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Stop Limiting Yourself: How Your Beliefs Become Your Biology | Nir Eyal
About this Episode
Nir Eyal spent six years researching why brilliant, talented people consistently fall short of their potential, and what he found will surprise you: it's not a lack of knowledge, resources, or intelligence holding most people back. It's the invisible belief system running silently in the background, shaping every decision you make without your awareness.
Most of us are walking around with beliefs forged in survival mode, and we're using them long after they've stopped serving us. The good news is that beliefs, unlike facts, are tools you can examine, update, and swap out.
In this conversation, Nir walks you through the motivation triangle that explains why willpower and information alone never work, and the exact four-step turnaround process that rewrites the beliefs costing you peace, progress, and connection.
Whether you're struggling with a goal that keeps stalling, a relationship that stays stuck, or a quiet voice telling you that you're not enough, this episode gives you a practical way out.
The Greatness Playbook: The Belief Breakthrough Edition
Nir’s books:
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
- Indistractable, Updated Edition: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
- Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results
In this episode you will:
- Learn the exact four-question turnaround process Nir uses daily to dissolve limiting beliefs about people, including the one about his own mother that changed everything
- Discover why being "too smart" can actually work against you and how liberating beliefs outperform facts when it comes to achieving what you want
- Understand the motivation triangle and why you'll never stay consistent on behavior and benefit alone without the third element most people skip entirely
- Find out why positive visualization and manifesting can actually decrease your chances of success and what athletes do instead that works
- Understand why the words you say out loud about yourself become your biology, and how to use secular prayer as a tool for pain tolerance and inner peace
For more information go to https://lewishowes.com/1896
For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960
More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:
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Hosts & Guests
Transcript
It turns out that people who can persist the longest are the ones who are more likely to succeed.
When I did interviews for this research, I talked to billionaires and I talked to people who were broke
and you would expect that people who don't succeed in life, that they would have more failures.
That's actually the opposite.
People who are more successful are the ones who failed more because they were more persistent.
And when they persevered, even though they failed more times,
eventually if they hit it, sometimes they hit it big.
He is an author, a behavioral design expert, and teacher who focuses on the intersection of psychology, technology,
and human behavior, the inspiring, near, IEL.
So what happens if day after day, week after week, year after year,
we constantly recite a script about our limitations, about our labels, about what we can't do.
It becomes physiologically as well as psychologically true.
Really?
If you have positive views about aging at 30, studies have found us a study at Yale
that found that people who had those positives at 30 lived on average seven and a half years longer.
That is more of an effect size than quitting smoking than diet.
It's more of an effect than exercise.
How important or terrifying is the words we think or say about ourselves and our limits to our life?
Incredibly important, the best things you can do is...
Welcome back. I'm one of the school of greatness, very excited about our guests.
We have the inspiring near IEL in the house, and he is an author, a behavioral design expert,
and teacher who focuses on the intersection of psychology, technology, and human behavior.
He sold millions of books worldwide, helping people overcome distractions,
build habits that stick, and take back control in a world that is designed to pull us off track.
Thank you so much, Near, for being here.
Excited about this, man.
Thanks.
It's going to be fun, man.
This is a topic that I love because most of my life, I grew up feeling very insecure originally
because school... I was in the bottom of my class all through grade school,
all through middle school, high school, and college.
Bottom of my class, bottom four, because he used to rank us on our grade cards
and tell us essentially either how smart or how stupid we are based on the rest of the class.
And I was always in the bottom four.
So I always had this belief that I wasn't smart enough.
It was like this feeling that I wasn't smart enough.
But for whatever reason, there was something else inside of me that said,
no, you can make something of yourself.
There was some calling, some voice, some feeling, some essence that was like,
it doesn't matter if you're stupid on your grade card or if you're lack the intelligence in school.
If you have the courage to risk, to put yourself out there, to try and fail,
to make mistakes, you can get better and you can do extraordinary things.
And that belief, thank goodness, has carried me over the last 20 years
to, you know, excelling in athletics and sports to building a business
where I had no skills or like anything about business
to launching a podcast to writing bestling books.
When I didn't have any of the evidence that those things would be possible.
But I had this like essence or belief that was like,
I think I can figure this out.
If I just, if I take the next step, if I meet the right person,
if I ask the right questions and then try, try, try, something's going to work out.
And that belief has given me the ability to, I think, outperform
so many people who are way more intelligent than I am.
Who are way smarter, who have more degrees, who have higher education than me,
all that stuff, but I just have the courage to believe.
And why is it, in your opinion, that so many people who are extremely smart,
extremely talented, have all the degrees, accolades in the world,
still lack the courage or the belief that they can go and launch the thing
that they really want to launch?
We see this all the time.
And the myth is that in order to succeed, you have to be the smartest.
That's the defining trait.
And in fact, in some ways, I think that being too smart can be a liability.
Really?
Because you start looking for facts.
So facts are very different from beliefs.
A fact is an objective truth.
And in school, we're graded by how many facts we can regurgitate on to a piece of paper.
A fact is something that is true whether you believe it or not.
That's one of the spectrum.
And the other end of the spectrum is faith.
Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence.
Those are two different sides.
In the middle, however, is a belief.
A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence.
So unlike a fact which won't change, unlike faith that doesn't require any kind of evidence to be a conviction,
beliefs can change.
And those people who hold themselves to their beliefs
rather than sticking to things that they will only do if they know they are objectively true,
they succeed more.
I can't tell you how many people I've spoken with in researching around the power of beliefs.
Who tell me the same story?
Is that something inside me?
I just believe that it was going to succeed and it did.
And that's why I've done this research over the past six years.
It's because there is an untapped power that people do not realize that they can access
that releases their potential by harnessing the power of beliefs.
My favorite story around this, my favorite piece of research is the Kurt Richter rat study.
Where in the 1950s, Kurt Richter took these rats and he put them in a cylinder.
And he wanted to see, you can't do this kind of study anymore, it's kind of ethically deurious,
but he wanted to see how long these wild rats could survive swimming in water.
In a cylinder with water?
Halfway filled with water, he put a wild rat inside.
How long they could swim?
And he sat there with a timer and it turns out the average wild rat can swim for about 15 minutes.
Four droughts.
Four droughts.
It gives up in droughts, right?
15 minutes.
Then here's where the experiment really started, the interesting part.
He brought in a new group of wild rats.
He put them in the water.
And he wanted to see now what would happen if as soon as he knew that they would give up,
as soon as they were about to drown after 15 minutes, he plucked them out, dried off the rat,
let it catch its breath, and then put it back in the water.
And he did this a few times.
Have you heard of this study before?
No.
It sounds like torture, but it's here.
How long here's the question?
You know there's a trick here, right?
You know there's something surprising.
If originally the rats could swim for 15 minutes, how long could the rats swim after they were conditioned?
After they had been pulled out, dried off, caught their breath, put back in the water,
how much longer could they swim?
I would say double.
Double.
That would be amazing.
You could think it went for 15 minutes to 30 minutes of extra perseverance.
Wow.
That would be incredible.
It wasn't double Lewis.
It wasn't triple.
It wasn't quadruple.
It wasn't for an hour.
These rats, after they had been conditioned, could swim for 60 hours.
What?
Not 60 minutes.
60 hours, 240 times more persistent.
Holy cow.
What changed?
The experiment was exactly the same.
These rats' bodies hadn't changed.
Nothing physically made them more perseverant.
What had changed, we think.
We can't ask rats what they believe, but what we think happened was that something in their minds had changed.
They had now seen the possibility that salvation was possible.
They had learned hope.
That made them more perseverant.
What does that need for us?
What's the takeaway here?
That when we attach ourselves to these limiting beliefs versus liberating beliefs,
when we find what those limiting beliefs are, do away with them and then find the liberating belief
that can harness that motivation, we unlock something.
It's not magic.
It was always there within us.
These rats could always swim for 60 hours, but they gave up for after 15 minutes
because they thought it was hopeless, and we all do this.
They had the ability.
They had the skill set, I guess.
They had the physical capacity to swim for 60 hours, but they didn't have the belief.
Most of them would die around 15 minutes on average.
They would give up.
Once they learned the belief system, even as a rat, I guess,
and you learn hope or this idea that, oh, maybe I can survive,
or maybe I could go a little longer.
They were able to go 240 percent more.
240 times more than originally around survival mode.
That's exactly right.
Holy cow.
And so this is what's being unlocked.
It's not magic.
It's not anything supernatural.
It's that all of us inside of us, we have these powers that we don't even realize are there.
And what's holding us back are these limiting beliefs.
I mean, it kind of sounds like the David Goggins of rats.
It's like, you know, okay, he talks about once you feel like you're about to die,
you haven't even begun.
Like your body can endure so much more.
It might feel like you're dying, but maybe you do just need a little bit of a rest
and then you get this thing called a second wind.
There's this thing called a second wind, where you have all this energy
because you can go forever.
Right.
And that is interesting.
Now I'm curious that they went 60 hours, that they eventually stop and die after 60 hours.
Eventually they've reached their natural limit.
And we all have our natural limits.
Yes, yes.
But what we think are our natural limits are way longer than we would expect.
There's all these things that are unlocked within us that our beliefs hold back.
Now, is it a fear of, is it a lack of skill of enduring pain that most people have?
Is it a lack of skill of enduring humiliation and embarrassment?
Is it a lack or skill of overcoming the idea of fear, of failure, fear of success?
What is the skill that people are lacking that is holding them back the most?
So when we look at what differentiates successful people, it's not necessarily intelligence.
It's somewhat correlated, but that's not at the top.
What's really at the top is two things.
Number one is perseverance.
Number two is adaptability.
Why?
Because it turns out that people who can persist the longest are the ones who are more likely to succeed.
When I did interviews for this research, I talked to billionaires and I talked to people who were broke.
And you would expect that people who don't succeed in life, for let's say,
that they would have more failures.
