Why You Suffer and How to Finally Stop | Peter Sage

You can spend your whole life chasing the thing you think will make you happy, and never once realize you were never built to catch it. That's the trap most high achievers live inside. Run faster. Earn more. Hit the next goal. The rabbit just speeds up. Peter Sage has spent decades coaching people out of that loop. He breaks human consciousness into four levels: To Me, By Me, Through Me, As Me. Most of us are stuck grinding in By Me, mistaking motion for meaning. He's lived the test, not just taught it. Six months in a UK prison, stripped of his business, his marriage, and everything he owned, and he chose to walk in smiling. This conversation will change how you carry whatever you're carrying right now. Because the outer world always follows the inner one. Get your Free PDF and Audiobook Copy of The Inside Track! The Inside Track: An Inspirational Guide To Conquering Adversity Amazon Ebook Audiobook Peter's Website Peter on Instagram Peter on YouTube In this episode you will: Understand the Curse of the White Rabbit and why achievement alone never delivers fulfillment Learn how to raise your financial thermostat so your own programming stops sabotaging you Discover the four levels of consciousness (To Me, By Me, Through Me, As Me) and why most people stay stuck Break free from GOOP (the Good Opinion of Other People) that quietly drives your decisions Master the three levels of change (intellectual, emotional, identity) that make new behavior actually stick For more information go to https://lewishowes.com/1939 For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960 Follow The Daily Motivation for essential highlights from The School of Greatness More SOG episodes we think you’ll love: Lewis Howes Solo [Don't WASTE Your Life] Peter Diamandis Shaka Senghor & Christian Howes TOPICS Peter Sage, four levels of consciousness, Through Me, Curse of the White Rabbit, financial thermostat, GOOP, self-worth vs net worth, friendly universe, identity change, personal transformation Get More From Lewis! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you look at the lowest level of consciousness, what I call that the victim mentality, it's a level that I call to me. I would have the house, the car, the body, the money, the whatever, but everything happens to me. All stress comes from life not fitting your pictures. And the friction that that causes is really where most people get stuck. A lot of people have the premise that in order to create the life they want, they've got to try to fix the outer world. And that's where a lot of people fall down because one of the universal truths that I've found in the work that I've done is that outer world follows inner world.

• 0:31Lewis Howes?

  He is a serial entrepreneur, a keynote speaker, and one of the most sought after coaches in the world on human behavior and personal transformation. We have the inspiring Peter Sage in the house.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  There is an energy that is intelligent that if you know how to tune into it, it can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. If I believe that I live in a hostile universe, I'm separate, therefore I'm only focused on myself. And so many people are standing in front of the mirror and they're angry because it's not smiling back.

• 0:58Lewis Howes?

  So I'm curious, why do most people suffer today?

• 1:01Speaker 00

  I would have to say, if I was going to give one overarching answer, it would be...

• 1:09Lewis Howes?

  You've been coaching people for a long time about how to unlock their greatest potential and how to get rid of feeling stuck and suffering in their life. So I'm curious, why do most people suffer today?

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Oh, great starting question. And I would have to say, if I was going to give one overarching answer, it would be that all stress comes from life not fitting your pictures. Meaning that the outer world doesn't fit the pictures of what you think the inner world says it should look like. And the friction that that causes is really where most people get stuck. And so if you imagine that a lot of people have the premise that in order to create the life they want, they've got to try to fix the outer world to fit their pictures. And that's where a lot of people fall down because one of the universal truths that I've found in the work that I've done is that outer world follows inner world, not the

• 2:07Speaker 00

  other way around. And so if you're working on the outer world without trying to realize it's a reflection of your inner world, you're always going to get stuck in a loop.

• 2:16Lewis Howes?

  So it's like there's two worlds that we're living in, the inner world and the outer world. And in order to create an outer world that is beautiful, abundant,

• 2:29Lewis Howes?

  and really giving us what we desire, what needs to happen on the inner world first?

