Shawn Stevenson: Welcome to The Model Health Show, this is fitness and nutrition expert, Shawn Stevenson, and I'm so grateful for you tuning to me today, you are going to love this episode. This is a very special episode for me personally, I've got one of my virtual mentors, who's now part of my life on the show today. And he was a mentor to me long before he knew because he provided some profound insights and principles of success that I applied in my life, and thus, changed the results that I was seeing in my life. And I'm so grateful to have him on today to share some of these principles with you.

I grew up in conditions where I didn't really see what success looked like. I would maybe watch Robin Leach on the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous", I watch shows like that and see the yacht and all that kind of thing. But that wasn't necessarily what success was to me, it was having a happy home for my family, certainty, a sense of love in the household, being able to get past a state where we didn't have so much month at the end of the money, where we can do things that we wanted to do. I actually didn't even take a "trip" or get into an airplane until I was in my mid-20s, I just didn't even know what that was. I would see... I knew what a plane was, I could look up and see the plane, the plane, but I never thought about myself being on one and going somewhere, just because it wasn't a part of my reality.

Also, seeing just people struggling and making sacrifices just to get by, but also sometimes cutting corners and making sacrifices and hurting other people because you're trying to survive. So, I'm coming from a place where I was around a lot of survival-based living. And humans, we are here, we are very perfectly capable of surviving, but our greatest ideal is being able to thrive. And not just thrive for ourselves, but then to be able to lift others up. And being exposed to these ideas was life-changing for me because I've never seen anything like it.

One of the most powerful things about our guest today, his books are actually used now in curriculum in schools, in high school. One of the things... I'll just throw this out there as a highlight, but he's a co-author of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" book series. These personal development stories that have sold half a billion copies. That's insane... It's hard to fathom that, that many actual physical books have been picked up and read by that many people, it's just absolutely crazy. But now, they're being used in high school for example.

When I was in high school, I had to read "To Kill a Mockingbird", Boo Radley, leave him alone, leave him alone, baby. But also "Odyssey". Odyssey had no context for my life and my success. And no offense to... I know there's going to be some people that they love Odyssey, it's like their... That's their bread and butter, that's their juice, they geek out on it. They might have a tattoo of a Kraken or... I'm sorry, there was Cyclops in that one. They got a Cyclops tattoo, no disrespect. But for me, it didn't provide a context of reality or place that I can get to. I was looking so far into the past, into this imagination, whereas the Chicken Soup for the Soul books had these stories of real people and these success principles and thing that can be a guiding light, especially if you're in a situation where you're dealing with a challenge.

So, man, it's just really awesome to have him on the show today. And I really can't wait to share this episode with you guys, I think that you're going to love it so very much. And of course, a big part of this movement, of personal development, is a big shift that's taking place where the top entrepreneurs, people we're looking at, the top people in the success and personal development space, they're playing the long game. They're looking at, "How can I improve my health and fitness and my nutrition?", including our guest today.

One of those ways... And even for my kids, because really where our success blueprint comes from is the way that we grow up. And of course, it can be changed at any time, but can you just imagine how much more graceful it is when you grow up with it in your environment? And so, my son, Braden, and also his best friend next door, Avery, shout out to Avery, they're huge fans of the Organifi Red Juice. They're switching over from box juices... And no offense, it might be 100% organic or whatever, but it's not packed with the kind of nutrition that you find is something like Red Juice. So, it's giving our kids this plethora of nutrients. And when I talk about a plethora of nutrients, I'm not just saying, "It's got some Vitamin A, this thing.", but the food source. It's food source-based nutrition. So, the Red Juice, it's red because it has acai. We're talking about an ORAC value over 1000. That's 10 times more antioxidants than any conventional fruit that you're going to find in a grocery store. Incredible.

And we know that antioxidants help to reduce inflammation. We have these kind of reactive oxygen species that are kind of going around our bodies and snatching electrons and creating this kind of free radical activity. Antioxidants come in and provide free electrons and essentially kind of slow down this process of accelerated aging. It's super important to get it from our nutrition, but more so, when we're getting it from real foods that are clinically proven to be advantageous for the human body. It also helps your body's endogenous antioxidant systems to work better because your body is making antioxidants too. But if you're eating Cheetos, that's not going to help your body to produce adequate amounts of glutathione.

If you're eating... I don't know, Mike and Ikes, I don't know why that's jump in my mind, that was a hot candy when I was a kid. But that kind of stuff is not going to do the job. However, eating real foods, food-based nutrient sources like we find in the Red Juice formula from Organifi, it helps your body's own antioxidant production to do its job and to do it at a high level. So acai is in there, and also, listen to this. One of the hallmark things and is just taking off in popularity, you can go to conditional.

Convenience stores and see that there's beet supplements, the root vegetable beets. And this is because there's a study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, showed that drinking beet juice can boost your stamina up to 16% during exercise and training, what an edge and it's legal. Also, they found that the test participants experienced less muscle damage and less fatigue after exercise. So they recovered faster. That's a really remarkable thing and it's coming from beets. And so beets are in the Red juice formula as well. Part of what makes it red, but there's also a little tint of the bluish hue in there too, from the blueberries. And now, listen to this, this was published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry affirmed that eating blueberries increases bifidobacteria, and it helps to positively modulate the diversity of overall gut bacteria. We know about the gut now, we know how important... We know that health really starts in the gut.

And so blueberries and the compounds in there literally help to feed healthy probiotic, the friendly flora and create a healthier ratio. So many of us experience kind of dysbiosis and blueberries one of those things that can help to get the right cascade of bacteria in our gut. So this is just a few of the things that are in the red juice formula, get yourself some red juice, kids love it. Kid tested, mother approved and father approved. Go to organifi.com/model, that’s O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I .com/model and you get 15% off the red juice and everything they carry. My kids love the red juice go packs. They could just go grab, open one up, pour it in the water, shake it up, good to go. Alright, so organifi.com/model. Now, let's get to the Apple Podcast review of the week.

iTunes Review:   Another five-star review titled, "I love this podcast", by Losi Newberry. "As a personal trainer for 20 years, I am constantly learning and evolving, I get so much information from Shawn’s podcast, that I can take and share with my clients. I can honestly give wellness tips within my scope of practice on Sleep, Meditation, brain health, nutrition, supplements and most of all, I just send them to this podcast so they can spend some positive time with Shawn Stevenson, he has truly enhanced my life."

Shawn Stevenson: Awesome, thank you so much for leaving me that review over on Apple Podcast. It means everything. And also, the fact that you are being of service and helping other people and allowing me to be a part of that, too. Thank you so much for the gift that you're giving and sharing your light and your energy and your experience with others, that's how we're going to do this, is all doing this together, so thank you so much. And if you have yet to do, please pop over to Apple Podcast, leave a review for the Model Health Show, let everybody know what you think about the show. And on that note, let's get to our special guest and topic of the day.

From his earliest days teaching inner-city high school students how to discover their potential and succeed no matter what their circumstances, to becoming a world-renowned transformational speaker and trainer, who has conducted more than 2500 workshops and events all over the world. Jack Canfield has devoted his life and career to helping others achieve their personal definition of success and create lives of greater joy, meaning and fulfillment. He is the co-author of The Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which has more than 250 titles and 550 million copies in print, in over 40 different languages. In 2005, he co-authored The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. And inside his book, Jack has collected what he asserts to be 64 essential lessons for attaining goals and creating a successful life. And now he's got a companion workbook to actually do the work, not just get to the gym but to actually implement and to do the work and that's just one of the things we're going to be highlighting the importance of doing the work, but we're also going to dive in and talk about some of these profound success principles that have had a huge impact on my life.

And I think you're really going to love this conversation with the incredible Jack Canfield. The first thing I want to ask you about really is your superhero origin story. I was just reading a little bit about, you were born in West Virginia, and I would imagine that you probably didn't grow up listening to personal development or being tuned into that, how did you get into this world?

Jack Canfield: Well, I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago, I was learning to be a teacher of history. I was actually practice teaching for half of that year, and then going to classes half of the year. And I was in a Laundromat, minding my own business when this guy walks in and he puts his stuff in the washer and he comes over, he says, "Put your book down, talk to me," I go, "Okay." And turns out, he was a graduate student in Economics and he said... We hit it off. And he said, "There's this living philosopher series up in Evanston, Illinois, why don't you go with me?" And I didn't have a car and I was kind of trapped. I just went, "Okay, great, let's do it."

And the first speaker we went to was this guy named Herbert Otto, he was the Director of the National Center for the exploration of Human potential and he said we're only using 10% of our brain. And I went up afterwards and I said, "Dr. Otto, I want to use more of my brain, what should I do?" He said, "There's this place called Oasis. It's a growth center, where every weekend they have personal development workshops. You should go take some." So I did, and then I ran out of money 'cause I was a graduate student, I was living on... What was I getting? A paycheck of $120 every two weeks. So, 240 a month I'm living on, I got a 7...