People think to themselves, you know, I don't succeed because I failed so much.
And it's actually the opposite.
That people who are more successful are the ones who failed more.
Because they were more persistent.
They kept trying and trying.
There was just like those rats who kept swimming.
And when they persevered, even though they failed more times, eventually if they hit it, sometimes they hit it big.
Do unsuccessful people just don't try enough?
Is that kind of what you researched?
That what's lacking is motivation.
And fundamentally, what these beliefs unlock is your motivation.
But the way we think about motivation is completely wrong.
The way we've been taught about motivation is if you do this behavior, you'll get this benefit.
So that's why we need motivation.
That's kind of the classical economic explanation.
I pay you a salary, that's the benefit, so that you do this behavior.
I work out for this long and I get a result.
I lose weight.
But when you don't see the result within two weeks, people give up.
Why?
So why do we lose motivation?
What's missing?
I mean, we have tons of self-help books telling us what to do.
We've got Google that we can Google something if we don't know how to do it.
We can ask LAI to tell us what to do.
We all know what to do.
What's lacking is not a lack of knowledge.
It's not a lack of resources.
There's something else missing.
And that thing that's missing is the fact that motivation is a triangle.
It's not a straight line.
On one side, you have the behavior.
What you need to do.
On the other side, we have the benefit.
Why we need to do it.
But holding the triangle together is belief.
If I don't believe, I'm going to get the benefit.
Let's say you work for a boss who you don't believe has your best interest said heart.
They're not going to give you that promotion.
They're not going to give you that raise.
Are you going to be motivated to work for them?
Even if you want the benefit?
No.
What's very likely on the other side of the triangle is the behavior.
That if I don't believe in my own ability to do the behavior.
If I have a limiting belief about that behavior, I'm also going to quit.
So if it was just as easy as I want this, so I do that, we'd all have six pack abs and be multi-millionaires.
It doesn't work that way.
Because of the power of belief, you have to have all three.
The behavior, the benefit, and most importantly, the belief.
If someone focuses only on, I'm going to go do this thing.
I'm going to have, I'm really excited and motivated to launch this thing because I want this result.
I want this benefit.
But they lack the behavior or excuse me, they lack the belief that they're actually capable of accomplishing it or deserving and worthy of receiving that accomplishment.
What will happen if they lack that belief?
They lose motivation.
They don't keep trying.
They're just like those rats that give up and sink.
And that's exactly what happened.
And when we keep trying, invariably, we don't succeed.
Now, this isn't magical thinking.
This isn't positive thinking.
I'm not a big advocate.
If you look at the research literature, just wishing for something actually makes you less likely to go out and get it.
Gabrielle Otige, into this wonderful study, where she hooked up people to blood pressure monitors.
And she tracked what happened to them when they did a visualization exercise.
When they thought about, you know, when they manifested, when they thought about the future they wanted.
When they aligned themselves with vibrations or whatever they thought.
Here's what happened, Lewis.
Their blood pressure dropped.
And they became more relaxed.
And then afterwards, they became less likely to do the things that it would take to get the results they wanted.
So what the research shows us that just dreaming, just visualizing about that potential outcome,
just manifesting is not enough.
In fact, it hurts you.
It makes you less likely to get those results because your body interprets that relaxation as the benefit.
And it's interesting.
It feels like I've already accomplished financial success because I dreamed it in my head.
So how does someone learn to manifest the right way?
Specifically from, you know, sports psychology talking about visualizing the outcome, visualizing the process on the court or the field,
how you're going to react and respond, strategizing and planning and business in the future,
when certain things happen, how will you react, like kind of putting yourself in the future?
What else needs to happen alongside visualization in order to manifest what you want?
So what the research literature shows us is that just the dreaming doesn't work.
And this is a great example of how the self-help industry has taken something true and manipulated into something that's false.
We hear that visualization works.
And we hear that athletes use visualization exercises, which is true.
But what do athletes visualize?
Do athletes visualize the trophy?
No. Do they visualize the gold medal?
No. What do athletes visualize?
They visualize the obstacles in their way.
They visualize if I'm on offense, defense is coming at me.
If I'm going down the mountain skiing, what could be in my way?
They're visualizing the obstacles so that they are emotionally ready to deal with it when those obstacles come.
So I don't know if you remember this in our last interview, but I might have mentioned I used to be clinically obese.
Like clinically obese, not just overweight.
Not your machine.
Lean machine.
But how did I do that?
What was kind of the secret to it was that I stopped dreaming about the outcomes.
And instead I started planning for the obstacles.
So what really made a difference for me was planning ahead, visualizing in my imagination when I go to that dinner party and someone offers me a drink or a piece of birthday cake.
What am I going to do?
What am I going to do?
How do I deal with that discomfort of having to say no?
I mean, if someone is overweight right now and they've always tried to get healthier lose weight, but they've yo-yoed or up and down and they've never been able to keep the weight off.
What would be the plan in this motivation triangle from belief, behavior, and benefit to say I'm actually going to get out of obesity or lose this weight for good?
What would they need to do?
Well, so this is my story.
First of all, I feel for anyone who's in that situation.
And I still have to do this every day.
I have to think about this.
It doesn't just go away.
It's still a struggle.
Now, I'll tell you what happened to me.
That from a very young age when I was very overweight from a young age for a long time.
And what I did starting back in the 1990s was I would read whatever diet book was the latest fat.
So it started with low fat and snack well cookies.
That's why I ate all day long.
Because that's how we thought we would lose weight.
And then after that, I went to a vegetarian diet.
It was all tofu and potatoes.
And then after that came keto.
And that's what I threw out the potato and tofu.
And now it's all keto all day long.
And then after that, I think it was intermittent fasting.
And the interesting thing is every diet worked.
Every diet worked.
I would lose weight until it didn't.
Because what would happen in variably every single time, the reason the yo-yo kept going back up and down,
was that when there was a little bit of doubt,
when that doubt crept in somebody would tell me,
oh, vegetarians don't get complete nutrients.
Or keto is bad for your kidneys or whatever.
You're question it.
You're like, huh?
Is there a better way?
That's right.
What should I be doing?
And then those limiting beliefs crept in.
So that next time I said, okay, I'm going to have that piece of pizza.
And you know, it's whatever.
I'll have a little snack and have some pizza.
How bad can it be?
What would happen?
This is actually a real term in psychology.
It's called the what the hell effect?
Yeah.
I've had one piece that may have the whole bond.
Exactly.
Right.
Or for me it would be, you know, let me chase it with the beer and surprise.
Yeah, yeah.
Right?
Because what's the point?
Add diets don't work anyway.
Now I have this information that maybe the diet I was on doesn't work.
Oh.
No diets work.
And so that became a limiting belief as opposed to the liberating belief of,
okay, maybe I went off track and I had a piece of pizza when I shouldn't.
Okay.
But I controlled the next thing that enters my mouth.
As opposed to the what the hell effect,
which was a limiting belief.
Yeah.
And so for not just weight management,
for time management, for money management,
all these things.
What is the core of human motivation?
Right?
It's not carrots and sticks.
A lot of people kind of beat themselves into submission with punishments or rewards
that they do the right thing.
And this blue line mind that the research now shows that it's actually not about carrots and sticks.
That that's not how the brain motivates us.
That in fact, the carrot is the stick.
It's playing that.
Right.
So it's like kind of like a matrix moment, right?
There is no sort of the carrot is the stick.
What does that mean?
That all human motivation,
all human motivation is from one thing and one thing only.
And that is the desire to escape discomfort.
Even wanting to feel good, craving,
lusting, hunger, desire,
itself is psychologically destabilizing.
So what that means, if all human behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort,
that means time management is pain management.
Money management is pain management.
Weight management, it's all pain management.
So if you can learn to manage that discomfort, you can unlock this hidden.
Yeah.
So one more time, if you can learn to manage pain or discomfort,
then you can unlock essentially anything you want.
That's right.
In any area of life.
Anything that the laws of physics don't prevent you from doing.
Exactly.
Everything worth having in life, right?
You know this, is on the other side of that discomfort.
Yes.
You want to build a great family?
It's going to take hard work.
You want to build a business?
You know it takes hard work.
You want to get in shape?
It's going to take work.
Yeah.
But what blew my mind is that I always separated,
sorry, I always, I never separated,
pain from suffering.
What's the difference between pain and suffering?
What's the difference between pain and suffering?
So pain is just a signal.
Where does pain happen?
Where does pain occur?
Is pain here?
Is pain here?
It's a mind, right?
Always in the mind.
It's always the where else could it be, right?
If you break your arm, the pain isn't here.
The pain is registering your brain.
Where else could it be?
It doesn't mean it's not real.
All pain is real.
But the suffering occurs up here.
For example, let's say Lewis that right now,
all of a sudden your heart started beating very quickly.
You were short of breath, the dry mouth.
Something would be terribly wrong, right?
You would have to go to the ER immediately.
But if you had the same physiological sensations
while you're on a run or in the gym,
that's great.
Now you have a positive perception of that same exact
physiological response.
And so pain is just a signal.
Suffering is the interpretation of that signal.
What does that mean?
It means that we can shape how we experience that pain.
It doesn't necessarily have to be suffering based on our beliefs,
based on the filter of perception we can interpret differently.
So I'll give you a great example.
Some of the research that stopped me cold in my tracks
was around hypnocidation.
Have you ever heard of hypnocidation?
Like hypnosis?
Yeah, but for surgery.
Oh, God.
It's mind blowing.
Okay.
Lewis, I would not believe it if I have not seen the tapes.
And in the research, I did.
I saw many of these surgeries.
There's a guy I wrote about.
Hypnocidation.
Hypnocidation.
So it's actually hypnotizing yourself to not feel pain.
So you don't have to go under anesthesia.
Right.
And you know me.
I'm a pretty science-back guy.
