John Assaraf on Neuroscience and Brain Training: How You Can Rewire Your Brain To Achieve Your Goals

0:00There's one question I ask every one of my students. Somebody tells me, I want to achieve a health goal, a wealth goal, a business goal, a money goal, whatever goal. Answer this question for me. I'll tell you whether you'll achieve it or not. Are you interested in achieving that or are you committed to achieve that? John Ashraf. He'll give you formula after formula, strategy after strategy of how you train your brain to succeed. We want to have the mindset plus the skill set plus the behaviors that align with the goals. And now we have a formula for the law of attraction plus the law of action to work together.

0:33What John does brilliantly with us here today is break success down into the internal part of it. How do your emotions overtake and how to get back in control so you can have success? John, let me start with your definition of success for you. And has it changed over your time? Because people need to work out what is success for them. And I think they learn better when they hear other people's theories on what is success. So it's definitely changed over time. Yeah. When I was in my teens and 20s, I grew up with a family that did have a lot of money. And everything was measured for me and my family was, how much money did you make?

1:15Because money gave us the ability to do stuff and to not have the fights in the house around money and the screams and the yelling that I heard as a kid. So my definition when I was younger was a lot of money. Yeah. And today it means something totally different. Of course, money gives you choice freedom and some emotional freedom sometimes. But success to me today is having this harmony in my life where I have the time to do what I want to do. I can stay healthy. I can contribute. I can have an impact. I can have influence. I can be a great father, a great husband, a great friend, and somebody who contributes to society where my life has fulfillment.

1:55So there's a variety of different ways that I can be fulfilled. And so now in my early 60s, it's all about fulfillment and trading my life for what I love is success for me. Yeah. So where do you feel in your life you chose success as like your performance standard or you chose to be successful? I remember being a young boy. Yeah. And my father was a gambler and an alcoholic. and good combination yeah a hell of gambling he would um always spend the money that he made he was a cam driver and so he made about 25 a day back then when i was a little boy because he used to brag about how much he made but then he would go to the racetrack um and gamble or play cards with his friend and then nine times out of ten he would lose the money and then my mother would ask where's the money so she can buy food and he would say i'll get it to you tomorrow yeah as i remember feeling like I will never be poor.

2:54I remember feeling that, like I will never, ever, ever want money. Now, what's interesting is I became a bit of a rebel when I was a kid. I sold drugs. I did breaking in entries. I stole in stores. I did a lot of illegal things so that I would have money in my pocket because I didn't know there's another way to do it legally. Yeah, you met your goals. Didn't have to be a positive way, but you met your goals. I met the goals of having some money in my pocket and I would give my mother some. And she would always ask me, where did you get that? I said, oh, I got from a friend of mine. And she knew something was up, but she had a little bit of security from me that she didn't have from my dad.

3:36So what is the John Ashraf formula for success? What are the ingredients? What are the components that make someone successful? Without any question, there's one question I ask every one of my students that I learned literally 43 years ago and it's defined everything that I do and it goes like this somebody tells me I want to achieve you know a health goal a wealth goal a business goal a money goal whatever goal it's a great answer this question for me I'll tell you whether you'll achieve or not and it's the question was asked of me when I was 19 and the question was this are you interested in achieving that or are you committed to achieve?

4:18And a lot of people like I did when I was 19, asked my mentor, first mentor, like his name was Mr. Brown, I said, well, what's the difference? And he looked at me, squirmed the eye, Brad, and he says, if you're interested, you'll come up with all the reasons and stories and excuses why you can't. You'll keep repeating the same patterns. You keep coming up with people or this is in your way or circumcised in your way And you will keep using those as your rules for life and standards. He said, but when you're committed, he said, you upgrade your identity to match that destiny, that goal, that vision that you want.

4:57And then you upgrade your beliefs and you upgrade your perspective and you upgrade your knowledge and you upgrade your skills and you upgrade your habits so that that becomes a new standard, the new norm. And I remember this as it was yesterday. It was, we were in a restaurant and he leaned in and he said, so now that you know the definition. Are you interested or are you committed? I can tell you, I said, well, Mr. Routh, I'm committed. And he reached out his hand. He said, in that case, I will be your mentor, your coach. And I said, wow, what's a mentor? So the philosophy of growing into your goals, I think a lot of young people in particular don't understand that when you set a goal, you by nature of setting it, can't achieve it.

