Overcoming Challenges: Neuroscientific Approach to Success

John Assaraf teaches progress over perfection, and how to rewire beliefs for success.

### John Assaraf: Rewriting His Story with the Power of Beliefs and Brain Training
* 🏃 Assaraf's mentors taught him to focus on progress rather than perfection, with "**little incremental gains** every day, every week, every month, every quarter."
* 🧠 He learned from a mentor that "**failure is an opportunity to learn**" and to "**disassociate [himself] being a failure from failing**".
* 🧠 Assaraf's brain training journey began when a mentor asked him to set goals and choose between being "**interested**" or "**committed**" to achieving them.
* 🧠 He was taught to **read his goals daily, touch them, and visualize achieving them**, as well as to **write down and listen to the beliefs he needed to achieve those goals**.
* 🧠 Assaraf believes that the "how-to" of achieving goals is the easiest part, and the real challenge lies in understanding **"why [we] are not doing the things that [we] know [we] should be doing."**
* 😓 Despite giving all his real estate agents the same training, Assaraf found that some were not getting the **same results**.
* 🧠 Assaraf's NeuroGym company aims to use advanced brain training methods to help people **unleash their full potential** by retraining their **subconscious minds**.

### John Assaraf: Rewiring Your Brain for Success
* 🧠 John Assaraf shares how he helped a group **increase sales by $100 million within six months** by teaching them to **change the way they thought about themselves and their habits**.
* Assaraf explains that we all have stories, beliefs, habits, people, and systems that support these stories, which then **recreate our lives**.
* He discusses the concept of **set points**, where we develop default modes in the brain for various aspects of our lives, and suggests learning how to **reset these set points**.
* 😨 Assaraf views fear as a subconscious trigger that causes feelings, and he treats it as a **signal rather than a stop sign**.
* 🧘 He introduces two "inner sizes" to manage fear: "**Take 6**" to calm the circuits and "**Aya**" to increase awareness and take small action steps.
* 💡 Assaraf defines beliefs as neural patterns in the brain that we behave based on, and he suggests **reading, emotionalizing, and visualizing empowering beliefs** to create new patterns.
* 📅 To form new habits and beliefs, Assaraf recommends finding **intrinsic motivations that outweigh the brain's resistance** and starting with **small actions that can be repeated over time**.
* 🎯 He uses vision boards to **see what you want**, accomplishment boards to **remind yourself of past achievements**, and "crap" boards to address **conflicts, resistance, accomplishments, and procrastination**.

none of my mentors ever had me focus on perfection. They had me focus on progress, to just keep getting better, little incremental gains every day, every week, every month, every quarter. And even when you move backwards a couple of steps, what's the progress that you made in what you learned. So, I was taught that failure is an opportunity to learn. And I was also taught to disassociate me being a failure from family. [Music] [Music] Hey, everybody, welcome to Impact Theory. Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right, today's guest is a wildly successful serial entrepreneur who has built five multi-million dollar companies, including one that generated over four billion dollars in revenue. He's also the multiple-time New York Times best-selling author of The Answer and Having It All. And he is widely considered one of the leading behavioral and mindset experts in the world. And part of what makes him so extraordinary is that he has had a just crazy string

of successes in multiple industries across absurdly divergent product lines. His areas of expertise range all the way from real estate and internet software to brain research and business consulting. This broad spectrum acumen has seen him featured in eight movies, including Quest for Success with Richard Branson and the Dalai Lama, and the global phenomenon The Secret. He is also a much sought-after coach and speaker who's been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and on CNN. Additionally, he's been interviewed and mined for his priceless insights by such high-profile interviewers as Larry King, Ellen, and Anderson Cooper. He's not one to sit back on his laurels and retire, however, so despite the kind of repeated success that eludes all but even the most die-hard entrepreneurs, he's launched yet another new company, this one called NeuroGym, that aims to use the most advanced technologies and evidence-based brain training methods to help people unleash their fullest potential. So please help me in welcoming the man whose latest book, Innersize, is

poised to unlock your brain's hidden power. The brain whisperer himself, John Assaraf. Thank you, absolutely. It's good to have you on. Oh, it's so good to be here, dude. I want to dive right into the brain training. So, it makes total sense to me now as an entrepreneur why you would be so into like brain research and brain science and all that, but I don't know that it's the most self-evident thing to the outside world. Why did you start there? Well, I didn't start there. What happened for me personally when I was a teen between ages 13 to 17, I got into enormous amounts of trouble with the law. I did a lot of unethical things, and I was getting myself into so much trouble. And I had one mentor that my brother introduced me to, his name was Alan Brown. He was a very successful philanthropist entrepreneur, and he agreed to meet with me for lunch one day, and he asked me, Why are you doing these things? You seem like a nice young kid. And I said, I don't know. I just

want to make some money, and I just want to fit in, he goes, but you seem like you're intelligent. Why don't you just use your brain's natural abilities? I go, Listen, based on my education and based on what the teachers have told me, I'm not going to do very well in life. And I left high school in grade 11 thinking that I'm not worthy enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough. And this one man, in one minute, in one meeting, changed my life because he asked me, What goals do you have? And I said, What do you mean, what goals do I have? I said, I want to go out this weekend to the bar, I want to have some good food, I want to find a nice young lady, maybe hook up with. And he says, No, what are your bigger goals? And I didn't have any. So he actually sent me home. He said, Fill out these pieces of paper. And on the pieces of paper, it said, like, What age do you want to retire by? Like, I was 19. This was May of 1980.

