Lessons - Success Principles and Transformative Growth | Jack Canfield, Best Selling Author

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. You are so, so, so evangelical about, and I think for good reason, and I really do believe that more people should have, you didn't go through all the principles, that's what the book is for, but I think that even the ones you mentioned, these are just things that I personally align with completely, and I've heard them from various sources, and I've also heard them from yourself, and these are not things that are so obscure or so out there. I think these are just really good things to internalize and to bring into your life. Regardless of what you do, what you're trying to accomplish, they're so agnostic of a situation, right? That's what I really appreciate about it. I think that, like, for somebody who is in a tough spot, and they are only seeing the future, as you said, what is, like, the first step, because you can go through all the principles, but all at once is definitely overwhelming for someone who's in a tough spot. I only agree, and I reckon what we recommend in the book, because I did have a co-author that helped me write the first book, just do some of the writing for me, as well, is that we recommend, you start with one chapter at a time, and I recommend one week at a time, so 17 weeks, but it's about four months, basically. Some people do it faster because they just do, and literally, at the end of four months, you can be a totally different person, a totally different place. And so it's important to you integrate the principles. So we recommend one week at a time, and there are exercises you do, right, in the book. There are some exercises where we ask you to, like, maybe appreciate three people a day for a week. Notice what happens when you start appreciating people. There's journal writing exercises in there. There's places to write down your key learnings. There's some questions that we take you through as secrets of questions, and when you answer those questions away, they're structured, it creates an aha experience. You start to realize, I mean, one of the things we were, there's an exercise called a difficult and troubling experience. So what's something in your life that's difficult or troubling you? Well, it might be my relationship with my sister. And then how are you keeping it in place? Well, I'm not confronting her about how much money she's spending that I'm helping support her after she came out of rehab. Then you can say, what's the payoff for keeping it like it is? Why I don't have to confront my wife and have an argument with her about it, or not to confront my sister, you know, blah, blah, blah. What's it costing you? What's costing me $10,000 a month? What would you rather have? I'd like this. What would you do? What would you have to do to do that? What have to do this? When will you do it by? So you're forcing the action, you're forcing the next step. You're forcing the awareness to come up because most people don't realize everything we do in life that doesn't work has a payoff. For example, when you were sick as a kid, think of the payoffs. You didn't have to go to school. In my house, they brought the one TV set into the bedroom. You got to drink ginger ale. We know that ginger actually is good to drink, but ginger ale is very cool, right? Sometimes, you know, you got the tension from your parents. You never got otherwise. I had a student once. The only time his dad ever paid attention to him in college was when he got in trouble. He'd drive up from Connecticut to Massachusetts, and he'd like try to bail him out, you know, and that was how he got his dad's attention. Well, there's other ways to do that that are less destructive. Of course. Of course. But that's really good. And then how this is structured is really to keep people like sort of taking that next step, right? Is that really good? It literally is step after step after each step builds on the one before it, and they really should be done in order. And I recommend that you get an accountability partner, one of the things we teach is mastermind groups and accountability partners, which is in the book. And one of the problems people have keeping themselves motivated to do something that is requiring like the fold your hands the uncomfortable way, because there are some things that require you to change, but the changes are for the good. So if you and I were accountability partners, we would go through the course together, perhaps, or if you want to just be not do that, you just be my accountability partner. I would tell you the five things I'm going to do every day to work on this course, and then tomorrow I'd have to tell you did I do them. And you know, I teach several of five, which is five things every day will get you anywhere you want to go. You want to lose weight, stop eating sugar, exercise for 30 minutes, drink more water, take a 20 minute walk after dinner, read something motivational, don't eat after eight o'clock. Those are things that everybody knows. If you want to be a better salesperson, make five calls to set up meetings, you know, send out ten thank you notes to the people you call, there are certain things we know. Like I was a consultant for remax, they have his five, ten, fifteen, five rule, and everyone it does it, like they have five in person meetings to sell a property or list a property, make ten phone calls to set up future meetings, send out fifteen thank you notes, literally handwritten or send out cards you can