The NEW Miracle Morning with Hal Elrod

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire! brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like The Hustle Daily. Today, we'll be breaking down the new Miracle Morning. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Hal Elrod into EO Fire Studios after surviving multiple near-death experiences and transforming millions of lives with his book, The Miracle Morning. Hal is now on a mission to elevate the consciousness of humanity. That's it, Fire Nation. just the consciousness of humanity. And today, Foundation, we'll talk about the miracle morning, why he wrote a new, updated, and expanded edition.

0:45We'll talk about that elevating the consciousness of humanity comments. We'll also talk about the miracle of life. And we'll also talk about your evening routine, not just the morning routine, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Hal and our sponsors. The Gold Digger Podcast, hosted by my good friend, Jenna Kuchar, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Gold Digger Podcast helps you discover your dream career with productivity tips, social strategies, business hacks, inspirational stories, and so much more.

1:18A must-listen episode is one of Jenna's recents on everything you need to know about affiliate marketing. Listen to Gold Digger wherever you get your podcasts. Belay is passionate about helping your business succeed with their simple, flexible staffing solutions. Download Belay's Bulletproof Budget Template for free, which is the exact budget template they use to grow from a small startup to one of Inc. 5000's fastest growing companies for nine straight years today. Just text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E to 55123. Hal, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:58Well, good miracle morning, Fire Nation and John JLD. Thanks for having me, brother. I love you. So good. It's been a long time. So something that I love being successful, I think that too many of us, we operate with this urgent mindset where we think that we need to be where we want to be and we need to be there now. And we go through life feeling anxious and like we're not far enough along. And we watch other people pass us by and we compare and it's just such an unhealthy way to live. And my belief is that when you finally get to the point in your life that you've been working so hard for for so long, you almost never wish it would have happened any sooner.

2:43Instead, when you finally get there, you go, oh, it had to take exactly this much time because I had to go through what I went through, meet who I met, overcome what I overcame, learn what I learned to become the person I needed to be to finally get to this point. So the lesson in that is be at peace every day with where you are in your life while you maintain a healthy sense of urgency to keep taking the next step forward. Fire Nation, you can tell that I love having Hal on the show. He is one of the few people, and I mean this, 4 ,000 plus interviews. He's one of the few people that brings the same type of energy that I try to bring to every single episode.

3:22It's natural. It's within him. It comes from every syllable of every word that he utters. And I just love that. And I love what he just said about comparing and despairing. I'm a huge fan of compare and despair. Fire Nation, you will always despair if you're comparing yourself to other people. You need to compare yourself to one person, you yesterday. If you're winning that comparison, you're winning life. And that's why Hal's here today to talk about the new miracle morning. This is the sixth time, Hal, you have been on Entrepreneurs on Fire. You are one of the top 3 % of all Fire Nation guests over the last 11 years, believe it or not.

4:05But here's what I want to say. My audience has heard your story. A lot of them have, but not every one of them. So go through very quickly and concisely because we have so much to get to about your crazy, multiple near-death experiences and the lessons you've learned. Yeah, and I'm going to add a part. I'm going to start with part of the story that most people may not know. I've only recently started talking about it. When I was eight years old, my sister died in front of me. And I woke up one morning to my mother screaming across the hall from her bedroom, and I ran across the hall. my mother was performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, CPR, on my 18-month-old sister, and she died that morning.

4:47And that really, I learned from my parents, they turned that tragedy into that pain into purpose, and they started helping other parents. Within a matter of probably six months, my mom was leading a support group. So that really helped plant the seed for me to turn my adversity into a way of helping others. You fast forward, I was 20 years old, and my poor parents who had already lost one child, they get a phone call in the middle of the night that I was hit head on by a drunk driver at 70 miles per hour. And I had died at the scene of the accident for six minutes. My heart stopped for six minutes.

5:21I, I, when, when they got the call, I was in critical condition and they had to drive two hours, not knowing if I'd be dead or alive when they got to the hospital. Um, I ended up flatlining twice more during the first week, which I was in a coma. And when I came out of the coma, the doctor said I would never walk again. And I had permanent brain damage. And, uh, I did take my first step, but I do still suffer from brain damage. And then you fast forward, uh, 2017, I was diagnosed with a very rare aggressive form of cancer and given a 20 to 30 % chance of surviving. And I underwent, uh, over 650 hours of chemotherapy.

5:57It was the hardest time in my life. Uh, and kind of, once again, I defied the odds and I just had this mindset that like, I will always accept whatever has happened to me and not wish it didn't happen because wishing something from the, especially something from the past or that's going on in the present, wishing it weren't happening doesn't change it. It just causes us inner turmoil because we're resisting reality. So the key lesson here is to accept reality exactly as it is and be at peace, be truly at peace, and then focus your energy, your effort, your faith on whatever it is that you want.