I took me six years to write this book.
I'm very skeptical.
I'm very skeptical.
I'm almost at the point of being cynical.
Yeah, for.
And so I needed the evidence.
And so I had to watch the actual video of the surgery.
And it turns out that in Europe, mostly Switzerland and France,
this is a technique that tens of thousands of people have gone through.
And so the guy that I interviewed, his name is Dana Gisler.
He was a former commodities trainer.
Very numbers guy, analytical, not woo-woo in the least.
And this guy, young 50s, he has this freak accident.
And he breaks a bone in his ankle.
And he has to get these screws put into his leg.
And then it's time to get these screws taken out.
Ooh.
And this is years later.
He's healed up.
He has to do this.
And he learns.
He comes across this technique called hypnocidation.
And he gets kind of curious.
He watches some YouTube videos.
He decides to take a class.
And he prepares his mind to the point where he goes under the surgery for 55 minutes
with scalpel cutting into flesh,
with metal screws being extracted from bones.
Oh my gosh.
Without general anesthesia, without local anesthesia.
Nothing.
Not that he just said nothing.
Let me put myself in a mental state to turn off the pain signal.
How does he do that?
And then allow you to cut open my leg without me screaming.
That's exactly right.
And not only...
He watched this.
And if he's...
Yes.
And not only is he...
You would think, well, maybe he's feeling the pain, but not letting it out.
No.
We can see in his blood pressure, in his heart rate,
all the things that should be going...
That's spiking.
You know, when the body's in stress mode, nothing happens.
He turned the pain signal off.
Well, he turned the suffering off.
Not the pain signal.
Not necessarily.
So here's...
This is the heart of the research I've done.
Is that beliefs have these three powers.
The power of attention, the power of anticipation, and the power of agency.
So what Daniel Gisler was able to do, and tens of thousands of other people, do all the time,
is that through the power of beliefs, they can choose where to pay attention
to the signals coming into their brain.
Because what's happening right now, your brain is taking in 11 million bits of information.
Right now, 11 million bits of information.
The sound of my voice entering your ears, the light entering your eyes,
the ambient temperature of the room up, you're taking all this in.
Okay.
Just to put that in perspective, that's the equivalent of reading worn peace every second twice.
Okay, that's what your brain is processing right now.
However, your conscious awareness is only 50 bits per second.
50 bits versus 11 million bits.
That means that your conscious brain, the perception of suffering,
is only taking in 0.00045% of the information has available.
I'm sorry.
So what does the brain have to do?
It's called predictive processing.
It doesn't see reality as it is.
It sees it as you predict it to...
B.
Bingo.
How did you know that?
Because you've seen it a million times.
These are called our priors.
And so our prior beliefs dictate what we see in the present reality.
So how do we shift a prior belief into creating future evidence
that we can create something we've never created before?
Yeah.
If we only have proof and evidence that we've been a failure, that we've tried,
and humiliated ourselves over and over again, that were not enough,
that were someone that's worth being abandoned, whatever it is.
Right.
How do we create a belief that we've never experienced to create a new result in our life?
Yeah.
So this is where the magic happens.
And the magic is that number first step is to see those living beliefs,
because we all have it.
What was yours?
Oh my God.
What was your biggest two or three like our biggest...
Oh, where do we start?
Okay.
I'll tell you, for me, it was relationships.
I had a lot of living beliefs with my relationships.
Like intimacy or...
I'll tell you exactly what happened.
So for me, it was my relationship with my mom.
That this particularly illustrates the point.
So a few years ago, my mom had her 74th birthday,
and I wanted to do something very nice for her,
and so I wanted to send her some flowers.
Now, I was in Singapore.
She was in Central Florida where I grew up.
And getting flowers from Singapore to Central Florida is no small task.
So I called up a bunch of florists.
I stayed up till one in the morning, making sure the delivery would happen on time,
that she would get them that the flowers wouldn't wilt in the car,
in the floor to heat.
I stayed up till one in the morning.
I went to bed and I pat on myself on the back and said,
I'm a good son.
I'm a good son, right?
I did the right thing.
I called her up the next morning.
I said, hey, mom, happy birthday.
Did you get the flowers I sent?
And she said, yes.
I got the flowers.
Thank you very much.
But just so you know that they arrived half dead.
And I wouldn't order from that place again.
Oh my God.
So it was finding the fault as opposed to...
Yeah, so you didn't feel me on this one, right?
Yeah.
So I...
You failed.
Yes.
So I said something to the effect of, well, that's the last time I ever buy you flowers again.
And that went over just about as well as you'd expect.
Right?
That's a good.
And then after the call, my wife, Julie, she turned to me and she said,
do you want to do a turnaround on this?
To which I said...
F-No.
No, no.
I'm pissed out.
I want your mozo jumbo touchy-feely.
Yeah, yeah.
I was up to 1 a.m.
I did my best.
Here what she said, I need to vent, right?
Because that's what we've been told.
This lie that if somebody hurts you, you need to tell them how you feel.
You need to get it off your chest.
You have to vent.
Wrong.
The research literature shows that that is not helpful.
That when you do that, when you vent about people, you're doing nothing but reinforcing your belief about that person.
So you don't see people as they are.
You see an effigy of what your beliefs say they are.
And so I knew this research at the time.
I was writing the book and so I knew about this.
It stopped venting.
I said, okay, fine, I won't vent, which I really wanted to do.
Of course.
And instead I did what she advised.
I did a turnaround.
Now this technique comes from Byron Katie.
She's been around for a very long time.
She's wonderful.
And she actually channeled a technique that goes back all the way to Aristotle.
About the work?
Exactly.
Exactly.
It's the work.
So I did this.
And I really respected it.
It's a very, very long tradition.
But Byron Katie really put it into a format that I think people...
Is it true?
Is it really true?
So here's what I did.
First step.
I wrote down the belief.
The belief was, my mother is too judgmental and hard to please.
So the first question is it true.
The...
Didn't...
You just hear...right?
Okay.
Next question.
Let's move on.
Obviously, she's too judgmental and hard to please.
Next question.
What's the next question?
The next question is, is it absolutely true?
Yeah.
Okay.
Is it absolutely true?
Well...
Well, it could be...
It absolutely means in all circumstances.
Yeah, yeah.
However, ever, ever, is it not true?
Okay.
Maybe...
I don't know how, but maybe there's a circumstances where it's not true.
Fine.
Okay.
Third question.
Who am I when I hold on to this belief?
When I hold on to the belief that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please?
Who do I become?
What kind of person am I?
Am I?
I'm not very patient.
I'm not kind.
Frankly, I'm not myself.
I'm not someone who I'm proud of.
And then the fourth question.
Who would I be without that belief?
And when I thought about that, if it's okay if there's some kind of magic wand,
I could wave it and dissolve that belief from my brain.
I would be kinder.
I would be more patient.
I would be who I think I really am.
And so I really...
You know, I understood that my belief wasn't really serving me.
Now, here's the important part.
Is that beliefs are tools not truths.
I'm like a fact or faith, a belief is something else.
A belief is a tool, not a truth.
So it doesn't actually matter if it's true or not.
But I was holding on to belief that to me felt very true.
And so the process, you ask, how do you go about changing these beliefs?
You look for the diametric opposite of that belief in this turnaround.
So what's the opposite of that belief?
My mother's too judgmental and hard to please.
What's the opposite?
My mother is not too judgmental and hard to please.
First, I didn't...
There's no way...
I don't believe that, yes.
I don't believe that, right?
But again, I'm not looking to change my beliefs.
The point of a turnaround is not to change your beliefs.
It's to give you a portfolio of perspectives that you can now choose from to see which one
serves you better.
So I tried it on for size.
How could that possibly be true that my mother is not too judgmental and hard to please?
Could that possibly be true?
Well...
Let me find some instances.
Let me pull the memory bank...
Or even with this specific instant.
Maybe she was trying to help me.
Maybe she was trying to make sure that I just didn't get scanned from this florist.
And she was trying to be helpful, not hurtful.
Okay.
Perhaps.
I think it would come off that way, but maybe...
Exactly.
Now let's do another turnaround.
Instead of my mother's too judgmental and hard to please, I am too judgmental and hard to please.
Could that be true?
You need her to have this perfect response for you to feel like it was a good job.
Bingo.
I wish you were there because it took me a while to realize it.
That's what I realized is that when I called her and she didn't respond exactly the way I had scripted in my head.
Thank you so much for thinking of me.
The abuse of praise didn't come.
Yeah, yeah.
I lost it.
And I said something that I regret.
So who's being judgmental?
Yeah.
I was.
I think Tony Robbins says when you trade expectation for appreciation, your life will start to change.
Yeah.
It's hard to have appreciation when you have a strong expectation.
That's right.
Even if you haven't voiced the expectation, you have an internal...
I was up to 1 a.m.
I did this.
I researched for hours just to get my mom flowers.
Yeah.
And I had to all be served.
Yeah.
And I deserve it at least.
Thank you.
Which is what?
Which is a belief.
Yes.
It's just a belief.
But there's a fourth one, which was the most true, which was the one I most did not want to believe.
Instead of my mother's too judgmental and hard to please.
I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself.
There were enough.
How could that be true?
Well, now, when I thought about it, I realized when I did something and put effort toward something that didn't work out,
that I took that as a personal failing, that I had somehow messed up, that I was incompetent.
I couldn't even get my mom proper flowers.
And so, who was judging who?
I was judging myself.
Now, again, are any of these true?
Doesn't matter.
What matters is which one of those beliefs gave me peace.
Which one serves you the most?
Exactly.
So, now I had a portfolio to choose from.
The first belief that my mother's too judgmental and hard to please.
There's only one way out of that.
She had to change from me to be happy.
The only way out.
With the other three, I could do something about that.
And so, that's the real power of beliefs is that for me, you said, what changed most?
It was when I could look at my relationships.
