consciously. I went to the door; I said the three words, said the three words, said the three words. And I did this so many times that now when I walk through a door, my mind automatically triggers those three words, and I remember to be those three words. So what words would you love to have describe you as a person that you would be happy if that was how people described you? What would those words be? Have those and now set them up in your life.

Conclusion

I teach executives to do this as well. I have them have a doorframe trigger when they walk into their office in the morning. As soon as they walk through that doorframe, they have, boom, three words go through their mind about how they want to be perceived as a leader. I have them set up another door; every time they walk into a meeting, into the conference room, when they walk through the door of the conference room, they have another three words that trigger off for them. And it just reminds them how to be. So these aren’t big crazy things. A lot of people, they think they have to completely change their life. What would change your life completely is setting up more trigger moments and associations that when you see something, you do this; that when this action is taken, then that happens; that when you have the opportunity to set up alarms on your phone, you set them up so that you’re interrupted in your everyday life to remind yourself to stick to the habits, to stick to the intention. You do that enough on a continual basis; you’ll find yourself in so many ways completely rejuvenated. And I promise you’ll stick to your habits even more. And once you do that, you know that everything changes. I would credit much of the success I’ve had to whatever extent I’ve had success.

On Writing and Practice

To learning how to write and practicing writing, and the reason for that is that without writing, it’s very hard to freeze your thinking on paper so that you can sharpen it, so that you can see where, for instance, using words that aren’t well defined, where you’re saying things that don’t need to be said. All of this will help everything else. I remember in college, for instance, when I took a class with John MC, an incredibly gifted writer and teacher, all of my grades in every other class went up because every extraneous bit of information that was hurting instead of helping me was taken out. So to sharpen the saw, a couple of different approaches. Number one is write anything, anything whatsoever, stream of consciousness essay, doesn’t really matter; let’s just call it one to three pages, something along the lines of morning pages, and Julia Cameron, the Artist’s Way, popularized this. There are a number of folks like Brian K, a very well-known writer, screenwriter, co-creator of the show “Billions,” buy morning pages. So that is an easy way to ease into the practice of just moving a pen.

I recommend freehand so that you can see your thinking on paper. That accomplishes two things: number one, it takes the anxieties and nebulous worries in your head, puts them down in a freeze frame so that you can kind of trap them in the printed form, so you can get on with the rest of your day. The second thing it does is it allows you to see where you are sharp and where you are dull in your thinking. Now, if you are drafting, as I do, for instance, right now, once a week writing, if you are looking for a proofreader and you do need a proofreader, if you can’t find a professional writer because we can’t all find professional writers, talk to friends who have any type of legal training. Or you could even hire a lawyer to do this, or a paralegal, someone with a law degree.

They are trained to look at language very, very carefully because in a dispute, in a negotiation, in a disagreement, arbitration, it’s going to come down to the wording of contracts. And I have found that when I do not have access to professional writers, it is often times just as good or even better to get lawyers or people with legal training to read my writing. So that would be a workaround that I accidentally discovered that is very powerful.

Taking Responsibility

You’re going to find the meaning in your life by adopting maximal responsibility. That’s going to be extremely difficult because you’re so bloody useless. You can’t even get your own house in order. And you’re going to be called upon not only to get your house in order but to do that well enough so some woman can stand having you around for more than, like, 15 minutes in the back of a car. And then maybe you’re going to have to do it so that you could be a good father to a family and a pillar of the community. And that’s not just empty words; it’s like if you do that nobly, there’ll be something to you. And then when the storms come, you won’t be blown over by the first 4-foot wave. And young men think, “Huh, I mean, I could be something that wasn’t blown over by the first 4-foot wave.” I think, “Oh, well, that’s inspiring. Maybe that’s worth doing a little work towards it on the off chance it might be true.” And the thing about it is, it is true. So it’s not that difficult once you understand it to make a case for it. It’s true, and it’s also true that you grow in proportion to the weight you take on voluntarily. And it’s also true that we have no idea what the upper limit to that is. You’ve met remarkable people in your life, people who can do remarkable things, and there are inevitably people who took on remarkable burdens. And because they did that, their development was forced by necessity. They were forced by necessity to grow beyond what they were, and who knows what the limit to that is.

Fear of Failure

The one reason that most people don’t do entrepreneurship is they do fear failure. And I think a lot about fear and failure. I think one of the great things that happened to me was I did love sports, which meant I lost a lot. And then with school, I was losing so much in fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh grade that by the time I was 14, I was used to losing. I would argue I loved losing. I think it’s why I love being a Jets fan. I’m being serious. I’m being serious. I think that is a characteristic of an entrepreneur, and that was a huge characteristic of mine. I think a lot about the kids that I see now that run away from playing something because they’re scared to lose. For me, I was the reverse. I would play and play, and I would cry. I cried a lot when I was a kid, if you want to know about me. I cried a lot at 9, 10, 11, 12. But I would just get up again and play, and get up again and play.

Scheduling Tough Tasks

If you want to know about scheduling, certain times, and do the tough stuff, if selling is the tough stuff, schedule it from 2 to 3, from 5 to 7. Put it on your calendar and don’t allow yourself off the hook until you do what you said you’re going to do. So powerful.