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Albert Einstein said something very profound. He says, "You cannot solve a problem at the same level of consciousness that created the problem." That sounds smart, sounds like something that Einstein would say, but you know, how do you pay your mortgage without a Friday? So let me share with you a framework that will give people some context to try to make sense of that, which hopefully will help. So you know, if you take the word consciousness, the thirteen letter hard problem in science, you know, science doesn't know how to address consciousness. They still think it's a byproduct of brain function and it isn't. Consciousness is not a function of the brain as much as you have a television doesn't write and produce its own programs, right? The brain doesn't produce consciousness. A radio doesn't write music. It tunes in.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  So if you look at the lowest level of consciousness, what I call the victim mentality. It's a level that I call to me. There's four levels I'll break down. To me. And the reason for that is because the mantra of that level of consciousness for people that operate there is that I would have the house, the car, the body, the money, the whatever, but everything happens to me. It's the quintessential victim mentality. And you only have to go to the savanna to understand that, you know, victim isn't a place you want to be, you know, nowhere in the universe is the concept of victim supported.

• 3:52Lewis Howes?

  So this is the lowest level of consciousness, victimhood.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  Victimhood, correct. And the challenge with that is that there's a lot of attraction to it. If you share your story and get significance or what we call secondary gain from your story. Because what it really does is prevent you from requiring courage to move to the next level. And that next level is what I call by me. And by me is the achiever level. And it's where most people in personal growth tend to operate from. We realize that to me sucks. Yeah, nowhere is to me rewarding me with something other than short term significance for sharing a problem. And you know, you've heard the term misery loves company.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Well, no misery loves miserable company. It's not a place you want to go. So yeah, Vince the victim isn't a character I want to play. But moving into the achiever world, that's where the hustle is. That's where by me is, you know, if I am going to get the house, the money, the life, the goals, what have you, it's going to happen by me. And so you get out there and you start wrestling reality. You start tackling the outer world, you start getting up early, doing your morning routine. And to be honest, the vast majority of personal growth is catering for what I call low by me to high by me. It's like, you know, I already know you want to achieve, you're not lazy.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  See, in the original days, the early days, you know, you've had Tony on, for example, in Tony's earlier days of personal growth. Yeah, it's, it was really attracting the to me to buy me market.

• 5:31Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  All right, stop watching infomercials at two in the morning, pull your thumb out of your ass, go set some goals, go get a cowboy, I'll teach you how. The problem is that there's not a lot of money in the victim mentality, wanting to escape from to me to buy me. Cause they're quite happy, a lot of them, being into me.

• 5:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Some people are very happy.

• 5:51Lewis Howes?

  It doesn't take hard work.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  Exactly, they're very happy being unhappy. In fact, if you solve their problem, they'll resent you for it because now they've got to find another problem to be able to hold on to.

• 5:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. To gain significance for being a victim in something else.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Significant certainty, yeah, you name it. Yeah, they will wrestle you if you try to take their problems away. And that's fine. Some people have to hit their head on the sidewalk to learn how to tie their shoelaces. All right, you can send them love, you can hold a space, and it's tough if it's someone you care about, your family member or what have you. But you really have to be able to understand that one of the first rules of coaching is that if you want something for somebody more than they want it for themselves, you're wasting your time.

• 6:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  So most personal growth caters for, you know, the low buy me to high buy me. How to 10x, how to hustle more, you want a BMW, you want to go to a Porsche. You know, or you're in a Ford, you, you, you want to go to a Lexus. It's the next level.

• 6:45Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  The challenge with that, if I was to put it into characters, you know, we know Vince, the victim is not a place you want to go. So Alan, the achiever is who shows up. But when you're wrestling the outer world without doing the work on the inner world, Alan, the achiever pretty soon becomes stressed out Simon.

• 7:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Which leads to burnt out Barry.

• 7:07Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Right, and maybe heart attack Harry.