And now, I do this probably six, ten times a day.
When someone annoys me.
I take a step back.
And I say, okay, what's the limiting belief here?
What's the opposite of that limiting belief?
And how could it also be true?
And my life, again, it's not about finding facts.
It's not about proving the truth.
It's not about truth.
It's about finding peace.
Yes.
Now, I'm happier.
I'm more myself.
I'm more calm and relaxed.
And those benefits.
And what changed?
All that changed was my belief.
You can call it a belief or a perspective, I guess, around what's happening in life.
That's right.
And what you choose to see and witness, right?
That's right.
But these limiting beliefs, we all have them.
And they're all hidden.
It's almost like our face, right?
Right now, if I said, look at your face.
You can't see your face.
You can see your hands.
You can't see your face, right?
The only way you can see your face is if you hold your face up to a mirror.
And then, you can uncover your limiting beliefs.
And we all have them.
It doesn't matter how successful you are.
We all have them in one area of our life.
What are the three biggest limiting beliefs of most people in the world?
The one I hear most often.
There's no time.
I don't have time.
I don't have time.
I hear that all the time.
It's too late.
People like me don't do that.
Or, you know, he, she, it hurt me.
Or the world sucks.
Or exercise is hard.
I mean, where does the list start?
It goes on and on and on.
Yeah.
It's funny because something that's coming up for me is, I've told this story a few different times.
But it always struck with me.
I was in eighth grade.
And the high school that my middle school was kind of connected to.
I really looked up to the senior basketball players.
I was playing basketball.
And I was playing a lot with kind of the upper classmen because I was tall.
And I had developed some athletic abilities.
So I was playing with like these kind of juniors and seniors in eighth grade practicing with them.
And I remember looking up to one specific senior who was the most gifted athlete probably
I've still seen today in my life.
Right?
Like one of the most gifted basketball players, but just athletically could do anything on
the basketball court.
Probably had a 45 inch vertical to dunk so easily.
Looks so smooth.
He was a freak of nature.
But whatever reason when he was playing in a game, he was average at best.
Like he wasn't reaching his abilities when he was just practiced.
And practice he could do whatever, but then in the game something would happen where he was just kind of like,
huh, why is he doing what he's capable of?
And I don't know if this is true or not, but what it reminds me of is it doesn't matter if you are,
if everyone thinks that you can accomplish incredible things.
If you don't believe, it doesn't matter if the world believes in you.
You still have to learn to believe in yourself.
But on the flip side, something I learned because I didn't have that athletic ability.
And people didn't fully, I didn't believe that people believed in me at different stages.
That was no longer true later, but that was my original belief.
But I was like, you know what?
I'm going to believe in me.
Even if no one, if the world's against me, I'm still going to believe in me.
And I'm going to have the courage to risk to put myself out there, to try, to train, to be consistent,
to do hard things over a long period of time.
And you could have the world believing in you, but if you don't believe in yourself,
it's going to be hard to accomplish anything to your potential.
And you could have the world against you, but if you have unwavering belief,
you can do incredible things.
That's exactly right.
And what's, what's manning about this is that just like you can't see your own face,
but you can see other people's faces, you were able to see his limiting beliefs,
but he couldn't.
And that's what's so terrifying about this is that we all carry these hidden limiting beliefs
and we can't see them.
Why can't we see them?
Because our default is passivity.
We used to think, we used to believe this theory throughout psychology,
throughout the literature, everybody knew this concept called learned helplessness.
You probably heard learned helplessness, Martin Sellingman and Meyer,
turns out, few years ago, they proclaimed that they had got it completely backwards.
There is no such thing as learned helplessness.
What we have is not that we learn helplessness.
We, our default state is helplessness.
Think about how we're born.
Yeah.
You just had beautiful twin girls.
When your girls were born, they're helpless.
Completely helpless.
They rely on someone else to keep them alive.
Right.
So we've started in survival mode,
but some of us stay in survival mode for our entire lives.
Right.
Because that actually, that is what provides safety.
Right?
So that evolution is a life.
Exactly.
So what we have to learn is we don't learn helplessness.
In fact, we learn hope.
And so the way out of a limiting belief is tiny bits of agency.
The third power belief is proving to yourself showing your brain
how an alternative belief can also be true.
So for example, what happened with my mom or what happens in athletic ability
or an entrepreneurial venture.
It's proving to yourself with small steps that that thing that you had held onto
as a truth wasn't a truth.
It was just a belief.
So how do you recognize when a belief that helped you survive
is now limiting your greatness?
You find the areas where you're stuck.
You look at the nearest resolution that you've had year after year.
Or that dream you keep talking about that you never take action on.
That's right.
That problem that persists that you can't find a way around.
That relationship that annoys the hell out of you.
And it's still annoying year after year.
You can't find a possible solution.
You're a smart person.
Why can't you find a way to be happy?
That's where you look.
So that's the first step.
Is figure out the areas where you have this muck in your life.
And what underlies it is typically not a lack of resources, not a lack of understanding.
Right?
Before you buy another self-help book, you have to understand that the OS,
the operating software of your brain, it is those beliefs.
And unless you fix those, knowing what to do won't help.
And now with AI, you can say, give me a detailed step by step plan
and how to lose weight in nine days or how to launch a business.
It'll tell you everything you need to do.
That's exactly right.
Yes.
It'll hold you accountable with a daily plan, step by step.
Give you the research, give you the information, backing with the data.
You have the whole plan.
And you still won't do it.
Why is that?
Why will people not do it when they know the exact plan now on how to get the results they want?
It's nothing new.
It's not AI, right?
Right?
Who doesn't know, basically, for 99% of the population to lose weight,
you eat right now, exercise.
Move more.
Yeah.
You don't need a diet book to tell you that.
It's been around for a very long time to start a business.
You need to do things that other people don't want to do.
Yeah.
To have a great relationship, you have to be fully present with people.
We know this, but we don't do it because we keep getting in our own way
because of these limiting beliefs.
We refuse to look at these limiting beliefs.
You know why?
Because they feel like facts.
They feel like the truth.
And there's nothing more uncomfortable to our psychological immune system
than changing our beliefs.
We hate it.
Right.
But of course, those beliefs that feel crazy, that feel like that can't be true,
those are exactly the beliefs we should lean into.
Man.
So as a parent, you know, what advice would you give to me as a new parent
on how to model and communicate beliefs for my twin girls?
So that they don't feel like they are stuck when things happen
that they haven't learned how to do on their own yet.
They haven't figured out yet in the future.
Like how do we model and communicate the ability to have agency
when you are in survival mode in some ways until a certain stage in your life?
Yeah.
What I love about what you just said, that a lot of people don't say.
A lot of people say, how do I get my kids to?
No.
That's a huge mistake.
No.
You have to model.
Exactly.
Exactly.
That's the way we change it.
They're not going to listen to what you say.
They're going to listen to what you do.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
And it's crazy.
You know, my second book, Indistractable, is all about technology distraction.
And people will come to me and say, how do I get my kid off TikTok?
How do I get my kid to stop playing Fortnite?
Yeah, I'm the part.
This is what they do.
So just like if you want an indistractable kid, you have to be an indistractable parent
in order to model the power of beliefs.
You have to be a high agency parent.
You have to show your kids that, hey, here's this challenge I had.
And here's how I overcame it.
Here's what I used to think.
And be vulnerable.
A lot of parents, they think that they need to have all the answers.
And I found, at least for my relationship with my 17-year-old daughter,
that when I'm the most vulnerable, when I ask for help,
not only does she actually help me.
She helped me with this book.
It's amazing.
She helped me every step of the way through this book,
to her bed.
I'm struggling with this.
And how do I express that?
Not only do I learn from it, she learns from it.
Right?
She gets the most out of it.
Because now she gets to be in a position of authority.
She gets to help you out.
So I think that's one of the best things you can do.
Honestly, don't make it up.
But show your daughters when they get a little older.
Here's what Daddy's struggling with.
Yeah.
What do you think that could do?
I'm trying to figure it out.
What would you guys do?
Yeah, what would you do?
Exactly.
And showing them, most importantly, that you're willing to change those beliefs.
One of the worst sentences in the English language is that's just how I am.
That's just who I am.
That's how I am.
The worst.
The worst.
I'm not a morning person.
That's my ADHD, which I, by the way, have.
I used to tell myself all the time whenever I was distracted by something.
That's my ADHD.
Just the excuse we hold on to that we don't want to change.
Well, what are we doing when we're thinking about that?
Right?
Or now, people in my age now, my friends say, that I'm having a senior moment.
Wow.
That's not good.
Why do we do that?
Even if it's true.
Let's say it's true.
Again, the police are tools not true.
So we don't even know if that's true.
Right?
When I would say to myself, and again, I've been diagnosed with ADHD, and when I would forget something
or have or be distracted and catch myself, I say, oh, there's my ADHD.
You're labeling yourself more.
You're emphasizing the belief of why you can't break through that thing to create what you want.
Dingo.
And so what?
If it's hard still, you're holding on to more of a limit when you continue to communicate
and verbalize the belief of this something is hard.
Your labels become your limits.
Yes.
And what this does is it creates what I call a sociological placebo effect.
There's a wonderful example in the psychology literature of Mr. A. And Mr. A is anonymized
in this study.
And Mr. A took, he broke up with his girlfriend, he had a bad break up with his girlfriend,
and he takes an entire entire pillbox, a prescription pillbox of antidepressants.
He wants to commit suicide.
And after he swallows all these pills, he changes his mind.
He decides he doesn't want to die.
And he goes to his neighbor, and he asks his neighbor to take him to the hospital.
He rushes into the ER, he collapses on the floor, and he shows the nurse the pillbox.
I took all my pills, I took all my pills.
They take him into the ER.
His heart rate is elevated, his blood pressure is dangerously low, and he has all the symptoms,
all the signs of a critical overdose.
