Lessons - Adapting to Life's Twists & Turns | Jack Canfield, Author, Speaker & Motivational Trainer

Welcome to the lessons episodes of Success Story. These lessons episodes will be shorter clips from past guests, accomplished value community members, and myself. In each short episode we'll feature concise and insightful actionable conversations and tactics, providing you with real-world strategies and tips to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. If you're seeking a no-nonsense approach to growth and progress, you've come to the right spot. Settle in, take notes, and enjoy. Well, you first, yeah, I was in India for most of February, mostly went over there just to get healthier at this retreat place where they do how you're very medicine, and I wasn't sick, I just wanted a longevity kind of stuff. There was a doctor there who was worth about $60 million, he was in the lineage of doctors over Buddhist doctor, you doing Ayurvedic Medicine for 2500 years. And his teacher who lived to be 114 said to him, and then he said to me, the three things you need to know to be happy in life is number one, what you want, know how to get it, and know how to enjoy it once you get it. And most people fall down in one of those stages, either they don't know what they want, you ask them what do you want. Well, I don't know, I want to be rich, I want to be independent, but what does that mean? It's not specific, they don't really know what that lifestyle would look like, they're not clear. The second thing is how to get it, and most people don't know, I mean, you and I went to schools that did not teach you how to be successful. They taught you history and literature and math, and I always say, you know, nobody failed in life because they didn't know the five causes of the French-American War. You know, it just never happened that way, and yet they don't know how to set goals, they don't know. We have a statistic now that says only 10% of North Americans that includes United States and Canada know how to set, they graduate high school having learn how to set goals. They don't know why to do it, they don't know how to do it, they don't know the importance of it, they don't know the research behind it, and once they set a goal, they've never been taught what are the steps to actually achieve it. I believe we should have a course in school called self-science education or life one-on-one skills or something like that, and literally starting a middle school all the way through high school. You got kids graduating, you can't even balance a checkbook, let alone set a goal and achieve it, or start a business. You know, we're training people to be employees, we're not training people to be entrepreneurs. You know, up until 15 years ago, you couldn't even go get a degree in entrepreneurship, let alone learn those kind of skills in a school. One of my friends who actually lives in Vancouver runs a Association of Dance Instructors in Dancing Schools, and he said to his kids once, he said, I want you to go write either an application to college or a business plan. His daughter wrote a business plan, his son wrote an application to college, and they came back, it was a weekend assignment, he was going to give him 20 bucks if they did it. And the one who wrote the application to college, he said, wrong answer, he said, you're never going to get rich just because you go to college, you're going to get rich if you learn how to run a business. So basically, I think people, unfortunately, are learning to be employees, go to schools, sit still, don't, don't rock the boat, do what you told, graduate, go work for someone do the same thing as opposed to learn how to think creatively, set goals, go out and achieve them, build a team, reinforce that, learn how to bring investment money into your life and so forth. So anyway, to go back to your question, like, what are the principles, basically what I've done in the Success Principles workbook, which I'll just hold up so everyone can see what it looks like here. This just came out recently is I've taken 17 of the 64 principles that are in the Success Principles book, core principles, the things you need to do, the absolute basics. And we put them in order. So the first one is take 100% responsibility for your life. Most people are blamers, complainers and excuse makers. We see that even now with the coronavirus, we have the president of the United States, blaming the Chinese, blaming the World Health Organization, and everyone's like blaming someone else to do nothing, Congress, the Democrats, the Republicans or Republicans blame the Democrats, nobody's focused on how do we just get it done. So I teach this formally in that first principle, E plus R equals O, an event plus your responsibility event equals an outcome. So whatever the event is, the event could be your wife leaves you, the event could be you get sick, the event could be the coronavirus, the event could be a recession, the event could be a new technology comes along and puts you out of business, just like Uber, really wiped out a lot of taxi cabs and limo companies. And so that's an event. How you respond to the event is what produces the outcomes you experience in life. In other words, your health, your happiness, the quality of your relationships, those are all outcomes of how you've responded to an event. We know that there are people during the last recession who got really wealthy. There are other people during that same recession who didn't. I just heard Robert Kiyosaki recently talking about the hero of Rich Dad Poor Dad. He was talking about how when the recession was coming and he saw it coming, he went and brought a lot of money and when all these properties went belly up, he bought them at a low price. He's now a billionaire just because he did that. So part of it is seeing the trends, studying trends, noticing the trends, I grew up in West Virginia. You hear all these coal miners saying, oh, we did everything sucks. No one's using coal anymore and blah, blah, blah. So they saw that coming for 20 years. Nobody wanted to change because it was uncomfortable. And so basically change requires people to be uncomfortable and do something new, do something different. When the coronavirus pandemic started, the business owners who pivoted and did something uncomfortable, did something different, they're surviving. The people that just went, oh, this is not right. This is not fair. You know, I saw, I saw, I saw a, they called memes