Shawn Stevenson: You had a 21-cent diet, too...

Jack Canfield: Yeah, well at the end of the first... My first month, I had to pay $79 rental fee for my apartment that left me about... What would that be? About $50 left over for two weeks to live on. So usually by the end of two weeks, I'm eating spaghetti noodles, which costs like a dime, 11 cent can of Contadina tomato paste, garlic salt and water and pepper and that's my dinner.

And today, it would be Ramen noodles, but they didn't have those then. And so anyway, I go up and I run out of money, can't take anymore workshops and I start volunteering. Can I be assisting? So, I think I did 37 workshops in 52 weeks, just weaseling my way in, taking registration, handing out tissue, whatever so I could be in the room. I was hungry for it 'cause I grew up, I was totally in on my brain, I went to a military school as a scholarship student, I went to Harvard as a scholarship student, and then I wanted to make a difference. So, I want to teach in these inner-city schools.

And so, anyway, that's how I got involved in it. Then I met this man named W. Clement Stone, who was a good friend of Napoleon Hill who wrote Think and Grow Rich, and they co-authored a book together. He said, "I want to teach kids to do this in the schools. Success is not a four-letter word. They can learn to be successful." So I ended up getting hired by him, to go and teach success principles, goal setting, values, having clear affirmations and visualization, taking action, responding to feedback, having a mastermind group, all this kind of stuff. That was literally, here I was, I was in my early 20s, and that's how I got into all this and never looked back.

Shawn Stevenson: You know, the coolest thing from that story is that you immersed yourself in that world.

Jack Canfield: Totally.

Shawn Stevenson: It's like one of the principles really of success and so many people don't do that. They kind of like, it's like a part-time thing.

Jack Canfield: Right.

Shawn Stevenson: You really got yourself into that world.

Jack Canfield: I did. I did. I read every book I can get my hands on. When Stone hired me for his foundation a few years later, I worked for his foundation for a couple of years, he made the mistake of saying, "Take any workshop you ever want to take, I'll pay for it, and any books you want to buy for the library of the foundation, do it." I've read 3,000 books, and a lot of them were paid for by W. Clement Stone. I took lots and lots of workshops. I was so hungry for it. I think if you want to do anything, you have to immerse yourself in it. I was just in India. I was there for a month, and it was a man who was kind of my teacher while I was there. His name was Dr. Pankaj Naram and his teacher died at 124 years old, so his master lived that long. His master, when he went to work with him, he learned to do pulses.

He could literally take your pulse and within a minute, tell you everything going on in your body. It's the most amazing thing I've ever experienced in my life. When he said, "I want to learn from my master," the master said, “Great, show up." So the first thing he did was make him wait for 10 days to see how committed he was. Then he said, "Go clean the bathroom." He cleaned the bathroom. He came, said, "Let's go inspect it," and didn't... Wasn't all that clean, and he said, "How do you expect to help people clean their bodies if you can't even freakin' clean a bathroom?" So he got the toothbrush out and really cleaned it, but he said, "You have to study with me for a 1,000 days. Every day you do what I do, eat when I eat, sleep when I sleep, drink what I drink," etcetera. He said, "You cannot learn anything if you don't devote a minimum of a 1,000 days to it." We talk today, we get these books that say, if you want to be a master, you've got to study 10,000 hours. That's the reality of that.

Shawn Stevenson: Wow. So this kind of culminated, that immersive experience and you getting out there and teaching, in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which is what a lot of people know you from, which has, correct me if I'm wrong, over half a billion books...

Jack Canfield: Half a billion books sold in 47 languages around the world, 315 million just in China, another 100 million in India, and the rest scattered. I think about 100 million in America and the rest, all over the place.

Shawn Stevenson: That literally takes my breath away because I think about today's digital economy, and even Justin Bieber's videos don't get that many views of this... And this is a physical book. It's so empowering.

Jack Canfield: But he gets more people at his concerts.

Shawn Stevenson: So you've got that and then, of course, The Success Principles, which I have a copy right here, this classic book which has sold well over a million copies as well. What I love about this and what I love about this workbook, I'm serious, this is literally nugget after nugget of huge insight, real truths about success that are often overlooked, or they're not communicated properly. The workbook is so wonderful because, as you know, unless somebody comes to an event, oftentimes they might get the nugget, but they don't do something with it.

Jack Canfield: Exactly.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah.

Jack Canfield: Yeah, W. Clement Stone used to say, "You have to learn... What you learn, you have to simulate it, but then you have to act on it. If you don't act on it, nothing happens." I think it was Benjamin Franklin, said, "Learning hasn't really occurred until a behavior is changed." There was a lot of us have book knowledge, what I call having shelf esteem, you've got a lot of books on your shelf; but you're not... You haven't changed your life. So, what I realized after the first book came out and after 10 years of it selling several million copies around the world, is that a lot of people had read it but they weren't doing the exercises that were there. So we said, okay, if we were going to take a 17-week course, and take the core 17 principles, and say, focus one week on 100% responsibility, focus one week on clarifying your vision, one week on making sure you have a clear purpose in your life, and then setting goals, using affirmations, etcetera; what happens at the end of 17 weeks, your life will be transformed. So for a lot of people, is people are afraid to go out. So now we have a lot of stuff on digital you can do, courses online that people can take, and also a book that literally you can work yourself through and radically change your life.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, and what I want to do today is to go through some of these principles, and of course we can touch on some of the insights and inroads and into doing something with them, but I just want to encourage everybody to get a copy of The Success Principles workbook and go through it because the process of taking these powerful nuggets and actually doing the exercises is completely transformative.

Jack Canfield: Thank you.

Shawn Stevenson: And you've got it broken down into these different sections. So, in Part One, we've got the fundamentals of success.

Jack Canfield: Yes.

Shawn Stevenson: Championships are won with fundamentals.

Jack Canfield: Absolutely.

Shawn Stevenson: The big one in this one, this one changed my life, and I'm not sure if I first heard it from you or it's from our mutual friend, Michael Beckwith, but I heard, it was either you or him, said, to take... You have to take 100% responsibility for your life.

Jack Canfield: That was Michael Canfield that said that.

Shawn Stevenson: Michael... Blended together, I love it. It's my stepdad.

Jack Canfield: No, you do. You do. Because what happens is most people live their life from a place of being a victim. We believe that our world will be better if it wasn't for our parents who are alcoholics, or it wasn't for the government, or it wasn't for whose President, or the do-nothing Congress, or all these things we blame. We blame the traffic for making us late. We live in LA, or I live 90 minutes north and you live down here, and the reality is people are always complaining about the traffic made them late. It's the same people, day after day. It's called, leave earlier. This is what the traffic do.

Shawn Stevenson: This is going to be there.

Jack Canfield: So I have this wonderful formula that I was taught by a psychotherapist, probably 35 years ago, called E plus R equals O, events plus response equals outcome. Most people, when they don't get the outcomes they want, instead of changing their response to the events of the world, they blame the event instead of changing their response. Two plus two, it's always going to be equal four. If you wanted a five in life, you're going to have to do a three instead of a two. Then what happens when you have something like an economic crisis or the coronavirus thing going on, all of a sudden, the world is doing a one. You can do your two, which you were doing, which was working really well, but one plus two now equals three. So you're going to have to up your game and do something different.

So, what I've attempted to do is, well, I've actually achieved it, is I've interviewed probably 150 to 200 of the most successful people in the world in every walk of life, from entertainment, sports, government, military, whatever, and said, what are those responses of the successful people? What are the thoughts that successful people think? What are the behaviors and habits of highly successful people? We can learn those. They're all learnable. I wasn't born any more brilliant than anyone else. I just happened to learn some principles and apply them. So, let's take responsibility, give up blaming, give up complaining, and give up excuse-making. Those are the three things that people do. I like to say that when you're blaming things or complaining about things, the people... You never heard anyone complain about gravity. You never hear anyone complain about gravity.

Shawn Stevenson: This gravity is holding me down.

Jack Canfield: You see all these old people with their walkers, they're all bent over, but they're never going, "I hate gravity. Gravity sucks. If it wasn't for gravity, I wouldn't be all bent over." The reason they don't do that is there's no option. We don't complain about things where there is no option. We only complain about things where there's something that can be different. So, if I complain about my wife and call her the food Nazi, she's, "You shouldn't be eating that. You shouldn't be watching that football game. They're making... You're getting all healthy. You're sitting here having Cheetos and a beer," whatever. I don't do that actually, but you get the idea. So I could say, "My wife's a pain in the butt." Now I have a choice. I can either say to my wife, "This is my body. You take care of your body. I'll take care of mine." Or I could go look for the perfect wife who goes, "Honey, do you want more Cheetos? Can I get you another beer?" 'Cause that woman exists, and I couldn't complain about my wife if I didn't have that image of another possibility.