But the pills don't say what medicine he consumed.
All it has on the pills is the number, it's a phone number.
Turns out Mr. A was in a clinical trial of these antidepressants.
So he didn't know when he was taking it.
It wasn't real.
Well, all that.
It's called, sorry.
So they call up this number.
They say what did this guy take?
He overdosed.
Tell us what this medicine is so that we can pump a stomach or do whatever and give the
antidote to whatever he took.
And they say, we made one minute, they look at him up, they say, oh, this person took
the placebo.
Wow.
Right?
This is a guy who passed out, had low blood pressure, he had a dangerously low heart rate.
All these physiological symptoms had manifested because of a belief.
Yeah.
The placebo effect, the opposite of the placebo effect.
And so let me ask you, Lewis, if the no-cebo effect, if believing something, can have physiological
symptoms that are clearly manifested in the fact that, you know, as soon as this guy
discovered that he had taken the placebo, that there was totally an inert substance here.
Oh, okay.
15 minutes.
It's all it took.
15 minutes?
He was revived.
He was back to normal.
So let's think, okay, that's, well, that's when you actually take a whole bottle of pills,
right?
Which is whatever it was.
Candy or something.
Yeah, it was, it was nothing.
So what happens if day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year,
we constantly recite a script about limitations, about our labels, about what we can't do.
It becomes physiologically, as well as psychologically true.
So how important or terrifying is the words we think or say about ourselves and our limits
to our life?
Incredibly important.
And this is one of the best things you can do is to, because this is, this is, it's
not easy.
I wish I had some, you know, overnight solution.
It doesn't work like that.
Changing your beliefs is not easy.
One of the first steps you can take is to listen to the words you are actually verbalizing.
When you say out loud, oh, that's so like me or just my luck or this is why I can't
or whatever the reason, those words that you verbalize, that's the first place to start
because you're actually saying it out loud.
Now, let's learn empowering words.
Oh, absolutely.
Just my luck.
This happens all the time.
Okay.
You're a optimistic person.
That's why you interpret.
Like the first, like, you know, parking spot, oh man, things, money always comes my way.
Yeah.
Easily.
Yeah.
Of course it does.
Yeah.
Why not?
But most people don't do that.
They don't do that.
And here's what happens.
There was a beautiful study where they had people who were self-identified optimist versus
self-identified, no, sorry, self-identified lucky or self-identified unlucky, okay?
People who said to themselves, I am unlucky or I am lucky and they had this label.
They took them into a room and they said, okay, here's a newspaper.
We want you to do this task.
If you count as quickly as you can, all the photos in this newspaper, tell us how many
photos and you'll collect your prize, $250, okay?
So do it as quickly as you can.
Both groups did this.
Both groups did this.
The pessimists took two and a half minutes.
The unlucky people took two and a half minutes.
The lucky people took 11 seconds.
Oh my gosh.
Why?
What was the difference?
On page two, one of those pictures said there are 43 photos in this newspaper, collect your
prize.
So they just...
And they sort of cut.
Yeah, yeah.
The lucky people literally saw reality differently.
Whereas the unlucky people said, okay, one, two, three, four, five, six.
And they sat there and counted for two and a half minutes.
Whereas the lucky people, the people who say good things always happen to me, found the
opportunity for the good thing to happen to them.
It wasn't that they were actually more lucky.
They just were more observant.
Their beliefs shape what they could see.
They could see reality differently.
That's, by the way, why entrepreneurs tend to be more optimistic.
Optifiers tend to think they're more lucky.
They think they're good things happen.
So one of the things I've adopted since this line of research is that now, instead of
saying, I used to, I hate to admit it, I totally was one of these people that says, oh,
God, this is happening today, traffic, or otherwise it's happening, or I got sick, or whatever
case might be, I would constantly remind myself of the bad things.
Now, every time something good happens, we see it out loud as a family.
We say, everything good happens to us.
Is that a fact, Lewis?
No.
Bad things happen too.
But we emphasize that everything good happens to us.
Why?
Because now we're more conscious of it.
Vanessa Van Edwards, our mutual friend.
She has a wonderful phrase of not asking people how you doing, right?
One of people say, how you doing?
Busy.
Busy, fine, whatever.
Whatever.
Instead she says, what's good?
Yeah.
I love that.
What's doing is training us.
What's good?
I'll tell you what's good, actually, you know what?
I'm alive today.
You know, like, I get to breathe.
Like, let's start there.
Just focusing on something so small that is a positive thing rather than what's not working.
I like to ask, what are you most grateful for today, or what are you grateful in your
life?
Yeah.
What are you most excited about in your life?
You need to first to give people shifting from a negative into some type of a more empowering
emotional or thought.
Absolutely.
The more empowering emotions and thoughts we have consistently throughout the day, the
more good things will happen or at least will feel better.
That's right.
These are what things don't happen.
That's so true.
Feel better.
But you can, not only do you feel better, you start seeing more of that.
So this is one of the three defining traits of what we call entrepreneurial alertness is
that people who have entrepreneurial alertness are more grateful.
They, Tina Seligman at, I see Tina Selig, sorry, at Stanford, has this practice where
she just sends thank you notes like you wouldn't believe.
Anybody who makes her feel good or does anything else, she sends them a handwritten thank you
note or an email or a quick SMS.
And that turns to be one of these qualities of successful entrepreneurs, successful people
is that they constantly look for opportunities to say thanks.
Yeah.
That's so interesting.
You're saying that because I've literally been for the last like three weeks thinking
that I need to order thank you notes like custom thinking notes because all I want to start
doing is sending more.
So you're to another confirmation in a sign that this needs to happen ASAP.
And I do that through text and video messages and things like that and calls.
But there's something about receiving a letter that my dad used to do a lot as well.
And I think it's one of the reasons why he became such a successful entrepreneur is because
he was just constantly thinking about others.
Yeah.
And he was thinking about, hey, how can I send a nice note or I saw something in newspapers
back in the day, the newspapers, cut out a clipping and send it to someone with a little
thank you note because a long way people remember people remember and with the crazy thing
you this is called provoked luck how we can manufacture our own luck.
What happens when that thank you note lands on someone's desk and right next to the thank
you note is a potential opportunity to do business with somebody.
Oh, the thinking of that person exactly you're creating your own luck, you're creating
your own luck.
It's so interesting because what kind of business did you dad start?
He was a life insurance salesman which was hard.
Yeah.
It's hard to reach out to someone you want life insurance.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think when we get out of our own I'm not enoughness or jealousy of what someone else
accomplished or what we're not accomplishing that we see other people doing and we just
acknowledge them and congratulate them.
Good things are to come back.
That's right.
And it's not magical.
It's not that it's not vibrations in the universe.
It's not quantum anything.
It's because it changes what we see, what we feel and what we do.
The three powers of belief anticipation, attention and agency.
It's by believing differently that we ultimately do things differently.
You talked about there's facts, there's faith and then in the middle there's belief.
How much does faith play into unlocking success in people's lives?
So it's interesting that I grew up pretty secular.
I didn't pray.
I prayed when I was very young.
My family immigrated to America and by the time I was six years old they had been
scammed out of every penny.
Some American saw that these immigrants barely spoke the language and he scanned them.
Well, basically took their life savings which they used to come to America and start
on a living.
So I used to pray then when I was very young because we were going through such hard times.
And I didn't pray again until I started doing this research.
Really?
Yeah.
So 40 something years later.
Well, here's what I found.
Was that?
You didn't pray at all for the last four years.
I didn't pray.
You know what I mean?
I used to pray.
Yeah.
You do.
I prayed growing up and then I kind of paused for like a day, not a pause, but I always had
this active participant in prayer for maybe a decade.
And in the last four years I've gotten much deeper.
Last four years?
Yeah.
This made me Martha.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I guess five years almost.
And how's it been for you?
Game changer.
Game changer.
I mean, there's so many things that we do and I do that support my inner peace.
Yeah.
And I think going through a healing journey, a reflection journey, you know, where I looked
within all of my hurts and pains and past and all these things and allowed myself to heal
over many years, brought me a harmony and peace, but having a sense of faith and a true
belief and praying about it every morning and every night gives me more confidence that
I'm exactly where I need to be.
Yeah.
Good things are coming and it's not about me, it's about being of service.
And as long as I continue to show consistently and essentially following the triangle of
motivation and doing these things consistently, good things are going to happen.
So I would hear people say that, but tell me the science.
And yeah, yeah, I'm just, I just, it didn't resonate.
The supernatural part didn't resonate for me.
And so I, I would hear people say that and I would be very jealous that you would get
all these benefits.
Yeah.
And I couldn't feel that.
Yeah, yeah.
And it turns out now, you're like, that's just my ADHD, I can't pray.
It turns out now, people like me are the largest religious group in America.
Tell me.
They're called the nuns, not the Catholic nuns, and O and E's that the law religion, no
religion, the largest religious faith group in America today are nuns that just happen
actually fairly recently.
A lot of them, they say there's not atheists, no, just no affiliation.
Some atheists, so many of them are what they identify as spiritual but not religious.
So hall, what's crazy about that is that people who identify as spiritual and non-religious
have higher rates of depression and anxiety disorder.
People who more than people who are not spiritual, not religious.
With people who say they are spiritual but not religious have higher rates of depression
and anxiety disorder.
Then people who say they are religious.
Much, much higher.
Really?
Yes.
So when someone says, I'm not religious but I'm spiritual.
Right.
What are they saying?
Like, they have some kind of conviction in some kind of higher power, but they don't
connect with any kind of faith tradition.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
So they have higher rates of depression than those with religious faith tradition.
That's right.
And we've known that for quite some time.
Yeah.
That people who have, people who pray have all kinds of benefits.
They live longer.
They're healthier.
They make more money.
They contribute more to the community.
There's all kinds of benefits to prayer.
And I knew that.
That's backed by science.