5:40how do you explain to them that you have to grow into your goal or there's a process of becoming the person sure so no differently if i said to most people young or old can you jog a marathon right now put on your running shoes put on your shorts put on a t-shirt or a sweatshirt can you jog a marathon non-stop right now most people are no that's it great but if we set a goal to jog it a year from now could we learn what we need to do to exercise even if we don't exercise it all right. We learn how many minutes should I do today? How much rest should I get? What should I eat? When should I get a massage?

6:13How much rest should I have? We could learn all the how right after we set the goal. So first we set the goal, not based on current knowledge, skills, beliefs, or circumstances. We set the goal because we want to get our brain locked and loaded on a destination, on a target. And then we come back and say, okay, based on where I am now, my knowledge, my skills, my beliefs, my habits, my perspectives on life, what must I start today? What must I stop today? What do I need to believe about myself in order to make that goal or vision a reality? And then what knowledge do I need? What do I need to grow into?

6:58And then what are the strategies that are available? Like, if I don't know how, that's okay. But in the absence of my own resources, I must be resourceful. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I like that. So I can go to chat GPT today and I can go, hey, I'm 22 years old. I'm 35 years old. I'm 82 years old. I want to achieve this goal. I don't have any clue how to achieve it. Can you maybe give me an outline of what i would need to learn what i would need to believe what i would need to do and in literally in seconds it spits out if i don't want to do number one i don't want to do number three is too hard is it great recalibrated yeah expand on number seven expand on number seven and and so that's why um goals are achievable by just about everybody when they are committed and especially now i mean especially the time we live in today but you want to grow a business god Call Brian.

7:55Call Action Coach. You want to get in shape. Read my books. Good, good, good. You want to get in shape and lose weight and keep it off. Not just lose weight, but keep it off. We know how to do that. You want to go across country by bike and do it safely. We know how to do that. So not knowing how should never, ever, ever be an excuse or a stop sign. Let's go back then to when you and the team put together the secret, the movie and then the book and all that sort of stuff firstly explain it to everyone that's never heard of it i guess is probably the starting point yeah so so this gal by the name of ronda byrne had this idea she was a filmmaker in your in your part of australia and she said i want to take some of the things that i've read in the books from the science of getting rich from napoleon hill's think and grow rich from maslow's loss from all the best stuff he said i want to create a movie about this thing called the law of attraction yeah right and um and the law of attraction from the metaphysical perspective right is we attract that which we're in resonance with right and so if i if i think positive thoughts if i think about being healthy and wealthy uh or i think about finding this parking spot over there magic's gonna happen and i think it's a bunch of bullshit, to be honest with you, the way that it was mostly taught in the secret.

9:20So in the law of attraction, it says like attract like. That's not how nature works. If you go down to a proton electron, you put a positive magnet with another positive magnet, it repels. So it doesn't hold true at that level. However, if you think about the law of attraction slightly differently, and you ask yourself this question. when i turn on a radio whether it's plugged into the wall or not and i tune into rock and roll 95.2 yeah i'm locked on that station so i'm locked into the frequency the tuner in the radio is locked into rock and roll 95.2 um what if i don't want to be on rock and roll station i need to turn the dial and maybe i go to classical music at 99.5 but both of those frequencies are there.

10:13I just need to tune into it. So the way I like to explain the law of attraction is, are you tuning in, you know, mentally, emotionally, physically, and there's one other piece to it, to the thing that you want, or are you focusing on what you don't want, thereby tuning into that station? Or are you kind of like on the station, there's a lot of hissing and clear signal? So the first law is absolute clarity. But with the law of attraction, the last six letters is action as an action coach. Good pitch. But action. And what I've discovered as well is if you add the law of attraction with the law of Goya, the G-O-Y-A, right?

10:59You and I talked about Tommy Hopkins last time we had dinner, right? It was the get off your ass-a-raff law, right? But you have to do the right things in the right order at the right time. So it's not just action because you could be busy, busy, busy, busy, busy doing the wrong things. And you'll wonder how come I didn't achieve the results. So we happen to live in a physical world, the non-physical too, but there's precision models. You want to release weight and keep it off? Well, you need to understand some basic math, right? Every pound is 3 ,500 calories. If I don't exercise and eat properly and maybe sleep well, then I may be having the wrong formula.

11:45So we want to have the mindset plus the skill set plus the behaviors that align with the goals. And now we have a formula for the law of attraction plus the law of action to work together. In going out, and as you said, there's a lot of misunderstanding around it. And you spent years, I think, Larry had you on and everyone had you on sort of thing. Larry King. Larry King, yeah. If you were to sit with someone today and sort of help them understand that you can attract into your life whatever it is that you want, how do you get them to believe that factor? Sure. Well, first, I like to help people understand the answer to these questions.