So people are only complaining because they know something better exists. They see people that are happier, healthier, have more money, or taking more vacations, going to places they want to go, etcetera, have better relationships with their kids. It's only that that allows us to complain. So, whenever someone's complaining, the only question I ask them is, "What would you prefer, and what would you be willing to do to get it?" That's really, get off that... My staff comes to me with a complaint, it's called, what do you want? What could you do to make it happen? Maybe there's something I can do to help. No complaining. In my company and in my seminars, if you were to come, we have these two big fish bowls. If you complain, $10 fine. If you're late to work, $10 fine. You make an excuse about why you didn't get something done when you agreed to do it, $10 fine. You blame somebody, the printer didn't do it on time. Well, you didn't bring it to him early enough, $10 fine. So, it's really critical to take 100% responsibility and notice it doesn't say 99%. 'Cause I always ask people in my audience and say, "How many of you would like to be married to someone who was 99% committed to monogamy?" 'Cause you know that there's always that little out, and so you have to be, there's no outs. There's just called 100% commitment.

Shawn Stevenson: So what do you do with the fine money?

Jack Canfield: We give it to charity.

Shawn Stevenson: I figured that.

Jack Canfield: Yeah, we support about three different charities.

Shawn Stevenson: So this is bringing up a huge conversation. I don't... If there was a kind of an anti-success method, it would be like the “complain your way to success”.

Jack Canfield: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: But it doesn't exist.

Jack Canfield: Right.

Shawn Stevenson: And you mentioned in the book, you said specifically that excuses steal your future.

Jack Canfield: Exactly.

Shawn Stevenson: This is like so many of us are ready with our excuses and not ready with solutions. I literally, even with my team, it's just like when you bring me a problem, bring a solution with you.

Jack Canfield: Yeah, I do, if you bring me a problem, bring me three possible solutions.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, because they exist.

Jack Canfield: One of them will probably work, yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: But it's like it's switching over.

Jack Canfield: Start thinking that way, starting thinking solution-oriented, absolutely.

Shawn Stevenson: So powerful. So, just to share this really quickly, but the reason that this was transformative for me is I could relate to it so much because I wasn't taking responsibility. When I was 20 years old, I was dealing with some tremendous health issues, and I was pointing a finger. I was like, they won't help me. The doctors, my family, all this stuff, I'm pointing a finger, but at no point did I think about what I can do differently.

Jack Canfield: Right.

Shawn Stevenson: When that switch flipped in my mind that this is my body, my life... Kind of like you and the Cheetos example, you take care of yours, I take care of mine, but this was in a healthy way, and I realized that no one else walks in my shoes. I have to take complete responsibility, no more excuses, no more finger-pointing.

Jack Canfield: Absolutely.

Shawn Stevenson: Not to say the bad things didn't happen.

Jack Canfield: Right.

Shawn Stevenson: That's the clarification. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Jack Canfield: About bad things happening?

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, because when the negative situations come up...

Jack Canfield: Oh, yeah, there's always going to be bad things happening. You're going to fall off the ladder. You're going to... The job disappears, technology takes over, things happen, your plane gets delayed, all kinds of stuff happens. The issue is, how do you respond to that?

Shawn Stevenson: Exactly.

Jack Canfield: Certainly, I've been divorced, I've had diseases that I've had to deal with, etcetera, challenges, breaking my leg, skiing, and so forth. It's called, well, what was I doing? I wasn't paying attention. For me, I literally have transformed my diet in the last year, in a major, major way. It's much more plant-based. I haven't had animal protein for at least a couple of months, and I feel much healthier. I've lost about 17 pounds in the last 40 days. And that old thing about when you point to someone else, well, they don't make it easy in the restaurants, or it's hard when you travel, or the airlines don't do it, there's always three fingers pointing back at yourself, and that's where it is. People will say, "Well, I got cancer. I'm not responsible." And I say, "Well, do you live near an EMF transmitter? Do you wear... I wear this EMF device that keeps my whole body balanced and keeps all the EMFs out here. We're probably a lot of WiFi in this room.

Shawn Stevenson: Oh, yeah.

Jack Canfield: Do you eat an alkaline diet? Do you do a fast on some kind of regular basis? Are you exercising? All these things and they go, "No, no, no. I didn't know about that." Whose responsibility is it to know? Do you ever read the manual of your car so when your car breaks down you, "I didn't know I was supposed to rotate the tires." Or do you take responsibility? 'Cause this is a rental car you have for life, and I want to stick around as long as possible.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, and you are, how old are you right now?

Jack Canfield: 75.

Shawn Stevenson: 75? Out here killing it like I have the feeling that you are, you've kind of just getting started like you've got so much more in front of you.

Jack Canfield: I do.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah.

Jack Canfield: I do.

Shawn Stevenson: Excellent, so inspiring.

Jack Canfield: 75 years young is what I like to say.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, yeah. And also having an incredible folks like Dr. Mark Hyman and looking at... We have our chronological age, but then we have our biological age.

Jack Canfield: Right.

Shawn Stevenson: And you're clearly much younger than what the calendar might say.

Jack Canfield: Absolutely, yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: And so a big part of this is the way that you think and the way that you live your life.

Jack Canfield: I think it's a lot about what you put in your body, but it's also about what you put in your mind. One of the things I worked on very hard was forgiving everyone I ever had resentment toward. There was a Shaman in Hawaii who basically said to a friend of mine who was diagnosed... She was going to die. And he put her on a massage table, and he said, "Okay, go back one week. Who do you need to forgive?" And she was on that massage table for six hours going back year, by year, by year, by year, all the way back 'til she was like six years old. And one week later, whatever she had that was supposed to kill her, was gone. It was not in her body anymore. And so it's not just the biochemical stuff we put in our body, it's also the vibrations of our thoughts that are so important.

Shawn Stevenson: Absolutely, absolutely, and these are the topics... You said many things that we talked about on the show, but our thoughts create chemistry in our bodies and that's incredibly powerful. And one of the things that you also highlight here is one of the principles and again, there's so many, and they're all so poignant and touching, and powerful.

Jack Canfield: Thank you.

Shawn Stevenson: But I want to cover these specifically.

Jack Canfield: Sure.

Shawn Stevenson: In the success equation, another one is to decide what you want.

Jack Canfield: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: So using your mental energy to decide what you want. Why is that so important?

Jack Canfield: Well, let me go back to my experience in India with this wonderful teacher. He said, "There's three things you need to know if you want to be successful. Number one, what do you want? Number two, how do you get it? Number three, how do you enjoy it once you have it?" He said 95% of the people do not have a clue about what they really want. They've been conditioned to want stuff that doesn't really fulfill them what I call the symbols of success, rather than the experience of success. So they have the car, the house, the designer suits, whatever, but they're not really experiencing that inner peace, contentment, fulfillment that they want. Number two, do you know how to get it? That's why I wrote these books, The Success Principles workbook, so forth, is that most people have not been taught how to get it. Think about it, you went to school, high school, you went to college, I imagine and was there ever a course on Success 101?

Shawn Stevenson: Absolutely not.

Jack Canfield: How to Capture Your Dreams 101?

Shawn Stevenson: I would have taken it.

Jack Canfield: Yeah, Achievement Motivation 101, I would have taken it too. And so, we're teaching kids things they don't need to know. Like when's the last time you needed to know the three causes of the Civil War or the five exports of Brazil?

Shawn Stevenson: Absolutely never.

Jack Canfield: Never, exactly. And so the things we need, what I call self-science education, how do you educate yourself about yourself we're missing so most people don't know how to get what they want even if they knew what they wanted. Only 5% know what they want. Of those 5%, only 2% know how to get it and only 1% know how to enjoy it once they get it. Think of all the billionaires you've heard of, the Harvey Weinstein’s of the world that just got sentenced to 23 years in jail. They're not enjoying their life. You've got all these people that are drugged out in Hollywood who are super successful by the outside standards, but they're not happy, they're committing suicide, they're having affairs, they're doing lots of drugs, etcetera to try to numb out the pain. And so we have all these wonderful rehab centers. Half of Malibu is a rehab center.

Shawn Stevenson: There's quite a few, yeah.

Jack Canfield: So, I want everyone to be in the 1% club. My commitment is to end suffering and to help people to inspire them and empower them to live their highest vision in the context of love and joy. So the Chicken Soup books are about inspiring people. The Success Principles books are about empowering people to have exactly what they want and how to get it.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, yeah. I want to just circle back really quickly...

Jack Canfield: Sure.