i wasn't even started yet. I said, But just fill out, fill out these papers. So I said, I want to retire by a time of 45 with 3 million dollars. I want to have a Mercedes. I want to have a house. I want to travel the world. I want to have a great lifestyle. And so I came back on Monday, and he looked at it, and he asked me one question. And that question transformed my life. And he said, Are you interested in achieving these goals, or are you committed? And I stopped, and I looked at him. He was standing up; I was sitting at my desk there at his office. And I asked him, Mr. Brown, I said, What's the difference? And he said, If you're interested, you'll do what's convenient. You'll come up with stories and excuses and reasons why you can't. And you'll use your education as an excuse. You'll use your stories as an excuse. You'll use the fact your father was a cab driver and was a gambler and never had any money. You'll use all of

that as your reasons why you can't. He says, but if you're committed, you will do whatever it takes. You'll let go of your stories, you'll let go of your excuses, you'll let go of all the reasons you currently have that are formulating your identity of yourself, and you learn how to let that go and become who you are destined to become. Why'd you listen to him like that's such extraordinary advice, which I would have promptly ignored. Well, I had been in so many situations where I was so embarrassed and ashamed for myself and for my mother and father, and here was a man who was kind, generous, caring, empathetic. He didn't talk down to me, he lifted me up, but then he also said, I can show you how. If you are committed, I can show you how. And I had nothing to lose at that point. Talk to me about that shame, that's really interesting, and you've talked about growing into being able to talk about stuff very openly. So what was the

source of the shame. How did it play out for you? So, the first source of shame. When I was five, I moved from Israel where I was born to Montreal. And I just started kindergarten in Israel. And then I was thrown into a class with 50 kids in Montreal in grade 1. I didn't speak English or French. And so I felt stupid. I felt like I sat there, you know, looking up at the ceilings, bugging the other kids. And was consistently reprimanded. Consistently put in the principal's office. And then I was consistently, you know, brought, you know, to my knees with my parents. My father was physically abusive, which, you know, is a challenge in itself. His words weren't a way, you know, that he communicated. Hands and feet were his way of communicating. And so when I did the wrong things, um, that's was the punishment. And so I felt embarrassed that I wasn't smart enough, that I wasn't good enough, that I wasn't going to amount to much and back.

then school was, you know, my parents were trying to say, Go to school, do well, that's your way out of, you know, where we were living. That's your way out of this life that we're having. Which wasn't a bad life. We had food on the table, we had a roof over our heads, but there was always a struggle. And Mr. Brown offered me some hope. It really amounted to that. He offered me gentle, kind love and hope without embarrassing me, shaming me, or making me feel guilty. What was it that he said that read to you as hope at that point? Um, it was his demeanor, of how kind he was. He was extremely successful, real estate offices, real estate buildings, a wife, Lori, children. Just kindness, you know, just raw kindness. There was nothing for him to gain from helping me. He didn't know me, but he just was kind. And it was one of the first times that there wasn't a hidden agenda or somebody just, you know, putting me down for being a degrading human being.

degraded human being, and he made me promise if I took what he taught me, I teach it to others. I think that you've become this really extraordinary example of rewriting your story. Yeah, how did you get out from under the story that you would have had to have been forming if your father was abusive? Because now I know that you guys, you're in very regular communication. Oh yeah. Um, so it just turned 88 where we, yeah, it's amazing. So I forgave him 50 years ago. What did that process look like? I know a lot of people are watching this right now. They are stuck in a story, man. Like something happened to them as kids or whatever's happening to them now. They don't know how to get out from under that story and could never conceive of having a beautiful relationship, you know, that they've sort of re-explored and reimagined. When I was in my 20s, one of the things that Alan put me on a path to was personal development. You know, read a

book a month go to events listen to cassette tapes back then of motivational stuff for motivation for inspiration for strategies for tactics of what to do to lift raise your your level of skill and knowledge um so i went to this event and i brought up this uh this uh challenge that i had with my father and the instructor said like when are you gonna forgive him i said never i'm never gonna forgive him [__] that forgive him there's so much pain and the instructor said well if you're never gonna forgive him then you're the one taking the poison pill hoping he's gonna die or he's gonna be affected he says you don't forgive him for him you forgive him so you can move on i was like aha number one and then he said why don't you ask your father why he did it whoa like why why was he like that and so when i mustered up enough courage on the phone with my father i said dad like how come you've never said i love

you he says well my father never said he loved me. That's not what a man says, but you say to my sister says well, that's okay to say to a girl or to a woman. I said, why did you hit me so much? Why did you it says because you were being a bad boy. I said, but why didn't you talk to me like, why didn't you just talk? And he says well, because my father hit me too. I had to put you in your place. I had to teach you the right way to stop the behavior. And it was at that moment that I realized he just didn't know better. He that's what he learned was the process to try and help me. So he's not a malicious human being. He's a kind, loving, caring man, but he was taught to get compliance hit so the pain will cause you not to do it again. And in theory, okay, understand the brain signs today, it does work in some cases, but especially with with children, even adults, the physical and mental and emotional.