12:29Number one is there's been about 108 billion humans that have been born on planet Earth. Oh, really? The ones that live now. Answer me this question. Were any of them born with any beliefs? Huh. A positive one or a negative one? A good one or a bad one? One that builds them up, one that tears them down? Anybody born with a positive belief or a negative belief? Yeah, no. No. On that same track, were any of them born with any fears? fear of failure, fear of being rejected, embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, judged, abandoned, unloved. Anybody born with any fear? Nope. No. What about a self-image or self-worth of how worthy you are, how deserving you are?

13:14Anybody born with any of that of 107 billion years? No. So when I go to, so you believe what you believe currently because of maybe your parents. Okay. They did the best they could. Maybe your teachers. maybe your siblings, your brothers, your sisters, maybe your friends, maybe the school you went to. So, television, radio, comic books, whatever it is, we started to create these beliefs, which in the brain is nothing more than cells that got activated and connected. And then the beliefs that were reinforced usually by the environment that we lived in, our homes, our schools, became dominant belief patterns.

13:54Well, isn't that any different than if you have a shitty computer programmer that doesn't write code properly. You have terrible software versus somebody who knows how to code really well. So is it possible that a belief is nothing more, a self-image is nothing more, a fear is nothing more than a pattern that's been reinforced in the brain? And based on the new research of neuroplasticity, we can actually deactivate, decommission, get rid of, set aside the disempowering, destructive, or negative ones, And we could deliberately and consciously create new ones now. So if you want to believe your beliefs, there's a problem.

14:36Yes. But if you're ready to learn that all my belief is, is a reinforced pattern in my brain. And both positive and negative. Positive, negative, constructive, destructive, empowering, disempowering, doesn't matter. From a pure neuroscience perspective, just leave the emotions out of it. But a pure neuroscience perspective, it's nothing more than brain cells that fired and wired together. You're on the Big Success Podcast. We're going to get back on Inner Size. John Astroff is going to teach you how to change the way you think, the way you go about it, and your levels of success. From financial advice to hairstyling, fitness training to auto parts, no matter what your product or service is, you've got to sell to stay in business.

15:18In Instant Sales by Brad Sugars, he delivers techniques for infusing your business with a powerful sales ethic and creating super sales success. Pick up your copy of Instant Sales today. And we're back. In a size, John, talk to me about exercising the brain. Yeah, just listen. You can exercise your bicep muscles, your quads, your butt, your whatever, and you do sets and reps and different exercises and your hopefully muscular system gets stronger, your muscles get stronger, your cardiovascular system may get stronger. For 43 years, just about every single day, I have been reading and or listening to affirmations that I've written.

15:58I emotionalize it to increase the amplitude of the vibration in my body. And then I would do a variety of different visualizations or mental contrasting exercises for my brain. And one day in one of my meditations, while I was intercising doing a few of these sequences, the image of Jack LaLanne popped into my head. You remember Jack LaLanne popularized exercise? Yeah. Right? So, he was like jumping jack. Yeah. And so, he's done a popularized exercise. I said, oh my God, I've been innercizing every day, training my own brain with a variety of different techniques and tools. And when I created my vision and my goals, and then I created, let's say images to represent health, wealth, relations, career, business, I would look at the images.

16:51I would look at my goals. I would read my beliefs. I would close my eyes and feel it. And I later found out, it wasn't even while I was doing it for over 20 years, I later found out that as I was visualizing, it was a mental simulation in the brain. Visualization is a simulation. As I was emotionalizing, I was actually increasing, okay, those neurons firing and repeating that pattern and adding energy to it. And so, I came up with, you know, inner size. And I want to understand the mechanics of achieving goals versus the mechanics of setting goals. I want to understand the mechanics of why do some people have empowering, strong, powerful beliefs and other people have disempowering, you know, destructive beliefs.

17:42And then if it was a pattern in the brain, could I turn off that circuit and deliberately create a new circuit? And the answer is absolutely. So I created this entire ecosystem and body of work around bursts, you know, like quick 10-minute inner sizes and stacks where I would take, let's say, cognitive priming and visualization and mental contrasting and affirmations, just like I would go to the gym and maybe do three different exercises for my biceps. Why not do three or four or five different inner sizes around my beliefs or my vision and my goals and my feeling of worthiness and my self-esteem and self-confidence?

