Strategies To Completely Transform Your Life w/ Garrain Jones

0:04This is the Ed Milet Show. All right. Welcome back to the show, everybody. I am really, really interested to get into this man's heart, even more than his brain today, because he's got a huge heart. He leads with his heart, and he's had an amazing life story. Let me set the stage for all of you. I want you to picture a few things really quick. Imagine this man at four years old. Someone tried to kill him. He's trying to put him in a dryer, telling him he was going to Disneyland. That's at four years old. By the time he gets to 10 years old, a few men tried to drown him. By the time he gets to 12 years old, his father's been murdered.

0:37And about that point in this young man's life, he kind of just gave up trying. And I think a lot of you, unfortunately, are at that point in your lives right now where you're considering giving up. And then from there, he ended up kind of going down a wrong path in his life. It's a crazy story. Then he ends up getting incarcerated for transacting drugs, which really weren't real drugs. We'll hear about that in a minute. So he got sentenced to 12 years in prison after that. Are you all hearing this? We're about to talk to this man. Then he gets out. Then he signs his record deal with Ludacris. He's like, all right, my life's turned around.

1:12Now I'm going to get rich. Except a few years after that, he's living in his storage unit and living in his car again. Hits rock bottom, and then he meets this stranger that kind of changed his life forever. And from there, from that, what I just described, from that 4-year-old to that 10-year-old to that 12-year-old, this man has now reached millions of people with his message. He's made millions of dollars also and completely changed his life. And I'm like, you know what? I think people need to know what he knows. And so that's why he's sitting here today. So Garen Jones, welcome to the show, my friend.

1:43Ed, I was sitting here as if I wasn't me listening to that. Thank you for being brave enough to create a platform like this so stories like mine have wings. So thank you. I'm so glad to be on. Yeah, it's my honor. I've really been looking forward to this. You know, what happened with that homeless guy first? Let's do the spoiler alert first. What happens with the homeless dude that changes your life? I know what he says to you, but I want you to tell everybody else. It seems subtle, but it's big. To just jump in right there, let me take you a week back. In the lowest point of my life, I've already tried to take my life twice.

2:23This is August 2011. and it was my rock bottoms rock bottom and everybody has a different version of their rock bottom bottom and I'm like in the car right down literally right down the street on La Brea and Hollywood at the in front of the Mel and Moore living in my car for two and a half years at that time my gosh stressed out depression anxiety mom dying in the hospital um just girlfriend had just broken up with me because I couldn't get my life together. And I'm just like, okay, I'm tired of fighting. I don't want to fight anymore. I want to be healthy. I want to be happy. I just want to inspire people.

3:07And I want to make a bunch of money. And I want the money to represent something that I passionately believe in that I would do for free. Just show me a sign. Then let's skip to that homeless guy. Because this was a week later. Now I'm at a gas station. And everybody knows you can't get a gallon of gas for anything less than like$4. I only had$2 to my name trying to get whatever I could because my car had run out of gas and a homeless guy walks up to me and asks me for money. I say, you have more money than me because he literally had a wad of cash. And he said, change your mindset, change your life.

3:45And I don't know what it was about those words, but it created like a conscious interrupt. and it made me think is my life a lie because of how I've been thinking and I didn't say those words but there was an energy that took over me almost like in that movie the sixth sense yeah where he literally saw his whole life because he didn't know he was dead yeah I saw all the lies that could be lies because the way I was thinking yeah and I said change your mindset change your life. So, so if I do different with the, with the same circumstance or in areas in my life where I'm not happy, my life will change.

4:26I don't think that was a man. I think that was my angel. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say that's God or the universe. Yeah. For me, I'm a Christian. So God all day long. I'm a follower as well. Yeah. I love you. I, um, you know what I want to hear everybody here on that. You need to be looking for those angels. You need to be looking for those moments. It may not even always come in the form of a human being. It may come in the form of a book you read. It may come in the form of listening to this show here today. But there are times in your life where people say I or me. And what I often think is me, I, when you define yourself, really what it is, it's a collection of memories and stories about your life.

5:04If someone says, I am, I am is, I is a collection of the things that have happened to us in our life. And this story we begin to tell ourselves about the memories we have ends up becoming this pattern that happens. And every once in a while, the world will send you what you just said, a pattern interrupt. And if you're willing to listen or take it, then you can make that shift. Now that's easier said than done. And it's an interesting story when you hear it. But if you really listen to what he just said, that this is a man who didn't have enough money to get gas. It had all of these accumulation of people that had really harmed you in your life, done you wrong to some extent, you probably could have been justified, right?