trauma that's created when somebody who loves you also inflicts so much pain to you. There's confusion the neural network in the brain says I love this person my mother my father my best friend whatever and then there's so much pain associated. Now we have these patterns in our brains of this love and [ ] hate love and pain and it's very very confusing but after this dialogue with him I started telling him I love you and it took three years. I used to call him every week I started telling him I love you dad hang up I love you dad I hang up I love you dad hang up then once one day he says to me I love you too boy and then he has never not said I love you to me my brother or my sister since then wow that's really extraordinary what what was the mechanism you're so good at like getting to the just raw how I pull this off. I know you use vision boards which I definitely want to talk about accomplish boards which I think is really extraordinary.

and i've never heard that before. And i think that's really, really awesome too. What board? Crap, crap board to get to the crap board. We definitely have to hear about that. Were you using the crap board to like reframe the story? Like how did um, I did the crap board didn't come until last couple of years. Let me come back to the Alan Brown story. When I came back that following couple of days with my goals and he asked me, committed or interested? I said I'm committed, shook my hand. He then put me through real estate school for five weeks. I graduated from real estate school May 20th, 1980. And the only reason those dates are ingrained in my brain. I passed the real estate test on my own without cheating. Wow. So that was step one. When I came back to the office, he had the forms that I had filled out. He says, great, sit down. So I want you to read every one of them every morning that you come in the office at 7:30. And I want you to run.

your fingers across them were these the goals of the those are the goals. The goals that I had so you had me write my vision for health wealth relationships career business finances charity fun experiences everything every year of my life. You had these documents he said I want you to read them every day and you're going to do it while you come into the office so that I know that you've done them. And I want to I want you to run your fingers across them as you're reading them and then when you're finished one paragraph close your eyes and I want you to feel what would it be like if that was true. So he got me to see it to touch it to close my eyes and visualize it and to feel it. So at the time he didn't understand what he was really doing but he was causing me to create new neural patterns in my brain that did not exist before. The only success that I'd ever really seen was on lifestyles of the rich and famous. I said one day I want a life like that.

and and so every single day for a year. I had to do that, and it only took 10 or 15 minutes. And there was also beliefs you talked about. What else was in there? He also asked me to write down. What would you have to believe about yourself in order to achieve those goals? He said, Well, I'd have to believe I'm smart enough. But I don't. He goes, I don't want to know what you don't. He says, What would you have to believe? Well, I have to believe I'm smart enough. I'd have to believe I'm deserving enough. I'd have to believe I'm worthy enough. I'd have to believe I'm capable of doing this. I'd have to believe these things. I wrote out a bunch of things, and he added a few more. He says, Great, now I want you to record those things. And on your way to work and on your drive to look at real estate homes because 19 getting to real estate. You listen to those over and over and over.

and over and over again until you can recite every single one of them. So he taught me the power of repetition. He taught me the power of looking at stuff, touching stuff, feeling stuff, seeing stuff, hearing stuff, memorizing stuff. And at the time I was 19. I said, I mean, I felt this was ludicrous to me, right? This is like, what the hell am I doing here? It's like, there's like, it was nuts. But that first year at 19, I made like 30 some odd thousand dollars, which was five grand more than my dad made as a cab driver. So I said, something's working. I just kept doing it. I was too afraid not to. So I kept doing it. In the second year, I made 151 thousand dollars, five times now. In the second year, he started upgrading my knowledge and skills more. So he started to say, okay, instead of doing this now, now you've graduated to doing this. And he taught me some upgraded skills. And so the combination of training my brain at a

young age with beliefs that I wanted to have. He taught me the right habits to have daily rituals, you know, for goal achievement versus goal setting. That's interesting, right? So he said everybody sets goals, either they write them down or they don't, they have them in their head. I'm going to teach you how to achieve goals. It's really interesting coming from the guy that was in the secret, and I love what you've talked about the difference between the law of attraction and the law of goya. Oh yeah, yeah. So what, talk to us about that. So the law of goya is simply get off your ass. So if you think and you believe and you emotionalize, you visualize and you create your plan for how am I actually going to achieve this. So what do I need to do? When am I going to do it? How specifically? How am I going to tweak it, measure it, and iterate it so that I'm consistently making progress. I learned the value of progress versus perfection.