use those to the people, you're guaranteed a six figure income. It's just guaranteed research proves it. So we know that five actions a day toward your breakthrough goal, the main goal you have whatever it is in life will get you there. So whatever that goal is, lose weight, have a better relationship with my wife, you know, double my income, I have more free time, whatever it is, so, but the thing is accountability. There was a woman named Gail Matthews up at college in Santa Rosa, Santa Rosa, California called Dominican College, where she took five groups, she had one group, just have a goal, think it, don't write it down, second group write it down, third group write it down, and come up with action steps, fourth group do all that but tell somebody that you set the goal, fifth group be accountable to someone on a regular basis before you finish the goal. Which one of those things you added increased the ability, increased the number of people that actually achieved their goals went from like I think it was 33% up to 76%, like about a 40% increase, one of the big things was having an accountability partner. So many people listening to calls like this, listening to these kind of podcasts, etc., are solo entrepreneurs, they don't have a boss. And so there's nobody telling them what to do. And so we tend to do the easy things first, the comfortable things first. So when I have an accountability partner and you telling me these are the five things I need to do, and then I talked to you the next day, did you do them? And you have to say, no, I didn't do that one, then two days in a row, I didn't do that one. Pretty soon you get so embarrassed, you just do it, you know, like if the government up there said, send in your taxes by a certain time, you know, revenue Canada, if you're in Canada, you rest down here. If they didn't say that, no one would ever get around to it, right? That's true. But when you have a deadline and someone holding you accountable because there are consequences to not sending in your taxes, and you can build a little bit less up here than down there. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw a great cartoon recently where this mother is asking a child or a child says to the mother, mom, what's the Canadian says, oh, that's a North American son with health insurance and no guns. It's not, it's not wrong. That's good. But the point, the point being that, you know, if I have a negative consequence, for instance, when I work with my coaching clients, if they don't, if they want to do it, like one of my friends wanted to learn to dive off a diving board, he was really paralyzed about it. So I said, great, you know, you're going to find a diving coach. And but what's going to be the reward you're going to give yourself? Well, I'm going to take his wife, they're going to go for a two day weekend vacation. What's the consequence if you don't do it? Now this guy is Jewish. And he said, my consequences already checked for a thousand dollars to the Ku Klux claim, the KKK, which is a pretty negative consequence. Exactly. One that one that was so reprehensible, you know, he wasn't. And he literally told me on the first diving instructor moment, he went out on the diving board and he looked down. And you know, when you're diving, it's into a pool that's eight feet deep, there's three feet from the board, and you're six feet tall. So it's a lot of this, you know, at the bottom. And he told the coach, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, and the coach said, well, then come off the board and he said, you're fired, you know, and he found someone who wasn't going to put up with that BS, but there was no way he was writing a check for a thousand dollars. So if you have a negative consequence, along with the reward, we're either motivated by a way from something or towards something. If you put them both together, there's much more likelihood you're going to do it. So having an accountability partner, building a consequence, building a reward, pretty much guarantee yourself success. I love it. I guess just, I want to ask just a few lighter questions about what you're doing. Like you've been working at this for like such a long time, but you're still putting out stuff. Like you're still putting up books, like what do you want to do next? Like when is retirement ever a thing or are you just like, no, that's like asking someone to like to play tennis or you're ever going to retire playing tennis. I mean, they'll play until their legs give out, right? You see the senior tournaments where they're 65, 70 and they're out there. So what's next then? What's next after this book? Well, I'm working on three books at the moment. One's called two. Goodness. Now I feel lazy. Now you're not lazy, you're just not, you know, we have different, different purposes, but different interests, whatever. So I'm working on love versus fear, which is really appropriate to what we're dealing with now. I'm writing a book with someone who lives up in the, she was in Quebec, actually, woman named Lisa Nell, we're writing a book about becoming unstuck. We've developed a process that really gets people unstuck, it eliminates limiting beliefs. And then there's a guy who lives in Toronto, you probably have heard of named Raymond Aaron. Raymond's writing a book with me called The Power of Wow. How do we wow our customers? In other words, if I wowed you in some way, you'd tell someone about it when I go to the where it's called and I was doing a book tour for chicken soup for the soul. And I