5:43For the rest of your life. And that's what other people do too. They just justify because you probably are justified if you have terrible things that have happened to you. But at some point you changed it. How did you, because what I love about your content is it's with stories, but it's also like tactical. It's both. How does - I learned the tactical. Yeah. After. Okay. Give us a tactic. Give us an idea. How does someone leverage rock bottom or what they think is their rock bottom? So we'll go right back into the story right there. So you're like, and if you listen really closely, you'll see a lesson.

6:18And if you listen even closer, as I connected the dots looking backwards, when took my, because I have a daughter who's 21 and I have a daughter who's 17 months old, baby soul and Kylia. 20 year gap is crazy. That's great. You don't look old enough to have a 20-year-old. I'm about to be 44 in a couple months. You look good, brother. Sasha says so, too, my producer, for the third time, but go ahead.

6:47But if you look even deeper than that, my jobs were taken away. My car was taken away. My mom was being taken away. My family was taken away. girlfriend taken away daughter I couldn't show up for someone when I couldn't even show up for myself in my mind taken away so it's almost like universe was stripping everything away from me so that I could be with myself for long enough to realize how much of the outside world I've had given my power away to. Wow. Only to remember myself. And it was almost like, be still and know that I am God. So I didn't even, I didn't see any of the signs. So as I gave power away, power away, power away, power away, power away, I, something need to get my attention for long enough so that I could be still, be still, be still so that even my ego had no more power.

7:55So that a message could come from a quote unquote homeless man and say, change your mindset, change your life. And so I didn't even have enough ego to be like, oh, no, I don't have any. I don't have any money. Yeah. I listened. I absorbed. I took committed action. And I just and that was the ramping of how I was able to because people always say leave the past in the past. Not if you didn't get the lesson, because now that your future will be will become a recreation of your past. So I went and I was like, yo, the gold is not at the end of the rainbow. It's at the beginning of the rainbow. It's like so many treasures in your life where you can grab so many lessons and recreate a whole new future.

8:45I'm just listening really reflecting on what you're saying because you know something about stillness you use that word and quiet maybe you should give yourself everybody listen this a little bit more of the gift of just a little bit more stillness and quiet and get to know you better because you know Matthew McConaughey is on my show this week when we're recording this and one of the things he said we're talking about how to build your identity and he goes really I think identity is more of a process of figuring out what isn't you and what and in our lives we do give our energy and our belief away to so many other people that we lose ourselves.

9:16And sometimes just reconnecting with yourself is the first step. Just who am I? What do I value? What am I grateful for? What would I like my life to be? And you can only do that in quiet. You can only do that in contemplation and reflection. And for you, you could give a key to this. I've not heard anybody say it this way before. You talk a lot about returning to the Garen as a child and returning to being a child in our life. and that's where the answers really lie. And you say that adults are really deteriorated children. Children, yeah. Let's talk about that. You think about it. Think about Ed when he was small.

9:53Big dreams, big goals. I want to be the president or whatever it was. I wanted to be a superhero, stronger than the average man, abs like an action figure, save and change lives all over the world. One, I've never met a superhero who hasn't had to overcome something hard in order to obtain their powers. But I didn't know this until I looked back and achieved all the life nuggets that were just waiting for me to go and grab those superhero powers. The best way I can describe it is I felt more free, more alive, more zest, more passion, more bigness when I was around four or five years old. And then when you span out and you look, people working nine to five jobs, getting paid less than their value, calling another man or woman, a boss, asking for permission for things that you have the key to inside.

10:59I'm like, where is the, what's missing? where's the gap and how did it get to that point when I look at my own life what I thought was my dad abandoning me what I thought was my mom uh not emotionally emotionally not being available which she was in her the best way she knew how but for me oh my mom's never there she's always working I thought that was abandonment but the original abandonment for me was when I abandoned my original dream, the thing that I love to do. I used to love to run. I used to love to sing. I used to love to, to just blurt out and wear the kind of clothes that I wanted to wear.