6:35For me, during the car accident, I want to walk again, and I did. And then during the cancer, it's I want to, of course, I want to beat cancer. I had two small children. My daughter was seven. My son was four when I was diagnosed. And nothing mattered more to me than living, you know, for them and for my wife and for our family. And once again, I had unwavering faith that I was going to beat cancer, even though the odds were against me. And I'm grateful to say that I'm still here talking to you, man, so. Yes, you are, brother. and the world is a better place for it. And that's kind of what I'll move on to next because your book, The Miracle Morning, it's already changed millions.

7:08That's a verified number, Fire Nation. Millions of lives. And I am a believer in the phrase, if it ain't broke, yo, don't fix this. But you went ahead and you wrote a new, updated and expanded edition. Why? Well, the first thing I have to say, John, it's so funny. I literally, in the title of the Microsoft Word document that I was writing, the updated and expanded edition, I wrote in the title, it said, if it's not broke, don't fix it. Because I wanted to remember, don't change too much of what has already helped people. However, I added over 70 pages of new content. So I rewrote every chapter.

7:51I mean, just from a place of, when I wrote the book, it was 13 years ago when I started writing it, I was a different person. And so I would hope that I'm a more evolved person. And so that when I go through and I read the old version of the book, I'm like, oh man, this could be so much better. So I made it better. Um, but I didn't change, you know, the, the structure, the, it's the same, but I added over 70 pages of new content and specifically 25 pages of new content in the savers section. The savers are the six practices that make up the miracle morning. So So I added new advanced techniques in that section.

8:25And then I added two brand new chapters at the end of the book, The Miracle Evening, which is your strategy for blissful bedtime and better sleep, and The Miracle Life, which is your path to inner freedom. It's basically leveraging the strategies and the mindset that I use to be happy in the midst of all of my tragedies. Genuinely happy when I was told I would never walk again. genuinely happy when I was told I had a 20 to 30 % chance of surviving. How can you apply that to be genuinely happy in the midst of your most difficult and challenging times in your life, whether they be financial or relational or medical or anything else.

9:04So this new book, it truly is updated. It is expanded against 70 pages of new content. And I am, I'm really excited. And I, one of the things I had in mind is we have millions of people that have read the original book. So how do I make this book where it appeals and it serves people that have already read the original book, maybe even multiple times, and it also doesn't overwhelm and it still serves people that have never read the original Miracle Morning book. And based on all the early readers of the book and the feedback, I think we really nailed it. So I'm excited. And we're going to dive deeper into a couple of those specific things, the evening and the Miracle Life soon.

9:42But before we do, let's talk about your mission to elevate the consciousness of humanity. What do you mean by that? So when I wrote the book initially, my mission was to change 1 million lives one morning at a time, because as an unpublished, self-published, unknown author, that was the biggest number I could think of, right? A million is a big number, right? And I figured it would give me a meaningful target to work toward the rest of my life. And it ended up taking six years for the book to sell over a million copies. And then I went, well, I need a new mission. I achieved that mission. I didn't know that I would do it, but I did it.

10:19Okay, great. And so I really started evaluating what does the Miracle Morning do for individuals and what does it do collectively for humanity? And I talked to a lot of people in my world, in my circle of influence that were part of the Miracle Morning team, Miracle Morning practitioners. I surveyed people. And what came up for us was it elevates human consciousness. Now, what does that mean? That's a very esoteric term. That's why you're asking me, I would imagine. But think of it this way. In a really simple term, what does it mean to elevate your consciousness? When you elevate your consciousness, you're elevating your awareness and how intentional you are in terms of how your thoughts, words, and actions impact yourself and those around you.

11:04So by becoming more aware and more intentional about how your thoughts, words, and actions impact you and those around you, you're elevating your consciousness so that you're not coming from a place of fear, but a place of courage, not a place of shame, but a place of possibility, right? So you're now thinking and acting and living from a higher state of consciousness. And with millions of people in over a hundred countries that do the miracle morning every day and elevate their own individual consciousness, collectively, the consciousness of humanity is being elevated. And I've been sharing the Miracle Morning for 11 years now.