none of my mentors ever had me focus on perfection. They had me focus on progress, to just keep getting better little incremental gains every day, every week, every month, every quarter. And even when you move backwards a couple of steps, what's the progress that you made in what you learned. So, I was taught that failure is an opportunity to learn. And I was also taught to disassociate me being a failure from failing. For sure, I want to go back to what you're talking about with beliefs. And you said, This is so cool. You were talking about how you wrote down these beliefs and you were reading them over and you were doing what you're told and you're running your finger across, really allowing yourself to feel it, imagine it, and your brain was screaming something at you. My brain was screaming, That's [ __ ]! That's not true. You're not successful. You're not earning that amount of money. You're not smart. You're not this. But I was also taught at the same time.

that when that happens, first and foremost, that's normal. That's the old self and the old patterns trying to fight for their life. And he said, with repetition and emotion and consistency, initially it's hard, and you have to use conscious effort to create the new beliefs. He says, But over 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 180 days, that new pattern that you're focusing on and paying attention to, your brain basically says, 'Well, I guess you really don't need those old patterns. You keep activating these new ones. Let's just make these ones work and let's make these real.' Yeah, but I want to understand what happened. And with the even the law of attraction, you know, the I was taught the law of attraction, you know, I was 23, 24 years old, also at a real estate conference. They're talking about this law of attraction thing, that there's this energy, everything's made up of energy. I am energy, you are energy, and my thoughts, you know, create this resonance between what I attract and what I don't. I'm like

oh god i like that. You know, like I want to attract more of the good stuff, right? Um, and so I, I, I bought in. Like, I bought into stuff that just made sense to me. But then I was a voracious student. I want to understand how. Like, explain to me how it works. Like, if somebody tells me visualize, I go, why? Like, how does it work? Like, if you ask me to visualize, like, why does it work? Like, why should I invest my time on that versus something else? If you're asking me to use affirmations, like, how specifically? Why? How does it work? If you're asking me to emotionalize, well, what's happening in me that tell me I need to create these false senses of feelings? I want to know why it works and why does it work, especially emotionalizing. I think that's something that people hear a lot. I talk a lot about embodying something, really feeling it. Yeah, but why does it work, right? Great question. It has to do with circuits in the brain and neurochemicals that are

released, and so when we feel something, chances are that we're going to release dopamine in the brain, the feel-good neurochemical that activates the reward center of the brain. And chancellor, if we feel that and we have this positive emotion around it, and that neurochemistry is flooding our brain and our body with feel-good chemicals, we're actually activating the motivational center of the brain. And so when we visualize, when we set a goal, when we take an action step, when we emotionalize, when we read our goals, the initial flood of neurochemicals, dopamine, serotonin, feel-good chemicals. And then if we share it with a friend, oxytocin, those three neurochemicals, those are the neurochemicals of goal achievement. But then there's the other side of it, the other circuits of fear, of stress, where norepinephrine, cortisol, or epinephrine, the stress hormones, can be released as well. And so I'm fascinated, and I want to teach people the stuff that we've learned about beliefs, self-esteem, self-worth.

fears and the stuff that really holds people back because all the how to how to get healthy and stay healthy we know how do i build a business and sustain it we know how do i get into a relationship and make it successful we know we we know most of the how-to for anything that anybody wants to do in this time frame that we live in so the how to is the easiest part of the equation so the harder part of the equation is why am i not doing the things that i know i should be doing and why am i not doing the things that i could find out easily how to do let's talk about that so in your real estate company you said i'm giving everyone the same training they're reading all of the same books and yet they're not getting the same results and it wasn't like oh well the smart people are doing better than the dumb people you said sometimes it was people that you were like god in real life this guy's not that bright but he's crushing so what ended up being the difference

between the people who didn't do anything with the information and those that did so. In this is going back sometimes, I think in 1992 we were stuck, um, but I knew there was more possibility. There was, there was room for growth, and I wanted to figure out if the stuff that I did in the 80s when I was a kid, you know, that broke free, would it work with some of my agents. And so we took 75 agents, randomly agents said, Hey, do you want to get into a six-month program to like retrain your brain, your subconscious brain, around your beliefs about what is possible for you to achieve, around your habits of what you have to do in order to achieve that? And we focused on retraining their subconscious mind. And so for six months, they had to go through a process of listening to certain audio tapes, reading, reading certain materials every day, and following the process of training their brain, specifically their subconscious brain, which controls 95 to 98% of all of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

today and within six months, that group increased sales by 100 million dollars. Jesus, 100 million dollars. I said, Holy [ __ ], right? This is working. And so we started to teach some of what we teach now in NeuroGym. Actually, now we have the technologies, we have the systems that are far better than what we did back in the 90s. And we went from 1.2 billion to 4.5 billion a year. And it wasn't because we taught them any more skills to be real estate agents. We taught them how to change the way they thought about themselves. We taught them how to change their habits. Our agents who made 750,000 or more were in front of a client 75% of the time. And we asked all the agents that weren't in front of more clients, like, Why are you doing that? Like, why aren't you in front of people that are going to help you earn more income? Oh, well, we're busy doing this and doing this and doing this.