11:42And people like, you're too big. You're too small. You're too this, you're too that. And little by little, I abandoned who I really was to get approval, to fit inside of other people's construct of how they thought I should live my life wondering why I don't feel seen I don't feel heard all this the people see me in the millions and all this stuff I was like there's something missing well what was missing was I didn't tend to to who I really really really was and I'm gonna I'm gonna drive home this point anything that anybody had ever seen me even when I sold my book and sold those hundreds of thousands of copies and all this other stuff in the quiet of my mind i always knew it was four percent they never four percent of give out because i was afraid of the real me got you because i abandoned him yeah and then i associated myself with with with like gandhi and nelson mandela when i was 14 i was like there's something here i don't know what this is there's a version of you that's similar to that yes yes yeah you know what i said those are the type of people who get assassinated and I quit that version of me and tried to say if I do just enough just enough to not be seen a certain way or to disrupt other people and I'll be in this small but if my just enough is a little bit more than other people around me great place to hide you're right I did it in sports you know why I did it you're brilliant The reason I did it was if I give just enough, see, if you give all of yourself and then you lose or you're rejected, that's really painful.

13:24So the biggest risk is to give all of yourself because you may lose still and you may get rejected. So what I did is I played it close to the vest. I gave a good effort, but I didn't give all of me. So I always held a little bit back in the tank. And I think the real reason I did that is it wasn't the, that way if I was rejected, it wasn't all of me being rejected. This thing you said, I want to go back. I abandoned the parts of me that I love the most to please other people. Yeah. Everybody hear that? Are you doing any of that in your life? And this notion, you are onto something so big. We're reaching similar conclusions.

13:53I'm writing right now for my new book a little bit about this returning to childhood thing too. And what I said earlier about, you know, I and me, who we define ourselves as, is a collection of memories and stories of our life. That's all you really are. Why are we so, ask yourself if you're an adult listening to this, which is most of my audience. When's the last time you had an entire 24 hours of bliss? Like a whole day. Just one day. How about three days in a row bliss? Like real bliss. The vast majority, 99.9 % of adults would say, I can't remember that. I mean, total bliss, if I took you back to four or three, how many of those days did you have in a row?

14:33And I think it's because when we're three or four years old, we've not collected these stories. We've not collected them. And as we collect them, they steal our bliss and our joy.

14:45You said something. I may have heard it this way, but you said actually one of the reasons, too, is that emotion is stored in the body. Yeah. And everyone just needs to consider this for a minute. If you went through some kind of trauma or disappointment, or even if you just went through, a lot of people listening to the shows are like, well, my dad wasn't murdered. No one tried to kill me. My dad, Ed Miletz, was an alcoholic. I come from a pretty good family. Yeah. You know, one of the other big diseases in life is the middle. The middle. I almost think to some extent it's great to be raised by like amazing wealthy family or whatever because then you get all these, you know, options and stuff and kind of coming from screwed up families like me and you.

15:24There's an advantage to that because you kind of to some extent know what you don't want in your life. Yeah. But the middle is like an asphyxiation of average. And so a lot of people's thing isn't trauma. It's like neutral. All their life's in the middle and there's no bliss there because there's no catalyst to move from it. So what do you mean when you say emotion is stored in the body? How good is this, by the way, you guys, already? Well, I'll tell you this. Context is everything. So anytime I share, there's a lot of people that haven't been to prison before. There's a lot of people that haven't tried to kill themselves or lived in their car, those type of things.

15:59However, you have been in a job that you know you don't want to be in and you've stayed in it for 10, 15 years or even in a relationship. You're like, in the quiet of your mind, my friends, that is prison. So as you hear this prison story and as you hear the father's alcohol story, I promise you those same emotions can still be stored in the body of unworthiness or not enoughness and all those different things. So context matters. Here's what I'll say. It is important to know that we're not just like skin and there's nothing inside. like there's eyes blinking there's hair hair coming out and there's follicles and these thoughts where the thoughts come from where are these ideas oh my god i was running on a treadmill and i just had this idea for this book that sold two million like there's a spirit inside of you and you're also a vessel so if you're a vessel and if you think of like a water hose and you tie the a knot in the water hose and we have 600 pounds of pressure of water, you turn it on, little spigots of water will get through.

17:10So if you think of your vessel, your channel, the whatever's coming inside, ancestral wisdom, ancient wisdom, uh, uh, conversations with God, all of it just coming through. Where do ideas come from? And you feel blocked or you feel your intimacy is like stuck or your creative capacity is not gone and you have no desire, no passion. You just can't connect. And I guarantee, and I don't have the scientific research to prove it, but I have the personal experience of hundreds of people that I've worked with. Way more valid. Yeah. So the experiential knowledge, what happens, say for instance, like me, I was molested when I was 13 years old.

