SHAWN STEVENSON: Welcome to the Model Health Show, this is fitness and nutrition expert, Shawn Stevenson, and I'm so grateful for you tuning in with me today. One of the primary controllers of our health and of our success in life is our beliefs. That's right, our beliefs are controlling every single thing about our own personal reality. What's said is that your outer world is a direct reflection of your inner world.

And truly, if we're talking about the psychological construct of the human mind, our beliefs are the generator of our thoughts, and our thoughts are the generator of our actions. And our actions, when done consistently, are the foundational seed of our habits, and our habits determine our ultimate destination. The things that we don't just see every now and then, but the things that we see consistently in our lives are based upon, finally, the final step is the things that we're doing habitually. But at its core, the first and foundational thing is the beliefs.

And right now we're living at a time where our beliefs can be very disempowering. The very thing that is manifesting our thoughts and influencing our actions and our habitual actions, and thereby determining the success or lack thereof that we're seeing in our lives, in our health, in our happiness, in our relationships. It really boils down to the beliefs.

And so being that this is a foundational aspect of our health that needs far more attention, because it's truly controlling our perception of reality, our perception of ourselves and the actions that we take and the results that we see, I want to continue to empower you, provide you with messages of empowerment and resources and different voices, to remind you of how powerful you are to effect change, to believe what you want to believe, to think what you want to think.

And if we're talking about a biochemical level, your thoughts create chemistry in your body instantaneously. Every thought you think changes your biochemistry. Every single cell in your body is influenced by your thoughts. And here's the key. We can be habitually thinking thoughts that create a condition within our system, a biochemistry, an environment that is conducive to ill health, to disease.

Or we can be habitually thinking the thoughts that create a biochemistry or an environment within our body that is conducive or affirmative for our health. Healthy lymphatic fluid, healthy cell replication, healthy generation of neurons. And the list goes on and on and on. Our thoughts influence all of these things, that's how powerful we are.

And so on this episode, I wanted to bring together a myriad of some of the most empowering voices, to provide a message of encouragement right now, and again, to direct us to turn within and to remember how powerful we are to effect change in our lives, in our families' lives, and in the world around us. And I think you're really, really going to enjoy this.

So first things first, I really want to implore you, because truly, I want you to be stronger both mentally and physically than you've ever been. We need to be stronger than we've ever been. So really focusing on getting our minds right, getting our bodies in a place where we feel capable, where we feel strong, where we feel like we can face the odds and overcome them.

We've got to be ready for whatever life is going to throw at us, because we're dealing with a little bit of... Maybe a Tetris scenario, maybe a little bit of Space Invaders, you really don't know what's coming down the pipe, but you can start to learn the patterns. But being able to get to that place where we feel capable of learning those patterns, to be able to adapt and to be able to pivot and to overcome obstacles, we need to feel stronger than ever.

And so obviously the foundational piece is, what is your body made of? Are you providing your incredible body and brain with the raw materials, the base nutrients that create your tissues, that allow for the miraculous process of creating new brain cells or new stem cells that become really anything and everything the body needs, are we providing our bodies with those foundational things?

So this is a time more than ever to get ourselves connected to real superfood nutrition. So in addition to eating real whole foods, making that the dominant place in our diet, we can have a little bit of the other stuff, but making sure that whole real foods are the foundational tenet in our diet, and then adding in real clinically proven superfood concentrates like for example, spirulina, it has a compound called phycocyanin, very, very rare nutrient.

And this is one of the rare nutrients ever discovered to stimulate stem cell genesis, the creation of new stem cells, which in some guilds of thought for decades, this was just deemed to be something that we can't really do readily, we can't necessarily bring something in from our nutrition to stimulate and to support this process. Now we know different. And spirulina is one of those super... This is why it gets a title like "superfoods", because it has these rare nutrients that do these very unique things in our bodies.

It's also the most dense protein food ever discovered. It's 71% protein by weight. 71% protein by weight. Absolutely loaded with amino acids, use... We say these things, but really get this, these amino as are the building blocks of all of our tissues, so it's kind of important. Also great resource of magnesium, vitamin A, the list goes on and on.

Spirulina, and I combine that with chlorella, which is an incredibly dense source of chlorophyll, thus the name "chlorella", but it also has these unique compounds that have been found to, and again, this is clinically proven, to support chelation of things like heavy metals, for example. And rare compounds like chlorella growth factor that has some really remarkable benefits in the human body as well. We also know the chlorophyll has been clinically proven to help to reduce the desire for hyper-palatable foods. And these are the things that we have readily available to us once we become aware of them.

So I have both of these superfoods combined in addition to moringa, in addition to ashwagandha, in a formula that tastes amazing. Everybody should be utilizing the green juice formula from Organifi. Again, right now, more than ever, get your superfood nutrition, get your nutritional basis covered. Go to organifi.com/model, that's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I/model. You get 20% off an incredible green juice formula, all organic, cold processed, real superfood concentrates.

Alright, so organifi.com/model, 20% off. Their red juice formula is amazing as well. Their Gold formula, it's just absolutely... It's done the right way, company is stepping up to do things with integrity. So again, organifi.com/model for 20% off. Now, let's get to the Apple Podcast review of the week.

ITUNES REVIEW: Another five-star review titled "Speaks the truth," by Jerry 4567. "Love this podcast, just found it during COVID, and the only place to get accurate info regarding health. COVID is political, and he steps away from that and looks at what is really going on. I'm implementing tips he gives a little at a time and seeing the benefits. He has a lot of great people on too. Please stay strong and continue to speak the truth."

