MAXOUT Your Mind Masterclass Ep. 6 | The Gift Inside The Pain

0:00This is Kevin Harlan. Black Friday game day is coming to prime and it's gonna be huge. Black Friday football is back with Bears Eagles at 3 p.m. Eastern, followed by an Emirates NBA Cup doubleheader, Bucks-Knicks at 7 p.m., and then Mavs-Lakers at 10 p.m. And the whole day starts with a Capital One Skins game as four elite PGA golfers hit the links with$4 million on the line. Don't miss a moment of Black Friday game day, the Capital One Skins game at 9 a.m., Bears-Eagles at 3, Bucks-Knicks at 7, Mavs-Lakers at 10. and it's all only on Prime. Welcome back to the show. So you're going to see a change in the show between now and the end of the year.

0:42You know, it's been no secret that I've had a few health issues the last couple of years. Heck, I haven't even posted on social media in a few years, but we've been coming strong with three podcasts a week, even during that time. Well, between now and the end of the year, I'm going to scale it down a little bit, but give more value. So what I'm going to do is I've created a masterclass that's going to come out on Tuesdays and you'll still get your Saturday episodes. We're going to take a pause on Thursdays, but every Tuesday, you're going to get a masterclass from me that I've created to help you finish 2025 strong and go into 2026 and make it the best year of your life.

1:10I'm calling this masterclass, Max Out Your Mind, Faith, Focus, and Fire, Mastering Your Internal World so you can navigate your external world. It's gonna come out every single Tuesday. I think you're gonna love it. God bless you. Enjoy the episode. Hey guys, here's this week's lesson. Gratitude in the fire, finding peace and purpose in every season of your life. The quality of your life will increase dramatically if you begin to believe and act like an observer in your life. Observe really means to notice or perceive. One of the reasons we lack such gratitude or even happiness in our life is it's all happening so fast.

1:46And so we've lost sensory acuity in our life. What it means is that there's just information and stuff happening all the time. We're busy, our phone, our laptop, Netflix, the meetings we have, the calls we have, our family, the obligations, the travel, whatever it might be. Work. We don't have time to observe. And so everything just happens quickly and we don't get any of the juice out of our life. And as a result, that's very difficult to be grateful. One of the ways that I define myself now is I'm an observer. But if you're not careful, all the speed of that, all the busyness of that, you don't see anything.

2:20You don't feel anything. You don't experience anything in any depth. The depth of experience is the quality of our life. And so I started to call myself to myself. I'm an observer of my own life. I'm an observer of humanity. I'm an observer of other people's lives. And so the more I started to condition myself to be more observational, to notice more, to perceive more. Maybe I even slowed down just a little bit. The depth of the gratitude in my life, the depth of my ability to make decisions, my discernment, my intuition, frankly, my intellect. I have tapped into a superpower by becoming more observational.

3:08It's also caused me to be more grateful, more present, more peaceful. yet at the same time when I need to be even more intense and competitive than I've ever been before. That's because I'm in my life. Most people are just in their life and they never are aware of it. They never observe it. Observation causes awareness. The happiest people, and by the way, the people that I love to be around the most in my life, are the most self-aware. I want to talk to you a little bit about this for a minute. Number one, start to show more respect for people. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is put your phone down.

3:51When someone walks in a room, put your phone down. When you go to dinner or lunch with them, don't put it on the table. Put it in your bag. Put it in your purse. Put it in your lap. Leave it in the car. This forces you to become more observational and present with people. And when you do that, it changes your life. So I become observational of these various things. I'm going to teach you how to do it. God's stuff. I observe God's stuff more into a level of depth that I never did. And this is going to sound hokey, but I'm going to give you some insights in it. I spend more time when I go outside and I hold my gaze at God's beauty longer.

