Jack Canfield is well-known for one of the most successful series of books of all time, The Chicken Soup For The Soul books. Although I would call him a mindset expert, he didn’t grow up around a self-help mentality. His mother was an alcoholic and his father was a workaholic. Later, through his determination, Jack became familiar with certain principles of success that he used in the late 1980s to create the Chicken Soup For the Soul series, even after being turned down by 144 publishers. Jack shares the same principles of success that he used to succeed back in the ‘80s, in his book, The Success Principles: How To Get From Where You Are to Where You Want To Be. Now Jack’s most recent book, The Success Principles Workbook, is available as a powerful companion guide to the original publication.

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Contact Info

• Website: www.TheSuccessPrinciplesWorkbook.com
• Book: The Success Principles Workbook

Most Influential Person

• Dawa Tarchin Phillips, Tibetan Buddhist lama and mindfulness teacher: www.DawaTarchinPhillips.com

Effect on Emotions

• It's kept me much more calm and much more neutral. Sometimes people think I don't have any feelings.
• The truth is, I've learned that most of my feelings come from thoughts and if I'm aware of the thoughts and can deal with them at that level, then I don't have to have the emotional outbursts.
• I still cry when I see cats and skunks playing together on YouTube. I love interspecies things and I cry at movies. I don't cry so much about loss. I cry more at the joy of beauty and love.

Thoughts on Breathing

• I do breathing exercises as part of my yoga and my meditation practices in the morning.
• My wife and I just spent a month in India; the whole month of February. We had a private yoga instructor who started with 30 minutes of breathing exercises and then 30 minutes of yoga.
• I studied Kundalini Yoga with a yoga teacher back in my '30s [and learned] to do that breath of fire real fast.

Suggested Resources

• Book: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
• Books: Anything by Thich Nhat Hanh (Here's an example: The Art of Living)
• App: I'm not a huge app guy, other than the CNN Newsfeed on Facebook

Bullying Story

• My dad was an alcoholic and he got violent when he got drunk he would rage and if I wasn't careful I would get beaten, so I would literally hide inside the radio.
• I would wait till he went to bed so he couldn't find me because he was violent. So I got bullied by him. He was a verbal bully as well as a physical bully.
• I got bullied as a kid too [in school]. They always teased the new kid that came in and I was the new kid.

Free Gift

Do you want to become more calm, relaxed, peaceful, and content? Learn how by downloading this free ‘Waves of Content' Meditation by Bruce Langford. Unlock the secrets of calm here: MindfulnessMode.com/wavesofcontent

Episode Transcript

Note: The following transcript is a draft transcript, and as such, may contain computer-generated mistranslations.

Bruce (00:13):

Well, Jack, I'm really excited, like I said, to learn more about your newest book and what you're up to and, and so on. And of course, we're all going through this challenging pandemic right now and it's putting us all on this planet in the same playing field in a way, isn't it?

Jack Canfield (01:02):

Yes, it is. It is. It's been a, you know, it's an equalizer. It doesn't matter who you are, where you are. You know, I have many friends who have come down with the Corona virus. I have a couple of staff people who've lost members that are family that actually died in the last couple of weeks. Wow. So, you know, for awhile it was like the Ebola virus. It was over there in Africa somewhere and you watched it on the news and think that's terrible. But all of a sudden, you know, it's for real right now. And so, but I think that's what's really valuable for all of us that are in this mindfulness mode is that mindfulness is one of the greatest tools you can have right now to stay sane, to stay centered, to keep your immune system high. We can talk about all that if you want.