SHAWN STEVENSON: Thank you so much for leaving that review over on Apple Podcast. And this should be something that we all strive for, and not just our unique truth, but taking a meta perspective, getting comfortable with looking at things that we might not necessarily believe in, and taking everything into consideration.

Because right now we're dealing with an incredibly complex issue that is something that would deem to be a health issue that has become widely politicized, that has become a societal conditioning and a very big shift in the way that we interact with each other as humans and the way that we conduct in the realm of business and society and education, it's having such an impact on all these other domains. We need to talk about it.

We need to make sure that we are stepping up, sharing our voice, being open to learning and discussing, and you know what we do here, we focus on the peer-viewed evidence. And there is... Of course, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence, there's a lot of observational studies we do our best to identify when we've got randomized controlled trials we've got meta-analysis to look at a bigger database.

But also it's important to know that in this current climate, a lot of these things are being suppressed. They're getting censored, they're diluting and moving the conversation about science to one very vanilla isolated one-size-fits-all thing. And that is literally the opposite of what science is. Science is never definite, and it's definitely not a one-size-fits-all societal approach. If something hints of that, that's when we need to have the red flags popping up left and right.

Alright, so with that said, even with the complexity of the terrain today, we can still feel empowered to speak our truth, to share our voice, and to also come from a place of compassion and understanding and knowing that other folks who might not agree with you, they're not necessarily trying to be a bad person or trying to hurt you or other people.

Folks, especially when we get into a state where we're driven by fear, where we're inundated with misconception about who's actually looking out for us and who's controlling regulation as far as what's getting onto the market, and understanding many of these organizations are proven to be corrupt.

From, if we look at Pfizer being forced to pay the largest healthcare fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice. It's not made up, it's not imaginary, it's not because I like to say it and find some little... No, it's because it's a fact. And yet these are the entities that we're looking towards like they are not criminal organizations.

And that's just one thing, that's just one thing that they got caught doing. They got caught doing many other things, testing experimental drugs on children in another country, illegally. And they got caught and... It's just nuts, it's just nuts. But these things, once we get 'em out and we talk about 'em, it starts to... The logic starts to surface and we start to actually put pieces together.

Because that's what life is really about, is creating your own patchwork quilt that is your story, and being able to take your experiences, being open and building upon them to create the life that you really desire and deserve, and help other people to do the same. But again, to do that, we've got to remain in our power and to be ready for the complexity ahead. So again, I want you to focus on getting stronger, both physically and mentally to be able to do what you've got to do, and I know you've got the power to do it.

And this episode, I want to share with you some messages from some of the most remarkable people in the world to remind you how remarkable you are. And today we're going to kick things off with one of the most in-demand speakers in the world, New York Times bestselling author, Lisa Nichols. So open your heart, open your mind, and let Lisa remind you how powerful you are.

LISA NICHOLS: You know tomorrow you're going to get 24 hours in the day, you know that. You know you're not going to get 23, you know you won't get 25. So my question to you, sister, my question to you, brother, is when will you love you enough to give yourself just one of the 24? You don't run out of time. You simply allocated all your time to someone that you put in front of you.

I'm going to follow it with this statement, I say it in love. You will always, as a leader, as a game-changer, as a gladiator, you will always have a long line of people waiting to be served by you. You will always. People will knock down your door to get in your life. Here is my question, when will you put yourself at the front of your own line?

And I say that because it took a doctor telling me. I was in Utah. My doctor called me on Zoom and said, "You are morbidly obese. You're over 220 pounds, you have severe sleep apnea, and you travel over 258 days out the year. And when other people go to work, to sit down to work, you go to work and get on stage and push out the little energy that you have from your sleep deprived body."

"Lisa, it's not a matter of if you're going to have a heart attack, it's a matter of when will you have it? And where will you be?" The doctor went on to say, "Will you be on stage in front of your audience? Will you be in the air on a plane? Will you be at home and fun of your son, Jelani? Or will you be in a hotel room by yourself?"

I thought she was cruel. I thought she was cruel to make me have that kind of fear. And then she followed it with this. She said, "The only reason why I'm saying this to you this way, it's because I've sat in your audience and I've experienced your gift, and I need to disrupt you enough to be radical. And so I'm not disrupting you or poking you for the sake of doing it, it's because someone is ready to be blessed by your gift."

Someone is ready to be touched by your soul, someone's ready. And until you handle the self-care, until you prioritize you, until you move to the front of your own line the way I had to do, you won't be able to give the world the all of you that you know you have to do. And my grandmother just transitioned.

And my grandmother would say, "Baby, when you get my age," she was 92 years and nine months when she transitioned, laid down to rest in peace and she's resting in peace 'cause she played full out. She said, "Baby when you get my age, you're supposed to sit in your favorite rocking chair," and I bought granny a good rocking chair, y'all.

"And you're supposed to share the stories of your life," she said, "but baby, when you're your age, you're just supposed to do one thing, do everything in your power to make sure that the story is going to be good to share." You are protecting your future memories of yourself. Me being radical about my health, you getting radical about your health, you becoming non-negotiable about your health, is about protecting your future memories about yourself.

That when you sit in that rocking chair, you want to look back and say, "I played full out for me first, and then I served everybody else from my overflow." That's your job, that every day that's your job, every day that's your job. And allow us to witness and be the beneficiaries of you playing full out.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Next up in this compilation of empowerment, we've got somebody who's truly tapped in to what greatness is. He is the personal coach, personal trainer of Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, just to name a few. He knows what it takes to rise above the conflict, to rise above the obstacles, to rise above the challenge, to rise to the occasion and to tap into greatness. So check out this message from the amazing Tim Grover.