On Selling and Marketing

So true, you know, I’ve been helping Tony and I obviously, we own Mastermind, and we help people with our programs and courses to sell what they know, to share that your greatest asset is your life experience, how to turn it into a course, a coaching program, a podcast, a workshop, a book. We obsess on that, but we know sometimes people get through all of it, their life experience is priceless. All these pieces, and it’s time to sell, it’s time to market. Sometimes the wheels come off, sometimes we get a little intimidated. I get that. But if you fall in love with what you do, it’s a lot easier. When you feel it’s a disservice not to get it in people’s hands, so you can help impact them, that starts changing. But then you start to get tactical, you’ve got to start getting repetition. So here’s what I challenge you this week: challenge you to look at where in your life do you need improvement?

Okay, I hope it’s in your business, hope it’s in sales, or I hope it’s, I hope you just recognize what it is. Recognize the hard part is if, if it’s your relationship, is it the hard part, having a conversation about a certain thing that you really need to talk about? Is it in your health? Is there something that you just keep putting off? “I don’t want to cut out the bread. I don’t want to go to the gym. I’m embarrassed to go there.” Is it in your business? Is it doing the marketing? Is it doing the sales? Is it putting yourself out there? Is it afraid to go live, afraid to do a video? Here’s my challenge to you in this short “own your future” behind the scenes podcast this week: figure out the things that you are putting off, that you are avoiding, that you’re a little scared of, or just a little uncomfortable with, and you just keep working on the things that aren’t actually moving the needle in your life, moving the needle towards the man or the woman you’re meant to be. You’re kind of putting it off till next year, next month, and you’ll never do it unless you do that one thing. I started this podcast off with, “It’s time to schedule it.” It’s time to schedule it.

So your challenge: recognize what you’re putting off, recognize what’s uncomfortable, schedule it, and then the best way to make it happen is to remind yourself why you’re doing this in the first place. Get leverage. When you think, “I don’t want to make that call,” but I want freedom with my family. I want to be in control of my calendar. I want to be in control of my life. Whatever it takes to get the leverage, the tool, the asset, the compelling future, running away from pain, do whatever it takes to get disturbed with your own inaction, schedule, and then hold yourself accountable for the results that you want to achieve. We’ve got to stop lying to ourselves, saying we’re going to do something, saying we want the success, saying we want to make the sale, saying we want freedom, and then we keep letting ourselves down because it’s uncomfortable. That can end today, this week, if you so decide. You’ve heard this phrase that first you create your habits, and then your habits create you. I think one of the challenges when you are working from home or you’re traveling is to establish structure because a confused mind tends to not do anything. You may be one of those individuals, like me, that need structure.

And by having a routine, a set of behaviors, they provide a system, something I could go to, and that reduces something called decision fatigue. A lot of times, if you have to think about things that you are doing on a regular basis too much, it could expend a lot of energy. And one of the challenges people report in our private Facebook group and our app and our social media is they just feel exhausted. And part of the exhaustion comes from using your brain overloaded in too many ways. So what I would say is have systems. And so, for example, for me, I have my morning routine, and you’ve heard me talk about this, maybe on our podcast, maybe in our books, and our courses. Some things that are specifically for getting my mind right first thing in the morning. I believe if you want to win the day, you have to win that first hour of the day. You have to win that morning.

And my goal is really not to distract myself. So when I wake up, first thing in the morning, I will go through and I will say, “Okay, what’s the most important things I get done today?” Because it’s not about being busy, right? We’re addicted to busyness. Sometimes we say, “Oh, people ask, ‘How’s your day?’ and ‘What are you up to?’ I just like, ‘I’m so busy,’ and we use busyness as maybe like a badge of honor. And what we’re really saying is that we’re busy, so we must be important.” But the goal is not to be busy because then we start designing our day around being busy, and we wonder why we’re stressed. We wonder why we are overloaded. So what I do is I say, “Okay, let’s say and do this with me, please. Wherever you are in your day right now, if you were to fast forward at the end of the day, and somebody was to ask you, maybe a family member or a friend, ‘How was your day?’ and you said, ‘Wow, it was amazing. Today was an incredible day. I crushed it.’ Reverse engineer it. What had to happen in order for you to say those words? What happened during that day? What things did you accomplish? Who were you being, doing, sharing, and so on?” For me, I think of three professional things I want to accomplish. I feel that if our to-do list is 20 things or 50 things or even 100 different things, then we’re just being busy.

The most important thing is to keep the most important things the most important things. And you could do anything, but I believe you can’t do everything. Certainly, you can’t do everything at once. So what would three wins be for your day? The reason so many people aren’t productive throughout the day is not only because they don’t have their purpose and their psychology and their physiology supporting them, but also because they’re going through the day in an ignorant way. You know, they’re going through the day, focus solely on responding to everybody else’s emergencies. You know, here’s what most people do.