Shawn Stevenson: Because I don't want to overlook how powerful forgiveness is.

Jack Canfield: Yes.

Shawn Stevenson: I didn't drill down a little bit more and it's just been kind of been talking to my ear a little bit. But you mentioned this being, in this particular instance, something to help somebody to heal. It’s part of that equation of taking responsibility for our lives and not making excuses because things happen to us, people might have done us wrong, but us, and I know this is something you talked about, but us carrying around that resentment is dragging us down and keeping us from being successful. Why is that?

Jack Canfield: Well, resentment is like having the emergency brake on in your car. It's dragging you. It's holding you down. And the truth is that what I finally got to after years and years and years of this work is that there's really nobody to blame. There's nobody that really did us wrong. They were just doing the best they could to beat somebody they had. Some gang member who steals your car, he's trying to impress his friends to allow him to be in the gang so that he has a place to belong. Everyone has needs to belong. Everyone has a need to impress their girlfriend, to be loved, etcetera. And so if you don't have the skills, basically, you're going to do the best you can with the limited awareness and skills and knowledge, you have to meet some basic need. So, I'm doing that right now, but I have more awareness, more skills than I had 20, 30 years ago. Problem with our prisons is we're not teaching people new skills and awareness.

We're basically punishing them. The only new skills they're learning are from each other about how to be a better burglar, a better drug dealer, a better tattoo artist, whatever it might be and while they're in prison. When I forgive, I don't condone your behavior, but I simply give for myself to let go of this thing I'm holding on to. I had a woman come up to me at a evening workshop I was doing a number of years ago, and she said, "It's just not right." I said, "What?" She said, "My sister and my father." I said, "What happened?" "When my father died, he left my sister twice as much money as me. This is not right, just not right." And I'd studied Byron Katie. Your thoughts are the things that make you miserable. And I said, "Well, how do you know it's not right?" And we went through that. She wouldn't get off it at first. I said, "When did your father die? She said, "15 years ago." I said, "For 15 years, you've been carrying this around." I said, "How often do you think about it every day?" And she said, "I don't know, six or seven times at least." I said, "Well, who's making you miserable every day? Your father did it once with the writing of a pen. You're doing it six times a day. Who's the worse abuser?"

Shawn Stevenson: For 15 years.

Jack Canfield: For 15 years, you are. And she finally got it. It took us about a 10-minute conversation after I had done this little seminar, but so many people are carrying that around and not letting go. And so, when I forgive, I'm letting go of all this resentment 'cause in our resentment... And when we get angry, what do we do? We grab someone like this and we hold on tight. My hands are not open to. They're not available to receive the new things. If I'm holding on to this, you can't pick up my book and give it to me. I got no way to hold it. I have to let go in order to let the new in.

Shawn Stevenson: Wow. Just going back to this profound understanding that we have to decide what we want, why is it that we don't do that, Jack? Why do we not give ourselves permission to want what we want?

Jack Canfield: I think it's a combination of things. I think a lot of it is a conditioning we got as a kid. You're not smart enough. Your brother is the athlete, you're this thing. Your sister got the singing talent, you didn't, whatever kids tease us. "What did you do with the money?" "What money?" "The money they gave you for singing lessons." And all of a sudden, we think we can't do that. We have a bad year in school, and we decide we're stupid. Most kids, I was a self-esteem expert for many years. Most kids by the age of the fifth grade, they've decided if they're smart or dumb, athletic or not, attractive or not, good friend or not, scientifically-oriented or not, musical or not, whatever. And then it sticks with them. We make up these beliefs. Most of the work I do with people now, one of the core pieces of work I do is belief change. And what we found is that most people between the ages of three and eight have made major belief decisions that are now still controlling them. They've decided, I'm not enough, I can't ask for what I want.

I recently got in touch with something in an experience where I realized at the age of pre-verbal, I was a baby, my parents, when I would cry my dad couldn't stand my crying 'cause he was a real macho, and it basically stimulated his tears which he didn't want to feel. He would put me out in the car and tell my mother to come in and leave me there until I stop crying. And so here I'd learned very early, don't cry 'cause he's not going to get you anything. Being yourself and asking for what you need, whether it was changing the diaper or holding me or feeding me, it doesn't work. Very early, I had to learn to be manipulative and to be something other than myself to get what I wanted. And so, all along, people are making these decisions that I'm not okay, I can't do this, etcetera. And so we've got to go back and re-decide that because once we made that decision, we forgot that we made it. Now, it's unconscious. I'll give you one example of someone in a workshop not too long ago, I'm writing a book with a woman named Lisa Janelle, and this was her client. And what happened was, she was a great athlete, and every time she practiced, she got great times. Then she'd compete and she wouldn't get as good a time as she did when she was practicing. And normally, people do better in competition.

By having her go back to the earliest time, she can remember this sense of whatever it was where she was stuck, she ended up back and she said, "Oh my God. I'm 10 years old." "Well, where are you?" "I'm talking to my mother." "What's happening?" I'm saying, "Mom, how come all my ribbons, all my trophies, all my medals, you never display them anywhere like all the other kid's moms do?" "Every time you bring a medal home, it makes your brother feel bad 'cause he's not as good as you." And she decided, at the age of 10, every time I win, I hurt people I love. And then she forgot she made that decision, but unconsciously, some part of her didn't want to win 'cause it's going to hurt someone she loves. Once she realized that and let go that, she was able to go and say, "Okay. Now, I can win. I realized I'm not going to hurt my brother. That’s his issue to take care of himself and his own to feel good." And so, we all have these limiting beliefs that are subconscious, that we have to surface and release. And I think there's a lot of unworthiness where people feel I'm unworthy of love. People that have had abortions, they feel often if they were teenagers, there's still this sense of I did something wrong, I'm guilty, I have to suffer.

And I think that a lot of times, people literally just don't know what they want because they've been so conditioned to want this. I had a client, three generations, everyone was a doctor. All the brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, doctors. This guy didn't want to be a doctor. He wanted to be a car mechanic. And so he ended up being an anesthesiologist, which is interesting 'cause what do anesthesiologists do? They numb out your feelings and put you to sleep. And then he developed migraine and headaches. And when we went back through the headaches to what was going on, he went back to that decision that he became a doctor when he didn't want to. He stopped being a doctor, opened a garage for exotic cars, and now, he has no headaches anymore.

Shawn Stevenson: Wow. So powerful, so powerful. Something that really jumped out with me is in this conversation of deciding what we want, we have to get to a place and this is what I want to ask you is in the book, can people look forward to, if they've had issues on figuring out what they want, is there... Okay, let's talk about that.

Jack Canfield: They can, they can. Well, there's all kinds of exercises in the book to really get you clear about what you want. What are your beliefs that tell you, you can't have what you want? There's some obvious questions that a lot of us ask in this work. If you had $10 million and you never had to work, what would you do? If God came down and said, "Okay, you never have to do anything you don't want to do, what would you do? There's a thing called a JOY review. Go back to the times in your life you felt the greatest joy. What were those? For me, they were always when I was a teacher. I was in military school, I was the captain of the freshman company where you had to teach everyone how to do right shoulder arms, and left face and forward march and all that 'cause I was a natural.

I was the head of my Hi-Y group in church, I was the head of my Boy Scout troop, I would've been president of my fraternity except I had a beard in college back when it wasn't cool to have a beard, so they made me the vice president 'cause they want to send me to the national convention. I taught in high school, I taught teachers so I'm happy when I'm teaching.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah.

Jack Canfield: So then I'm clear, I just want to be the best teacher I can and teach the millions of people to do what I do. And now created the Train the Trainer program. But we've trained, I think, now 3500 certified teachers in 107 countries are teaching this work and that's very fulfilling for me.

Shawn Stevenson: That's awesome, that's awesome, so that's what we can look forward to with the Success Principles workbook is uncovering these things for ourselves.

Jack Canfield: Yes.

Shawn Stevenson: But another principle is we have to believe that it's possible 'cause when we decide what we want we have to actually believe that it's even possible.

Jack Canfield: Now beliefs are... There's two levels of dealing with beliefs, one is beliefs are a choice. You can literally choose right now to believe that you can have anything you want. It's simply a choice. Most of us are choosing unconsciously, we're choosing based on our conditioning. So, it's difficult, it's challenging to make a choice in the face of a habit, you know. Like I always ask people when I'm doing a seminar I say, "Fold your hands, notice which thumb's on top. Now unfold your hands and move all your fingers up, so the other thumb's on top. How does that feel?" Everyone goes, "It's uncomfortable, it's awkward. I don't like it."

Go back, how's that? Comfortable? Okay, everything I'm asking you to do is going to feel like this. It's going to feel like it's the wrong way, but you have to sustain it. It's being courageous and consistent and persistent that allows you to succeed, and so we can study what are the beliefs of successful people?