TIM GOVER: I've talked to every person I've ever coached, for the business, to the athletes, whoever it is. I say, "Do you have fear?" "I have fear all the time." They have fear all the time. Now, does that fear makes, freezes you in one spot, does it paralyze you? Or does that fear propel you forward? That's how you have to look at it.

So this is what they do, they all have fear, but they don't have doubt. There's a huge difference between fear and doubt. Fear is instinctive. Fear is instinctive. Alright, that's something that's telling you, "Hey, listen." If you don't have fear, whatever you're chasing, whatever your win is, whatever race you win, it's not big enough. It's not big enough.

So we all... Fear is instinctive. Doubt is something we bring on ourselves. And a lot of times the doubt we bring on ourselves is manifested through what other people tell us, through their thoughts, through their ideas, which we start... Which we start to believe. And the people that win, take other people's doubts and they use them for energy, they don't hold on to 'em. It's like a workout, it's like an empty calorie.

It's like an empty calorie, it serves no purpose. You got to burn it off. You can use it for fuel and get rid of it. So everybody's going to have fear, you're supposed to have fear. But you cannot have any doubt that, "This is going to do it." I'd rather have you fail at something and say, "I went after it," than not... Than be frozen by doubt and never given that, and never go after that opportunity. And that's what most people do from a health standpoint.

Yeah, when you give 'em a nutrition plan, when you tell them, "These are the things that you have to do," there's some fear in you, there's some, "Wow, I got to give up this, I got to do this, I got it here, by my sleeping habits here, this is what's going to happen." From a physical standpoint, mental. And you're like, "Man, can I do all this? Can I do all this? Can I do all this?" But the ones have been like, "You know what," just like you said, when your podcast sitting in Missouri, you had no doubt. You had no doubt.

Said, "We're going to do this," and that's what you did. So things that people think are negative, the greatest athletes in the world have the fear. They have the fear. Michael Jordan used to tell me all the time, "Every time I get out on the basketball court, yeah, there's a fear of me not playing at my highest level, but I have no doubt on what the outcome is going to be." He always says, he goes, "I've never lost a game in my life, I just ran out of time."

SHAWN STEVENSON: Up next in our Empowerment compilation, we have somebody who truly knows what it takes to tap into our greatness. We've got undefeated boxing champion, Laila Ali. She's also a bestselling author, incredible chef, so her cookbook is like a must-have, for sure. And also she's been a host of a myriad of different television shows, actress, the list goes on and on.

She's done so many amazing things. Also, her father, Muhammad Ali, if we're talking about the greatest of all time, it's synonymous with his name. So next up, to again remind you of how powerful you are, check out this message from Laila Ali.

LAILA ALI: I've always had some defiance inside of me, and it really worked out in my favor some of the time, not all the time. But in this particular situation especially, because even though my father is the greatest to so many people and so respected and loved, I saw all his mistakes, I'm aware of his downfalls. There's so many. And that really shaped the way I see the world, the way I see people.

So you can be good at something, it doesn't mean you know everything, it doesn't mean you have all the answers, for me. And a lot of times we give our opinion based off of our own perception or our own life experience. So I had to take that into consideration. I might ask him his opinion on one thing and listen because I respect his opinion on it, I'm like, "You know, yeah, he knows." I'm going to come to you for nutrition advice, but I might not come to you for some other advice, "Well, no, Shawn... “You know? It depends...

SHAWN STEVENSON: Don't come to me for surfing. I don't...

LAILA ALI: For what?

SHAWN STEVENSON: Surfing.

LAILA ALI: Okay, see

SHAWN STEVENSON: Surfboard, I don't know nothing about.

LAILA ALI: Right. So for my father, that defiance was there, just kind of like, "So the reason I can't do it is because I'm a woman? The reason I can't do it is because it's too hard?" That right there is going to go in one ear and out the other. Now, if he would have said something to me that resonated and made sense, and made me say, "Oh, okay," maybe I would have listened, but his reasoning just wasn't there.

And at the end of the day, to answer your question, I know how to go with my... I know how to go with what's in my heart. You see what I'm saying? So if I'm going to be wrong, I want it to be wrong 'cause of the decision I made off of following my own heart. Not because I listen to someone else and then have regrets later. I'm not afraid to fail at something that I'm super passionate about, that I want really badly. If it doesn't work out, guess what, I'm going to try something else.

I'm going to learn from that and I'm going to move on, but I'm not going to be so afraid to try something because I'm worried about failing. And not only that, if I can see all these other people doing it already, how you going to say I can't do it? You see what I mean? So to me, it's not like, "Well, I'm the first woman ever," because I am the type of person that I'm very realistic, and I don't necessarily want to be trying something that I'm not passionate about and not sure about.

But I'm passionate about it, I want to do it, I've seen other people have done it before, why wouldn't I be able to do it? So that's something I don't understand, like when people hold themself back and it's like, you already see all these other people are doing it, why can't you? Why?

You have to let your passion drive you, 'cause the only reason I wasn't going to be able to do it is if I wasn't willing to work hard. Because these women were working hard to try to knock my head off. Trust me. They didn't like it. They didn't like all the attention I was getting. "Oh, Muhammad Ali's daughter, she's coming in here, she thinks she's going to get all the attention, she's thinks she's just going to jump all ahead of us." And then people judge you by your looks. I do it. I see a pretty girl, I'm like, "I'mma beat her ass."

You see what I'm saying? Because you just, you naturally, you can't help it, you naturally think they're not going to be as tough, you naturally think that. And it's like a subconscious. But I'm the same way. I'm just joking. I don't care if you pretty or ugly, I want to whoop your ass.

You're getting in the ring with me.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Just be clear.