Jack Canfield (01:41):

I've been, I think in the last two weeks I've been on 20 or more podcasts and radio interviews and everyone's talking about it and I've been sharing something. I call the five M's. We can talk about that if you'd like to as well. But it's a time that we're all confronted in a way. I've been telling people, you know, there's a huge timeout when I was a kid and I would did something bad and my mom would say, you're getting a timeout. And she sent me to my room and all of us are in our rooms right now called our homes or apartments and can't go out. And we have to think about what we did, you know, and why is it that our healthcare system is so overloaded, unprepared? Why is it that we were burning up the environment in terms of the forest and the seas and, you know, the ice caps melting and the pollution that we have and the bad vibes, bad diets that most people are eating. And, you know, we could go down the line, it's made my family at least sit around and talk about that and say, okay, what's the new normal going to look like? We want that normal to be something that's of a higher level, more compassion, more love, more you know, abundance, more prosperity, but not at the cost of our fundamental essential life.

Bruce (02:52):

Yeah, I agree with you completely Jack. And well you mentioned mindfulness more important than it's ever been to understand

Jack Canfield (03:00):

Mindfulness and Deliv with mindfulness. What does mindfulness mean to you, Jack? Well, it means to me being aware means being aware of what I'm experiencing in my own body, what my emotions are, what my thoughts are. I set an alarm to go off about every hour. I'm one of these people that's very intellectually active and I could sit for five hours editing books and stories and forget that I have to go to the bathroom, drink water, get up and move. And then when I finally remember, it's like my legs almost don't move. You know, when I first learned about mindful, I started doing Vipassana meditation way back when and a 10 day retreats with people like Jack Kornfield and so forth. And so I literally meditate every day. So that's a, a period of like intense mindfulness, if you will. But throughout the day, just to stop and that for me it requires like a alarm to go off for something to remind me.

Jack Canfield (03:51):

And then I, I stop, I scan my body from head to toe and notice my breathing and my breathing shallow and my breathing be take some slow deep breaths. I'm a real big advocate of this. Six slow breaths in six slow breasts out are also doing what they call box breathing, where you inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four, and then hold out for four. But just cause whenever we're stressed out, someone always says, Hey man, slow down and take a breath. You know? And so by breathing any of the pranayama yoga exercises, you know it was really helpful for me. And then I check in with my thoughts. Mostly I'm involved, so I'm not like someone is sitting around like my, my, my stepdaughter who's more into like worrying about everything, you know? So for her, if she scans her thoughts, she realizes I'm making myself crazy by thinking these thoughts.

Jack Canfield (04:41):

You know, fear is, the result is we often heard fantasized experiences appearing real or future experiences appearing real. And what happens is we're going into the future imagining something bad that hasn't happened yet. Instead of being right here in the present moment, because right here in the present moment, I'm breathing in, I'm breathing out, I'm happy, I'm warm or cold depending on which I want to be, you know, temperature control. And I've got food in the pantry, I've got food in the refrigerator, everyone in my house is healthy at the moment. I'm looking out the window. It just rained all day yesterday. But now everything's green and blue skies and, and I've got, you know, I love to do this exercise called the rampage of appreciation that a Esther Hicks is channeled to Abraham, which is basically looking around and everywhere I look, I see your phones, I can listen to great music with my, my phone, my clock would tells me what time it is and water in a bottle next to me, this computer that someone invented and created.

Jack Canfield (05:38):

So there's so many things to be grateful for as well. So I'm a big fan of gratitude. And so mindfulness for me is as much as possible, staying present to what I'm experiencing in me, what I'm experiencing outside what I can actually sense in you not going into like projections, Oh, he's mad at me, he's not talking to me. All I notice is you're not looking at me. And then I can project all kinds of thoughts on that. But that's not, you know, necessarily what's really going on. So I'm a big teacher of when in doubt, check it out. Right. I'm imagining things ask, is that what you're really feeling? You know? So it's a combination of awareness tools and then responding, I think to those awarenesses, you know, stretching my body, drinking more water, getting up and moving being quiet when my wife's talking instead of interrupting her. All those things. Yeah.

Bruce (06:29):

Jack, I loved your book, the success principles that I've, just wondering, which one of those success principles would you say to someone right now as we deal with this concern with the pandemic? Which success principle do we need to get onboard with immediately?