4:30It's not that you don't walk outside and see a beautiful field or a stream or even a building that one of God's creatures was an architect created, but you hold it quickly. I've started to observe. This may sound really weird, but I did this this morning. I walked out behind my house. There's an ocean out there, which I can observe God's beauty there, but I did something much more simple. Just walked out there and I sat there for a few minutes and I just stared at one leaf on one tree. And I kind of forced myself to observe it longer than I might. Just one leaf. I narrowed my focus down to one leaf.

5:04And I held that gaze for a good minute. Very different than normal. Oh, there's a tree. And then I moved to another one, another tree with a different leaf on it. I spent some time observing it. I was much more present with myself, much more present. I then walked back in the house and my family was having breakfast. Instantaneously, I was more present. And when I walked in, I paused for a second. And I held the gaze and I watched my family and the beauty of them. My precious son's home from college. So is my daughter. They were both actually in the kitchen at the same time. They said, hey, what's going on, guys?

5:42I stopped. I just held a gaze. It's my only son. It's my only little girl. And I watched him for a little bit. And I appreciated him for a little bit. I let myself feel love for them. There's all these things around us all the time that if we We just held the gaze a little longer and stopped looking around. Not just put our phone down. That's basic. It just became fully present with a leaf, with a building, with a water feature, with a piece of... I do this lately where I stare at my hand and I just notice things about me that I've never noticed before. I'm going to tell you right now, your decision-making, your thought processes, your ability to control your emotions are exponentially connected to your ability to observe and be present.

6:33And this is a skill. It is a talent, and it is not easy. I want to also tell you what I observe that's changed my life. I take time every day now to observe my breathing. You take for granted your breathing every single day. But if it stops right now, you end. It's probably something to pay attention to. So if I can get quiet and just pay attention to my breathing and hear myself and feel myself breathe, I'm much more self-connected. I'm much more grateful. I'm much more centered. I'm much smarter instantly. Instantly, I'm stronger and smarter and more present. If you can't be present with yourself, you have no way in the world of being present with other people.

7:14You're like, hey, man, I'm busy. Number one thing in business, ability to build rapport and connect with people. If you can't connect and build rapport and connect with yourself, you can't do it with other people. People say to me all the time, your interviews are just different. In fact, Ed, I see some guests on one show. I see them on yours. It's a completely different conversation. Why is that? I think it's my ability to be present with them and connect with them because I'm connected with myself. So I ask a smarter question in the moment. I can feel something, an energy from them that others don't feel and they feel from me.

7:49my breathing is a huge one. Just for today, give yourself a gift just for a second right now.

8:01Feel yourself breathe. Remember that guy? Remember her? She's been there all the time. Pay a little more attention to her. Pay a little bit more attention to him. It'll help you pay attention to everybody else. She's with you all the time. he's always been there. There's only been two constants in your entire life, God and you. How much attention do you pay to each of you? You ought to give yourself that gift. It's why you're not happy. It's why you're not more productive. It's why you're not more influential. It's why you're not richer. It's why you don't have the emotions you want. It's why you don't have the body you want.

8:44It's why you don't have the things you want. Whatever the things are that you're lacking. It comes down to self-awareness, presence, and connection with oneself and one's maker. I pay attention to humanity. One thing I do a little bit more of than I've ever done in my life is when I walk into places, I observe people. I'm present with them. I look at their face. I wonder what their story is. I wonder what their history is. I love to people watch when I'm not noticed and I'm alone in an airport or somewhere. I know this may sound hokey, but I do it a lot. And I pray for them. People walk by me on the street.

9:16If they don't recognize me, I'll peace be with you. I just have that thought. This connects me to people. This gives me gratitude and depth. I don't want to be a one-dimensional human being. I want to have multiple dimensions and experience multiple emotions. And the way I do that is I observe. Something I do kind of semi-regularly is I just look at me in the mirror and notice things about me that are aging or that have changed. But I like being present with me. It makes me more comfortable with me. Pay attention to your breathing. Pay attention to people. Pay attention to humanity. Pay attention to God's stuff.

