The Negativity Fast: How a Simple Practice Can Transform Your Life

0:08Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantz and my guest today is Anthony Iannarino. He is a renowned expert in B2B sales with decades of experience and a track record of generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue. He's also the bestselling author of five books, including one we're going to talk about today called The Negativity Fast, Proven Techniques to Increase Positivity, Reduce Fear and Boost Success. So, Anthony, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me back. It's good to see you again. So I got a kick out of Seth's comment on the top that you called the positivity buffet.

0:49So what gives? Is it positivity buffet or is it negativity fast? It's negativity fast until Seth says it's the positivity buffet. And then it's the positivity buffet. Just one of my favorite people and a great mentor for me. Yeah. Kind to endorse my first book back in 2007. So he's been a longtime friend and mentor of mine as well. So you're a sales guy. I mean, can I call you that? Yeah. What's a sales guy doing writing what kind of feels like a self-help book? It's a self-help book. And you know what? My friends put it under sales and selling and management, and I had to ask them to put the self-help on there.

1:34So I went to Barnes & Noble to see if they had it. And they're like, why is that in business? It should be in personal development. And I'm like, I didn't have anything to do with it. It's a publisher, right? And the publisher decided what they were going to do. This has been a passion of me for a long time. I went to college when I was 26 after having two brain surgeries. I decided I should do something with what was left of my brain. So I went to college. Political science. All you do is argue with people instead of political science. That's all you do. It's just constant back and forth. Then I went to law school, which was even more political than school.

2:13And I ended up being angry about politics and geopolitics and all the ways I wanted the world to look better than it does right now. And eventually I realized, you're really angry. And I had one of my professors who said, you just have to let go of all this, which is the worst advice ever. How do you just let go? I don't know how you do it. I'd say it to do it in this book, but I don't know how to tell you how to do it. And I decided that I was going to do 30 days getting rid of all of the negative sources in my life. So any cable news, that's all gone. AM radio is gone. Everything's gone. I got rid of all of it.

2:53I liked it so much. I did it 60 more days. And then I did it 30 more days. And in that last 30 days, I realized not only do you have to get rid of the negative things, those negative sources, but you also have to replace it with something positive. So for me, that was Les Brown, Zig Anthony Robbins, Stephen Covey, like anybody who was just positive and future oriented. That's all I listened to for 30 days. And now I just have never gone back. So I'm now much happier. I'm not political. I'm what I'm calling post-political because it's just hard with all this divisiveness. So I'm not a divisive guy.

3:37So I think that the better way to do it is to try not to spend a lot of time with politics. So, I mean, in a lot of ways, what you just described there was your fast, right? I mean, and that I'm guessing is, you know, obviously is the, you know, what you're prescribing as a path for many people to at least give a try. Yeah. And I have to tell you that the, there's 11 chapters before we get to the fast. and most of them, I will tell you, is me explaining to you that you make yourself negative. And that's a hard thing for people to understand. So the complaining that you do, that's all you. And I wish I would have known this earlier when I was doing the research on this book.

4:22I cited everything in the book. But if you are a chronic complainer, your hippocampus in your brain will start to shrink and you will not be as good of a thinker as you are. And you'll have trouble solving your own problems. Who knows that kind of thing? I wish I would have known it because it was not in the book, but I got it right after that. But it's us making ourselves angry and unhappy by what we say to ourselves most of the time. And one of the things to tee another one of those up, you talk about how we lie to ourselves, kind of unpack that idea. My younger brother is a comedian And he's always unhappy driving from Ohio to Florida.

5:05Then I'll spend months down there. And he believed that everybody had road rage because they were trying to get in front of him and people drive poorly. In Florida, for sure. I know they're the worst. But one day somebody was trying to cut in front of him. And he looked at the guy's face and he thought, this guy's too far away from a rest stop. And he really needs to get to a rest stop. And I said, now, how would you know that? And he goes, because it happens to me all the time. And because it's happened to him, now he has the empathy for this other person. And I said, all you did was lied to yourself.

5:39You don't know that guy wasn't road rage or I don't know, but he decided that's what he was going to do. He's a lot happier. He just lets everybody go. And that was him making himself miserable for 20 years and now just dropping it just like that. I wasn't prepared to have to put him in my book, but I thought that was a really good addition. So you talked about how the first few chapters, I think it's the first 10 or so, talk about the negative things that we do. But then obviously you get into some things like gratitude, I mean, habits or practices that you talked about eliminating, but then filling.