Jack Canfield (06:46):

Well, I think the most important ones, actually, the first one I put in the book, which was take a hundred percent responsibility for your life and your results. And in that chapter there is a formula. It says E plus R equals O. You have an event plus your response equals an outcome. And what happens is we have an event right now called the coronavirus pandemic. We have an event call and your governor said, stayed home, don't travel. We have an event called, there's not as much as toilet paper on the shelves in the supermarkets, you know, whatever you want to call these things that we're experiencing. We watch a new show that's an event. And I think that it's our response to the event that is the thing that's going to produce the outcome of what our experiences. So our experience now is the outcome of how we responded to an earlier event.

Jack Canfield (07:32):

You know, someone gives you a $2,000 bonus check at the end of the year. You can either spend it as a response or you can put it in invested, and that's a different response. In a year later, you're gonna have a different outcome. One of them is you have no money. And the other one is you have like maybe 5% more money in your, your IRA account or something. So the reality is that most people now have a choice about three things. There's only three things you can control in life. You can control your thoughts, you become aware of them, you choose different thoughts or you choose no thought, which is what the Buddhist would have. You do just be present 100% with no judgment, no interpretation. You have the ability to control your images. So basically if you find yourself imagining terrible things, like even if there was a snake in your studio right now and a snake was coming toward you, you'd have to go into the future a few seconds.

Jack Canfield (08:21):

And imagine that make biting you to be afraid of snakes. Just moving across the floor. You don't know what it's going to do. And so as we go into the future and imagine we're going to lose our home, our child's going to get sick, my mother's going to die. I'm not going to be able to pay the mortgage. I'm not going to have a job when this is over. You know, that kind of stuff, which is not the case right now. For most of us. What happens is then we experience fear and fear goes us, takes us into the amygdala, which is the back central part of the brain. The amygdala hijacks the prefrontal cortex, which is where rational thought and creativity and spiritual ideas and and experiences come from. And so basically by stopping the negative thoughts coming into the present moment, either just focusing on our breath or focusing on just what cell around us, the reality without interpretation, without stories, we can come into the present moment and there's a couple of techniques I teach.

Jack Canfield (09:14):

I'll be glad to share them with you in a moment where you can literally harmonize the brain and the heart such that you automatically activate the prefrontal cortex. Get out of the amygdala fear. Now we have the ability to deal rationally what, what, what, what we need to do. If you're, if you're a compromised person with asthma or you've had, you know, pneumonia recently, you'd smoke too much, then you really should quarantine yourself and not go out. That makes sense to do. There are vitamins and herbs and supplements. So it would make sense to be taking right now. You know, I was watching bill Maher last night and he was saying he's now only doing edibles. He's not inhaling marijuana because he must not heard his lungs so much, you know. But there are, there are rational things you can do that if you have facts, there's, those are useful.

Jack Canfield (09:59):

But then beyond that, we just need to come back into the present moment and be with our breath or be with what is. So in terms of our physiology, what we're experiencing in our body, what we're experiencing around us, and then we don't have to be afraid so much. So E plus R equals O if you find you're experiencing anything you don't like, you know, not just that during the pandemic, but a lot of people are experiencing, for example, their, their income has gone down. You know, people aren't ordering their products or online services. Maybe they had a job where they're furloughed or at home. And the question now is, okay, what can I do creatively to respond to this so that I don't go broke? But if you're, if you're, if you're so in fear, but what's going to happen in the future, you can't really deal presently in a moment.