and they had stories and excuses and reasons why. And so part of the work that I love to do now is really help people understand. What is your story like? What's the story you're telling us? Because we all have a story. We have a money story, a relationship story, a health story. We have a story for everything. And then that story keeps recreating our lives over and over and over again. And we have beliefs that support the story. We have habits that support the story. We have people that support the story. We have systems that support our story. And so my question I always ask people, who would you be with a different story? Talk to me about set points. That was something really interesting in what you talk about around the stories and things that we carry that I found really interesting. Sure, so Maxwell Maltz wrote a great book many, many years ago in probably the 70s called Psycho-Cybernetics. And Maxwell Maltz was a surgeon who performed surgery on people. And what he noticed is even after plastic surgery that he

performed on people. Some people didn't see any change in their faces, and it was visible to everybody else but not to them because they had a map of what they thought they look like. Yes, so we all have a map of reality. We have a map of what we think we look like, and any deviation on the physical level to that map, to that visual representation we have in our brains, that doesn't match the map, your brain deletes or distorts it. So when we were working with real estate or when I worked with business owners, in addition to upgrading knowledge and skills, if you think about how, let's say, income, we have set points for how much income we earn. So whether it's $10,000 a year or $20,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 or a million, it doesn't matter. We get this set point, and then we behave the way we need to behave, and we feel what we need to feel to earn that income. And over a period of time, it becomes part of the brain's default mode network.

so we develop set points for everything, and so if the set points in the brain and there's a psycho-cybernetic mechanism in the brain, a control and response mechanism in the brain, and it's our brain. Why not learn how to reset the set point? And so now we're looking at what technologies are available to help, help reset that. What evidence-based methods are there to set that or to reset that? And so when we take, let's say, visualization, right, and you start to see yourself, even if the picture is not clear in your mind, of achieving the next level of your success, whether it's releasing weight and keeping it off, getting into a relationship that you love and are happy, and whether it's to make two or three or five times more money and live a certain type of lifestyle that allows you to do the things that freedom with having money allows you to do. If you start in your mind first and you impress that through conscious efforts into the subconscious mind, it then causes thoughts and emotions and

behaviors. So, I like to work from the outside in and from the inside out. So, use both. I want every advantage. It's interesting. So, I've heard you now a few times, and the first few times, it didn't really make my radar, but you always say release weight. You never say lose weight. Yeah, what do you do when you lose something? Look for it. Yeah, I don't want to look for weight that I've lost. I want to release it. I like to use language patterns as well that are gonna empower me versus disempower me. Uh, self-talk is so critical, and so I'm consistently paying attention to how am I speaking to myself. Am I speaking to myself in the kind motivating empathetic compassionate way, or am I consistently self-deprecating and putting myself down? I used to think a lot like when I was younger, I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not worthy. Um, those thoughts, uh, and you know lots of fear, fear of being embarrassed, fear of failure, fear of being ashamed, and I

still have the thoughts every once in a while especially when i'm setting new goals. Those come up, holy mackerel, they come up so freaking fast. Are you smart enough to achieve that? Are you good enough to achieve that? Even when I got into really diving deep into the brain science and even my new book, I was petrified to release my book. It took me two years to write it because now I'm entering another whole domain of neuroscience and neuropsychology with world-renowned experts that I've worked with for years. But now here I am putting myself out there with, Hey, this is neuroscientifically correct, so I had to make sure that it was. And but there's a lot of fear, but I understand what the emotion of fear is. It's a subconscious trigger that causes this feeling that I don't like, and it's a ghost signal for me, not a stop signal for me. That's interesting. What do you mean by that? Well, fear is an emotion. Emotions are all triggered at the subconscious level.

they release neurochemicals that cause a feeling. We are consciously aware of feelings that are triggered at the subconscious level. The feeling is the end point of the human experience in the physical body. And so when you have something in your brain that a neural network says, Well, what if this book comes out and you fail? What if it's not good enough? What is scientifically not correct? What if, what if, what if? My brain is going to process that the same way as your brain and everybody else because everybody's brain is the same. The mechanism of how the brain works, Einstein's brain, Hitler's brain, Genghis Khan's brain, Tom Bilyeu's brain, John Acetate, all the same functionality. So if you understand the mechanics of what's supposed to happen, then you say, Okay, great. When I feel this, then what am I going to do? So I like to use an analogy of a car. You're driving a car and you're talking to a friend of yours and a light pops up on the dash.