6:17So what are some of the best filling, if you will, practices? Gratitude is the top of the heap. I mean, there's nothing even like it. In fact, as I was writing this book and I was studying gratitude, the claims on gratitude are so many and so outrageous. You look at it and you go, it can't be true. You will have better cognitive functioning. You will have less inflammation in your body. You will have less of a risk of having a heart attack. You will have less anxiety, stress, depression, all of these things. And you're reading all these and you're going, how much work does gratitude do? It does so much work.

6:59And you don't know that until you start to look at all the claims. And so I decided, well, I will cite that. And then my editor said, no, cite everything. So every claim in the book is backed by science. I read all the papers. I did my best to distill it. and make it a fun book that you're going to enjoy, even though it's got some science in it, but it's not a science book. So it's not a hard book to read. And everything in it is really practical and tactical because I think that's what I want to write. I want to write something that you can read it and say, I could do that. And that would help most people feel better.

7:37So I think a lot of what you're talking about, you know, I use the word habit, I think already, you know, you get into habits, better habits, you know, as opposed to the bad habits of like waking up and reading CNN or whatever, right? So what do you have some rituals or habits yourself that you pretty much say every morning or every evening, I'm, you know, I'm going to do XYZ? Yeah, I'll tell you the best one on gratitude. So for anybody that's listening to this, and you want to have less stress, less anxiety, and to feel a lot better. This comes from the person that we call the father of positive psychology.

8:12So Martin Seligman. and Seligman is a wonderful writer. And one thing in the book called Hope Circuit, which is a really good book, he describes a study that they did and they called it three blessings. And three blessings, all you have to do is at the end of your day, don't do the gratitude journal in the morning. You do it at the end of the day and you write down the three good things that happened to you and why those things went well for you. And you do that, according to Seligman, for two weeks and for at least six months, people have less anxiety, less stress and less depression. He says in the Hope Circuit that he believes that this is more powerful than pharmaceuticals or psychoanalysis.

9:02And these are the things that are not taught to us. I mean, you probably just heard this three blessings for the first time. would have been nice to know this maybe in seventh grade or eighth grade or when you're a teenager and you're really grouchy all the time you're really negative at that period of time but i've done this for a long time and i will say i'll give you one piece of advice if you want to do this get a journal and write it down write down the three blessings every single day whatever went good and then in about a month go back and just start reading those entries and you'll start to think a lot of good things happen to me.

9:38Every day, good things happen to me. Because you're writing it down and you've got this record of having all these good things happen, it can start changing how you feel about things in other ways. I think that's particularly powerful for everyone, but I know a lot of entrepreneurs beat themselves up because they haven't achieved where they want to go. I think a lot of that of stress is just what you mentioned. They don't turn around and go, yeah, but look how far we've come. And I think that's what you're talking about is celebrating the little wins because unfortunately, the only thing that seems to stick with us is how I failed the day.

10:16So great practice. You talked about some of the things you kept out of your life. There are some things that I'm on social media only because it's a channel for marketing for us, but it's a terrible... I mean, it can cause a lot of negativity. You mentioned politics. I mean, heaven forbid that it just seems like the last 10 years have just gotten worse and worse. I mean, how do we keep away from, you know, some of the stuff that, I mean, there's nothing wrong with, or I should say there are some potential positive things about being informed, you know, so how do you kind of balance that? Like, I'm going to, you're not saying stick your head in the sand, but I'm going to ignore, you know, all of that stuff out there when there is actually a level of news that maybe you should be aware of.

11:03I like The Economist because it's not trying to divide Americans into two tribes. So I like that because they're British and they're not so divisive as we are here anyway. The other thing I would tell you is that my wife is always unhappy with me because she'll say, did you see that story today? And I said, I didn't get to see it. And when people say, how do you just leave all that stuff out? And what do you know? Like when something happens, How are you going to know? All the negative people are going to tell you. You don't have to wait very long. They'll tell you something bad happened, though.

11:37They can't wait to tell you that. And most of those things I can't do anything about. And I have an awareness, but I don't have an attachment to it. So being aware is one thing. Being attached, and that's a very different sort of problem for people to have. Have you found that over time? Because I think some of the practices you were talking about, I feel like they're cumulative. Would you say that's somewhat true that you start practicing gratitude and things, it just starts working on other parts of you. But let's face it, that big sale that you thought you were going to get didn't come through.

12:12Kind of a bummer moment of the day. Do you find that you have more ability to maybe snap back out of that, kind of change your state instead of letting it dictate your day? It's either a loss or it's a lesson. I mean, so that's what a sales guy would say, but I'm desensitized to the word no or to losing a deal because after you do it for 37 years, you are pretty desensitized. So I would tell you over time, if you just look at a loss and you say, what did I learn? How could they make me more effective in the future? It's 100 % worth trying to do that instead of saying, well, I lost this and there's no way for it to cover.