Oh, yes.
Research.
Oh, this is well-established.
Hero of science, everything else.
Very well-established.
Now, I read this research as I was writing this book and I came across it and I was kind
of jealous but I thought, it's not for me because I don't have that particular faith
in the Zero Natural.
And then I came across this study that blew my mind.
And the study, here's what they did.
They took three groups of people and one was a control group, so nothing, no intervention.
One were people who prayed from a particular faith tradition, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim,
they had some kind of particular faith tradition.
And one group were people who had never prayed that they taught how to pray.
And they said, if you don't have any kind of faith tradition, you don't have to say
God, say whatever is meaningful to you.
To the sum of all forces or mother nature or a higher power, whatever it doesn't have
to be anything supernatural, whatever it is that you want, substitute that word, but
here's how to pray.
Okay, and they taught them how to pray.
Like a 60-second prayer or like something.
And they had a standardized intervention.
Then they took those three groups and they gave them, this is that there's a standard protocol
to test pain tolerance.
The test is essentially they take your hand and they tell you to put it in an ice-cold
bath, very, very cold, painfully cold water.
And then they have a researcher who looks at your face and they see every grimace and
every, you know, your contortion.
And then ultimately, when you can't do it anymore, when you have to take your hand on the
water.
Now, both the group that prayed out of faith tradition and who didn't have a faith tradition,
but prayed way outlasted the control group.
They were way more pain tolerant.
They were like the rats that could go 60 hours.
Exactly.
Now, what's fascinating about that, that even the people who didn't have a faith tradition
but learned how to pray also had those benefits.
They also had greater pain tolerance.
Data people that didn't pray at all.
They didn't pray at all.
And so this is something I've changed when you ask what's the power of faith.
It turns out that prayer works even without faith.
Wow.
And so this is kind of my call to action.
I think a lot of the problems we have today in America come from the fact that many people
like I used to say, I can't step into church because I can't prove that everything that
was said here is absolutely the truth.
I was looking at everything through the fact lens.
I can't either.
I'm like, everything for me isn't like, how is that really truthful two thousand years
ago and the translations and this and this, but you still, you still go.
I still go because I asked this to Arthur Brooks recently, I don't know if you know
where Arthur Brooks says he's like a devout Catholic.
He goes to Mass every morning at like 6 a.m. or something and I go Arthur, you're a smart
guy.
Like you're intelligent.
You're like professor of this, like bestling author, how can you really say that everything
is true?
He goes, I can't.
But the belief of these things and the essence of it and the stories and the lessons, give
me more peace and help me live a more peaceful life.
And that's the goal.
So I don't call myself an atheist or agnostic, I call myself a free thinker.
And this is a term I learned when I lived in Singapore that you could be a free thinking
Christian, you could be a free thinking Muslim, you could be a free thinking atheist.
It doesn't matter.
It means that you're not, you're not asking that question anymore.
I stopped looking for proof.
Yeah, yeah.
And what I'm looking for is peace.
As I said.
Gosh, let's go.
That is what people need.
Any peace.
They don't have it.
A lot of people don't have it.
Because beliefs are tools.
Not truth.
I'm not.
We're never going to know.
Okay, well, I was not going to know.
But what I find when I walk into a church or a synagogue and I start with a prayer, which
I never used to do since I was six years old, now I do, it benefits me.
I feel better.
I am better when I adopt this belief that I can pray even if I don't have all the answers.
You're more present, probably less reactive, you're more tolerance, you're more...
I can solve these problems now.
Rated full, yeah.
Yeah.
And so what I did, I went to, it sounds like a set up for a joke, I went to five religious
leaders.
I went to a rabbi, a priest, an imam, a monk in a Swami, and I asked them all the same
questions.
All walked into a bar.
And the same question was, how do I pray when I have uncertainties about God?
Oh, wow.
What did they say?
Well, I learned these five key tenets of prayer that, so everybody gave me a different
piece of the puzzle.
Now, a lot of it was overlapping.
Uh-huh.
Nobody has a monopoly on these practices.
But what I was doing was, and I threw out everything.
I said, well, if I don't have perfect certainty, then I can't do any of it.
And then I learned from these religions that we can pray even if we do have doubts.
So from the rabbi, I learned that you can do first and understand later.
So on Mount Sinai, the Jews say when they receive the Ten Commandment, they say, na
seven Ishma, first we do, then we will hear, first we do.
So that, to my, in my life, first I do the ritual.
Then I will see.
Don't ask why I'm supposed to do this or what the result will be, but just have the
faith, I guess, that you're supposed to do this first.
I would call it the belief.
Not the blind faith.
Okay.
Not, you know, the belief that I'm doing this because it serves me.
Right.
I'm not going to accept everything whole cloth.
I'm not going to do everything that someone tells me.
I'm not going to be gullible.
I'm going to, what's the definition of belief?
It's a conviction that is open to revision based on evidence.
So if, you know, as opposed to before, first I need it to be a fact.
Then I can do it.
First I'm going to do it.
And then I'm going to see what comes of it, the rituals, right.
From the Imam, I learned about the simplicity of prayer in Islam.
You pray five times a day, same prayer, five times a day.
Doesn't have to be super complicated.
You don't have to have a prayer that's, you know, super liturgical and has all kinds
of practices.
You can create a very simple ritual of just sitting and being with your thoughts for a minute
and showing gratitude and just a moment of peace, right, to solve these problems on
your own.
You can create that in your life, whether you have a faith wish or not.
From the Catholic priest, I learned, it was beautiful.
He told me about how people come to church looking for their prayers to be answered.
And they asked for things, right.
They say, you know, I wanted to find love.
I want to find a business success, please heal me, et cetera.
And what they oftentimes don't realize is that the coming to church, the community aspect
is many times how prayers are answered.
That it's the person down the pew who can help you with your business, who can help
you find love, who can solve it, and he's probably, it's that community aspect.
And that's something that a lot of us who are, who don't have that faith tradition, don't
get unless we go.
That's true, right.
And from the Swami, from the Hindu leader, I learned about how it has to be about something
bigger than yourself, about the power of finding a cause, finding a purpose that's more than
just you.
And then from the Buddhist, the separation of pain from suffering, about the practices
and Buddhism, you know, my wife is Chinese and something that she heard growing up in
her Buddhist household was bitter now, sweet later, about how you can separate the pain
from the suffering in order to sustain motivation in order to keep going.
And so you can take, every religion has aspects of all these things.
But even if you don't have a particular faith tradition, you can do what I call constructive
interpretation.
You can walk into a place of worship and say, you know what, I don't need every single
thing to be true in order for me to get these benefits.
And I think that's what holds a lot of people back.
They need the facts to really like say, well, did that really happen if not, then I'm
going to discount this whole thing.
Right.
And if you fear, it's not just the believers, it's not just the participants.
There's a lot of faith institutions that want a purity test, right?
You have to believe every, that's not constructive either, right?
That pushes people away.
Yeah.
It's so interesting because every time we go to church, Martha just feels she's so grateful.
She just feels better just going.
She's like, oh, I feel so much peace.
So if prayer gives you that peace, now if it makes you feel bad, I guess it's not good,
don't do it.
If you have peace, why not do that more frequently, right?
Even if you don't have all the answers, I can't remember, I don't know, Wayne Dyer said
this quote or where this quote came from, but it's like, you know, a lot of people think
seeing is believing, but believing is seeing.
It's like, how do we switch it?
Like I'll believe it when I see it.
No, it's like start believing it and it will reveal itself.
That's right.
Right?
Isn't that?
Did Wayne Dwyer say I thought I just came up with that?
That's a chapter title.
Exactly.
That's what we tend to think.
We think, oh, you know, when I see it, I'll believe it, but we do not see reality as it
really is.
We have this simulation running in our brains because of the, you know, the 11 million
bits versus the 50 bits, we all have this simulation.
None of us are seeing reality clearly, right?
So when I advocate, so one of the things that sometimes people will say is, you know,
are you telling people to lie to themselves?
Aren't you telling people to gaslight themselves to just be delusional?
And the answer is you're already delusional.
You're already gaslighting yourself.
You're just...
Negative way.
Exactly.
You're gaslighting yourself with these existing limiting beliefs and refusing to see another
potential reality, which if you considered, could actually be just as true, if not more
true, then you're currently living belief.
Yeah, but I mean, come on.
You know, you study, you know, psychology and human behavior.
How can we put all this into prayer?
Like, that's not what you've lived your entire life.
I feel like you're the, gosh, who am I thinking of?
You're the, who's the newscaster, Dan...
Sullivan?
No, no, no, gosh, why am I forgetting his name right now?
This is...
He did the meditation stuff.
Meditation, yes.
Not Dan Sullivan, but Dan Harris.
Dan Harris.
Dan Harris.
You're like the Dan Harris of prayer now.
You know, it's like skeptical, like analytical, never going to believe in this stuff.
But now you're saying prayer.
I believe in the practice.
I'm not, I'm not, I've just stopped asking about the questions that I, I don't think
I'm going to answer.
Yeah, I don't think anyone will.
Yeah.
Because you just, just to have blind faith and trust from people from thousands of years
ago.
That's right.
For me, that's hard to do too.
But I think the essence of the stories, the essence of the historical things that
happen when they did or didn't do certain things, I can see how can that relate to my
life today?
I think that what's unusual about you is that a lot of times when I talk to people of
faith, they, they feel a little uncomfortable admitting that.
Well, because I think I have question in my whole life.
You have question.
I think I have.
Yeah.
Because I'm like, this doesn't make sense.
But you, but how can you kept going despite thinking?
I stopped for life.
That's right.
Yeah.
I mean, I stopped just because I was just kind of like on my own journey and I was a critical
thinker.
And I was a free thinker.
So it's like, oh, let me try this.
Let me try this.
Let me try this.
And I think I still question a lot of stuff.
I'm like, why do they do these traditions?