18:24And so I did that and I've had over 100 ,000 students inner sizing in the last eight years and the results they're getting by working on the inner game while they upgrade their knowledge and skills. Oh, yeah. Right. It's not just do this, but once you believe that you deserve it, once you believe that you can do it, once you believe that there's a path, then you start thinking, well, how can I do it? So when you inner size and you strengthen your mindset and you shatter the limitations and the obstacles, and then you upgrade your knowledge and skills of what do I need to do, and then you start to develop the right habits and there's inner sizes for that, you can start to achieve what I call is predictable success.

19:05So we take possibility of success and create a more predictable path for it. And so I just fell in love with inner size. I trademarked it. I, you know, I have been building this entire ecosystem around it within, you know, my app and all that stuff. And yeah, I love the app. I'm going to get to that in a moment. I want to deal with the gorilla first. the gorilla to me is one of the things that when i read in a size i sat there i went there were two things that stuck out to me one is my gut health and i'll get you to deal with that in a moment uh but the different the dope means etc but start fill me with the gorilla why is why do we have the gorilla and and how does it play out there's there's two parts to the gorilla i think everybody that's watching has heard about the conscious mind right yeah conscious i can choose what i want i can say well here's why i want it and here's why i want it and here's how i can achieve it and that's all great and you need that it's no different than you know you need gear one in your car yeah and gear one gets you going um but if you want to slow down let's say the engine and go faster you go into gear two then go to gear three and four and five so the gorilla you know represents the subconscious condition, the subconscious mind, which by all accounts of the research now, controls 95 % of our thoughts, our emotions, and our behaviors.

20:29And the question is why? Like, what is this subconscious mind? How did it become trained or conditioned? And why are so many of the processes automatic? And so, our creator, whatever you believe created you and me and everything else. I don't care what you call it, but there's this intelligence that's within us and created us. He said, listen, anything that you repeat, a thought pattern, I'm good enough. I'm not good enough. I'm smart enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm worthy. I'm not worthy. I can do this. I can't do this. Anything you repeat and feel, over a period of time, the brain just says, you've done this so much.

21:07You've taken this action or you've procrastinated, self-sabotaged so much, or you've earned this much, okay, I'm just going to automate all of the underlying processes to conserve energy. Now, most people don't think of life as you have this brain. It's worth about a hundred billion or trillion dollars, but most people don't know how to use it. And they don't understand that your brain is almost like an orchestra. There's an executive director. There's that part of the brain, I call that Einstein. But there's another part of the brain that I call either Frankenstein's monster or this gorilla part of your brain that says it doesn't matter what you want.

21:46You are going to think and feel and behave based on how you've been conditioned, think, feel, and behave and expect. So this 800 pound gorilla has got all of these automated processes so that you don't have to think. You don't have to consume a lot of energy. Just like you're not thinking about digesting, but you're digesting. You don't think about what's happening to the air that you're breathing. Where does the hydrogen go? Where does the oxygen go? Where's the nitrate go? Where's the carbon go? What happens with the carbon dioxide that comes out of my mouth? So all of these automatic processes is this 800-pound gorilla.

22:22And if the 800-pound gorilla is well-trained, you can achieve anything you want in your life because it's automatic. If I took away all of your success in every area of your life, it wouldn't matter because you already have the patterns of what it took to get there. Got it. So you'd automatically, I need to think this, I need to strategy this, I need to do this, I can call this person, that person, you know, don't do this, do this, and that would be automatic. And so this 800 pound gorilla, in many cases, we just need to retrain the gorilla so that the gorilla aligns with what I consciously want.

23:02And hence, you know, go back to, that's why I created inner sizes. that is one of the best ways to train the gorilla. Yeah. I love the aspect of you talk about how the gorilla's goal is to keep me safe and to keep me alive. Yeah. Where does that go? How does that play out, I guess? Sure. So if you think about, again, we're talking about being human. Yeah. Okay. What is the number one priority of the human species? Stay alive. Survival. Survival. Above all else, survival. Number two priority. And this is exactly how the brain makes actually its decisions. Number two priority is avoid any pain or discomfort, whether it's real or imagined.