Jack Canfield (10:44):

Just to give you one example, a friend of mine who has a studio where he has, it's a fitness studio. People come in to work out, he's got a lot of equipment, big studio, and all of a sudden the order is you can't go those places, you know, you're locked down in your home. All those studios are closed. So he did this, this, this breathing technique which comes from the heart math Institute. You're probably familiar with it. Yes. The quick coherence process and as he began to get into his prefrontal cortex, what happened was he had a creative idea and the idea was all my clients are sequestered at home. It can't come out. I've got all this equipment. Why don't I sanitize it within an inch of his life. Call up all my clients and say, I'll deliver this to your home. You want to spend cycle a bicycle, you want to have a treadmill, you want an elliptical, whatever, your weights, whatever you want. And he's renting that equipment to them and he's actually making money. Renting the equipment is doing as well as he did when he was, had the gym memberships people coming in. So it's possible to have better outcomes if you're doing the right responses. They're only responsible. We have what we think or we imagine what we say and do. And so we can control all of those. Yeah,

Bruce (11:54):

Well, you know, I've read so many books that have had a lot of great concepts and ideas and, and certainly the success principle does too. But one thing I noticed is I read the book and I'm thinking about things and it says, you know, you should do this or you should do that. And then I don't always do it. But with your new book, the success principles workbook, you've got all of those worksheets and activities right there in the book. And I think that's what really makes the difference between just reading stuff and feeling good about it at the time and reading stuff and actually doing it, learning from it and changing. So what's one exercise you put in that book that you think is really life changing for people right now?

Jack Canfield (12:38):

Well, that's like asking me if you know, we can only keep one organ in your body, which one would you pick? And I'll say why I say that because there's really a, a concept behind it and then I will share some activities with you. But what happens is that what I'm teaching in this book and when I taught in the original success principles book and what I've now put in the workbook is it's a system that if you follow it in the right order, you're going to get the outcome you want. So a system is something that creates a predictable result over and over and and over and over. There was, if I gave you a lock and gave you the combination for that lock and you knew the combination, you could lock and unlock that lock as many times as you wanted and have as many successes in a sense as you want.

Jack Canfield (13:22):

The problem is a lot of people are missing some of the numbers in this combination called how to have success in life, or they might have all the numbers now working really hard, but they're doing them in the wrong order. In other words, if you create your goals before you clarify your purpose in life is Stephen Covey said in the seven habits of highly effective people, you could get to the top of the ladder and be leaning against the wrong wall. And so we want to make sure that what we're doing, what we're putting our life energy into is aligned with the intrinsic purpose that we were born to fulfill. I believe everyone has a purpose. Some of us are meant to be media people like yourself and you know your broadcast or you're casting broad information. Some of us are meant to be doctors and nurses and bank God.

Jack Canfield (14:04):

We have those people on the front lines right now. Some of us are meant to be musicians, you know, little kids. I have a grandson who is a six and a half, four I just talked to, it's my son's birthday today in Brooklyn and we were FaceTiming and he just bought himself a cello. He's a drummer by trade and the kid is just trying to play the cello. He's just a natural music. He just wants to play instruments. We've got a piano, he's got a drum set in seven years old, you know, and so in other kids they're doing, you know by no meal progressions in their head while they're in the crib at two years old, they're doing math problems in their head. So we are all given a set of talents that if we can identify them and bring them forward and then create goals around that, we can have incredible lives.

Jack Canfield (14:49):

Now, having said all that, I think one of the greatest exercises is to really start to look at in this first chapter, how much blaming, complaining, and excuse making we all do in life. So there's a whole thing like what are the, who are you think of all the people we're blaming right now? You know, we're blaming the government. You know, we're blaming Trump for not getting on the ball soon enough. Trump's brain blaming the Congress for impeaching him. So he didn't have time to think about it. You know, the Congress is blaming each other, the Senate and the Congress, the, you know, and also the Democrats and the Republicans and the liberals and the conservatives and you know, on it goes. And if it produces no better outcome, you know, and we, we blame the weather for making us late. And anyone in California that I know leaves home late, they know it's the four Oh five is a, is a freeway.