• 7:10Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  Or if you avoid that, what normally happens is you drop back down into two meter catch your breath, realize that's not who you are, get back on the horse. So your business fails, you get despondent, you know, you go into victim mode for a few short while, or you have a relationship breakup, you go into victim mode for a short while. Then you realize you shake it off, it's not who you are, you get back on the horse. But that cycle tends to repeat for a lot of people. And that's because there is a third level of consciousness.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  And the third level is the level of through me. Through me is where life starts flowing through you. There's far less effort, synchronicities happen, deals line up, doors open as you touch the handle, you're not having to shoulder barge them in buy me. And it's a very different way of being able to operate. And we've all had situations, moments, glimpses, phases where that tends to happen. But how do you engineer that is, is a great question, which I'll, I'll dive into. But through me is a far more effortless way of living. Now, if you go to somebody like Dr. Joe, who I know you've had on several times.

• 8:17Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Dr. Joe's market in personal growth centers around what I would call low through me to high through me. People understand there is a quantum field. There is an energy that is intelligent, that if you know how to tune into it, it can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you to help you open the doors, to line up the meetings.

• 8:37Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  See, and buy me, if you want to get a certain sales target as an example, you make 50 sales calls and you hustle. And through me, you end up meeting somebody in a lineup in Starbucks who turns out to be a fifty client customer. It's it's that kind of energy.

• 8:52Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  Which people would call luck if you're in to me. And yeah, chance if you're in by me.

• 8:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  As Dr. Joe says, if something happens once, it's an incident. If it happens twice, it's a coincidence. But if it happens more than twice, it's a pattern and patterns are based upon laws. So how do you understand that? We know the laws of the physical world. We've reverse engineered that through observation, starting with, you know, Copernicus getting into Galileo into Newton. And we know now the physical law so well, we can repair the human body or put somebody in orbit. But what are the laws that govern the inner world?

• 9:30Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  That's where through me operates.

• 9:33Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  And people that go to a Dr. Joe week long advanced retreat. You're not going to get people from by me go there because they're too busy being busy. People that already understand that, low through me to high through me, great. My market, the one that I've spent most of my career working with, is I'm the guy that gets people from by me to through me.

• 9:54Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  That's the jump.

• 9:56Lewis Howes?

  And to Because once you get, once you start realizing there's a different level from by me to through me, that's when things start to unlock.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 10:04Lewis Howes?

  And there's levels within through me.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 10:06Lewis Howes?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Uh, there is a fourth level and this original model comes from, uh, Michael Beckwith.

• 10:10Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  And I searched for years to find out where this original model came from. And I was with actually, uh, Michael a little while ago in in Bali, we were speaking at the same event.

• 10:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, he's a great guy.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  And he says, yeah, it came through at a, when he was teaching in class one time. But but I've

• 10:22Lewis Howes?

  It probably came through him too.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 10:24Lewis Howes?

  It's like

• 10:25Speaker 00

  It's how it works.

• 10:26Lewis Howes?

  And what's the fourth level?

• 10:28Speaker 00

  Fourth level is what we call as me. It's above my pay grade. It's really where a lot of the spiritual masters arrived at and taught from. And it's really what you would call, uh, non-duality. It's about oneness.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  And so the question's become, how do you move through the levels? I'll give a a short insight. So to get from to me to by me, from victim to achiever. What have you got to give up? What have you got to replace it with?

• 10:53Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Well, the first thing you have to give up is blame. Blame doesn't work in any area of life. I don't care if you're sat at the traffic lights and somebody hits you from behind. The moment you start blaming, your frequency drops to a point of victim. You know, taking responsibility for everything, no matter what, is a very hard pill for people in to me to swallow. So it's a lot easier to point fingers. As I said, it it releases you from the obligation of being able to embrace courage to move forward through your insecurities or fears.

• 11:23Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  To go from, and what do you replace it with? Personal responsibility.

• 11:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  And that's pretty simple.

• 11:30Lewis Howes?

  So victimhood is really about being in a state of blame or lack of responsibility.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:35Lewis Howes?