LAILA ALI: Just be clear. I was just joking, but I know that people have that perception. So I had to work 10 times harder than everybody else, 'cause everybody fought me 10 times harder. And I was willing to do it because I wanted to be a champion so bad, so nothing was going to stop me. Not even the greatest.

SHAWN STEVENSON: If we're talking about the neuroscience of empowerment and actually getting in there and making changes to that amazing brain of yours, look no further, than Dr. Joe Dispenza. That's whose up next in this Empowerment compilation.

DR. JOE DISPENZA: Well, if you think about it, it's really common sense, some of the research shows that 90% of the thoughts that we think on a daily basis are the same thoughts as the day before, So if you think that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny, and 90% of your thoughts are the same known thoughts that you're always thinking, then your life should stay the same, because the same thoughts lead to the same choices, the same choices lead to the same behaviors.

The same behaviors create the same experiences, the same experiences produce the same emotions. Those same emotions tend to influence the way we think, and our biology or neurocircuitry or neurochemistry or hormones, and even our gene expression, is equal to how we think, how we act and how we feel. And how you think, how you act, and how you feel is called your personality, and your personality creates your personal reality. That's it.

So then it makes sense then, if you want to create a new personal reality, a new life, you're going to have to change your personality. And you got to start thinking about that you've been thinking about and change it. You got to become aware of your unconscious habits and behaviors, even how you speak, and you have to look at the emotions that you live by every single day and decide, "Do these emotions belong in my future?"

Many people try to create a new life as the same person, in order to create a new personal reality, you got to change your personality. So the principle neuro sign says that nerve cells that fire together wire together. Thinking the same way, making the same choices, demonstrating the same actions, creating the same experiences that stamp the same networks of neurons into the same patterns.

All for the familiar feeling called you. And you do that for 10 years in a row, well you're going to hardwire your brain into a very finite signature because you're firing and wiring that way. And that box in the brain that becomes our personality becomes our identity. By the time we're 35 years old, for the most part we've done something so many times that the body now knows how to do it as well as the mind, and that's a habit.

So we have these unconscious programs of behaviors, automatic habits, redundant emotional reactions, hardwired beliefs, perceptions, attitudes that function just like a computer program. You press "go" and it runs automatically. So then when it comes time to change, thinking positive way is going to do nothing, because your body has been conditioned for the most part into a program in the past, so the thought never makes it to the body, 'cause the body is on a different program.

So how do we begin to influence the body so that the thought actually produces some type of change? So think about if you think an unhappy though, you're going to feel unhappy. If you think you're a failure, you're going to feel like a failure. Once you feel like a failure, you're going to think you're a failure.

And people get caught in these loops of thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking, and that redundancy is a conditioning process, 'cause all you need is an image or a picture or a thought, and a feeling, a response, stimulus response. And so people tend to condition their brain and body into the past, and so when it comes time to change, you got to leave that familiar territory and any choice that you make, if you said, "Hey, I'm going to eat a better diet, I'm going to wake up early and work out, I'm going to do meditation."

The moment you decide to do something differently, get ready, 'cause it's going to feel uncomfortable, it's going to feel unfamiliar, there's going to be some uncertainty, you're not going to be able to predict the next moment. That means you've left your known biology and you're stepping into the unknown.

Now, theoretically, that sounds great, but if the body has been conditioned into a familiar feeling, it's in the known. The moment you take it outside the familiarity, it wants to go back to where it's comfortable. So the body starts influencing the mind, and this is where people say, "Oh why don't you to start your diet tomorrow? Why don't you start working out this evening? You're really never going to change. You're too tired. You have a headache, you know? This doesn't feel right."

And this is where people talk themselves out of it, because if they respond to that thought, that thought leads to the same choice, which leads to the same behavior, it creates the same experience, produces the same feeling, and then they say, "This feels right." No, that feels familiar. So going from one state of mind and body to another state of mind and body, you got to cross a river. And the hardest part about change is not making the same choice as you did the day before.

Now, once people understand that they're going to be uncomfortable, then the question is, what thoughts do you want to fire and wire in your brain? What behaviors will you demonstrate in one day? And the act of closing your eyes and rehearsing who you're going to be when you open your eyes, it begins to install neurological hardware in your brain to look like you've already done it.

Now the brain, which is typically a record of the past, now becomes a map to the future. And if you keep doing it, the hardware begins to become a software program and you start behaving differently. And then if you can teach your body emotionally what the future will feel like, that means then you're not going to wait for your wealth to feel abundant, or your success to feel empowered, or your new relationship to feel love.

In fact, the moment you start feeling abundant, you're generating wealth. The moment you start embracing empowerment, you're stepping towards your success. The moment you're in love with yourself and you're in love with life, you start creating equals in your life, now that's causing an effect in your life. So many people just, many people, they already know how to do this, but they usually wait for the worst thing to happen in their life before they get the wake-up call.

When we're looking at a person's brain in real time when they're going through some type of change or transformation, you see this massive amount of disorderliness going on in the brain, like the person is really losing their mind. All the circuitry is coming unglued, there's all this cognitive dissonance taking place, that's the moment they want to quit, that's the moment they want to give up. That's the moment they don't believe in anything, they believe in themselves.

That is the prime moment where change takes place. Right there. 'Cause that's the end. They're on the edge. On the edge there. So it's important for people to understand that if you're going about living every single day in the familiar life that you're living in, and you don't have a vision of the future, then you'll continue to live in routine.

And if you wake up every morning and do the same thing as you do the day before, over time, your body is going to be on auto-pilot and it's going to drag you into a predictable future based on what you did in the past. And many people lose their free will to a bunch of programs. So then when you sit down and you become conscious of your unconscious thoughts, when you're in the program, you're unconscious, right?