Jack Canfield (15:37):

It's really a parking lot. This is a freeway. And so they said, well, the traffic made me late. Well, you've been late eight days in a row. What are you pretending not to know? You live in Los Angeles, you know, and so I have a whole set of exercises in that first chapter to really get in touch with what is your blaming and you're complaining. And one of the things about complaining that people don't realize is when you're complaining about something, you only can complain about something if you have a preference of something you prefer, but you're not willing to risk creating. So if I'm complaining about my wife, like let's say I'm watching a Superbowl and I'm watching that and I'm eating, this is made up cause I don't do this. I'm, I'm a pretty conscious eater. But let's say I'm watching a Superbowl, I'm eating Cheetos, I'm drinking beer, and my wife comes in and she says, I can't believe you're watching a super bowl and you're eating this terrible food and getting drunk.

Jack Canfield (16:26):

And those people were out on the field and they're in healthy shape and they're making lots of money. You should go in the gym and workout. So I go to work on Monday and I complained about my wife, the food Nazi, right? Yep. Well, I couldn't complain about her if I didn't know that somewhere on the planet was another woman going, hi honey, can I get you some more nachos? Would you like another beer? And there are women who knew that. So you never hear an older person complaining about gravity. Why not? Because gravity, you can't change it, right? So we don't complain about things. We can't change. If you're complaining about the weather, it's only because you know there's better weather somewhere else and ready to move to Florida or moved to Miami. I mean our move to Arizona, let's say to get out of the snow, you'd just rather sit around and complain.

Jack Canfield (17:05):

We call it the aim of awful club and some bars. That's all people do. So if once you become aware of it, three mindful. Again, most of us are not mindful of our self sabotaging habits and these exercises in the book are partly aware, the get you aware of that and then give you options of things to do differently. For example I have a whole exercise called difficult and troubling experiences in that first chapter on a hundred percent responsibility. The questions go something like, what's a difficult or troubling experience in your life? What are you doing to keep it in place? How are you creating it? Mineral words. And there was, I create, having my sister mooch money off me because I don't tell her no, I don't want my mother to be mad at me or I don't want people to think I'm this rich guy who doesn't care about his sister because she'll be out on the street with a shopping cart and they'll say, well, Jack Canfield, he's got all the money.

Jack Canfield (17:54):

Why didn't he care? You know, so what am I telling myself to keep that in shape? What am I pretending not to know? Well, it's keeping my sister you know, what's the word I want? The pendant and not the developing her best internal skills. And we go through these set of questions like that. You know, what's the payoff? I get, well, no conflict. I don't have to deal with her and hear her cry. What's it cost me? It's costing my wife being ticked off because she's going, well, you can afford to give your sister that. Why can't I afford to get a new shoes? You know? And so you go down through these questions, you get to the end and you go, wow, I need to talk to my sister. And you know, when will you do that by? And I recommend people do that every month.

Jack Canfield (18:33):

And what, I have a yoga teacher who when she started working with me, he was making 50,000 a year based on the success principles. She's now making $500,000 a year. Her name is Peggy Bassett, and she's the PBS, one of the PBS yoga instructors that does fundraisers for them. And she said, I do that exercise every single month. And I always come up with something where I'm, I'm stuck in my life and I didn't realize I was the one who was sticking myself. So that's just an example of one, one principle. One of the things I, I think is fascinating is you talk about clean up your messes. And I'm, I'm just thinking, you know, some of my mindful tribe listeners, you may think, well, what's the connection between clean up my masses and mindfulness and success? Can you explain that to us? Sure, sure. Do you ever know if you have a little crack in the wall or a spot on the wall?

Jack Canfield (19:23):

You notice it a lot when you first get it. Yeah. And if you don't do anything about it, you stop noticing it after a while. You know, it just becomes background, which means you've numbed out your awareness. And so there's a couple of things that happened there. As I begin to not be aware of this, and I don't want to be aware of my sister's knees. I don't want to be aware of this. The cats pooping all over the house or whatever. Pretty soon my awareness shuts. I shut my awareness down. And so then I'm not aware of my higher self. I'm not aware of my intuition that's giving me guidance. You know, we all should be responding to our highest inner guidance. And so what happens is we need to clean up our methods for a couple of reasons. Number one, those kinds of things happen and we don't deal with them.