9:53If you hold a hug for six seconds, your brain now floods, starts to release, by the way, serotonin and oxytocin into both of you. It also increases your immune system and reduces depression. If you can hold a hug for 10 seconds, you get what they call a serotonin oxy flood. a flood. So you're not only giving yourself that gift if you can do it, but you're giving yourself the gift to other people. What I'm basically saying here on everything is, if you could hold the gaze a little longer, if you could pay attention to your breathing a little more, if you could just take a flower or a book or your hand or something and just get present with it and notice the different things, become an observer and noticer of things.

10:35If when you hug somebody, All the data tells us, hug it for six seconds. You both get the gift. So I could give you the normal list that everybody else talks about, that I've talked about, or I could start on Thursdays to give you stuff you don't hear anywhere in the world. And it's this. And that's why right now I can shift gears and get super intense because I'm fully present. I'm fully self-aware in the moment. Doesn't mean I always am, but it's helped me control my emotions. It's helped me control my thinking, my intellect, my relationships, all of it. and overall be a more blissful, peaceful human being.

11:10So many of you pray every single day, but you're just checking the box. Can you be present in that moment and have an appreciation and gratitude for this beautiful time you're connecting with your maker? In my case, my savior. Can you just get a little bit more of the juice? I'm telling you, you won't be successful if you don't. These are the things that have taken an average ordinary man like me and built a pretty good life. I want to experience our emotions. right? I want to have all of them. I want to be present for them. I want to observe them. I want to be aware of them. I don't want to just go through my life busy, grabbing, accumulating stuff and thinking someday when I'm old, I'll get around to it.

11:52You can't love yourself if you don't know yourself and you can't know yourself if you don't spend any time with yourself. And so you got to spend some time, man. It's such a great gift is to walk outside and go, what can I observe? I've done a million Zooms from where I am. Can I tell you something? I started this and I went, what is that belt buckle? If you're on audio, it doesn't matter. What is that belt buckle? Oh my gosh. That's when I won that golf tournament with Milt Walker. It took me all the way back to that moment of total bliss. And it's only because I noticed it finally. And it was one small observation of the belt buckle over my head on Zoom that I didn't just take note of.

12:35I got up and looked at it. And it took me into that moment. And it completely shifted me. Something that simple. So observation changes everything in your life. And let's go back to that golf shot I hit. You know what required me to hit that golf shot at that time? And I'm not a great golfer. This is a golf tournament. But you know why I had the capacity to hit that golf shot? My best golf shot under that most pressure? That's why this stuff matters. So hold the hug a little longer. Give people the respect of showing up. Notice and perceive a little bit more. Pay attention to your breathing. Notice God's stuff.

13:12Notice architecture. Notice people. Notice humanity. Hold the gaze. Take in more detail. Get more of the juice. And all of the juice you want in your life of the other things are much more likely to happen as a result. So because the truth of the matter is the quality of our life is really the quality of how we feel. Your life is really predicated on the quality of the questions you ask yourself. When you can take control of the internal questions you're asking yourself, it can change everything in your life because questions direct our attention. And attention is almost everything. We really get what we pay attention to, don't we?

13:46What you pay attention to, you get. And the brain is really lazy. The brain is constantly trying to conserve energy. So it loves to run patterns. It loves habits. So when you begin to build the thought loop, the habit of asking yourself a question of what am I worried about? What am I lacking? Your brain constantly goes to find those things. And because you can only process so much information at once, if I paid attention to everything in my life, I would go crazy. So your brain tries to conserve energy and keep you sane and it filters out a bunch of different things. But sometimes when we repeat a thought, it can become what I talk about often on here, like a delusion.

14:20It becomes delusional thinking. and we miss what's always been there. I talk a lot about the reticular activating system in the brain, the RAS, which is basically the filter of your life. It reveals to you that which you truly believe or which is really, really important to you, and it sort of scans out everything else. It's sort of like a matrix. I write about it in my book, The Power of One More. And so these questions you ask yourself can direct your RAS so that you're paying attention to the things that serve you. And so we're going to go through that today. And remember this, thoughts are really like magnets.