Why do they do that?
Like all this stuff.
I question, but I'm like, you know what?
Let me, if I know it benefits, doesn't mean I have to agree with every specific thing
or I can still question it.
But how can I apply the things that I know are helpful for me, for my wife, for our marriage
and our relationship that just help us feel better?
Yeah.
Like, I don't have to have all the answers, but I can believe that good things are going
to happen for me if I continue to believe them.
Right?
Yeah.
That is a type of prayer in itself.
I don't have to say, God, give me these things.
It's just more of like, it's more of a gratitude prayer.
Thank you so much for the blessings.
Thank you for the opportunities.
Thank you for the hard lessons that have given me appreciation now.
It's like a thankful prayer for me that puts me in a state of peace and appreciation.
And I think the more grateful I am and appreciative I am of life, I believe life brings me more
to be grateful and appreciative of whether it's a law, science, a belief that I've made
up, whatever it is, it works, and it gives me more peace.
Well, you're ahead of the game because I had to like, see the studies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's fantastic.
That's excellent.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
I wish it didn't take me so long and then I wish more people would find that path.
I think we would be much happier, I think.
Well, I think a lot of people have dealt with so much pain and then turn pain into suffering
from some type of, I don't know, belief, maybe religious belief, or their parent that was
in a religion that then did something wrong to them and they're like, oh, this person
is associated.
Yeah.
It's like an association with someone that said something to you or judged you or made
you feel less than who is a part of some belief system.
A faith.
Yeah.
And then you're associated and you're like, that is bad and wrong.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If this person was supposed to look out for me, take care of me, not lie to me, not
cheat on me, not steal from me, and they did this thing and they follow this belief, the
whole belief is wrong.
And if you think about it, it's very protective.
Yeah.
And so this is why we can't see our hidden limiting beliefs because to us, you know, if we
are looking for evidence, we'll always find it, we'll always find it.
And so that becomes our new belief, which we adopt without even questioning it.
And so then it's sealed in, we come incapable of actually testing and seeing it in a way.
But here's the other side of it.
I could hear a skeptic, you know, listening to this and say, yeah, I get it that you were
skeptical.
You found a way.
But I'm still skeptical.
And I'm still skeptical near that, you know, I follow your four steps of the work.
And at the end of the day, I still need a boundary in place with my mother because every
time, pretty much every time I do show up for her, it's a negative comment.
And what am I just going to say, well, one day she was nice to me and she accepted me
and she acknowledged me when I did something for her.
But it just seems so hard.
Yeah.
So when do boundaries come into play to just to also add to someone's life so they don't
either don't get taken advantage of over and over again because they say, well, that's
not really the belief.
They're really a good person deep down inside.
I'm going to give them another chance because they didn't mean to screw me over.
Yeah.
And that just continues to happen.
Well, first of all, I'm not here to change anybody.
I'm relaying my journey.
Yeah, yeah.
And this is what's what's worked for me is that what I was looking for was that piece
that it wasn't helping me in my life when I was labeling people as constantly judging
them as evil or this or that it wasn't it wasn't making me better.
Yeah.
It wasn't it wasn't helping my life.
And one of the mantras, one of the the prayers that I repeat to myself is that love is
measured by the benefit of the doubt.
Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt.
That to me is very meaningful because as a human, I want to love my fellow man, at least
to some amount, right?
We should all offer grace to others.
But it's very difficult, right?
Because we are again, our beliefs find it much easier because we are born into passivity,
our default state is passivity.
We find it much easier to stick with what we always have because that's what's protected
us in the past.
But it's like a tool that we keep carrying that's busted and not a good tool for the
job.
It's not like a carpenter says, oh, the hammer, it's the one and only true tool.
No, a carpenter says sometimes it's a saw, sometimes a good tool is a wrench, right?
There's different tools for the job.
So just because you've always held this hammer, it just because you've always held this
belief, doesn't mean you can't take it out an exam and eight, is this the right tool
for the job?
So what I found in my own life is that when I held these grudges, when I had these, these
belief filters about people.
Not that you shouldn't put those barriers on.
Sometimes boundaries are the right thing to do.
Sometimes it doesn't mean you have to constantly subject yourself to an uncomfortable situation.
But without giving that grace, no, what do I mean by love is measured by the benefit
of doubt.
When my daughter was born, there was this love unlocked for this new human being, right?
You just experienced it a few months ago, that just comes out of nowhere, right?
And we give these babies ultimate grace, total benefit of the doubt.
Why do we do that?
Babies are kind of annoying.
Let's be honest, right?
They scream, they cry.
Constantly cry.
Yeah, all these things that they do that you can interpret as annoying, right?
But you don't interpret it as annoying.
A baby is not trying to annoy you, that's the best tool the baby has is to cry.
That's how they get what they need.
So we give them this benefit of the doubt.
And the more we love someone, how do we measure that love, the more benefit of the doubt
you give someone, the more you love them.
So what I try to constantly remind myself is that we're all just growing up babies.
We're all just doing our best.
Why is it that when we grow up, no, you get no more benefit of the doubt.
You have to do anything perfect and if you mess up and if you hurt me, if I interpret
you as hurting me, you get no grace because you hurt me.
Whereas what I try and remind myself now, it's not always easy.
What I try and remind myself is that that person is doing the best they can with the tools
they have.
It's like me expecting, you know, my daughter to suddenly speak Russian.
She gives me Russian.
How could she possibly have that tool in her disposal?
She doesn't have that tool when she was a baby.
She couldn't speak in complete sense as all she had was a ability to cry.
And people who harm us, people who hurt us, people who have done things in the past,
it doesn't mean that they didn't hurt us.
It doesn't mean that we should just forgive them blank unconsciously.
It means that we would be better off.
We would enjoy life more.
We could be more at peace if we have a new belief that serves us better.
I'm curious about this.
What happens to a person's biology when they expect to fail before they even start with
the thing they really want to do?
What happens to their mind, their body, their cells?
When they expect to fail or they don't believe it's going to be the ultimate outcome before
they even begin to think they want to do?
Well we know that if you expect to fail, you will.
So someone who's running a marathon, who's more likely to finish a marathon?
Someone who says, I can't finish this marathon or someone who says, I believe I can't finish
the marathon.
Now, we don't know the facts, many people don't finish marathons, but who's more likely
to finish?
The person who believes they can.
Exactly.
Because if you believe I can't finish this marathon, you quit, you're done.
That's it.
And the story.
So it's not that believes guarantee success, it's that you're much more likely to achieve
success when you believe.
What if someone's just like believing, but they're just so far, they've never run a
mile and they say, I'm going to go run a marathon today and I believe I can do this.
What happens when the belief really, you don't have that 240% or times in you really
for what you're thinking you're going to do?
So belief is not faith.
A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on evidence.
So you still got to look at the evidence.
It still has to be open to real world assumption.
I'm trying to.
I can't just be miracle curious.
You have to look at what actually serves you, but the point you had earlier about biology,
you asked what happens if you don't believe.
You know what happens when you do believe.
What happens?
We know that people who have positive views about aging at age 30, if you have positive
views about aging at age 30, a person who says something like growth is possible at any
age.
I believe that the growth is possible at any age versus aging leads to inevitable decline.
Now between those two statements, which is true Lewis, I can learn at any age or aging
involves inevitable decline.
The one you believe, right?
That's what's true.
Which one is the fact?
They're both kind of facts, right?
But which one becomes, which one is manifested as the truth in real life, the one you actually
believe.
If you have positive views about aging at 30, studies have found a study at Yale that
found that people who had those positive at 30 lived on average seven and a half years
longer.
That's crazy.
You know what that means Lewis?
That is more of an effect size than quitting smoking than diet.
It's more of an effect than exercise.
Wow.
Right?
Now, is it magic?
Is it that you're vibrating a certain frequency?
And because I think that therefore I do, that therefore like these things change in my
biology and my cells?
No.
And what is it?
It's got nothing to do with that.
It's the fact that if I have positive views about aging from a young age, what do I
do differently?
Remember the beliefs, the three powers, what we see, what we feel, what we do.
So who's more likely as they age to get out there and go for a walk, to start gardening,
to see friends, to work out?
If you believe, oh, I'm having a senior moment, versus, hey, growth is possible at any age.
Your behavior will continue to show up to empower you.
Yeah.
As you age, versus in a disempowering behavior, like I'm having a senior moment, I'm just
going to smoke all day now.
Or, yeah, I can't do that because of ex-wise, let me give you another study, steroids.
Okay?
There was two groups.
One was told just to exercise, per normal, go to the gym, exercise, per normal.
The other was told, we had this amazing new steroid.
We want you to take this steroid so we could test its efficacy.
Here's your workout routine.
Okay?
Do these exercises.
Turns out, the steroid was a placebo, okay?
You know there's a trick here.
The steroid was a placebo.
And yet on that placebo, the men who took the pill they believed was a steroid, gained
more muscle mass.
Crazy.
They physically, their beliefs became their biology.
Just like beliefs can add years to your life, their beliefs became their biology.
Why?
Wasn't magic.
It was the fact that when I believed that I'm on a steroid, I would get one more rep.
I would put on a tiny bit more weight.
I would work on a little harder because, hey, I've got the steroid in me, I better make
it pay off.
So the belief became the biology, even though it was completely a placebo.
And it influenced the behavior.
That's right.
And the behavior helped influence the results.
It's all about the behavior.
It's all, but when it comes to placebo, that's exactly what it's all about.
Wow.
Yeah.
And this is fascinating.
Your book is called Beyond Belief, the science-backed way to stop living in yourself and achieve
extraordinary results.
I'm curious in this book, from all the research you've done, it took you six years to write
and it rewrites, you know, start praying after 40 years because you had so much research
that showed the benefits to it.
What was the biggest takeaway for you from researching Beyond Belief?