  Or even if something happened that you didn't want to happen, then maybe you felt like it was not supposed to happen. There's still a level of how can I respond from a place of, okay, this happened to me. This is not fair. Whatever it might have been, I was abused, I was neglected, I was, someone stole from me, whatever it might be, I got fired. Okay, this happened. Maybe it wasn't fair. But it's, what I'm hearing you say is, is learning to interpret it a certain way, take responsibility for the energy or the actions you're in right now and create a vision from a play, a place of responsibility moving forward rather than staying stuck in that victim mentality. Is that what I'm hearing or is there something else?

• 12:15Speaker 00

  One hundred percent. And there's some skills required to develop to be able to do that, which I'm happy to touch on as well.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  To go from, you know, by me to through me. What have you got to give up? What have you got to replace it with? Well, the first thing you've got to give up, and some people aren't going to like hearing this, is the need for control.

• 12:35Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  I didn't say control itself, but the need for control. And most people are trying to control so many things that are uncontrollable. In the outer world, hence the amount of stress that usually, you know, comes up. What do you got to replace that with? Trust, faith, knowing, pick a word, in what? In all fairness, something bigger than you. Mm hmm. Most people I've worked with that are depressed are depressed because they're too focused on themselves. And that's, you know, that can be tough when you're, everything's against you. Because you're in survival mode, it's natural. But generally speaking, gratitude and depression don't live in the same room. Right. And if you can focus on something to be grateful for, and there is always something to be grateful for.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  But if you can give up the need for control and replace it in something that's smarter than you. Again, let's go, go back to Einstein. He said, one of the most powerful questions you could ask or answer in your lifetime is do you live in a friendly or a hostile universe? Hmm. Now just look at that through the lens for a second. Mm hmm. If I believe that I live in a hostile universe, everything out there with teeth is after me. I've got, I'm separate, therefore I'm only focused on myself. Therefore, it's all about, you know, the egocentrism. It's all about how do I protect? How do I safeguard? How do I conquer, whatever it may be, go out and get?

• 14:00Speaker 00

  If you are with somebody and you break up and you live in a hostile universe, your self-talk is gonna be, I'm no good, so they left me, or why did this happen to me? If you look at life through the lens of a friendly universe, somebody leaves you, so well, thank God they went, so they made room for somebody who's right. If this is happening for me, then there's something here to learn. And asking questions like, look at what I've learned, rather than look at what I've lost, is a different shift between a life on antidepressants and a life of possibility. Yes. And so what was Einstein really pointing at? Because the reality, Lewis, is that we don't live in a friendly universe, nor do we live in a hostile universe.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  We live in a self-reflecting universe. Hmm. Two men sat behind prison bars, one saw mud, the other saw stars. Mm hmm. Same environment, different interpretation. Mm hmm. So if you're able to develop the skills of how to look at life through the lens of, you know, through me, rather than by me or to me. Yeah. And one of the key skills to that is asking better questions. And, and people, uh, uh, underrate that as an actual skill.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  So your brain is a loop closing mechanism. It's going to find answers if you pose questions to it. It's what it does. It's like a faithful Labrador. If you get a stick and you throw a stick, you're allowed. You're gonna catch it. It's gonna go get it. Yeah, yeah. Now, what most people do is they throw lousy sticks. Right, you throw a question and you know, you get this moldy stick and you throw it in the swamp and the Labrador comes and drops it back on your clean carpet. Yet you ask the question, why am I not good enough? Why does this happen to me? Yep, why am I unlucky? Your brain's going to fetch the stick because you're a schmuck. Because your teacher said you weren't good enough. Because your elder brother got all the attention. Whatever it is, the mind's job is to rationalize and justify. That's what it does.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  Right, not based on truth, based on trying to close the loop. Mm hmm. The brain doesn't like to live in the space of a question. Hmm. That's what makes cliffhangers or page turners. Alright, because we need to know what's happening next. So you learn to ask better questions. Again, if you're in through me, you're asking questions. As I say, instead of why is this happening to me? It's like, okay, what can I learn from this that serves me? What's great about this I've not noticed yet? No, what could make this fun for me? Mm hmm. In something that's boring? Just asking better questions. Why? Because questions are the steering wheel of the mind. Hmm. Questions direct focus. And so learning how to be conscious about asking questions rather than be trained