So the moment you become conscious of that thought, you're no longer the thought, you're observing the thought and you begin to objectify your subjective self, you start pulling out of the unconscious program, and consciousness awareness is the first step to do that. And so many people don't want to light a match in the dark place, because all of a sudden when they decide to be defined by a vision of the future, they're stepping out of the known.

You're going to hear, "I can't, it's too hard. It's not going to work. What about this?" And those are the thoughts that are standing in the way between that person and that vision, and it has to come up. And if a person has been in the habit of unconsciously complaining and making excuses and feeling sorry for themselves and judging other people, that's their habit.

The moment they become conscious of it, now they're out of the bleachers and they're on the field, 'cause now you have to not let that thought slip by your awareness unnoticed. And then if you're living in guilt or suffering or pain or unhappiness, but you live that way every day, and it just feels like you, and all of a sudden you become aware, "Oh my God, I've been guilty for the last 10 years, I didn't even know it, I just felt like me." You're starting to separate yourself from your biology.

And so you have to go through the process of unlearning before you re-learn, and that 95% of who we are, that is what's stopping us from stepping into a new future. So then if people that are waking up every single day... Think about this, the brain is a record of the past. If you wake up every morning and you start thinking about your problems and your problems are just memories that are etched in your brain, that are connected to certain people and problems and certain objects and things in certain times and places, the moment you start remembering your problems, you're thinking in the past, right?

And if every one of those problems has an emotion associated with it, and you start feeling bad or unhappy, now your body is in the past. So thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of your body, and how you think and how you feel creates your state of being. So most people then, they start their day in the familiar past, then they get up and they run through a routine series of behaviors, and their body's now habituated on autopilot into a predictable future. That's the known.

So the familiar past, the predictable future, are both the known. There's only one place where the unknown exists and that's the present moment. So then when you're creative, you got to be present, you got to pay attention to be creative, that defies or goes against the programming. And so then there's... There has to be some type of waging of intention that's greater than those programs, and most people, they get uncomfortable, they rather just get on their cell phone or turn on the TV and watch a football game, or distract themselves from that feeling.

But when people really make up their mind to change, they have to come up against those feelings, those habits, those hard-wired attitudes. And it takes a great act of will, but when we do it, the side effect is we see changes not only in our health, but in our lives as well. And then we say, "Wow, that really worked." And now we're the example of truth, that's what makes it so cool.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Remember, we want to be stronger both physically and mentally than ever, and that includes strengthening our immune system. We've all heard this before since we were kids, probably the importance of Vitamin C, but does this actually stack up when faced with this current terrain of the virus that's on everybody's mind.

Well, a new study, cited in the journal, PharmaNutrition, investigated the impact of vitamin C in relation to the cytokine activity associated with COVID-19, and found that vitamin C is remarkably effective by inhibiting the production of the cytokine storm. And that was one of the big issues that researchers and the public alike were concerned about, is the cytokine storm.

But it's without context, it's without any solution, when the data shows there's a myriad of different things that we can do, and one of them is based on a very simple principle, a vital essential nutrient for the human body, and it's a regulatory force for our immune system. But the question is, are you getting the right type of vitamin C?

You might be like, "What do you mean? I thought vitamin C was vitamin C." No, no, no. No, that's what I was taught in my Nutritional Science Class in college. I paid for this education and I was taught, "Yeah, make sure that patients get their RDA, vitamin C." There's multiple types of vitamin C, there's multiple forms of magnesium, there's multiple forms of vitamin A. The list goes on and on.

If we're talking about magnesium, for example, we've got magnesium citrate, magnesium sulfate. There's a myriad of different forms, are you getting the form that you need? And also most importantly, are you getting a bioavailable form as your body is even going to use in the first place? Do we have any data actually showing synthetic vitamin C versus botanical real whole food-based concentrates of vitamin C?

And the answer is yes. A study published in the Journal of Cardiology, had 20 smokers consume camu camu berry daily. This is the most dense source of botanical vitamin C ever discovered. Over the course of a one-week study, they found that it led to significantly lowered oxidative stress in inflammatory biomarkers like C-reactive protein.

What's more, is that they had another study group that they gave synthetic vitamin C to, the kind that you find those little packets out there at the gas station or checking out at a grocery store, and they found that folks that were taking the synthetic form of vitamin C, there were no changes in these critical biomarkers, in this particular group who again was utilizing synthetic vitamin C.

For the researchers, this indicated that the combination of other antioxidants found in the camu camu berries, had a more powerful antioxidant effect than standard Vitamin C products alone. It matters. Camu camu berry, combined with my other favorite source of vitamin C, I've been talking about this for years, camu camu berry, amla berry, acerola cherry.

But never was there... I would get these different super foods from different places, never was there a formula, organic formula without any binders and fillers, where all three of my favorite vitamin C dense superfoods were together in one place. But that's what I have now with the Essential C Complex from Paleo Valley. Go to paleovalley.com/model. That's P-A-L-E-O V-A-L-L-E-Y.com/model. You're going to get 15% off their incredible vitamin C complex. The Essential C Complex is a must-have right now.

And again, I mentioned amla berry. The Journal of Food Science and Technology, states that a single amla berry can contain up to 600% of the RDA or vitamin C. So this combination is incredible, all done the right way. They have some incredible snacks as well, snacks for adults and kids alike, their incredible bars. And their formulas are just done the right way. It's a company with a lot of integrity, who's seeking out to do the right thing, right now when we need it most. So head over there, check 'em out, paleovalley.com/model.

And now next up in our Empowerment compilation, we have someone who literally exudes empowerment. He's going to make sure that you feel that empowerment whenever he's in the room with you. And who I'm talking about is the incredible Shawn T. He's the person behind some of the most successful home fitness programs ever. Ever.