11:42Well, 11 years since the book came out, longer since I was even writing it. And I'm probably gonna spend the rest of my life sharing it. Like this isn't a book for me. This is really, it's a mission. The Miracle Morning mission is, I look at it this way, two or 3 million people have read the original book. And that means I have roughly 8 billion people to spend the rest of my life trying to reach. And that's what the mission is about. Well, we're going to do our part here at Entrepreneurs on Fire to get that message out, to get that word out. And Fire Nation, we have some unbelievably critical things for you to hear about when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

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14:04This is the exact budget template that Belay used to grow from a small startup to one of Inc. 5000's fastest-growing companies for nine straight years. Text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E, to 55123 to download the Bulletproof Budget Template and streamline your business with Belay today. Hal, we're back. Everybody is struggling in some aspect of their life right now. That's just what it means to be human. We're always struggling. That's not a bad thing. In fact, that can be a good thing. Like for me right now, it's dialing in the right nutrition for my body as I gracefully enter my mid-40s with a baby on the way.

14:41What would you share with us struggling human beings? Yeah, you're right. I mean, struggle is a part of life and it can be our greatest opportunity for growth, but it doesn't make it enjoyable and most of us avoid it. Now, here's the way that I look at this. It was really in 2020 as the world went into chaos and people were slapped upside the head and it's like, wait, what's happening? There's this pandemic and wait, we can't go out now. And there was a lot of fear and uncertainty. And what I realized is that when we focus on things that are out of our control, we feel out of control. And when we feel out of control, it perpetuates feelings of anxiety and fear and stress and depression, none of which serve us, none of which serve our loved ones, none of which actually are conducive to putting us in an optimal state to make meaningful changes in our life.

15:37And so I asked myself back in 2020 as not only an individual and a father and a husband, but as the leader of the miracle morning community, it's like, okay, what should I be focusing on? And what should I be encouraging other people to focus on? And the answer was, it was relatively straightforward. It was number one, only things that we can control. Right. And number two, uh, what can we control ourselves? Like that's ultimately we can control. So for me, I doubled down on a miracle morning and I invited the miracle morning community to do the same. And I can't tell you how many people have messaged and emailed and shared on social media that the miracle morning saved them during the most difficult times in their life.

16:23And here's the thing is that to me, my miracle morning enables me to start every day in a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual state. And there's not much more important that we can focus on to show up for those that we love and those that we lead than to cultivate inner peace every single morning, to optimize our mental and emotional state every single morning, to clarify our highest priorities every single morning. And the miracle morning can be done in 10 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour. And in any of those timeframes, it enables you to do everything that I just said. And so that's it.

17:03If you're struggling right now, I would encourage you to do your best, like I did during the car accident that I just shared that story and my cancer, be at peace with what you can't change. And it doesn't mean you're happy about what you can't change. It's very important to distinguish the two. Happiness is an emotion and emotions are fleeting and they're often short-lived. You can be happy one minute and you get a phone call, it's bad news, now you're unhappy. Then you win the lottery, now you're happy. Then you crack, right? I mean, you jostlate between positive and negative emotions all the time.

17:38But when you live your life in a state of acceptance where you accept the things you can't change, being at peace is not an emotion, it's a state of consciousness. Inner peace is a state of consciousness that is emotionally neutral and deeply rooted and unwavering. So be at peace with what you can't change and focus all of your energy on what's within your control, which is really taking care of yourself. And some people think self-care is selfish. It's egotistical for me to focus on myself when there's so much suffering in the world. No. If you want peace in the world, it starts with peace in your heart and you can't give away something that you don't have.

18:18So for you to cultivate inner peace every morning enables you to give it to your family, to your colleagues, to your clients, your employees, everyone in your life. And if we all do that collectively, the world is a much more peaceful place. Now, you have two brand new chapters in this book. And the first one I want to talk about is called The Miracle Evening. I want to know why having an evening routine is even important, because I always just thought that you passed out in front of your television with a beer in your hands. Is that not true? Yeah, that's not true. Oh, okay. So no, for, well, it is funny that I've been asked for years, like, Hal, what's your evening routine?

18:57And I was always kind of embarrassed to be like, I don't really have one, you know, I just go to bed. But, but after, you know, a little bit of research, I realized that how we end the day might be, I don't think it's as important, honestly, but I think it's, it's, it's, it's very important, but not maybe not as important as how we start the day. Cause that how you end the day does set the tone for the morning. And one of the things to consider, and this is a really important realization, is that whatever mental and emotional state you dwell in as you fall asleep is the mental and emotional state that you start your day with.

19:30And you can all relate to that. If you go to bed feeling stressed out, you know, oh, tomorrow I've got to wake up and I've got to face this and I've got so much on my to-do, I've got these things and these projects and blah, blah, blah. Then as soon as you wake up in the morning, your eyes, oh God, I have to, here it is. You go to bed stressed, you wake up stressed. And so I realized the best thing I can do for myself is to realize that my only objective as I get ready for bed and laid down to go to sleep is to put myself in a peak state, which in this case for me, it's to be completely at peace, grateful, and happy as I drift off to sleep.