One of the stories I love to tell is sometimes it's not what you don't know that gets you in trouble, it's what you think you know that's not true. Like women can't become president or a black person couldn't become president of this company or whatever it might be. And I tell the story about this guy named Cliff, in Australia, who was a sheep farmer and he wanted to run a marathon and he looked at all the races there were none of them were available when he was available and the only race that was available when he was available was this six-and-a-half day race. It was like 575 kilometer or something like that, and he'd never won a race before but he said, "I can do that." He goes over and he registers and they said, "You want to run this ultra-marathon it's like six-and-a-half-days. Have you ever run a marathon?" No. A 10K? No. What makes you think you could do this?

Now he's dressed in overall, like a farmer, t-shirt, baseball cap, sunglasses and work boots, work boots not Nike running shoes and they were afraid he was going to have a heart attack and die 'cause he was in his 60s, so anyway, they finally let him run and he starts running. Everyone else was taking off like really fast runners like you'd expect and he's kind of doing what they call the Cliff Young shuffle like this, this.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah.

Jack Canfield: And what happens is, he had a secret, nobody knew he had this secret, the secret was he didn't know that you're supposed to sleep when you run a six-and-a-half-day race. So he was behind for the first two days, he was so far behind no one... He never caught up to anyone who say, go to get six hours sleep. On the third day he passed everybody, they were all asleep and he ran non-stop for six days, broke the record by 12 hours, and the secret was he didn't know you were supposed to sleep. So basically a lot of us have beliefs about how much sleep you need, what you have to eat, what's not possible for someone like you if you're a black lesbian with two kids from Alabama, you can't possibly do this. Not true.

And so one of the things I loved about doing the Chicken Soup books was finding stories of people that you'd never think could've accomplished what they did and they did. And so I think you have to just choose I can do this. And then the other thing you have to do, as I said, is you have to do some exercises like we have in the book and also people can literally come to my website. I do these free calls sometimes for like a 1000 people at a time where I take 'em through this process where we go back to find the limiting belief and where it started from and we clear like 980 limiting beliefs in an hour and a half, and then all around the world. Just did three of those in January.

Shawn Stevenson: Remarkable, and the exercises to walk us through that process are in the book. So next I have to ask you about this because for a lot of people, Chicken Soup for the Soul was a phenomenon.

Jack Canfield: Yes.

Shawn Stevenson: But you becoming like a personal brand and an entity in and of yourself and kind of branching out and having the Success Principles take off this was a big result of that personal branding was from you being in the movie The Secret.

Jack Canfield: Yes.

Shawn Stevenson: And in the book, of course you talk about this topic, to use the law of attraction why is this a principle that we need to focus on?

Jack Canfield: Well, I think the law of attraction is only one of the things you need to focus on. A lot of people think I just kind of decide what I want and give it to the universe and I think occasionally that works, that happens, but most of the time the universe has given you something back like in an inspiration to take some kind of action like go to this Starbucks instead of that Starbucks or to write this book, or to start your podcast, or whatever it might be. So there are actions that you need to take. I always like to say the word action is the last part of the word attraction. So the law of attraction includes action in it, but the belief that the universe has my back, the universe is on my side, that the world is set up with a bunch of rules that actually work.

I like what Michael Beckwith who's a good friend of both of ours says, the first stage is we think we're a victim. Why God are you doing this to me? Second stage, you realize, well, there are some rules. If I play by these rules, these laws, the law of attraction, law of compensation and other things like that, that life works better. Wow, when I visualize my goals they actually help come true when I take action when I ask for feedback when I persevere and when I pray, and when I be generous, have gratitude and so forth.

And so then you're in what he calls the manipulative stage. We're manipulating the universe based on the laws and then one day you wake up and say, "Well after all these laws who made those laws is there something... Is there a higher power? Maybe I should surrender to that instead of my ego." And then eventually you start doing not my will, but thy will, and the last stage, that he talks about and I agree is now called the enlightenment stage is you realize you are God. Just like a drop of water is not the entire ocean but it is the ocean. And so you get to the place where some of these people I met in India. I was in India, guys wearing a t-shirt says, "Put your hand out." I put my hand out. He doesn't do anything other than put his hand on top of mine, goes like this, and drops small mala beads into my hand. Perfect mala beads, 108 beads with a little end bead. And I went, "Whoa! How'd you do that?" He said, "Well, I've learned to do that. That's a power I've developed. I can manifest anything." And so you realize that he's now a God, in a sense, not the God or all the god, but...

Shawn Stevenson: A part of.

Jack Canfield: A part of it. So we all have these stages we go through. I think my books are probably mostly second level, how to manipulate the universe to get what you want, and then how to surrender to the higher power. So you're getting your guidance for what you're wanting to manifest in the world from a higher place, but then using the laws, the techniques, the principles in the book to actually manifest that and make it happen.

Shawn Stevenson: It's remarkable. There's, again, there's so many different things I want to talk to you about, but we definitely need to dive in and talk about some of these other sections in the book. We've got transform yourself for success, we're going to talk about transformation and we're going to do that right after this quick break. So sit tight, we'll be right back.

Today, we're the midst of a new revolution with our understanding of food. We used to just be focused on this macronutrient paradigm: Proteins, fats, carbohydrates. Carbohydrates and proteins got a pretty good name, but fats were dragged through the mud. Why is that? Because it's called fat. The name implies something different than the other two because when we hear the word "fat," we think about fat on our bodies. Fat in food and fat in our bodies are two totally different things. And it's like thinking, "If I eat blueberries, I'm going to turn blue," when you think that eating fat is going to turn you fat. It just doesn't work like that. And any of those three macronutrients can actually put fat on your body if you eat too much or the wrong types.

Healthy fats, which I'm proposing that we start to call lipids or even energy, are incredibly important for every single function in your body. Your cells, every single cells in your body, we have upwards of 100 trillion cells that make you up, require fats to just maintain the integrity of your cell membranes. We're talking about the thing that holds yourselves together and enables yourselves to communicate. It's very important. Also your brain; your brain is mostly fat and water. This is why fats are so important. When you're deficient in fats, especially the right kinds of fats, you can see some big issues. So in order to address that, some of my favorite things today are MCT oils and specifically, if we look at emulsified MCT oils that actually taste amazing, and these are medium-chain triglyceride oils that are extracted from things like coconut or palm. And these medium-chain triglycerides have a thermogenic effect on the body, which means they are able to positively alter your metabolism. That's number one, thermogenic effect from MCT oils, positively altering your metabolism.

Number two, MCTs are more easily absorbed by your cells. So unlike conventional food of any type that has to go through a pretty arduous process of digestion, turning that foodstuff into you stuff, MCTs are able to go directly to your cells and provide almost instant energy. And number three, MCT oils are very protective of your microbiome. There's so much research today about the importance of having a healthy microbiome and the integrity of our gut. MCT oils are one of those things that help to support that because they are especially effective at combating viruses, parasites, bacteria. There's so much goodness that is able to be found in these MCT oils, but you want to get the good stuff.

And for me, that's why I go to onnit.com/model. That's O-N-N-I-T, dot-com, forward slash M-O-D-E-L to get the emulsified MCT oils, which is like a coffee creamer. These are great to add to your coffees and teas, smoothies, and things like that to get in a little bit of extra flavor, plus all the benefits of MCT oils. They're easy to stir so you don't have to throw everything into a blender just to get a nice coffee drink. But also, they taste good and they make the process of being healthy fun and enjoyable. So head over, check them out. They got vanilla, coconut, cinnamon swirl and strawberry. It's one of my favorites. So go to onnit.com/model for 10% off your entire purchase, not just for the MCT oil, but all of the health and human performance supplements that Onnit carries, and all of their fitness equipment, gear and so much other cool stuff. Alright, head over there, check them out, onnit.com/model. Now, back to the show.

Alright, we're back and we're talking with New York Times best-selling author, Jack Canfield, about his new workbook, which is a companion to The Success Principles. It's called The Success Principles Workbook. You need to get your copy like yesterday. It's available right now. And before the break, we were talking about getting clear about what we want, we were talking about taking responsibility. But another principle, before we move on to the next section here, I wanted to ask you about is this concept of success leaves clues, success leaves clues. So I think a lot of times, when we are deciding what we want, it's just a big question like, "How am I going to make this happen? How do I figure it out?" And oftentimes, there are people that have already figured it out for you.

Jack Canfield: Well, success leaves clues was a quote Tony Robbins said at once, I've read it somewhere, and I thought, "That's really so true," is that everything you want to do with very few exceptions like going to the moon for the first time, creating the Tesla automobile for the first time, someone's already done it, and they've left clues. They've left books like all these books that you and I read. People have left clues about how to be better marketers, how to sell stuff online, how to be a great podcaster, and do video blogs, how to do... I just got a book the other day someone sent me about how to do yard sales and get rich from it. It's like everything's out there. You want to make money in real estate? There's 59 books on how to do that. There's TED Talks, there's TEDx talks, there's masterclasses online now. They're amazing, so much information.