It's rare to find somebody who hasn't done a Shawn T workout, or at least seen his infomercials that have just been everywhere for many years, but being able to have him as a friend and spent time with him, he is the real deal. He is a truly empowered and empowering human. He seeks, what drives him is to empower others, and so that's what we have here for you today. This is a message from the incredible Shawn T.

SHAUN T: Adversity is fuel, right? If you think about something so simple. If you look at the news. What is the thing that gets people talking? The negative, like only the bad stuff. Things that empower people, like, "Here's something very empowering that you can do to really get through 2020." If the news is all that, nobody talking.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Come on.

SHAUN T: Right? Nobody is say... I understand we got to know what's going on. But they don't have the... I've actually pitched myself to be on a specific show to be like, "Okay, let's have the powerful moment at the end of the show, so that people can... " But no. When people watch TV, reality TV, the highest rating shows, when you see that there's a fight on Bravo on one of the shows. It's like, "Oh girl, did you watch that?" You know what I mean?

These are the things that are getting the most energy, the most fuel. Social media. Shawn, you've been through it, when you post something. People want to take what you say and they want to create the adversity because they want the... They want that fire. They want it. But where people are not doing, is within their own adversity, with their own struggle, within their own challenging times.

They don't want to work as hard to push themselves forward as much as they want to work hard to dig into the other adversity and to dig into the fighting and stuff that's going on in the world. And so what I like to say is, and we've all been guilty of it. We've all probably commented on something that we didn't want to, and we're like, "Oh my gosh, this is negative. I don't want to get involved in it." But then you're like, "Oh, you know... “That rage wins.

But imagine if you took that same energy to yourself when you're going through your own struggle? And you say, "Instead of me giving it to people on social media, instead of me entertaining this negative stuff that's happening on the news, what if I'm able to change myself? What if I'm able to help enhance myself?"

And so, that's how you get to a point where you can love yourself. And just kind of really quick going back to just the fitness thing in general, the people who really love themselves more and really commit to themselves and are very present and aware of where they are in their life, that's what health really is.

Yes, we have to eat healthy, and of course you have to work out, but that's when I get back to the mental state. Because you have to be aware, you have to be present, and you have to be willing to do the work to constantly lift you forward.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Empowerment comes from a myriad different perspectives. It comes from a myriad of different experiences and exposures. Many of the most successful people know the power of a successful morning routine, and the person who really brought this to an entirely different stratosphere is Hal Elrod. He's the author of The Miracle Morning, massive, massive, international bestseller. And he has the next message of compartment for you, right now in this compilation.

HAL ELROD: Our daily rituals determine our results, how we feel, what we think, what we focus on, and ultimately our quality of life. And the Miracle Morning, the premise of it is around a very simple concept, or it's round a couple. But the first one is that Jim Rohn philosophy I shared earlier, which is, your level of success won't exceed your level of personal development. And the way I would flip that is the other side of the coin, and the way of saying that is, your level of success will parallel your level of personal development.

So in other words, our society has conditioned us to think that if you want to achieve more, you have to do more. And while that is a strategy, what I found is that the more true, more effective, more lasting strategy is that the real secret to achieving more isn't doing more, it's becoming more.

Doing more will give you short-term benefits, short-term results. Becoming more will give you long-term lasting results, and you can often achieve more by doing even less. As you become more effective through your personal development, more efficient through your person development, you can achieve more by doing even less. That's the first premise.

The second is that how you start your day, sets the tone, the context and the direction for the day that you live thereafter. And a simple way to put that is, if you win the morning, you win the day. Right? Or you put yourself in a position to win the day. One of the gentlemen featured in The Miracle Morning movie, Brian Johnson, founder of Optimize, he said that, "Your day is your life in miniature, and that the way you create an extraordinary life is you put together, you string together many extraordinary days, and all of those days start with the morning."

So most people, they have... No offense to anybody, but at least for me, it used to be a mediocre morning where I slept until the last possible minute. I usually hit the snooze button a few times, which if you think about that, that doesn't even make sense. You're saying like, "I want extraordinary life, but I'd rather lay here unconscious for nine more minutes." And do that a few times.

And then you wake up and it's literally you're resisting life itself. You're going, "Ugh, I got to get out of bed, I don't want to get out of bed." Versus waking up not when you have to, but waking up because you want to. It doesn't have to be an hour. It could be 30 minutes. Most people do an hour-long Miracle Morning. About 82%. Like 15% or so do a 30-minute Miracle Morning, and the last few percent do less than that, like 15 minutes. But either way, it's completely scalable.

There's a chapter in the book called the Six-minute Miracle Morning. So you can really do whatever you want. So that's the premise is how you start your day sets the tone, the context, the direction for how you live your day. And if you have a goal-oriented, growth-oriented, focus, purpose-driven morning, you become the best version of yourself, and then you bring the best version of yourself into everything that you touch throughout the day.

The one thing to consider is, right now, and this is true in life, but especially now. Whenever we're stressed out, we tend to go to bed thinking stressful thoughts, and then consider that your first thought in the morning is almost always the same as the last thought you had before bed.

So if you went to bed thinking stressful thoughts, not only do you marinate on those throughout the night while you're sleeping, your subconscious goes to work on the stressful thoughts and continues to soak them into your nervous system. But when you wake up and the first thing in the morning, your first thought is usually "Ugh" Right? Whatever you were thinking before bed.

And flip that over, think about for me, Shawn, what's the most exciting time for you? Throughout your lifetime, when is the most exciting time for you to wake up in the morning? Like vacation or Christmas, or what is it for you?