They wake up, they get ready for the day, they go through the day, they go to work, they’re not really thinking about anything yet. They’re just kind of going through the motions. They get to work, and what do they do? They open up their email inbox, which is the worst thing you could ever do to be productive. Your inbox is a nice organizing system of other people’s agendas. That’s what an inbox really is. It’s a nice organizing system. Every email

in there is someone needing something from you or pulling from you. That’s what most of them are. Isn’t it true? And so what most people do is they open up their inbox, and they start responding to other people’s emergencies, or they start looking through all their emails to see, “Well, what am I supposed to do today? What’s the biggest fire I have to fight today?” In other words, they’re living their life in reaction versus living their life in intention, in intelligence, in direction. They’re not focused on what to do throughout the day. They’re just saying, “Well, I’ll do this because that’s what popped up today.” You know? So for me, I never even check email until 10:00 a.m. When I get up and I’m looking at everything, I sit down and I strategize my day before I ever even think about checking my email.

And then I might only check my email once or twice a day because I set up all other systems to support my ability to be productive because in your life, I’m guessing that you’re only really making money if you’re producing. And in my industry, I live in the expert’s industry, that’s the self-spirituality, business growth world, where we offer advice to other people about how they can improve their life or build their business. That’s the expert industry. In the expert industry, most people are really struggling to be productive because we’re creatives, right? We have so many great ideas and so many great intentions throughout the day, and we have so many ideas we can never actually accomplish them.

Maybe you’re the same. Maybe at base, you’re really a creator, and you have all these ideas of so many things you want to do, but you’ve never really been able to organize them and get them done because you haven’t set up systems to support your levels of productivity. Let’s start with the beginning of your day. I’m just going to jump into one little thing that I do at the beginning of the day. It’s not the very beginning, but I think it will help you, and it’s a way of organizing my day, and I call this one-page productivity. It’s just a simple sheet of paper that I have that I fill in in the morning after I’ve gone out and I’ve exercised. That’s a piece of my morning activity, is mastering my physiology so I can become a high performer. It starts with me drinking lots of water in the morning, eating the right things, going for a little quick run or workout, or even just a brisk walk to energize my body and my mind so that I can be creative and think. And when I get back to my office, and it’s time to actually work, I do this one-page productivity sheet, and this one-page productivity sheet helps me really think through what I need to do throughout the day. So here are the three elements of this, and by the way, below this video, you can download the sheet and you can use it in your daily life.

Let me walk you through how to use it. Basically, there’s three elements of the one-page productivity. The first element is major projects. These major projects, usually, if any given person probably has, oh, I don’t know, three big buckets of projects that they’re working on. So I might be working on writing a new book. I might be working on doing a new seminar. I might be working on reinvigorating my online marketing. Those are big, big. These are big bucket projects that aren’t necessarily they’re the priorities for the day. These are the big vision, these connect me to the, “What are the big things I’m doing?”

And any given person, if they’re well organized, they’re probably only working on three, maybe five main projects. So what I want you to do when you start out in the morning, to keep your big thinking, big and thinking outside of just the day to focus, is you know, and in High-Performance Academy, we’ve already talked about purpose. So we’re already engaged there, okay? This is just a little snippet. I want you to think about the big picture of your projects, and I want you to think about what are the five things that you would have to do to move these projects forward. This is not five things that you need to move them forward today. That’s your priorities. Your projects are just, in general, what are the big things that you need to do? The big five things you would have to do. So, for example, if online marketing is one of my big projects, in re… One of the things I might have to do is learn to code a web page, right? Or learn to design a web page. Now, that’s a project. It doesn’t mean that today I’m going to learn how to do it. It just means, in general, that’s one of the things I will have to do. So these are, what are the five big things you would have to do to actually make that project come into fruition? What would you have to learn? What would you have to go out and master? Who would you have to contact? What are the things you would have to do for your big projects? Next is people category. In this people category, I want you to think of two things in the people category.

The people category is really important for high performers because high performers really get ahead not just because of who they know, but how they’re engaging who they know, right? What they’re asking for, what they’re doing. So the people category that I want you to think of each morning on this one-page productivity is two categories. One, I want you to sit down and think of who do you need to reach out to today? Who do you need to reach out to? So if I want to learn coding as an example, in general, I might want to schedule some time with a coder or web designer. So I’m like, “I’m going to have to reach out to a coder or web designer today.” And this is important because most people, when they open up their inbox, they just start replying to all these things.

When I open my inbox, the first thing I do is I send out these emails, people I need to reach out to. It’s the first thing that I do when I open my inbox. As an example, very first thing is send out all the emails to people I need to reach out to. The second category here is the people that you are waiting on. Given any person’s real schedule, you’re waiting on somebody to give you some information or a decision to move forward in your day, isn’t it true? You’re waiting on something from somebody so that you can move forward. And most people, they just sit there and they wait for the email to pop up.

They hope that it’s going to come. They don’t do anything about it. The second thing I do when I open my inbox, after I reach out to the people I need to reach out to, is I say something specific to them. So let me give you an example how this actually might operationalize in the day. When I open my inbox, I’ll look in my emails for these people first and foremost. It’s the first thing I’ll do after I send out the ones I need to reach out to strategically