And the other thing is, ask people who've already done it, like a story I often tell down in Dallas, Texas, doing a TV show for the first Success Principles book in the morning. And I'm getting my makeup put on in the green room, and I asked the woman putting my makeup on, I said, "What's your dream?" I always ask that of people. She says, "Oh, my dream? I want to own my own hair salon." I said, "Great! What are you doing to make it happen?" She said, "Nothing." I said, "That's a terrible strategy. That's not going to get you what you want." And she said, "Well, I don't know what to do." I said, "I have a radical concept for you." She said, "What's that?" I said, "Why don't you go find someone who owns a hair salon and ask them how they did it?" And she went, "Wow! That's a good idea."

Why wouldn't that occur to somebody? You want to go to the moon? Find out who already went to the moon. So basically, I just say there's nothing that you probably want to do, whether it's make a million in real estate, have your own TV show, become a best-selling author. If someone has something written about it, runs a workshop on it, or is available as a mentor. There's so many people, retired business people, like through the SBA and things like that, who are bored out of their gourd that would love to advise and support younger people to be successful. You just have to ask.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. Ah, so good. And this, today, and this is something you can really speak to because you were there when there were... There was just a library you can go to. Today, we have instant access at our fingertips.

Jack Canfield: Yeah, they go to the library, go to the catalog.

Shawn Stevenson: Yup, Dewey Decimal System.

Jack Canfield: And then go through the stuff and then go there and hope it was going to be on the shelf. Now, you can access every book in the world by Internet. It's incredible, but there's so much information available. But you have to... I would say also, though, I've made one mistake in my life. I read too many books in the beginning and I wasn't putting them into action. And so if I was to do it again, I'd read fewer books, read my underlines again after I underline 'cause I underline a lot, and then I would pick five or six things and actually do them. And so the workbook is really like, "Let's do this stuff. Let's not just read it and spout it off and be able to quote people and sound intelligent, but let's do the work so we get to the other side of the goal. Get to where you want to go."

Shawn Stevenson: That's a huge gem you just dropped on us. That might be the biggest takeaway from this episode. You just shared the biggest mistake, you just said it. The biggest mistake in your life is to read less and apply more.

Jack Canfield: Well, the biggest mistake I did was to read more and apply less. But the way to say it, what I want you to do is... I think reading is important. Actually, if you're not a reader, then at least be a listener or viewer. There's a lot of good stuff out there that you can learn. Yeah, I learn something every time I watch Oprah's SuperSoul Sunday. There's little nuggets of, "Oh, I could do that. I could think that way." But do the work. One of the big transformations in my life was Byron Katie's work, The Four Questions, and the Turnaround. And I heard the tape of it and I thought, "This is brilliant." I actually did the work, it's called The Work. And she says, "You got to do it for several months before it kind of Velcro’s into your system." So the same thing's true with what I teach about affirmations, visualization, taking action, so forth.

Shawn Stevenson: And in the book then, when we have these things, then you say to act as if.

Jack Canfield: Act as if.

Shawn Stevenson: What does that mean?

Jack Canfield: Act as if it means you start acting as if you already have the thing you want. You start acting as if you already are the thing you want to become. I tell a story in the book about when I used to live in Pacific Palisades in LA, used to go to the Wells Fargo Bank, and there was a bank teller who had a little string tie with a little cowboy thing. And he never quite looked like he was a bank manager. The guy next to him, always dressed in a suit, looked like a bank manager. Two years later, the guy in the suit's the bank manager. He's taking loans and all that. So he started acting like he was a bank manager long before he became one. I remember when I bought my first suit, I bought something... Today, I don't wear suits that much 'cause we would live in California, you don't have to. But when I was living in Chicago, I bought a suit that was a little more expensive than I probably could afford, but I knew I wanted to look the part. I wanted to start being that person.

A lot of people, they don't tithe. They don't give money back because they think, "Well, I'll do that when I'm rich." No, if you could take 10% of your money and give it... You got to do it when you're starting out. So you act as if you're already one. Nobody tips somebody if they feel poor; they tip them if they feel rich. So simply by tipping somebody, I'm saying, "I have enough. I have abundance in my life." Start acting with gratitude, start dressing a certain way, start being happy. How would you be? I do an exercise in my workshop, two of them. One is called The Millionaire Cocktail Party. So I ask everyone to stand up and pretend you're a millionaire. And if you're already a millionaire, pretend you're 10 times your net worth. Now, go around and interact with everyone as if you're this millionaire or multi-millionaire.

Everyone's different. "Hey, how're you doing? Just came back from the Cayman Islands," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, "And here's my yacht, I did this, we travel." And I said stop after maybe 15 minutes. "How do you feel?" "Amazing!" "Now, were you different?" "Yeah." "How are you different?" "I was more confident, I had more energy, I was more generous, I was more present to people." "Now, what changed?" "Nothing but the belief that you were already a millionaire. You didn't have any more money, but you acted differently because of your belief." And that's the kind of belief when you act that way, that actually produces people wanting to be with you, and play with you, and give you the... Play with you to be a millionaire because people want to play with people that have up energy. They want to play with people that are confident. They want to play with people who are certain. Certainly sells, you probably heard that.

So then, I had them do another thing called Come as You’ll Be Party. So at the end of our workshop, we have a two-hour cocktail party where everyone comes in costume, meaning if you're going to be getting a Nobel Prize, show up in a tuxedo and have your mock Nobel Prize with you. If you just wanted an Oscar, get one of those Oscars you can buy at the LA Airport that are just made out of plastic. We had one woman, she wanted to interview people on the red carpet. She actually rented a red carpet and got a camera guy to come out. Everyone coming into the party, she interviewed them as if they were coming into the Oscar awards. And have your best-selling book, just make a mock cover, put it on there, talk about it. I can't stop that party. I want them to go in and have dinner after that at 8 o'clock and nobody wants to go, they're having too much fun. And within two to three years, almost everything that they acted as if, they have. It's phenomenal. It's the most powerful way to create what we call cognitive dissonance or this...

You have your belief about what's possible, and then you have your current reality. And if I keep believing this, it creates a structural tension between the belief and the reality, so I want to heighten that structural tension. Advertisers do this to us all the time. "Imagine yourself behind the wheel of this car." Or what they do? "If you come in and test drive a new Porsche, we'll give you a free toaster." Now, I'm test driving my new car. I get back in my old car, my old car was fine until, "Ugh, I liked that Porsche a lot better." So we want to purposely use what people do to sell the stuff we don't need to impress people we don't know to actually get what we want. And that's the way you do that.

Shawn Stevenson: Use the power for good, that's brain entrainment.

Jack Canfield: It is brain entrainment, yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. So that's so remarkable because we really operate from the way that our brains are wired up. It's difficult to try to fight against it, and also there's a statement that in neurology that, "Neurons that fire together wire together."

Jack Canfield: Yes.

Shawn Stevenson: And so these connections are not necessarily easy to break, but it is much easier to build new ones. And as those are firing, the other ones can start to dwindle away a little bit. So proactively acting as-if is one of the most, for me even healing, even going through a process of getting better seeing yourself as that person and starting to let go of the fear of the pain or the injury as much as you can. And it just even immediately starts to change the chemistry in your body. You start to produce new neurotransmitters and hormones. It just helps you to feel better. And when you feel better, it's easier to be that person.

Jack Canfield: Absolutely. It's funny I'm remembering my father-in-law when my youngest son was about two. He fell and hurt his leg and he started limping and crying. And my father-in-law said, "Christopher, show me how you used to walk before you fell". And he walked perfectly. He said, "Keep doing that."

Shawn Stevenson: Powerful. Just yesterday the kids were out in our neighborhood riding bikes and somebody fell and they're just it's so extra, especially. And they're looking for you, "Where are you at so you can see my pain."

Jack Canfield: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: But he just got up and walked it off.

Jack Canfield: If you're not there to go, "Oh my God," they just get up and walk away. Exactly.

Shawn Stevenson: So this is really pulling just section one but going into part two a little bit. And we'll just touch on a little bit more here. Transform yourself for success. There's quite a few powerful principles here but I just want to talk about a few of them. One of them is to drop out of the "ain't it awful club", and surround yourself with successful people.