SHAWN STEVENSON: For me now, I mean it's daily, but back in the day, it was definitely Christmas Day, that would be... That's that vibe.

HAL ELROD: I love that, 'cause I think for most of us, especially when you're a kid, if you celebrated Christmas, you couldn't wait to wake up. And so you think about it, the last thing you were thinking about before you went to bed is "It's Christmas. Oh my gosh, I can't wait." And you probably didn't even sleep that well because you were so freaking excited, you're tossing and turning, you couldn't fall asleep, but as soon as your eyes shot open in the morning, you were like, "It's Christmas!" And you were excited and you were energized.

And it didn't matter how many hours of sleep you got or the quality of the sleep, you were intentional before bed about what you were thinking about. You created your experience in the morning before you fell asleep, and then you manifested it, you lived it first thing in the morning, and you're on fire, you're energized, you're excited, you're happy, etcetera.

And one of the things I've realized what the Miracle Morning is, that you can, like you said, every day, you can recreate that experience intentionally every single day.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Next up in our Empowerment compilation is another one of my favorite humans. It's world-renowned psychologist, bestselling author, Dr. Susan David.

DR. SUSAN DAVID: If you think about our thoughts, so we might have thoughts like, "I just can't take it anymore. This is ridiculous." We might have emotions, emotions might be things like leaning a stress discomfort, anger, frustration, you know, the full range of emotions that we're experiencing. And then we've got stories. Some of our stories were written on our mental chalkboards when we were five years old.

Stories about who we are, what kind of people we are, what kind of life we deserve, what kind of love we deserve. And the way we deal with our thoughts, emotions and stories drives everything. It's critical to how we love, how we live, how we parent, how we lead, and indeed how we deal with a pandemic.

So what you talk about, which is so critical, is that one of the narratives that we have in society is that we've got to be positive; that even in the shadow of illness and death, that we've got to be happy, looking for silver linings, grateful. All of these narratives that we have. And what I really do in my work is push very strongly against this idea that we've just got to be positive. And there are a couple of reasons for this.

The first is that when you are experiencing difficult emotions and you try to force positivity, what you're basically doing is you're not living in the world as it is. You're living in the world as you wish it would be. And if you are feeling something that's difficult right now, that is what you are feeling right now, and trying to pretend otherwise is not actually dealing with the reality. And you might say, "Well, what difference does it make?"

Well, it makes a couple of really, really important differences in terms of our well-being. The first is that we know that people who pretend to be happy or try to be happy or try to be positive, what actually happens is they are very often doing something which is called "emotion suppression". What this means is that they're feeling upset or lonely, and they're saying, "Well, at least I've got a job, I should be happy, or at least at least I should be happy."

They're pushing these difficult emotions aside, and we know that when we suppress our emotions in an ongoing way, actually what it does is it is predictive of higher levels of depression, high levels of anxiety. A second reason why we don't want to just force positivity, is that when we do this, it's denial, it's avoidant. And so we are not then actually developing skills that help us to say, "Gee, what I'm struggling with is this. And this is how I need to navigate the situation."

So you're not actually in a situation where you then are able to come up with solutions and strategies to what it is you're facing. So those are some of the reasons why forced positivity is so destructive. But we know that people over time who try to just put on happy, actually become less happy. That there is a real decrement in terms of people's capacity.

And Shawn, just by the way, this is not only in terms of oneself. We know that when people try to force others into happiness, actually what it does is it is detrimental to the relationship. It's detrimental to how we develop skills in our children. And even if you're a manager or a leader, we know that when managers and needles try to push aside the difficult emotions of their team, when they say things like, "Oh, let's just be optimistic. Let's just get on with it."

Actually, what's so fascinating is the team's blood pressure increases. The team doesn't even know that the manager is doing this, but they actually have this physiological effect, and really what this does is it leads one to experience others when there is this suppressed emotion, as being false inauthentic and difficult to actually relate to.

And so it's no surprise then that forced positivity, as I've already mentioned, impacts on people's well-being, but it also actually impacts on people's relationships, as well as their capacity to actually achieve their goals, because it is avoidant.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Oh, this is so good. So we tend to, in our culture, force positivity upon ourselves and force it on other people, "Just cheer up. Don't worry, be happy. Get over it," and we're not using the vital and valuable information, the feedback that our emotions are giving us.

DR. SUSAN DAVID: This is profoundly important. Everywhere we go on social media, it seems like people are telling us to find silver linings, just be positive. And the opposite of that is, if you somehow aren't positive, you're bringing me down, you're toxic, and therefore I need to do away with you. That is the messaging that is in our society.

And really what I want to promote is that this idea, we think that we are being positive and happy and that it's actually helping us to be more resilient and more successful, but actually what we know is that it actually lowers resilience. And I don't just mean this in us as individuals or us in relationships, I really mean us as a society.

When we cannot go to difficult emotions, when we can't learn from difficult emotions, we fail to actually develop skills to navigate a simple truth. And the simple truth is that there is pain in the world and there is difficulty in the world, and when we just force positivity, we are bypassing that reality, and therefore we aren't actually able to show up to ourselves and others. And Shawn, what you point out is this really important aspect of "why".

Charles Darwin first described that emotions are functional, that emotions help us to communicate with others, but also with ourselves, and so when we push aside our difficult emotions, we struggle to develop skills that help us to adapt and therefore thrive in the world. Because our emotions are critically important in helping us to adapt. And if there was ever a time that we needed to adapt, it's now. It's in the shadow of uncertainty.

So if we think about these difficult emotions, what we know is that these difficult emotions, thoughts and stories are normal, as I've already described. We have around, for instance, 16,000 spoken thoughts every single day, and so many more course through our minds. "Am I good enough? Is my job okay? Am I going to be safe?" We've got all of this. There is nothing inherently good or bad about a thought, an emotion, or a story.