23:47Real or imagined. Okay. So that's number two. Number three is conserve energy while you do number one and two. And then number four is gain pleasure. Have fun. Have great sex. Eat great food. You know, eat the stuff you want to eat. Go to do the things you want to do. So the hierarchy of how our brain makes decisions is, is this safe and secure? Will this affect my life and hurt me in any way? Yes, no. Go to the next step. Is there any possible danger here? Can I lose money? Can I lose my time? Can I be embarrassed? Can I be ashamed? Can I be ridiculed? Can I be judged? Can I be rejected? Can I be unloved?

24:24And if anywhere in your memory bank, there's a possibility of that happening, think about it like a radar in your car. an early warning detection mechanism, right? If there's a car too close to you, do you want to beep, you know, on your dashboard? Of course. If you're driving on the highway and the air in the right front tire is low, don't you want to signal? Well, this part of our brain, I call Frankenstein's monster. Frankie's monster is always going, what if negative? What if you fail? What if negative, negative, negative, negative? So the Einstein part of the brain says, here's what you want.

25:02Here's how good it will be. here's how you can do it here's how it will feel here's who you can help here's here's how to do it but the other part of your brain is the brakes part of your brain yeah you you always want a car a brake on your car or your motorcycle right you don't just want to have gas so this early warning detection mechanism is a highly sensitive part of your brain that will just give you a signal now here's the problem the signals come in the form of feelings so we have this emotion or feeling of fear and the automatic reaction that's biologically embed into every human being is fight this thing run away or be be still and freeze so when most people are in a state of fear or doubt or worry or stress or anxiety, left unchecked, panic.

26:02They don't have the skill of what do I do when this circuit has gone off in my brain? It's just a circuit. Well, what do you do if you don't want the light on in your room? Turn it off. Well, what if you don't like a TV channel? You change it, right? Well, what do you do when you have the stress circuit activated or the fear circuit activated or the worry circuit activated? Have you ever considered that it's just a trigger that went off to make you aware? And now if you, let's say, practice an inner size called take six, calm the circuits, in less than 60 seconds, you could turn off the switch.

26:39If you practice the physiological sigh, 30 seconds, the circuit goes off and the other circuit comes back on, the executive director, the CEO of your brain, the orchestra leader. Well, the problem isn't fear. The problem isn't stress. Stress circuit is only activated when the demand exceeds your current capacity. Got it. So the question then becomes, how do I turn off the circuit first and either A, increase capacity or focus on what I want versus what I don't want? So we never blame the feeling. We learn how to be aware of first, then manage, and then we become a master when we've managed long enough.

27:27Got it. Big success. Hit that subscribe button. Jon Asraf is going to take us through good to great when we come back. Jon Asraf, the brain whisperer, is one of the leading high-performance success coaches in the world. Today, he is CEO of MyNeuroGym.com, a neuroscience-based company dedicated to helping individuals strengthen their mindset. To learn more about John Assaraf, please visit JohnAssaraf.com. And we're back. John, good to great. When you started out in real estate way back when, you didn't set a goal of doing okay or doing good. you built$4 billion a year plus in sales, 1 ,200 team members.

28:13What do you think was the difference between you, billions in gold, and the average real estate person, a couple hundred grand a year in income type thing? When I first started out in real estate, I was 19. May 1980. 1980, to put it to perspective, okay, that's when I took my real estate course. June 20th, I graduated and got my license. At the time I was making, well, at the time I was making zero, but I left my$1.65 an hour job. And Mr. Brown, who was my mentor, said, what kind of lifestyle do you want to live? I said, well, I'd like to have a four-bedroom house. I'd like to retire my parents.

28:59I'd like all these things. And he says, great, that's a good future goal. But right now, I said, well, I'd love to get my own apartment. I'd love to buy my own car. I was, at the time, driving my brother's 1973 Dodge Dart. I would drive him to work to teach tennis. I would go to the real estate office, go look at homes, learn what I need to learn, take some action, go pick them up. And my first goal was$10 ,000 a month. That was my first goal, is I want to, by the end of 12 months, be making$10 ,000 a month. It might as well have been$10 million a month. because 10 ,000 a month, my father made 25 grand.

29:33So 10 ,000 a month for me was like a crazy goal. But Mr. Brown said to me, first you pick the goal and then you figure out all the other stuff of beliefs and habits and skills and et cetera. And in the first six months, I made$62 ,000. I made 31 ,000. Mr. Brown took his 50 % of 31 ,000 for being my coach and mentor. And over the next 12 months, I made$150 ,000 by upgrading my mindset and my skills. And so then it was kind of like, okay, I went and traveled around the world for 14 months, 15 months. And then when I came back, I was like, okay, I need to, you know, I want to get back into this. I had zero money.