Jack Canfield (20:05):

And so our awareness shuts down. The second thing, it happens, we often start to get into a place where, let's say that you've got this junk drawer in your kitchen, which we all tend to have, you know, it's got flea medicine, it's outdated and won't even work on the dog anymore. Two dog collars of dogs you don't even own anymore with their Dillard, vanity tags, flea brush, you know, just, and then all kinds of other things that are in there, you know, two screws, one broken screwdriver, you know, and every time you go in there, part of you thinks I should clean this up, but you don't do it. And so there's this part that says, God, I can't even have a clean drawer in my kitchen. I can't even have a set of glasses that match, you know, whatever. And so then what happens?

Jack Canfield (20:47):

A subconscious level is how are we going to create peace in the middle East? Or how am I going to become a millionaire? How am I going to become a best selling author if I can't even keep my house clean? If I can't even organize my books, I can't even, you know, keep the bathroom organized. So on a subconscious level, all of those things are doing several things. The other thing they do is it's taking what we call attention units because like if I look around at my desk and I've got 35 unfinished things every posted, that's still there usually represents an incomplete in my life that someone I should call something I should do something I should fix. Call the plumber, you know, do that thing, read that book or do that thing from Amazon, whatever. And the more incompletes I have that are taking my attention, it doesn't allow me to have my full attention.

Jack Canfield (21:34):

Goes back to mindfulness again. You have my full attention on the most important task. One of my mentors as a man who runs a strategic coach program in Chicago whose name will come to me in just a second. I don't know why it's not coming right to second. Anyway, Dan Sullivan. So Dan Sullivan, I took his program and then has an office space them, like his company has offices, but he has no office. He said, because what I realize is a desk is just a place for incomplete things to pile up all the things you didn't read, all the books you're going to handle, all the emails you printed out that you're going to respond to, whatever. So he said, I have three conference rooms in the office and I just book a conference room whenever I come in and I bring in people and they bring in the such and such file, bringing that artwork to look at, who do I need to talk to, get them on the phone.

Jack Canfield (22:22):

And at the end of the day I have this empty conference table again. I just go home. Wow, isn't that piled up for me to do? And so he's not like storing stuff. You know, most people's credenzas behind their desk are just piles of magazines. They haven't read reports they're going to read letters are going to file, et cetera. So he doesn't have any of that. So all of his attention is on learning and teaching. So he probably reads a couple of books a week, figures out what's in there that's valuable that he can teach his students, his coaching clients, develop some process around that, calls them a strategies, something like that. And he, he'll usually write, it's like a little booklet a month that he sends out to his clients based on something he's read because he said if it's not usable, why know it. And so then he turns it into something usable.

Jack Canfield (23:06):

But the point being that he has 100% focus on everything he's doing now. I'm not quite like that because I'm a collector of stories that I then put into books and collectors of you know, ideas and somewhere, but very much more that way than I ever was before I met, I met damn. So the more incompletes I have, it's taking up attention units and we know that the mind can only hold about seven units of attention at a time. And when you get beyond that, they find out something called the Zeigarnik effect. A waitress will remember what everyone in our station has eaten until they pay the bill. And then five minutes later, she can't tell you what they had because it's complete. She doesn't need to cloud her, her mind with them. But most of us are running around with so many incompletes. So one of the tasks I give people in the book, I have a whole page of about 25 things that you need to look at.

Jack Canfield (23:58):

Do you have filing us undone? Do you have tax records that are not organized? Do you have stuff that needs to be fixed and repaired? Are there things that no longer fit that you're diluting yourself, that you're going to weigh 122 pounds again? You know, even though you're a 48 and you eat too much, like most of us do. So like going through your clothes closet, going through all the junk doors going through the attic, you're, I've seen people's car trunks that look like used use stores. You know, there's so much stuff in there. Even the backseat of some people's cars, they're like archeological digs, you know that they ate this on Tuesday because it's between the newspaper of Wednesday and Monday. There's the McDonald's wrapper, you know? And so it's like, it, it, it, it gives you such clarity of focus when you've completed and also emotional things.