In fact, it is the opposite. These thoughts, emotions and stories are helping us to make sense of our world, helping us to understand what we need to do. So let's do away with hassling with whether we should or shouldn't have them. But of course Shawn, as you talk about, what can sometimes happen is we can sometimes start engaging with these thoughts, emotion, stories in ways that are destructive.

And so what I've found in my work and what I talk about in my TED talk, is that often when people have them, they tend to do one of two things. The first is what I call "bottling". Bottling is where you push aside the difficulty emotions. You say things like, "I shouldn't have them." Or what we spoke about, "I just got to be happy. I've just got to look for silver linings." Or sometimes even with good intentions, "I'm just going to ignore it because I've just got to get on with everything that I'm trying to get on with." So bottling is where you try push these aside.

"Brooding" is where you get stuck inside the thought, emotion, story, and you get victimized by it. "I'm so angry. I'm so upset. Every time I think life is going my way, now everything happens," and it's not effective. So we know that both bottling and brooding don't serve us. They are both actually forms of rigidity.

When we bottle our difficult emotions, we are using one way of being with those. We're often getting distracted, we're getting lost on Netflix, we're pushing them aside. But it's a form of rigidity. Brooding is also a form of rigidity, it's getting stuck in that difficult feeling.

So there are a couple of things that are really important. The first is, and you've already alluded to this, that our emotions contain incredibly valuable data. Our emotions contain signposts of things that matter to us. So let me give you some examples of what I mean here. Imagine you have got a piece of paper and you listen to this podcast right now, and you think about some of the emotions that you have been feeling of late.

And you imagine writing this emotion on the piece of paper, and that emotion might be lonely, it might be fear, grief, anxiety, frustration, anger, rage, whatever that emotion is. Or even joy, whatever that emotion is for you. Boredom. So now, turn the piece of paper over. What most people would say in the force positivity brigade is, "Think of something now that you're grateful for."

What I'm going to do is I'm going to invite something opposite, which is ask yourself what is the difficult emotion sign-posting for you? What is it telling you about your values and your needs? So, loneliness might be sign-posting that even in a room full of people, even when you are locked indoors with your family, that you can be lonely. We can be lonely in a crowd, we can be lonely on Zoom calls 24/7.

So loneliness might be sign-posting that you need more intimacy and connection, and that you don't have enough of it right now. Grief, grief is love looking for a home. Grief is often sign-posting that you have some sense of memory, of a person, of a place, of something that was important, and it's reminding you of what it was that was offered by that person or the place, and inviting you to be in communion with that thing that is important.

If you're feeling frustration that frustration might be sign-posting that you need more time and space for yourself, that actually you are depleted, and the value that you might be writing on that piece of paper is "self-care". So when we push aside our difficult emotions, then we aren't actually becoming adaptive to the world as it is.

And yet when we just face into that difficult emotion with curiosity, the first part of emotional agility that I mentioned earlier, and we say, "What is this emotion signaling that is important to me?", we are now stepping into a place of power and understanding and learning. Some of the other examples, Shawn, is boredom might be sign-posting that you value learning and growth and you don't have enough of it.

Guilt as a parent might be sign-posting that you value presence with your children, and that you have spent so much time nowadays making sure that they're on their homeschooling Zoom call, but you are yearning for that presence with them. So slow down into your emotions. Don't race for the emotional exits. Instead ask yourself, "What are these emotions sign-posting?" Because fundamentally, our emotions are data.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Our Empowerment compilation would not be complete without a shoutout to one of the GOATS, the greatest of all time. When it comes to empowerment, when comes to personal development, and the person that I have for you to conclude this episode, is New York Times bestselling author... I mean, that's an understatement.

He's actually so like half a billion books, and this is not an exaggeration. He's behind all of the massively successful Chicken Soup for the Soul books and also other personal development books, and is one of the greatest teachers to do it, and for your final message of empowerment we have Jack Canfield.

JACK CANFIELD: 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 were alcoholics, or it wasn't for the government, or it wasn't for who's President or the do-nothing Congress, or you know, all these things we blame. We blame the traffic for making us late.

We live in LA, or I live in 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 is.

SHAWN STEVENSON: It's going to be here.

JACK CANFIELD: And 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. And 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. So two plus two, is always going to equal four. And if you wanted a five in life, you're going to have to do a three instead of a two.

And then what happens when you have something like an economic crisis or the Coronavirus thing going on, all of a sudden the world's 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.

And so what I've attempted to do is, 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?"

And 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. And 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 that people... You ever heard anyone complain about gravity?

You never hear anyone to complain about gravity.

SHAWN STEVENSON: "This gravity is holding me down."

JACK CANFIELD: Yet you see all these old people with their walkers are 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. So we don't complain about things where there is no option. We only complain about things where there's something that could be different.

So if I complain about my wife, call her the "food Nazi". She's, "You shouldn't be eating that, you shouldn't be watching that football game. They'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. And so I could say, "My wife's a pain in the butt." Now, I have a choice, I could 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 to their kids, and so 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?" And 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 could do to help." No complaining.

And in my company and in my seminars, if you were to come, we have these two big fish bowls, and 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 to... $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, I 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. It's just called 100% commitment.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Thank you so much for tuning into the show today. I hope you got a lot of value out of it. If you did, please share it out on social media. You can tag me. I'm @Shawnmodel on Instagram and Twitter, and I'm at the Model Health Show on Facebook, and we have 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 themodelhealthshow.com. That's where you can find all of the show notes, you could find transcriptions, videos for each episode. And if you 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 in.