The Secret To Rewiring Your Brain To Achieve Success | John Assaraf EP 262

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

0:10I firmly believe that taking charge of your mindset allows you to be in the driver's seat of your life and unlock your potential. And that's why I'm thrilled to share that my new book is out right now. It's called The Greatness Mindset. In it, you'll learn how to build a plan for greatness through powerful exercises and toolkits designed to propel your life forward. This is the book that I wish I had 20 years ago. It's everything I've learned in the last decade with the research and the science to help you unlock your mind. Make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash 2023mindset to pick up your copy of my book, The Greatness Mindset, today.

0:51There are some people that are born, you know, with incredible drive. They just have this insatiable drive and they'll just, I'll do whatever it takes for the things that I want. And there's other people that want things, but they just don't have this insatiable drive. And this is where, as much as I hated school, I love to use school as an analogy. In the game of life, whether it's health, wealth, relationships, career, business, spirituality, fun experiences, you have to decide what level of the game do I want to play at. Is it the great school level, the kindergarten level, the high school level, the university level, the pro level?

1:21Because each one of those levels requires a totally different mindset and totally different skill set. they're building blocks on each other but if you are extremely talented but you're not prepared to practice and rehearse and drill and fall and fail forward to the next attempt you will never make it as a pro you will never make as a pro business person you'll never make it as a pro husband or wife or athlete or musician you just never will so just get used to that if you're not prepared to pay the price. If you are prepared to pay the price and you have the aptitude and the talent, now we're talking about there's some real potential here.

2:00And what we don't know is, you know, what's in your heart? Like what is the fire that stirs you that you wake up saying, I will do this even when I don't feel like it. I will do whatever it takes to overcome my temptation for mediocrity, my temptation for excuses, my temptation for reasons and circumstances to hold me back. I won't allow those to be in my way. And if you have that within you, you'll achieve whatever you choose. And so the question you asked before is how do you develop that? Start small. If you don't have discipline, show yourself that you can give yourself one command and one follow through.

2:37Right now, I'm going to get up. I'm going to do two push-ups. Right now, not like later. Now, can you give yourself a simple command, one sit up. Right now, I'm going to go get a glass of water. You start with something ridiculous. I learned many years ago, reduce it to the ridiculous. So for reduce it to the ridiculous, and I start, I said, can you do that? Great. Will you? Because that's the difference right there. That's the razor's edge. The people who can, will you? Great. When? Now. Now. Right? So if you develop that skill, and specifically from a brain plasticity, a neuroplasticity perspective, as soon as you do that, you give yourself a command and you take the action, You have just created a neural pattern.

3:15You can give yourself a command and take action. Now that may just be one time. But what if you did that every hour by putting a little bell on your computer? And every hour, if my computer was open, every hour, I take 60 seconds just to be in control of my mind. I don't care where I am. Stop what you're doing. Stop, take six breaths. Just get centered. Am I on track? Am I off track? Am I doing something I shouldn't be doing versus a high impact activity that I need to be doing? Every hour, I've trained myself to just reset. I didn't always do that. So I just started with one a day. Right. Then two.

3:48Sure. Then three. Then it was working so well. I said, great, let's do this every hour. As soon as you become the person who believes in themselves, you see, everything you do or don't do leaves an imprint on your self-worth and self-esteem scale. And you know it. Absolutely. You know it. Every time you have that cake or that cookie, you either believe in yourself or you don't believe in yourself. Right. You're voting with every decision. You're disqualifying with every negative belief. You're qualifying with every positive. Same with behaviors. So you start getting aware of, am I qualifying myself to move forward or am I disqualifying myself to what I say I want and what I do or don't do over and over and over again?

4:36because thought patterns become emotional patterns, which become behavioral patterns. And our brains pick up on our thought, emotional, and behavioral patterns and says, hey, you know what, you've done that one enough. I'm just going to make that automatic for you. So all of a sudden, you know, if you're a person who has lots of positive thoughts, but you suck at taking action, your brain says, let me make that a permanent pattern for you so you don't have to think about it anymore. But I'm also going to create some neural tension. Now you're going to start talking to yourself about how you don't want to not take action, but you're still taking action.

5:06And this is where we have this conscious, non-conscious ping pong match going on all the time. Complex. Yeah. It's actually complex, but it's actually pretty easy to. So someone's listening right now and they're thinking, you know, there's a lot of things I want. You know, I want to get out of this relationship or I want the relationship. I want to have better health. I want to have more money, whatever it may be. And they've been saying that for years and they feel like they've been consuming all the information they need to have, but they haven't been able to take action. Maybe because their why isn't powerful enough, what would you say should be their first step?

5:35Well, the first step is to take one thing. I'm going to go back to one thing. Yeah. And say, great, let me move one thing forward. Why? Because that just changes the trajectory of the same pattern repeating itself. And as soon as you interrupt a pattern and then you repeatedly interrupt the pattern, it's like taking a detour. And as soon as you take a detour one day, you're like, okay, that was okay. your tendency is to want to go back to what's comfortable. But if you take the detour two days, six days, seven days, we know from a neuroscience perspective, it takes about 66 days to create a solid enough neural pattern that it'll go from conscious effort and thinking about it to a non-conscious pattern that has the beginnings of automaticity happening without your involvement.

6:23You're just doing it. Whenever I want to change something, whether it's a habit, whether it's a thought or emotion or behavior. I say, I'm going to work on this for 100 days, not 30 days, not 21 days, not 66, which is right around there. I say 100 days. And then I focus all of my, just on that one thing for 100 days. So let's say you want to drink more water, 100 days, a glass a day, conscious effort to one a day, whatever you did before, you'll still do, but one glass a day. So, you know, I started that with my assistant. I said, I want to drink, you know, like four of a day, you know, like, you know, 32 ounces, whatever the case is.

6:58And so every, we got a mug and it's on my desk every time I walk in. And then I have some support from her saying, Hey, remember to drink your water. So just do it. So the first, you know, two, three weeks, I feel like I'm going to drown myself in so much water, but then it's like, okay, now I'm used to it. Now I'm drinking as much water as possible because the habit is there. And one of the rules that I love to follow is the habit is more important than the intensity at first. So don't worry about the intensity. Develop the habit. So can you take one minute a day to focus on how you will achieve a goal?

7:31Just one minute a day. Can you take one minute a day to focus on your health? Yeah. Can you take one day to retrain your brain? Yeah. If you can get that behavior to be a habit, it's easy to stack. It's just like the foundation of a building. Once you have the foundation, if you build it right, you stack. And so every good discipline affects another and every bad discipline affects others.

8:08Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. And I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description that will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

8:59Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

9:14Thank you.