17:55and that was something that really did something inside of me and it was a story and an impact well that story and an impact will stay inside of your nervous system for the rest of your life which is why if something happens with your dad or something happens with your mom there's physical abuse mental abuse and then all of a sudden you never because as little kids you don't really no emotional intelligence. You never had an opportunity to release that in a healthy way. It stays stuck. Then you attract a boyfriend who yells just like your dad. And then all of a sudden you get triggered. That trauma is it's energy that's stored in your nervous system.

18:40And as long as it's in there, anybody that brushes up against that, well, it won't, you'll blame it on them. You'll blame it on your skin color. You blame it on the religion, the president, the God, but deep down inside is a little kid that was hurt. And that person is afraid to revisit something that was so scary, that was so dark, that was so this. The reason why I'm very well versed in this is because the aspect of my life that was so difficult and I had to overcome and overcome and overcome. Just like when you play video games and you beat a dragon at the end of the round, at the end of the round, you get a bigger sword.

19:22You get extra, extra powers for the next level. Because of a lot of levels that I've personally overcome, not read, my life was the book. I got a lot of great insights that I could share to help you to collapse timeframes. So you don't have to learn something 20, 30, 40 years and pay millions of dollars in your life to be able to obtain. You get to listen to today's show. Huh? You get to listen to today's show. 100%. I want to validate something for you that you just said. I want everybody to hear us give you a different version of the same thing. Then what we're going to do after that is we're going to start taking some of the practical steps this man did to turn it around because it's unbelievable.

20:10So I want you to know the steps, but I want to share something with you just to validate your work. so I just gave a speech in Vegas I'll call it like 8 weeks ago a couple thousand people there actually more I think there were like 5 ,000 I give the speech and I'm in the line afterwards where like there's a line of people that want to get a picture or take a book and there's like literally several thousand people in this line it's going to take forever so I'm taking the pictures this man taps me on the shoulder and says someone wants to see you and say hello and I turn to my right and it's my high school baseball coach who I have not seen since I was a little boy and I admired this man and I looked up to him.

20:46He was like amazing to me. And he's obviously much older now. I'm 52. I don't know how old he is, but he's older. And it was him. And I saw him and I hugged him and I actually started crying in front of a thousand people. So good to see you. He said, I'm so proud of you. I can't believe it. He had come to see me speak and didn't tell me he was coming. Anyway, the reason I was so emotional is, and I love him and he did so many great things for me but I had an experience after a game once where I was particularly mad at myself I didn't play well but we had won and he was furious with me and he pulled me into his office angry and at the end of the yelling at me he goes did you ever think Eddie and I'll never forget this he said maybe you're just not good enough and I just stopped and I said yeah maybe I'm maybe I'm not and that altered me it stripped me of my confidence at the time now here I am 52 years old and just seeing him I was probably 7 16 17 and immediately the emotion because he retired after that year I never really saw him again after that and it altered my life and I carried that story with me for a really really long time because it actually happened But then what I did as part of your work is at some point I changed what that meant to me by changing the question I asked myself about it.

22:10So it really harmed me for a long time because I took the wrong meaning from that event because I just wasn't equipped at that age. I was defenseless. But at some point I flipped it and it almost became something like I wanted to prove I was good enough. And I'm not sure that I'm not sitting here with you today in large measure, not small measure, because of that moment in my life. Because I changed what it meant to me at some point. And it's one of the profound things in your... So, by the way, that emotion has been stored in my body until eight weeks ago. Until eight weeks ago, I got to release that emotion.

22:48So you are so right about these moments in our life that we think aren't significant that I'm telling you at 52, I couldn't let go of them. It was awkward. Yeah. Like, he saw me. I made it. Yeah. I made it. I wanted to say to him, he doesn't remember he said it. It was, I want to say, I am good enough. Yeah. I am good enough. But it was just good enough to see him proud of me. I want to say something to that because there's a lot of people out there. They're like, oh, yeah, you don't experience that because you make all this money or you have this. No, no. nobody is safe from what has impacted us and everybody has their moment so just because someone may appear to be successful even ed and i want to acknowledge you for saying that because a lot of people don't say those things so the fact that you even said that is saying a lot for people creating yeah exactly by the way so i i really want to acknowledge that because you talk a lot about vulnerability and authenticity and it's really something i've really decided is the most cathartic thing I can do in my life.