don't take a hammer and hit a light. It's a signal something's happening in the engine, in the trunk, in the tires. Something's happening. Emotions and feelings aren't positive or negative, they're empowering or disempowering to varying degrees. If you don't understand them, and so if you think about fear, right? How does a firefighter go into a burning building when there's this enormous adrenaline and epinephrine, you know, that could stop most people dead in their tracks? They learn, Here's the feeling. It's normal. Do you have the knowledge and the skills and the preparation to deal with this in a safe way? Go if you don't, now you retreat. So we have this phenomenal brain, right? It's genius abilities. We can't figure out how to replicate it anywhere with billions of dollars, but we are getting some of the user's manual now. So when you feel fear, what should you do? I teach the first two inner sizes that I teach every one of our students. Number

one is called take six calm the circuits. So if you have this unpleasant anxious fearful emotion energy in motion, right, and it's unpleasant and the brakes have gone on, if you just take six deep breaths in through your nose, out through your mouth like you're breathing through a straw, you will deactivate the stress response center. Which means blood is going to go back to the left prefrontal cortex, the Einstein part of the brain can actually think through this problem. Because what happens when the stress response center is activated, blood goes away from that into the fear response. So you have epinephrine, cortisol, adrenaline to be able to get you out of the situation. It's part of our instinctual brain, part of the reptilian brain, the first part of the brain that was developed was that, then the mammalian brain, the limbic system, then the neocortex, the thinking brain. So when our brain has this signal of, Oh my god, you might get hurt, you might lose this, you might get in trouble, you might

be embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, judged, et cetera. That part of the brain is going to get activated. So, if you take six deep breaths first, calm down, calm the circuits first, then do inner size number twos called Aya Aia. The first day is for awareness. What am I thinking right now? What am I feeling right now? What am I sensing right now? What is my behavior right now? To you thoughts, feelings, sensations, awareness of behavior. What's my intention right now? That's the I. Well, my intention is to move forward. I want to do this. Great. What's one very small action step that you can take now? The reason you want to take one small action step is one small action step your brain can handle. If it's one small step towards it, the threat response goes away. But if you focus on the end game right away, you're going to get that rush and that instant trigger of the fear response, stress response. So, the first thing you want to do is learn how to manage your mindset and what you focus on. Learn how to

manage your emotions because they drive your behavior more than anything else. Because we move away from pain and we move towards pleasure, but we move away from pain a thousand times faster, and pain wires in the brain faster for survival mechanisms. So, purely from a neuroscience perspective, just understanding self, once you understand, okay, this feeling is normal, okay, what should I do? Take six con the circuits ayah, and now you can start being progressive and make progress towards what you want. Now, while you're in the, you know, in the, uh, what am I thinking feeling, it's a chance to be aware. And the biggest gift we have as human beings is our awareness, because awareness is what gives you choice, and choice is what gives you freedom. Most people are living their lives in a reactive state, automatic reactive state because of these set points that we talked, started talking about. So, we're in this repetitive cycle over and over and over and over. We react to the same things, we behave the same way, we eat the same foods, we dress the same way just to maintain that homeostasis.

comfort zones, and we've never been taught like when were we taught as kids. Like here are your six core emotions, here's the way you deactivate, you know your stress center or fear. So here's how you activate your imagination center, here's how you have more focus, here's how you develop a new belief, here's how you develop a new habit, here's how you release one. We haven't been taught that, we've been told they're important things, but we haven't been given the tools, and then we haven't practiced the tools enough to be able to make them part of our unconscious competence brain. So how do you do some of those things? I mean, that was a pretty extraordinary list, and I'll say beliefs, releasing beliefs, habits, releasing habits like that is really interesting. So what is a belief? I mean, think about what is a belief, and let's go to again, I just like to go to the neuroscience fields because just my passion now is a belief is nothing more than a group of cells that have been connected and then

reinforced, and we have two types of beliefs. We have beliefs that, Whatever, I'm going to stop you there because that's so important. Yeah, and so different than I would have expected. I think when people hear belief, it is believing something that is true, which did not enter into your definition. No, we believe whatever we believe is truth for us, but it's not the truth. That's really interesting, right? But we have been conditioned. If we go back a little bit to what we talked about earlier about, you know, when you were a baby, when you were born, what belief did you have? Zero. Goose egg. Zero. Not one. And so you learned what to believe and how to even formulate your beliefs, chances are from parents, teachers, brothers, sisters, television, maybe when you read some books, right? And we behave based on what we believe. So we might be behaving our lives away based on false or inaccurate or disempowering beliefs. So if a belief is a neural pattern in the brain, then we probably have some good ones, empowering ones, useful ones, and chances

are we have some that are not useful, not empowering, and not worthy of the geniuses that we all are. So the question is, is it possible for me to develop new beliefs that I don't believe right now? The answer is, yeah, yes. What does that process look like? So the process is, you can read new beliefs to life. And so, if you listen to beliefs that are empowering over and over and over again, and you emotionalize them, and you visualize yourself actually acting out those beliefs, and you learn how to pay attention to that little inner critic that says that's [ __ ] that's not true, that'll never come true, that's not you. If you learn and you remember that that little voice is there to consistently keep you in this homeostatic place, and it's there to protect the beliefs that are there now. The latest research shows that to develop, you know, a new pattern takes between 66 days and 365 days. How do you help people be consistent long enough to form that, like when people talk about, oh, it takes