Jack Canfield (24:46):

Who are you? Who are you incomplete with? Who do you owe an apology to? Who do you need to forgive? Who do you need to ask for money? They owe you? Who do you need to pay back? So there's a whole checklist. When I'm training my trainers, I would, now I've got 3,500 trainers around the world teaching in 107 countries teaching the success principles. They have to go through that entire list and complete it in order to become certified because I want them to be living these principles and also be as focused as they can.

Bruce (25:16):

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I love what you say in your book about surround yourself by successful people and we hear that over and over and over. But you have a brilliant suggestion in there. And I think that's just great. What you, what you suggest. And that is about interviewing. So tell us about that.

Jack Canfield (25:36):

Well, I have a lot of things in my book. I don't remember everyone in great detail, so you might have to help me remember the one you're referring to.

Bruce (25:41):

Yeah. Well you just said, you know, if you can't always surround yourself with successful people, interview successful people and become familiar with their concepts and, and just become familiar with what they're all about and learn about them just like I'm doing now. And I, and I absolutely agree wholeheartedly. I think that's a great way to, to just become more comfortable with successful people.

Jack Canfield (26:06):

Well don't you find as an interviewer that you're learning stuff every week that you might not have known and you're actually applying and some of it in your life and your life's improving as a result of it. Absolutely. Yeah, it truly is. So I have, you know, Jim Rowan has that famous quote, you become the average of five people you spend the most time with and now very few, that's family members, colleagues at work, your best friends. And so forth. And if those, and I have an exercise in a book to list all the people you have constant interaction with, put a plus sign next to it who everyone who uplifts you put a minus sign next. Everyone who brings you down. And when I first did that, my mentor w Clement stone, it was a multimillionaire. He was where? $600 million in the 1970s. Wow. And he interviewed me for a job and his foundation, which I ended up getting.

Jack Canfield (26:50):

And he said do you take a a hundred percent responsibility for your life? I said, yeah. He says do you blame anybody? Yeah, you, you went through this whole thing and I realized I wasn't going to present. Then he said, I want you to make a list of everyone you spend time with consistently put a plus next to everyone who's positive and minus next to everyone is negative. He said, now I want you to stop spending time with anyone who's negative. And I said bill, my mother's name has a minus sign next to it. What do I do? He says holidays. That's it. They'll just, that's it. Cause they're going to bring you down. And they do, you know, we have some people that are like, I think Zig Ziggler called them psychic vampires. You come into the room and they just kind of suck the energy out of you or out of the room.

Jack Canfield (27:34):

Other people walk in the room, the whole room lights up, you know, you want to be that person. You want to surround yourself with that kind of person. So as you were saying, if you can get into the sphere of influence of those people, like go to the church they go to or go to the clubs they go to or belong through the associations they belong to. But also if you can't do that, you can call up people and invite them for lunch. You can invite them to just let you interview them for 10 minutes. You have some questions because you'd like to grow up and be like them kind of thing. You can watch their Ted talks or Ted X talks. You can watch their YouTube videos. You know, you could sit by your sequestered at home right now, watch YouTube videos for eight hours a day and you would never run out of everything that Tony Robbins, myself you know, Deepak Chopra, Jack cornfield, all these people have recorded.

Jack Canfield (28:20):

There's so much information, so much education available to us. And we can hang out in a sphere of their thinking. One Hartford researcher whose name's escaping me again said that we are the result of the conversations. We have, the conversations in our own head and the conversations we have with other people. And when you read a book or watch a Ted talk or watch a YouTube video or attend a master class or any of these things that are out there, you're having a conversation with some of the brightest, most conscious, most aware, most successful, accomplished people on the planet. And it's free for the most part, for masterclasses. You pay a little money every month, but you're, you're, you're working with masters. You want to make a movie spike Lee. Showing you how to do that for God's sake. So it's worth the investment.

Tune in to the podcast to hear the rest of the conversation.