The biggest takeaway for me was that I am, and by extension, all of us are capable of
far more than we know.
We're just scratching the surface of our capabilities.
And there are many, many studies in the literature that I share in the book as well that just blows
your mind, right?
The things that people can do when they believe, you know, monks who can raise their body
temperature consciously, they can do that.
There's a case study that I talk about where someone who had Parkinson's disease, who
was bedridden during the day, they're in the sleep lab.
And in the middle of the night, they wake up, they hop on a table, they raise a piece
of furniture over their head, and they start screaming alligator alligator because they
were having a dream, it's a Parkinson's patient, who was bedridden in the middle of the night,
got up and was fighting alligators in their sleep, right?
They were having a delusion, they were having a sleepwalking event because they weren't
bound to the reality of their beliefs, they were unconscious at that moment.
And so this goes on and on and on, that this demonstration as the rats, as we talked
about earlier, that when we unlock our true potential and we remove those limiting beliefs
and adopt these liberating beliefs, we can do so much more than we ever imagined.
What do you feel is possible for your life with all this that you've researched over the
next five to ten years?
From my life specific?
For your life.
Like, is there anything that you felt like, I'm only going to be dealt with to do books
a certain way or I'm going to be researcher, I'm going to be this type of a dad or something
that you always had until after this book, where now you've unlocked a new hidden potential
inside of you that you want to take on over the next five to ten years?
I think when I changed my relationship with my mom, I also changed my relationship with
my daughter.
Really?
Yeah.
How so?
Typical teenage trauma.
Yeah.
Like when I tell one of my friends who also has a teenage girl, oh my gosh, it's the worst
you know, teenage girls and they have all their issues and drama and all that, and that's
just a belief.
That's just a belief.
You know, in pre-industrialized countries, there's no such thing as a rebellious teenager.
That's something that we've invented in industrialized countries.
Why?
Well, what do you mean why doesn't it happen there or why not?
Yeah, yeah.
Why do we invent it or why doesn't it happen?
It's a belief.
Wow.
You know, the teenage brain, that there's all these hormones and they're all rebellious.
When I tell people, this is not a fact, there's no such thing.
It's not a foregone conclusion that a teenager has to be rebellious.
Many cultures don't have rebellious teenagers.
People are listening to this and saying, that's crazy.
Why?
Don't look at the science.
Look at the science.
Google it.
It doesn't exist.
The sugar makes your hyper.
Every parent.
Every parent knows.
You can't give your kid too much sugar.
It makes them hyper.
No.
It's false.
It's a complete myth.
Look it up.
But people hate this stuff because we hate challenging our beliefs.
We don't like it.
We have this psychological immune system.
If you feel that reaction, if there's a belief that's challenged, that you really don't
want to believe, that sounds crazy, those are the beliefs you most need to explore.
It's like, why?
It's praiseable thinking.
Yes.
Not only is it probably not true, but it's defending you against something.
What is it defending?
When I think to myself, my kid goes crazy when I give them sugar.
My kid goes crazy when I give them too much social media.
My kid is whatever, whatever.
What is that serving?
What does that belief do for me?
It's giving me.
Exactly.
Not only is it reinforcing, it's giving me something that's much more comfortable.
It gives me passivity.
Remember, our default state is helplessness.
We like that passivity.
That's our default.
Man.
That is crazy.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
I saw a clip online of a comedian doing an interview with a talk show host.
And I can't remember what exactly he said, he said, you know, I heard something around
like, oh, he has daughters and they're about to turn teenage years or like 11 or 12
and he goes, oh, man, get ready.
Like the interviewer is like, get ready.
It's about to be really hard for you.
And the guy cut them off right before and he goes, that's just a belief.
Like everyone who says that, it's just a shitty dad, you know, it's like, it's just a crappy
dad who didn't know how to like connect with his daughters, you know, and just puts that
label in this, all your daughters are about to be crazy, you know, when they turn teenage
years.
So this is comfortable.
Oh, yeah.
Right?
No, I don't have to actually do something.
Yeah.
This is, by the way, whenever if I go to the doctor and I need a prescription for something,
you know how the doctor has to tell you all the side effects, I don't tell me, I don't
want to know them.
I don't want to hear the side effects.
You don't hear it because then you're enforcing them.
That's right.
You're primed to look for those things.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
This is how I actually, I cured my insomnia.
I used to have terrible insomnia.
And insomnia turns out, as I was doing this research, is highly susceptible to the placebo
effect.
When they took, they put people in a lab who got great sleep and they told them, hey, we
were monitoring your sleep, you know, you slept really, really poorly.
And then they had them take these objective tests of alertness and cognitive abilities.
And guess what?
These people who had gotten perfect sleep, when they were told you got crappy sleep,
they, no, on the objectively on the test, they did worse.
And they did the opposite.
They took people who they interrupted their sleep.
They gave them a bad night's sleep on purpose, told them, you had a fantastic sleep.
Wow.
Look at these amazing scores.
You did really well.
They did very well.
They're very sharp.
Yeah.
I'm going to go up day after day, thinking, oh, I'm feeling groggy.
I'm feeling tired.
I had a bad night's sleep.
You only remember the parts when you were asleep, when you were conscious.
But all that time you were unconscious, you don't remember.
So today, I have another mantra, one of these secular prayers that I repeat whenever I
wake up at 2 in the morning, which happens sometimes.
I repeat to myself this phrase, the phrase is that the body gets what the body needs
if you let it.
That's all I said.
Just take a deep breath in.
The body gets what the body needs if you let it.
I just say that again and again.
And what that helps me do is to divert away from the remination, which causes the leading
cause of insomnia.
If I don't get a night's sleep, then I can't perform tomorrow.
And I've got this interview with Lewis.
And it's going to be terrible.
Whereas now I just tell myself, look, if I get a bad night's sleep tonight, I'll get a
good night's sleep tomorrow.
Yeah.
Right?
And I have exactly what I need for today.
As long as I exactly, that the body will reconfigure, unless there's some exceptions,
of course.
Yeah.
If you go for two weeks and I'll sleep, then you're like, yeah, or if you have some
kind of severe condition.
Right.
But for the vast majority of us, this insomnia is produced because of the fear of insomnia.
Of course.
Gosh.
That's the worst.
That's the worst.
Miranfar.com, N-A-R, and far.com, beyond belief, the science-backed way to stop limiting
yourself and achieve extraordinary results.
This is going to be the book that you're going to want to get because for me, as someone
who's a researcher skeptic, if you can learn these things and really see the benefit of
them, I feel like anyone who's skeptical, and who's
analytical, and needs like the research to prove certain things, they're going to get it
in this.
And I truly believe, that's funny, I truly believe that belief is everything.
Like belief is everything.
And my whole mission within my book, The Greatest Mindset, is to rid people of self-doubt.
Because I believe self-doubt is the killer of all dreams.
And when you doubt yourself, you will not accomplish your dreams.
That's 100%.
Like you said, you don't believe you can finish the marathon.
You're not going to finish, right?
But if you learn to believe in yourself, and you learn how to stay consistent with it,
and do what you talk about in the Triangle of Motivation, have the behaviors that match
those beliefs, and what was the bottom one?
The benefit?
The behavior?
Yeah, yeah.
The benefit of the behavior.
Yeah, yeah.
The benefit of the behavior.
And if you can stay consistent with that behavior, and keep the belief that you can
stay consistent with that behavior, good things are going to happen.
So I want people to get beyond belief, powerful book, change your mind, change your life.
You can get it now.
You can get it anywhere.
Books are sold.
Amazon, all the places.
You're also on social media.
I believe Instagram is your main spot, but you might be on LinkedIn as well.
I think I see your content there.
So, N-E-Y-A-L99 on Instagram, I believe that's still your Instagram.
But near and far.com, you got a lot of great resources and content there.
Near I got a couple of final questions for you.
I want to acknowledge you for taking this on because again, you know, you're like the
Dan Harris of meditation, but now in belief in terms of stepping into new things at this
season of life.
You're extremely successful as an author, speaker, business person.
But to take on your own limiting beliefs at this season is hard to do.
Most people don't risk enough to look at themselves and reflect and say, how can I
try something new on?
How can I let go of a belief that's not serving me in my relationship with my mom or other
people in your life?
How can I create more harmony at this season?
And so, I acknowledge you for taking this on and actually applying the research that you
found.
I asked you this before.
I think last time you were on was like five or six years ago.
But I'm curious what your three truths are now.
And if you were able to live as long as you want, but at the end of the day, you have to
take all your work with you, all of your writing, your books, your content is gone from
the world.
But you get to leave behind three truths, three things you know to be true from all of
your lessons.
What would those three truths be for you?
The three truths that I would leave behind.
So that's all I get to leave these three truths.
Three lessons, three truths, kind of like from all the things that you've learned up to
now and all the things you think you will learn until your death.
You can't leave any of that content behind, but you could share three truths.
I think one is we do not see reality as it is.
We see it as we are.
I think another one would be that you are a capable of far more than you know.
And that your beliefs become your reality.
Your beliefs don't become reality for everyone, but your beliefs become your reality.
Amen of that.
Say a prayer.
Say that prayer over and over again.
Your beliefs become your reality.
Repeat that mantra.
Final question.
What's your definition of greatness?
So last time you asked me that last time I was on, it was about doing what you say you're
going to do, right, living with personal integrity.
And I think now I've learned that real greatness is about having control over those beliefs.
That it's one of the few things we can control.
We can't control what's happening in the world.
We can't control this.
These things that are outside what we're able to influence.
But you always have the luxury to control those beliefs.
Can't control what happened to you in the past?
Can't control what's going to happen to you in the future.
But I think real greatness comes from controlling those beliefs so that they serve you rather
than you serving them.
Yeah.
Thanks for being here.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness.
Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's
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Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well.
Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review.
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And I want to remind you of no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy,
and you matter.
And now, it's time to go out there and do something great.