14:53They truly are. When you begin to think about something repetitively, you draw to you through what you're aware of, the people, places, and things that actually make those thoughts real oftentimes. So you have to be careful what you think about because you'll probably attract it. And I think a lot of you know what I'm talking about, especially those of you that have become more and more successful. You've really developed the ability, the vibrational frequency to get yourself in such a state that when you think about something regularly, all of a sudden, someone you haven't thought about in years, you're thinking about them all the time.

15:20they call you out of the blue. Or you just had a thought recently about a particular car. All of a sudden you see that car everywhere. That's also how your brain works. Be careful what you're thinking about because your brain's going to show it to you. And so today we can change the way we feel if we can change and ask these questions. So here's the seven questions. The first question to ask yourself when something's happening is, what does this mean? Step back and assess your meaning of the event because oftentimes in life, and by the way, sometimes fear is not a bad thing. fear can cause you to focus.

15:50That's hardwired into you through hundreds and thousands of millions of years potentially to protect you. So sometimes fear is like, pay attention to this. This is something you need to work on. So it's not always detrimental. Also remember this when it comes to meaning. It's not what happens to us in life. It's how we react. It's how we respond in life. Remember that again. It's not what happens. It's how we react and how we respond. Well, normally our response is based on what we think something means. So the first question is to ask yourself when you're worrying about something or fearful about something or some event that's coming up that's causing you stress, what does it mean?

16:27Because if you can change the meaning, you're going to change the emotion. When you change the emotion, you've changed your entire life. And oftentimes, maybe you've attached a meaning to something that doesn't serve you. There's this great story that I've heard many, many times about Mother Teresa, and I've told it on the show before. but Mother Teresa would say, like, let's take me or you, usually most people, that she would say when she was present for someone's death, it was the greatest honor of her life. That's the meaning she would take from it. But I think most people, myself, probably you included, if I was present, if I went to a, there was a car accident on the road, and I had to pull over, and I got out of my car, and I found someone that had passed away from that car accident, and I had to take them from the car, my meaning in that event would be tragedy.

17:10Would, I'd probably replay that video, and it would cause me great pain in my life. I'd replay it over and over and over again, you know, these mental images we replay. Because the meaning for me as I was witness to tragedy, someone lost a mother, a daughter, a sister, and that would be the meaning, justifiably, by the way, that I would take from that event. Mother Teresa would say that if she was at that exact same moment, that it was the honor of her life because her belief was, oh my gosh, I was present to watch this person's soul leave their body and go to heaven. Do you see how then she'd leave that event of someone's passing?

17:43feeling blessed, feeling honored, feeling privileged that she got to watch someone's soul go to heaven, happy for that person that they get to spend eternity in heaven. Whereas most people would be at that same event attached to a different meaning, create a totally different event. And oftentimes the reason that we've attached so much stress or worry or fear or anxiety to something is we've attached a crazy meaning to it. And oftentimes the meaning we take is really, what are they going to think about me if this happens? What are people going to say? How are they going to feel about me? How are they going to look at me?

18:13But when you decide to take control of the meaning of something and step back away from it, get above it, think about it, and attach the meaning. Many times in my life, I'll ask myself, what would I need to believe this means? You know, if you're a business person and you get a tax audit, let's just say, you're in an audit of some type, right? You see, the meaning is, if this goes the wrong way, I'm going to lose everything, and I'm going to live on the street, and I'm going to go broke. And you actually begin to, you may not say that verbally, but it's like, it's tremendous. It's the worst meaning.

18:42Or as you can say, listen, this is something I know we've done things that we need to be able to do. Even if it doesn't go my way, I can come back. I've come back from difficult things before. You attach a meaning to it. When you begin to ask yourself, what do I believe this means? Evaluate that. Attach a correct meaning that serves you. All of a sudden, you've changed your emotional state. That's number one question to ask yourself. Number two question to ask yourself is just when I want to change my state and how I feel. Quality of the questions, quality of our emotions, right? Who loves me and who do I love?