20:09I call it blissful bedtime. In fact, the subtitle for the miracle evening chapter is your strategy for blissful bedtime and better sleep. And so in the book, I talk about more than, I mean, I talk about logistics of, you know, how long you need to stop eating before bed. So your food is digested. I talk about sleep supplements you can take, but the biggest, the biggest thing is teaching you how to flip the switch and let go of stressful thoughts thoughts and replace them with peaceful, grateful, joyful thoughts so that you go to bed in a really blissful state. And then I'm telling you, every morning I wake up in that same state.

20:49And it wasn't always that way. I used to struggle with insomnia and I was like most people. And then I finally dug into the research to figure out how can I go to bed every night and have a ritual that prepares me for a really quality restful sleep so that I can wake up at my best to do the miracle morning and the rest of my day. You also focus on the miracle life. What is that all about? So the subtitle for that chapter is Your Path to Inner Freedom. And again, it kind of goes back to what I talked about. I think everybody has a superpower. And if I have a superpower, It was being at peace with the most unbelievable events in my life.

21:31And so the miracle life is really walking you through. I call it the ABCs of the miracle life. It teaches you how to accept life exactly as it is, how to be grateful for everything, even the most difficult circumstances you're going through. Because think about that. Like when I was in, there's a scene in the miracle morning movie, which you're in, by the way, if anybody hasn't seen the miracle morning movie. You got to see it. You can watch. Go to MiracleMorning.com. You can watch it. JLD's got to see one of the first people that I filmed for it. But I ended up getting cancer in the middle of filming.

22:02And my director said, let's keep the cameras rolling. We got to share your journey with people. And there's a scene in the movie where I had gotten injected with chemotherapy in a nerve on accident. They missed what they were. They were shooting for my spine. They hit me in a nerve. And I had been in 11 days of horrific migraines. so much pain. And I had been filming selfie videos for my community and social media, just sharing my journey. And I was always really positive and sharing the positive. Well, I was bawling my eyes out in the hospital one day and my dad was sitting next to me at the hospital.

22:36I said, I gave him my phone. I said, dad hit record. I want people to see this side of it too. And my dad, and I didn't know what I was going to say, but my dad hit record. And when you watch the movie, I say, I've never been in so much physical pain in my life. And it's been 11 days. I can't even bear it, but this doesn't change that I am choosing to be the happiest and the most grateful I can possibly be in the midst of the most difficult time in my life. And here's the miracle life paradigm. We've all been conditioned to think when good things happen and life is going good, I feel good. But when bad things happen and life is going bad, I feel bad.

23:16The miracle life paradigm is teaching you that no matter what's going on in your life, you actually have a limitless ability within you. We all do to choose how you feel, to choose your optimal mental and emotional state, even in the midst of pain, of tragedy, of difficulty in your life. And so that's the miracle life is it's realizing that you already have everything you need to be the happiest you could ever be. And it is called life. You just have to know how to shift your mindset and elevate your consciousness so that you can actually get to that place genuinely where you're not faking it and putting on a smile, even though inside you're dying.

23:58You're actually genuinely getting to a place where you're at peace. You're grateful and you're happy no matter what's going on around you. Fire Nation, you must read this new updated and expanded edition of the new Miracle Morning. If you've read the original Miracle Morning, again, there's 70 more pages. There's some critical things. Hal has added all of his life experience that he's had from the first edition to this one. So it is a must read. Hal, bring us home, brother. Give us one key takeaway that you want to make sure our listeners get where they need to go to pick up the new version of this book and then we'll say goodbye.

24:39Yeah. So where to go head to, you can get the book anywhere books are sold, but go to miracle morning.com. If you want kind of the hub, you can watch the movie there. You can download the free miracle morning app. Of course it links, you can go get the book and you can go straight to Amazon if you want to get it there as well. Um, and here's what I'll leave you with. You know, I think that for it's really a wrapping of everything we talked about today, which is to love the life that you have while you create the life of your dreams. And here's the distinction I want to make. There is a difference between your life and your life situation.

25:11Most people, when they ask, hey, how's life? Oh man, I've got this going on and this is really difficult and yada, yada, yada. But you're not actually answering based on how life is. You're answering based on how your life situation is, your external circumstances. Life is the breath you just took. Life is this moment. And I want to encourage you, challenge you, invite you to consider that life is always perfect and life has an unlimited supply of joy and love available to you 24 seven. And it doesn't mean that your life situation isn't going to cause you challenges and be difficult. I trust me, I deal with it all the time.