Jack Canfield: Well, Jim Rohn is one of our great philosophers of success once said, "You're the average of the five to 10 people you spend the most time with." And we've done research on that. The A students in school hung out with the A students. The B students hung out with the B students. The gang bangers out with the gang bangers. The Goths hang out with the Goths. The Hippies hung out with the Hippies, etcetera. And so basically, if you want to be successful, hang out with successful people. Just to give you an example. In my own life, there was a guy named Lou Tice who since passed away, but he was doing the work I wanted to do at a very high level at this thing called the Pacific Institute teaching people about goal setting and visualization, affirmation. He was making $8 million a year. At that time I was making $140 thousand a year.

So I said, "I got something to learn from him." So I called him up and I said, "Lou, if you ever come to LA, I want to be your chauffeur. So instead of hiring a limo, let me drive you around. All I ask is I can ask you questions." I'm probably in my late 30s, early 40s at that point. And so, one day he calls me up and he says, "Jack, you mentioned... I'm going to come to LA. I'm giving a talk at a country club, pick me up at the airport, take me to the hotel, take me to the country club, back to the hotel." So I pick him up. I drill him with questions. He's very open, answers all the questions that I have for him. And about a year later, we both bid for a contract for the LA Unified school district or LA county office of education and they were wanting to have a orientation program for people on welfare to train them to go to work. And up at that time, their orientation program wasn't working. 85% of the people went through orientation, never showed up for job training. That's called a failure.

Shawn Stevenson: Absolutely.

Jack Canfield: So we both bid on that. It was a $750 thousand contract. And I won, and Lou lost. We were the last two people. He called me up and said, "You're a really good student."

Shawn Stevenson: That's really cool. That's cool.

Jack Canfield: But if you hang out with people who are successful, they think different. One of my friends says, "They think with more zeros after the sums of money they want in their life." And the way they think, what they read, where they eat, how they hang out, what they talk about, all that is learnable. And so, long before I could afford I would always upgrade with miles to business class, use my miles for that rather than getting a free vacation to Hawaii so I could sit next to people. And I remember once I'm sitting on the plane coming back from New York and the guy next to me we started talking. Turns out he's the guy that sells the advertising. Let's say you got a Visa bill and you open it up and there's little flap in there where you can rip it off and it's selling you something. You can subscribe to a magazine or something. So we talked about that and he liked me so much and what I was doing he gave me a real good deal to put our stuff about our books "Chicken Soup" in the Visa bills. So if I hadn't been in business class, I wouldn't have had that conversation.

Shawn Stevenson: Wow, so true.

Jack Canfield: There's a guy I wrote about it The Success Principles book, the first book. He was one of the top salespeople for insurance. And he thought it was the other guy was even better. So he called up the guy and says, "Next time you take a trip could I buy the seat next to you if you're flying from New York to Cleveland or whatever and just ask you questions?" And the guy said, "That's the most interesting proposal I've ever done." So yes. And so he did the same thing. When you're with people like that, ask questions. People love to share. 99% of people will share with you how they got where they are.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. That's so funny how that works.

Jack Canfield: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: My friend. Jim Kwik said that most people are tuned into... Their favorite station is W-I-I-F-M, what's in it for me. And also, we're tuned in to our own world, our own ego. So people want to talk about themselves. They want to share. It's just giving people the opportunity. So often when we're trying to connect with somebody, we're trying to tell them how important we are instead of allowing them to talk and to share what they have to share.

Jack Canfield: When I got inducted into the speaker's hall of fame, there was a cocktail party at the National Speakers Association. And I was allowed to go to that 'cause these guys were. So I go there and I meet this guy. He's the youngest bank president ever in the history of the banking world and Summers White's his name. And I'd walk in and he walks up to me and he says, "You're Jack." I said, "Yeah." And he started interviewing me. So the whole cocktail party he's the only guy I ever talk to. And all he did was interview me, "What about this?" and "How did you do that?" I got out of there. I called my wife I said, "I just met the most interesting man I've ever met." And she said, "Well, tell me about him."

Jack Canfield: I said I can't. What I realized, I thought he was interesting 'cause he was interested in me.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah.

Jack Canfield: And I'm still here, you know, ten years later talking about him.

Shawn Stevenson: That's crazy.

Jack Canfield: Because he asked me questions and I got to... And I love the guy 'cause he was interested in me.

Shawn Stevenson: Wow, so awesome, so powerful. I hope everybody really gets that. That's so powerful. So, something really cool, this is one of the coolest things in the book, from my perspective, and prior to me reading this, this is something that I would talk about because we tend to be so focused on all of the bad things that have happened in our lives. We tend to be so focused on the troubles we're experiencing. Our brains, we've kind of evolved. We got these primitive parts of our brain, amygdala. It can hijack things and it's kind of... We're looking for problems.

Jack Canfield: Sure.

Shawn Stevenson: But in the book, one of the principles is to acknowledge our positive past.

Jack Canfield: Yes.

Shawn Stevenson: Talk about why you put that there.

Jack Canfield: Well, I teach something called the poker chip theory of self-esteem. The idea of poker chips is, if you and I were playing poker, and I have 100 chips, and you have 10; you'd probably play more cautiously. You lose two bets of five, you're out of the game. I lose two bets of five, I've got 90 left, so I can throw away five, no big deal. So if I can build up your stack of chips, you're more willing to risk because you now have extra chips. The same is true with self-esteem. The more self-esteem and the more self-confidence, the more self-concept you have, the more willing you are to risk rejection because you know you're okay. So, basically, it's important to look at your past and realize you've had a lot of successes. Most people, if I said, write down ten great successes, most people go, "God, have I had ten great successes?" I said, "How about getting a driver's license?" They go, "Oh, yeah, when I was 16, that was huge."

Now it doesn't seem so big. How about graduating high school? For a lot of kids, that was like, hey, man, I'm lucky I got out of there. The fact that you survived the war in Vietnam, or the war in Iraq now, or the war in Afghanistan, to be more current. So the reality is that we all have numerous successes that we don't really acknowledge, and we tend to focus on what's wrong with us rather than what's right with us. You know from your research with brain that, basically, when I have an event and there's an emotional negative component to that event, it logs in as a way to protect me from having that in the future. So, basically, I much more quickly remember my negative experiences than my positive experiences. So what we want to do is I do things like write down 100 successes you've had in your life, and people have to strain, like, well... They end up with stuff like passed Mrs. Jones' Biology class, passed fourth grade, past fifth grade, passed sixth grade, but then they start to realize, I bought that first car. I bought that first this. I put on that really good party from my boss. I put together that trip to the Andes for my friends. We have many, many more successes than we do failures. We just tend to focus on the failures. So it's a way to get people to shift their focus to the positive things that they have had, and to be grateful for them, and to honor them.

Shawn Stevenson: And even when negative things do happen, we've made it through, if you're here in this time now.

Jack Canfield: You have. I like to say, in one of my books, you've survived everything that ever happened to you. So think about that, you've survived everything that ever happened to you, which gives you a lot of sense that I'm going to survive the next things that happen to me because I'm a survivor, so, yeah, absolutely.

Shawn Stevenson: You also have a principle, to keep your eye on the prize. As soon as I read this, I immediately thought of Martin Luther King.

Jack Canfield: Yes.

Shawn Stevenson: Then I remember hearing a story about you were actually a part of the Civil Rights Movement.

Jack Canfield: I was.

Shawn Stevenson: And going to church, it was Jesse...

Jack Canfield: Jesse Jackson.

Shawn Stevenson: Jackson's church in Chicago, right?

Jack Canfield: Yeah, yeah, yeah. My friend who got me to go to that workshop I mentioned earlier where I met the head of the Center for Human Potential, he was also very involved in something called Operation Breadbasket which was Jesse Jackson's idea; said, "If the white man is not going to lift you up, you got to lift yourself up." They called it Operation Bootstrap, just grab your own boots and lift yourself up. So he took me to Jesse's Church, and I spent a year going to Jesse Jackson's Church, which was way cool because all these celebrities would come through Chicago. Sidney Poitier stepped on my foot. Bill Cosby, he's got his problems now, but back when he was a big deal, when he was a comedian, he stood next to me on the side 'cause we both got there late to church. When you're 22 or 23, that's a big freaking deal.

Shawn Stevenson: Absolutely, yeah.

Jack Canfield: I learned a lot from Jesse about how to work a group. Jesse would be up there, and he'd be talking. All of a sudden he'd go like this, and the band would start to play. I thought, oh, that's cool. I want to learn how to do that.

Shawn Stevenson: That's powerful.