19:12and just stopping at any given time when you have stress in your life and just taking an inventory of that one thing. Who do I love and who loves me? And I can tell you, just picturing my mom brings me a little bit more peace. And so then I'll think of my children, my family, and my wife, and siblings of mine, my sisters, and my friends. Your best friends aren't necessarily the people that you have to spend the most time with. They're the people that you have the best time with. Take a second. Who do I love? Who loves me? What are some of those best times? Just give yourself the gift of it for a second.

19:43It'll completely change your state. Ask yourself, who loves me? Who do I love? So, so far we've covered two things. Evaluate and attach the correct meaning to what's going on. A real one, a realistic one, a reasonable one, not some crazy one you couldn't really believe. Evaluate the meaning. That's one way to change your emotions. Number two, just take an inventory real quick of the most important things in life. Who loves me and who do I love? Picture their faces. Give yourself that gift of asking that question because guess what happens? When you ask that question, that's what you pay attention to.

20:15Number three is about attention. What am I paying attention to? What you pay attention to is the most critical question you can ask yourself. Are you paying attention to what you possess or what you have or what you lack or don't have? We are constantly looking for what we don't possess as opposed to having an appreciation and putting our attention on what we do have. Because they're two totally different perspectives. If you ask yourself that question, what do I have right now? What do I possess? When possessions don't mean things necessarily, it could be a thing, it could be money, it could be a house, but it could be, you're in possession of one of the most wonderful relationships in the world.

20:55You're in possession of whatever your faith is. What do you have? And when you focus on what you possess and have, as opposed to what you lack, you're happy. you're more blissful. If you live a life where you're constantly focused on what you don't possess, and I'm not talking about just things, friends, relationships, emotions, money, right? Answers to things. You focus on what you don't have. That's a vast space compared to the things you do have. But when you begin to change your attention, what you pay attention to is what you do have. It changes everything. And when you live a life, which is by about 95 % of people, I know this is me too most of the time until I've changed this of what I don't have or what I don't possess.

21:40In your case, I would ask you, do you focus on what you don't possess or what you do possess? Because when you begin to become grateful for what you do possess, the relationships, the cherished moments, memories, your health, whatever it might be, you live a life of real bliss. But if you have that mindset where what you're always paying attention to is what you don't have and what you want, what you don't possess, you could end up having a whole bunch of possessions. You could have great people around you, amazing relationships that you cherish and great physical possessions and money and still be unhappy because you're paying attention to what you don't have.

22:20The happiest people put their attention on what they do possess, not what they don't. It changes everything. And that's why you have to ask yourself about the meaning of an event, number one. And that's why you got to focus on who you love and who loves you. This directs your attention. These are questions that help direct your attention. So ask yourself this up front. Do I spend most of my time focusing on what I do possess? The relationships, the loved ones, the material things, the ideas, the thoughts, my health, my faith? Or do I spend most of my time focusing on what I don't possess and trying to acquire it?

22:52Fourth question to ask yourself. What will this matter in five years? When you change your frame of reference, see if something's really stressing you, just ask yourself. In five years, will this matter? Will this matter in five years? And if that doesn't work, will this matter in 50 years? And you'll change your perspective on something. Sometimes we make something such a big deal, such a big stress. But when you begin to just step back and say, is this going to matter in five years? You get a perspective on it that allows it to be reduced to its proper influence over you. Right? Now, again, as I cover these things, that doesn't mean you shouldn't pay attention to problems.

23:27We're going to get to that in a minute. There's answers here. This isn't Pollyanna. But imagine this. What if you took this tool basket I've given you of the five and you start to evaluate, what meaning did I attach to this? Does meaning serve me? Is this meaning I've attached accurate, truthful, real? Or am I off base on this meaning I've attached to and it's killing my emotional state? If I change the meaning, could I change me right now? And if I got really good at always attaching the right meaning to something, could I change my life? Number five question to ask yourself. What can I control about this and what can't I control?