get in late at night, missed dinner. And when I get to my room, I open the door and there's a chair sitting there with a note and a thermospodal and a bowl and a spoon, it says, your books have been chicken soup for our soul. We know you arrive late. You may have missed dinner. This is chicken soup for your body and it was a warm, nice, very nice. Here I am still telling that story because they wowed me, you know, and so we collected all these stories of how people in different industries have created wow experiences at the university level, brick and mortar stores, online stores, whatever. So those three books I'm working on, but most importantly is my train to train a program. We've now trained, as you mentioned, over 3,500 people in 107 countries to do the work I do to teach the success principles. We've had people in Nepal right after the earthquake going around the small villages, teaching people that they could rebuild. People in Africa and Yemen and places where there's really horrendous things going on, teaching this as well as in the universities and people doing in corporate world, etc. My goal is to have a million people teaching this by the way we are 2030. So now we're moving from training trainers to training trainers of trainers as the next leverage point and then eventually I'll have regional directors in India and Northern Africa, the Middle East and so forth. So we have an online version for most people because they can't travel, especially today. And we also have a live version we do, we've lived in about 60 people a year, but the online version we have hundreds of people going through at the time is like the way that you've built up the business, just like a natural. You find progression of what sort of like, where was I guess the point where you decided to make like helping people and really just enabling people like your career, like where was that point? Well, I was in that transition I mentioned early about, I was in Chicago, I was at the University of Chicago and part of what that program was a two year master's program was a year of practice teaching. So we taught like three fifths time and then went to class like a weekend and stuff. And they there was orientation week and they took us to three schools, one a suburban school, a really rich suburban school and a inner city tough school. And one of them was actually called rich township, it was the name of the township, the girls were wearing madras skirts and they got circle pins and they you go into their home at class that looked like, you know, a kitchen, I can't even afford that, you know, and then you go to this inner city school where the kids were like just the desk were all carved up, the teachers weren't really enthusiastic to be there, the textbooks were old and used, nobody looked good, you know, everyone was like depressed. And I thought, wow, I could make a difference here. So for some reason I ended up teaching in an all black inner city school and that's when I met Martin, that's when I met the guy who at the laundromat who said, so I just wanted to, I wanted to contribute, you know, I got involved in a civil rights movement and did a lot of that work with Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson for a while. And then it just became larger human rights, women's rights, everyone's rights, we all should be living magnificent lives. Unfortunately, that's not the case, we see, even today, how the coronavirus is hitting all the poor people much worse than unfortunately, I've seen a couple of articles on it, it's disproportionate, like extremely disproportionate. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And when I was in India, we went into the slums there and you cannot social distance in the slums. I mean, people are sleeping five and six in a room, people are, the walkways between the buildings are like, you know, two people wide. So as you're walking on, you're brushing everybody, it's going to be a cluster. So I'm not real happy about that because I love the country, but I think that, I forget your question. No, no, it was, it was, no, no, it was just, it was like what started you on this path, but just love what drives you wanting, wanting to make a difference. You know, I just, I just, that's what turns me on, you know, when I watch someone's eyes light up and they get it, or I get an email from a 15-year-old who said, I used to, 15-year-old email me a couple of years ago, my mother bought your success friend's book, my mother never reads, never. And I was saying, why did she buy that book? So I wanted to see what was in it. He said, I stayed up two nights in a row reading it. And I was getting F's and flunking out of school. I was smoking dope. I was skipping classes, smoking weed in the parking lot with kids. I was drinking. Now I stopped smoking dope. I'm not drinking. I'm going to class. I'm getting A's and B's all because of your book. That makes my day. I can go for a week on that, you know what I mean? So it's, it's what I meant to do. It's what I do well. And I love it when I'm up in front of a room or even now talking to you, you know, you heard me go, I'm not on, it's, it's, no, I can feel the authentic passion. That's why like in all seriousness, like you were, you were really easy interview because it wasn't like pulling things out. It's like you just live it. I can, it's, it's, you can tell when you, when you speak to somebody really like is living their authentic self, it's nice to see. And I just wondered where the passion came from. It was very. Yeah.