28 days to form a new habit. It's like, okay, I can get my head around that, but when you start talking about 100 days, 365 days, it gets pretty daunting for adults. Yeah, it does. Um, so you have to use intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. So you have to start everybody off. Well, why is it important for you to be able to develop these new beliefs? Like, what will your life be like if you had them right now? What would your family life be like? You have to give them a benefit that's greater than the switch cost. That's interesting, right? So the switch cost is something that our brain resists. The only human that likes change is a wet baby. Every other human being is resistant to it because safety first and homeostasis and energy conservation. So we are biologically wired not to want to change. So we have to deliberately coax the brain into motivational reasons, emotional reasons. You have to have intrinsic reason why must you do this. And so you can use pain as a frame as

well, so if you don't, then are you okay with your life being like this at this age in five years, and 10 years, and 20 years? And if you're okay with that, then you're not a candidate for change. But if you're committed to letting go of the old so you can create the new, and you create motivations every day, that's where the power is. Remember, earlier progress, not perfection. So anybody can do one minute or 10 seconds. So if you can start to formulate a habit, a daily habit, a weekly habit, it doesn't matter how long it is. If you can create that space in your brain that on this day at this time, this is what I do, and you do that repeatedly, that becomes a habit. And it takes those 66 days or so for a simple habit that you have to consciously do to then the habit doing you. And that's why they say we are all creatures of habit because habits run themselves, their subconscious programs just run themselves. Most people don't take the

time to become aware. What are my empowering habits? What are my disempowering habits? And then the next question is, well, how do I release this one? And how do I strengthen this one or create a whole new one? And what we're looking to do is build empowering habits that then run their course. I love that. All right. One thing I'd be remiss not to ask you about before we go are the three boards. So vision boards, accomplished boards, and the one I don't know about, the crap boards. So crap board. So vision board for seeing what you want. The accomplished board for reminding yourself that you've accomplished a lot so that you feel good. And the crap. Do you actually put up images of things you've accomplished? Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. I have them in my closet in my home encased on the floor. Like on the floor so that you don't look at them. No, I look at them. No. So I look at them just because I sit down and put.

on my shoes, I want to look at them every day. Interesting, yeah. On my um, I have this ritual as well. I do something called brush and prime. So on my bathroom mirror, I have my goals that are on my mirror so that as I'm brushing my teeth, I'm priming my brain to see my goals in front of me every morning and every night. I love that, right? So that's priming your brain, which is a whole other topic we can have. And then the accomplishment boards remind me whenever I look at the stuff that have accomplished. I go, That wasn't easy. There was a lot of ups, downs, highs, lows, failures, you know, times I thought I'd quit and I didn't. So it's to remind me to go through the times that I don't think I'm going to be able to achieve those things. And then the crap board stands for conflict, resistance, accomplishments, and procrastination. So what conflicts are happening right now that I need to resolve? Um, what resistance is in my way is what

are my resistance. What in front of me is it resisting right now. And then accomplishment as well is to remind you that you can get through stuff. And then procrastination is what's causing me to procrastinate. So if you create a crap board as well you have that in front of you. And then you can create a game plan for what am I going to do about it. What am I going to do about the conflicts. What would you put on a board for conflicts. Is it a picture of a person. Oh it could be a person that you're having conflict with. It could be uh something you're trying to figure out that's conflicting. Uh whether it's in your company, a department. Uh whether you're having conflicting thoughts of should you do it, shouldn't you. And there's uncertainty, any conflicts that you are experiencing is going to create neural dissonance in your brain. It's just going to create chaos in your brain. And so if you take it out of your head and you put it on a sheet of paper you

can look at it. And now you're one step removed from what's happening in your brain. And so, um, the more you can be in coherence, it's the equivalent of being part of a band that's in harmony. That every player is just like, Oh man, this just sounds so good. Well, the more you can be in coherence, the more you're going to be in flow, and the more you're going to take action. The more chaos there is in the brain, neural chaos, whether it's because of emotions, you're lacking something, there's conflict, as resistance, the more you can get it out into the in front of you, and open, and say, Well, what's causing this? The easier it is for that Einstein brain to say, Okay, maybe I could do this, maybe I can do that, but I can also call a friend, or a mentor, or a coach, or I can research. It makes total sense. All right, before I ask my last question, yeah, tell these guys where they can find you online. You can find me online at myneurogym.com.