23:52And by the way, coach, I love you. You did millions of great things for me. We all have that moment in our life, right? Where I'm sure he doesn't remember it, but man, did it alter me. It just went into my nervous system and has stayed there all these years. You talk about, here's some of the steps that you went through to start to turn your life around that you weren't doing prior. So I want you to just share some of these things. I'm going to not rapid fire, but like, I want to talk about them. Voluntary discomfort, which included some phone calls you made to certain people too. I'm sure it was uncomfortable.

24:22So just take a bow around that. Yes. So I didn't know that you can't change what you're not aware of, but I was changing and I didn't realize that it was rapidly changing my life. So everything I'm about to share with you is as I connect the dots, looking backwards, I saw the power of apologizing to somebody for something that I did when I was seven years old that I didn't know that she held. I hit this girl over the head with a backpack when I was seven, and then I messaged her like six years ago, and I was like, hey, kids do the stupidest things. I know you don't remember this, but I just want to say that I'm sorry.

25:00She goes, number one, why did you do that? I'm in tears right now. Two, what about me made you do that? Three, the same thing is happening to my kids, and I don't know what to tell them. so it was that moment right there I was like oh people keep things they remember how you make them feel yes I wrote a list this is great and I didn't know it was going to turn into as many people from kindergarten up to present date I wrote a list of 250 names of everyone that I had ever impacted negatively thought of negatively not even in the physical thought negative thoughts wow and anybody who had ever hurt me with the intention of apologizing for my part and not expecting them whatever their response was their response i was clearing myself i wanted to be truly free because you can't fight fight for something that you can only give to yourself which is internal freedom the the person who molested me people who who jumped me but i held on resentment for 30 years i was like i just want to apologize for when we had that fight i want to apologize for holding resentment towards you for 30 years they're like what are you apologizing for we were the ones who who jumped you and i was like but i held on to the resentment that resentment affects me and so I just want to create the possibility of just having no negativity when I think of you.

26:39Instantly freedom. So I did that for 250 people up into present date including forgiving the two men and I don't know where they are in the world forgiving the two men who murdered my father wholeheartedly simultaneously i'm watching all of this business come i'm like where are these people coming from i forgive these two people two new people come into my business i let go of this thing this new thing it's almost like this universal order of this magic trick i do this and and i spoke to my uh my spiritual advisor monica zanz she said garen you released hate from your heart these were all little subtleties of hate so any level of resentment and it doesn't matter what they do the forgiveness is freedom and letting go of resentment will complete the cycle brother whoa yeah one of the top things ever said on the show ever ever ever yeah out of a bazillion episodes.

27:45I'm convinced what that is, by the way, is that you're, um, when you have negative stored energy in your body, either through holding, we come back to that again. Yeah. When you store it to your point, what either something you've done that you want to apologize for, or forgiving someone else for trauma they've caused you, that energy is blocking you. And when you release that energy or vibrational frequency increases tremendously. And that's when you begin to magnetize the things into your life that because we've all had those moments. You're like, I was thinking of so-and-so and then they called me.

28:12Yep. That's when you're vibrating at a high frequency, but usually for most people that is like once a year, deja vu or some fluke thing. But you know this now that you're on the other side of it. When you do begin to live with this type of intention, when you are a vulnerable person, that frequency increases and it's just unbelievable. Perhaps all these things were already there, but your reticular activating system was blocking you from seeing, feeling, or hearing them. Or perhaps they weren't there and now you're attracting them. But all I know is they've appeared in my life the last 30 years in ways that are what you would consider to be miraculous, which now has become habitual.

28:45Yeah. Right? What was once miraculous is now habitual. And that can happen in everybody's life who takes some of the steps that we're talking about today, putting yourself through voluntary discomfort, doing uncomfortable things, but the apologies, the forgiveness, these are real things. The other thing that you say about vulnerability, and I want people to really hear this because there's different aspects of what we're going to talk about today that hit different people. But you're so right. I've only, I said this 20 years ago. I haven't said it since, so I know you didn't get it from me. It's yours.

29:13But causing people to feel safe in your presence is one of the great keys of being a leader of anything, is that people can feel safe in your—great father, great mother, great brother, great sister, great business person, right? Great coach, great anything. People have a tendency to feel safe in your presence, and you say the pathway to that happening, ironically, is to be what? Man, there's so much. There is so much to that. That's such a loaded question. But when you accept who you really are. And are willing to share it. Yeah, and you're willing to share it. And you're willing to create this, it's like a pathway.