12:54I've lost deals plenty times. I'll tell you, it took me seven years to win PetSmart. Seven years. And I had my peers saying, why don't you give up? And I'm like, because I don't get a commission check if I give up. I have to keep going. The woman who kept me out let me in one day. And I was talking to the senior leader. And I had seven years with$2 million a year from PetSmart. So just keep playing the game. If you're an entrepreneur, I mean, I know that you've seen all of the cartoons of the path to success as an entrepreneur. It's all over the map, right? So you get some progress, you go back.

13:34That's just how any good pursuit actually goes. It doesn't ever just go a straight line, you won. No, that's rare, I would say. Oh, absolutely. In fact, you know what, I've been at this game for a long time. And one of the things you realize over time, and I think that's why entrepreneurs are kind of a strange breed of resilience. Over time, I think you start to realize, you start seeing, like, I didn't get that deal because I was meant to get this deal. And actually, that deal would have been a bad deal. I think you start seeing examples of that happening and go, oh, maybe I shouldn't sweat what I thought was a loss at the moment because something's going to happen.

14:14But that takes time. That takes experience. Some of those clients that you're describing, I know those. And when they say we might not be a good fit for each other, you're like, how fast can I get out of here? I'm ready to go now. All right. So because it's maybe it's the last chapter, let me double check. But I think it's the last chapter. The yeah, the fast itself. Kind of for the last bit that we have left here, kind of if somebody is listening and thinks, OK, I want obviously we want them to get the book so they get the full detail. But give us a little taste of how somebody would get started.

14:47What a negativity fast would look like that you describe in that final chapter. In that final chapter, what I would want you to do is to start to say, what are the kinds of things that trigger me? And you're really triggering yourself when you do that. But it's worth knowing that this is something that bothers me. I'm too connected to like politics or whatever else they're connected to that's negative. I would say you make a list of those things. I will tell you, though, don't start with people. That's exactly the wrong way to do this. The people come at the end. Which people do I need to spend less time with?

15:24But don't do that at the beginning because you want to take care of the things that are really about you and what you do. And I'll just give you a quick story. Albert Ellis is the guy that created CB, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Very powerful stuff. I actually did it at one time to help get rid of some of my anger, and it worked perfectly. But Albert Ellis would say that you have an A, B, and a C. The A is the activating event. And then the B is your belief about it. And then the C is the consequences on how you respond to that. And like my brother, all they do is they switch the belief. And if you switch the belief that it's not road rage, that person's trying to get a prescription home to their young sick kid or something.

16:14And you can lie to yourself like that all the time. And you're mostly lying to yourself about the triggers anyway. So you might as well get around that. And if I could say just one other thing that I would want to share, the thing that seems to be the most popular in this book is my love for being a bail bondsman for dogs. So I go to the Humane Society at the end of every year and I buy all the dogs. That's normally about nine dogs. I do not take these dogs home. I would be divorced immediately if I brought another dog into the house. They take the money and they're happy. And the last time I was there, they said, would you just let us keep the money because we're going to have some difficult dogs that need training?

16:54I said, you could use the money however you want. They said, will you take a picture with this pit bull? Big pit bull, very not aggressive in a mean way, but just really wanted attention. So I took a picture with them and they put it on their website and it went on to Facebook. And some woman read this and said, this angel came in and bought these dogs. I didn't think of it like that. I thought it was a bonds bailment. So the woman came in the next day and she bought all of the cats. I don't know. That's like 46 ,000 cats in a humane society. She bought all of them. And then two of my friends saw this and they said, you mean we can buy the dogs and we don't have to take them?

17:35And I'm like, of course you can. Just go in. And so they went in and bought four more dogs, just gave them the money. If you really want to feel good, if you're really negative, if you really just don't feel good, go do something for somebody else because you will disappear and you will be there just for that person. And you will feel so good. It's called helper's high. Don't even need a medical card to do it. You could just go out and help somebody, a homeless person, go to a pantry, do whatever you can do. But that will make you feel so much better just like this. You can't be in both of those states at the same time.

18:12Yeah, awesome. Well, Anthony, it was great catching up with you and hearing about the Negativity Fast. Is there anywhere you'd invite somebody to connect with you or learn more about the book itself? LinkedIn is a good place to connect with me. And then I think if you go to the negativityfast.com, that'll take you to a page. And you can also find it on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Awesome. Great book. Appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by, and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.