johnasaraf.com on my Facebook fan page on Instagram on Twitter those are nice those are the main ones. All right. And then my final question, what's the impact that you want to have on the world? Oh, um, on my epitaphs, He lived, he loved, he gave, he had fun. I always thought that if there's a way that I could somehow use my life in a way that I can make somebody else's life a little bit easier to live, either through knowledge or understanding or love or a process, then my life has been worthwhile. And so I just want to make, I just want to make a difference. And I'm one of the people that doesn't believe that there's anything wrong in the world. Everything's unfolding exactly as it should. There are many things not to my taste that I don't understand, but I just want to make the journey as good as I can for as many people as I can. That's beautiful. Yeah, John, thank you so much for being on the show. It was really

incredible guys. Done guys. When I say dive in, I mean dive in. Somebody that really takes the kind of time and care that he takes to understand how the brain works, and be able to make it digestible for people so that you can put it to use in your own life. I think it's really extraordinary that so much of this was born from a moment of kindness between him and somebody who'd been there, who then made him promise that he would do the same in kind. And the fact that he's given so much of his life to doing that, to understanding how things work, how habits work, how beliefs work. And there's even more that you'll find on him talking about those beliefs, which I think is really extraordinary. I think is one of the most foundational things about the human experience in terms of trying to be successful, is understanding what the beliefs are that operate in your brain. And the fact at first when I heard that he was in The Secret, I was like, Oh, God, the law of attraction freaks me out.

so the fact that he has the law of goya, and that you at the end of the day have to get off your ass and do something, that's when i knew that we were spiritual twins, and that i was going to be really into this guy. so i'm telling you, there's so much power in what he talks about. it's a no bs approach to how the brain works, how you can rewire it, how you can prime yourself to do really extraordinary things. so dive in. i think you're going to find some amazing takeaways that you'll be able to put into use in your life immediately to extraordinary effect. all right, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. and until next time, my friends, be legendary. take care, my friend. awesome, thank you, that was incredible, everybody. thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community. if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.

Train Your Brain To BECOME LIMITLESS & Achieve ANY GOAL You Have | John Assaraf

If you’re looking to thrive in uncertain times, achieve unprecedented goals, and improve the most meaningful aspects of your life, then Impact Theory is the show for you. Hosted by Tom Bilyeu, a voracious learner and hyper-successful entrepreneur, the show investigates and analyzes the most useful topics with the world’s most sought-after guests. 

Bilyeu attacks each episode with a clear desire to further evolve the holistic skillset that allowed him to co-found the billion-dollar company Quest Nutrition, generate over half a billion organic views on his content, build a thriving marriage of over 20 years, and quantifiably improve the lives of over 10,000 people through his school, Impact Theory University. 

Bilyeu’s insatiable hunger for knowledge gives the show urgency, relevance, and depth while leaving listeners with the knowledge, tools, and empowerment to take control of their lives and develop true personal power.


Tom Bilyeu

Mentors focused on progress rather than perfection, teaching the value of continuous improvement.

John Assaraf, a successful entrepreneur, credits a mentor for transforming his life and mindset.

He emphasizes the difference between being interested in goals and being committed to them, highlighting the importance of dedication to success.

Moving to a new country at a young age and facing language barriers led to feelings of shame and inadequacy.

The speaker's experience of abuse and embarrassment at school reinforced these negative feelings, until a kind mentor offered hope and support.

By embarking on a journey of forgiveness and understanding, the speaker was able to rebuild a beautiful relationship with their father and move beyond the pain of the past.

The Power of Mentoring and Goal Achievement

A mentor guided the speaker through real estate school and goal setting, leading to financial success at a young age.

The mentor emphasized the importance of beliefs and the power of repetition in achieving goals.

The speaker was taught the value of progress, learning from failure, and the impact of positive beliefs on overcoming self-doubt.

Repetition, emotion, and consistency are key to replacing old patterns with new beliefs.

Understanding the science behind visualization, affirmations, and emotionalization is crucial for making them work.

Retraining the subconscious mind can lead to significant financial and personal growth, as evidenced by the 100 million dollar increase in sales of a group of agents.

The Power of Personal Stories and Beliefs

We all have stories that shape our lives, including our beliefs and habits.

These stories create set points in our brains for everything from income to weight, but we can learn to reset these set points.

By using conscious effort to impress new thoughts into our subconscious minds, we can change our emotions and behaviors.

Fear is just a subconscious trigger, and we can learn to process and respond to it differently by understanding the mechanics of our brain.

Managing Fear and Emotions for Better Decision-Making

Fear and emotions can be empowering or disempowering, and it's important to understand and manage them for safe decision-making.

Taking six deep breaths can deactivate the stress response center in the brain, allowing for clearer thinking and problem-solving.

Developing awareness of one's thoughts, feelings, and intentions, and taking small action steps, can help in managing the fear response and making progress towards goals.

It is possible to develop new beliefs through repetition, emotionalization, and visualization, with the process taking between 66 to 365 days to form a new pattern.

To help people be consistent in forming new beliefs, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are essential, along with creating daily or weekly habits, regardless of the duration.

Using vision boards for goals, accomplished boards for reminding of past successes, and crap boards to address conflicts and resistance can help in priming the brain and staying motivated to develop empowering habits.

Overcoming Resistance, Accomplishment, and Procrastination

Acknowledging and addressing resistance is key to moving forward and achieving goals.

John emphasizes the importance of making a difference and having a positive impact on the world.

He encourages taking a no-nonsense approach to understanding how the brain works and rewiring it for extraordinary results.