the other day, it was a, it was a vision board. And he said, I didn't put this shit on my 2020 vision board. And no one saw it coming, but it's a perfect example, yeah. So how do you react? Yeah, like, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with a company called B&I Business Network International. A guy named Ivan Meisner started that and now I have like 95 hundred chapters around the world. I think that 9,000 500 chapters, well, the CEO of that, when this thing started to happen in December in China, realized this was because of the virality of this and the ability of it to move so quickly, he said, this is going to come all over the world and they have chapters all over the world. So he started then to figure out how to put this whole thing online and do it through his Zoom calls, you know, all their chapter meetings. And they pulled it off. They were ready when it happened. Unfortunately, you know, our healthcare system in America did not do the same thing and now we have these real huge hot spots in New York and, you know, Detroit and Chicago and Louisiana, so far. So I think the reality is that we have to not blame, we have to take responsibility and then our our response to the event is what gives the outcome. So there's only three responses you can have to anything, your thoughts about it, the images you conjure up in your head about it and then what you say and do your behavior. And so a lot of people right now and probably going forward for months are in fear, they're in anxiety, they're imagining bad things happening. If you're in the present moment, you and I are in the present moment, we're having a great conversation, you've got food, you have some money, everything's good. And so the reality is in order to feel afraid, you have to go into the future and go, well, three months for now, not going to be good, three months for now, I might lose all my clients, three months for now, but it's not three months for now, it's now. So fear is required in order to get afraid, you have to go into the future. If there was a snake in your office right now slithering toward you and you started to get afraid, the only reason you're afraid is because you're imagining it biting you, it hasn't bitten you yet. So you have to go into the future. So what we want people to do is come back to the present, whatever you're in fear, your energy's in the amygdala, which is the back part of your brain, the lower brain stem. And fear hijacks, the prefrontal cortex right up here. And so the prefrontal cortex is where you have your rational thoughts and where you have creative thoughts. And right now more than anything, as business people, as anyone who wants to be successful in any area of your life, you have to be able to think clearly and also think creatively. And so what you want to do is not be in fear and there's a lot of things you can do about that. Number one is coming to the present moment right now, everything's fine. The other thing is create positive images of the future, rather than negative images of the future. Zigg Ziegler, who was a great motivational speaker, said once, fear is negative goal setting, worrying is negative goal setting. You're imagining something in the future you don't want. Just as easy to stop the movie and replace it with an image of what you want. And so you see a lot of people that are doing that, people that are starting to say, okay, for months, I wanted to take my business online. I wasn't doing it. Well, now I kind of have to. For months, I wanted to lower my staff and do more outsourcing. Well, now I have to. So basically, I think that we just have to take 100% responsibility to realize it's not the coronavirus, it's not the pandemic, it's not our government, it's not the economy, it's ruining our lives, it's our response. And two plus two equals four, it always will. So if I've been getting four, the world's doing two, I'm doing two, four is comfortable, we're great. All of a sudden, the world does one. And for some people right now, the world's doing zero. You can't do zero plus two and get four. So you've got to change what you're doing. And here's the bad thing about that or the uncomfortable thing, I'm going to ask you to fold your hands like this, actually go ahead and do that. I'm going to do that when everyone watching do that, and notice what thumb is on top. So your left thumb is on top, correct? Left thumb, yeah. Yeah, it's a mind too. Now what I want you to do and everyone watching this, unclass your hands and move all the fingers up a notch. So the other other thumbs on top, don't just move your thumbs. Now, how does that feel? Like that. Feels awkward, it feels. I don't like it. It was awkward, I don't like it. What does your body want to do? It wants to go right back to where it was before. So let it go back to where it was before, right? And that's where most people are right now. They're where they were before and where you were before isn't working anymore. Yeah, do something different. So whenever we fold our hands a new way, it's going to feel uncomfortable. And everything we're going to do in the future for a while to create the new normals going to be uncomfortable. It's going to be out of our comfort zone. I always have say everything you want that you don't have is just outside your comfort zone. That call you're afraid to make and don't want to make because it's uncomfortable. That request that you want to make the putting yourself out in a certain way for fear of how people will judge you. All those things are uncomfortable asking for investors, asking for people to buy a product from you when everyone's like holding on their money right now. I have friends in my business, which is speaking and training who are actually making more money right now than they were before year over year last year, but 40% up. Why? Because they instantly pivoted put together packages for people, reduce the price, gave them payment plans and said, you're sequestered at home right now. You can't do the normal things you're doing. You don't have that hour commute both ways at the end of the day. You have two extra hours. What could you do with that? You can educate yourself. Now, if you don't want to spend money to do it, you can go to YouTube, you can go to TED Talks, you can go to Masterclass, there's all kinds of things on the internet that are available to do. But the point is, it's not the event, it's your response. So that's the first principle is you got to pivot.