Jack Canfield: He is the one that taught me to work with big groups. Most therapists, which is what I was trained to be after I was a high school teacher, you got 30 kids in a class or 20 people in the group. I wanted to work with hundreds and thousands of people to hold different game, to control and manipulate and move that kind of energy. A Tony Robbins can do, I can do, and so forth. But, yeah, I taught the inter-city schools for a couple of years. I was teaching when Martin Luther King was killed. We had a riot in my school. I literally saved a kid from being killed. A fireman came in, this big 6-foot-3 basketball player, ran into the back when we turned around with those axes that has a point like this, and he's going to do that to the kid. I don't know where I got the strength to do it, but I just grabbed this axe from behind him. He turned around to me, and I said, "You really don't want to do that." He went, "You're right." So I've been through... I marched in Chicago with King. I marched the Democratic Convention where they beat up all the "hippies". I was always involved in wanting to empower people who weren't empowered.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, so in that context, keep your eye on the prize, how does that apply in our individual lives?

Jack Canfield: Well, what it means is, once you have a goal, don't give up, focus on it. Do the affirmations, do the visualization, create a vision board, act as if it's possible, tell people it's a done deal, put it on your website. I have a list of 134 goals I want to accomplish in my life. It's on my website. Everybody can read it. When they do... Kenny Rogers, who I wanted to meet, it's on my website and list; he calls me up and says, "I hear I'm on your website, and you want to meet me." I said, I do. He said, "Well I want to meet you." I said, "Why?" He said... I said, "I want to meet you 'cause you're a singer," and he wanted to meet me because I was a writer. He wanted to write a bestselling book. So he invited me to Vegas, come backstage with him. The Righteous Brothers and a bunch of other singers were there.

Shawn Stevenson: Come on.

Jack Canfield: I got to... I mean, how cool is that? I wanted to go to the CMA Awards. I get an email. "Hi, I'm the director of the CMA Awards, Country Music Awards. I love country music, and if you want to come to New York, I can get you backstage. So, let people know what you want to do. Often, people will come forward and want to help you to do it. So never feel like it's a bad thing to put it out there. But every day, one of the things I learned in India is pretty esoteric, but the point was, one guy was saying, you create a white frame above your right eye. So, there's a white frame out here and you visualize your goal is already achieved every day while you're pressing right here on this finger. This activates clarity of what you want and then if you want, if you're having trouble getting the image, you can tap right here as you hold that. And there's a mantra, which I won't try to teach people, but the mantra is an accelerator, but it's not required. Just an affirmation.

Like I'm so happy and grateful I now have a million-dollar year income. So happy and grateful my book has just sold a million copies of the success principles workbook. I'm so happy and grateful that I am totally healthy and cancer-free, whatever you might want to say. That principle of keeping your eye on the prize, if you have a vision board, with your goals on it, if you're visualizing it every night before you go to bed and every morning when you wake up, those are the things you want to do. Like, I have a door, it's a whole door. My vision board's a door, the inside door in my office. All the things I want to accomplish are on that door. I never go out that door without stopping for a moment and looking at each of those things and imagining already having it. When I get it, I take it off, then I put something new up there. So, it's magical, there's so much trying to distract you. Think about all the social media you get. All of the ads that you don't want to look at. All of the…Thank God for the fast forward on the DIVO or whatever you call it.

Shawn Stevenson: It's an entirely different landscape and that's why I was so interested to talk to you because you've seen these different generations.

Jack Canfield: Yes.

Shawn Stevenson: That are still, we still all want the same things.

Jack Canfield: Yes.

Shawn Stevenson: But the landscape of how to get those things is so changed.

Jack Canfield: Yes.

Shawn Stevenson: For the better and for the not-so-better. There's more distraction, but there's also more opportunity.

Jack Canfield: More opportunity. I always say if the internet had been around when I was in my 20s, I'd be a lot wealthier sooner, because we had to go out and do book signings at 100 book stores in order to market a book. And now because of the internet, I can come to you and reach a million people talking about the book. So it's possible. I always tell people, if you're an author, you're probably not going to be an overnight success. It's going to take some work. It took me a lot of years to get to where I am, but it's like the airplane taking off. It doesn't take off right away. It's building up speed and then all of a sudden, it goes like this and then, and then all of a sudden it goes to 35,000 feet and now there's a lot less drag, it's much easier. So don't freak out when you're still getting speed on the runway. Eventually, it'll take off. And today with all the multipliers there are with social media and the internet and mastermind groups and tribes and all this kind of stuff, it is definitely much more possible to get there faster.

Shawn Stevenson: Jack, in the book and in the workbook, you cover some other sections on building wealth, because you can't do this stuff for ourselves on building a team. So much good stuff.

Jack Canfield: You have to have a mastermind group, an accountability partner, a team of people that you work with to support you. I know you're a member of probably more than one mastermind group. You mentioned one of them to me earlier today and I'm a member of three. And I have 12 staff who are totally devoted, not just to me, but to the work and partnering up. I love that there's... We always say you can get there faster if you work with a master and you can get there faster if you have a team. There's a wonderful African proverb, says, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, travel together.

Shawn Stevenson: I love it. That's a good place to wrap right there, because for me and having the opportunity to now meet you and to go through the book, I'm telling you, you're literally just dripping gems everywhere. Everything that you say is just amazing. So many times while you were talking, telling stories like I mentioned on our break here, I was just riveted. I forgot everything else that I wanted to talk about and I'm just listening to the stories. It's really profound. This is why Chicken Soup for the Soul is just so remarkable. But also just your life experience, the things that you've done, and accomplished. You shared with me, before this show, all the different places that you've lived and it's just a wonderful tapestry and I'm just excited to see what you do next. I'm grateful to have a little part in this new book and I want to make sure everybody picks it up. So can you let everybody know where they can go and grab their copy of, The Success Principles Workbook?

Jack Canfield: Sure. You can go to Amazon.com, BarnsandNobel.com, most of the big book stores will have it in your local area. If you got here, you can go to our website and order it through Amazon and I'm going to do a free seminar, probably a couple of them, over the next couple of months, for people. We're going to teach a masterclass where we're going to talk about, not so much the stories I've been telling, but going through the techniques with people so they can actually experience some of those things. Just go to JackCanfield.com and we have so many online courses and things we're doing, but my biggest thrill right now is training trainers. And so, if you're interested in learning how to teach other people to be empowered, please go to JackCanfield.com and learn about that. You'll become part of the Canfield family and it's an awesome tribe.

Shawn Stevenson: Perfect. Yes, absolutely. And Jack, again, thank you so much for putting your life experience into these books for us and it is a true pleasure to hang out with you. So, thanks for coming.

Jack Canfield: Thank you. I feel the same way with you. So, thank you.

Shawn Stevenson: Thank you. Awesome. Everybody, thank you so much for tuning into the show today. I think a good place to summarize everything was the story he shared about Kenny Rogers. Most people, when they see me, they wouldn't think that I grew up on Kenny Rogers, but I did. Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton duet, come on now. My grandma played it.

Jack Canfield: Islands In The Stream.

Shawn Stevenson: Yes! Ah, it's in my blood. It's is in my blood. But he also shared the scenario about The Poker and Kenny Rogers is The Gambler. So when he was talking, I was just clicking these things together. But what it really boils down to is aligning ourselves with people who can further your career, further your self-development, further your health. That's what it's really about and it's so beautiful that he put a focus on that in the workbook of creating a team. And for a lot of us, we might think, "Well I don't have the capacity. I don't know who to talk to. I don't have the money. I don't have the resources," and we start, boom, we start coming up with the excuses. That's one of the first things we highlight and how our excuses block us from success. I promise, I guarantee you, no matter where you are in your life right now, there are people that you can bring into your world, that you can align yourself with that can help to help you to achieve any and every goal that you have for yourself. The first part is, of course, have the audacity to have the goals that you actually really want. And then, putting these things into play and having a great workbook, like Jack put together, is a great manual to help you to get to where you want to be. So I appreciate you so much for tuning into the show today.

Shawn Stevenson: Make sure you pick up a copy right now, The Success Principles Workbook, available. Even if you didn't read the New York Times Best Seller, over a million copies sold, Original Success Principles. There's a good summation of everything here in the book, but why not get both? Alright, but most importantly, like Jack talked about, read a little less, do a little bit more. Alright, we don't want to just walk around being human filing cabinets. We want to do something with this work. Alright. And if you got a lot of value out of this episode, make sure to share this out on social media. You can tag me. I'm @ShawnModel. And Jack, you're on Instagram? What's your Instagram?

Jack Canfield: Yeah, @JackCanfield, I think.

Shawn Stevenson: @JackCanfield, he thinks. Try it out. You'll probably find him. He's on Facebook as well, it'll be Jack Canfield on Facebook too. So you tag him there too. And just let us know what you thought about the episode and we've got some epic shows coming your way very soon. So make sure to stay tuned. Take care. Have an amazing day and I'll talk with you soon. And for more after the show, make sure to head over to the ModelHealthShow.com. That's where you can find all of the show notes. You can find transcriptions, videos for each episode and if you've got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well. And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome and I appreciate that so much and take care. I promise to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life. Thanks for tuning it.