• 16:48Speaker 00

  to ask the wrong questions. And this is where another powerful concept comes in that helps you stay in through me versus by me. The whole aspect of by me is competition. It's effort, it's force, it's go wrestle reality to the ground to try to make it fit my pictures. Through me is where you move your center of gravity from control to observation. Hmm. You're allowing something smarter than you to do the heavy lifting because your frequency is aligned with what it is that you want, not focus on what you don't want. Right. Again, life is a self reflecting universe and so many people are standing in front of the mirror. And they're angry because it's not smiling back.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  And so what do they do? They try a short term fix in the outer world. They get some lipstick and they draw a smile on the mirror, hoping that that's going to work.

• 17:39Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  But you have drama at the dinner table, you solve that. There's drama at the gas station. You go to work, there's drama there. You're in the genre because you haven't fixed the smile on your own face. Hence, outer world follows inner world. That makes sense.

• 17:55Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 17:59Lewis Howes?

  What's the thing we need to let go of to go from by me to through me?

• 18:03Speaker 00

  So let go of the need for control.

• 18:05Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  And then replace it with trust, faith, or knowing in something smarter or bigger than you, i.e. a friendly universe.

• 18:12Lewis Howes?

  Friendly universe. And then from through me to as me, what do we need to let go of? Or maybe it's step into?

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Well, to let go first, you need to undo or let go of the, what I would call the illusion of separation.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  What do you replace it with? Unconditional love.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  If you let go of that, and again, you listen to any of the spiritual masters, regardless of the traditions or genre or background, that's essentially what they were pointing out. We are all one. In as me, I see myself in you. I see myself in the rock, the tree, or however you. Duality dissolves. Again, above my pay grade, I'm not nowhere near there. I'll stick with by me to through me to help people. Yeah, this guru is out there that'll address the other stuff.

• 19:00Lewis Howes?

  Why does most self-help and personal development not work in today's modern society?

• 19:06Speaker 00

  Because they're addressing the wrong things. They're addressing how do you do better in by me?

• 19:12Speaker 00

  And trying to do that is saying, right, if you're in by me, and Tony says this beautifully, he says, "Success without fulfillment is failure." And so, most people are trying to get to the top of success mountain by elbowing their way through the crowd. They get to the top, they sacrifice, they miss their daughter's recital, they sacrifice their health, and they get to the top and they want to jump off because they don't like the view. Why is that? Because they were taught that if they succeed enough through achievement, then they'll feel happier. And the challenge is that it doesn't, that you're running east looking for a sunset. And what are you doing? You're blaming your shoes. Or if I get a better personal trainer, if I learn to run faster,

• 19:57Speaker 00

  or it must be the diet, let me try this. So if I just get that edge, then I can run faster, I'll finally get my sunset running east. And of course, it's a different paradigm. You're not going to do that. So, understanding fulfillment, it's what I call the curse of the white rabbit. Sounds a little Hollywood for where we are here. But I'll explain it. If you get the concept of a dog track, people are familiar with, you know, the greyhounds, they open the trap and they run around and people bet on who's gonna win. Right? Not my scene, but for the purposes of metaphor, it should serve this quite well. And any achievers listening to this, this is going to be an eye opener. So, why do the dogs run? They

• 20:40Speaker 00

  run because they're chasing a mechanical rabbit. The question is, did they ever catch the rabbit? No. What if they run really fast? No. They want to speed up the rabbit. Speed up the rabbit. What if they have a better trainer? Speed up the rabbit still, yeah. Sleep in a better kennel? I mean, it's no, right? So, the reason the dogs don't catch the rabbit is because by design, they can never catch the rabbit. Now, replace greyhound with entrepreneur or achiever, replace rabbit with the goal you think is going to make you happy. Now, if you look at the dogs at the end of a race, you ever see a greyhound at the end of the race? They're ecstatic. Why? Because they got to run.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  That's what greyhounds are born to do. Entrepreneurs, we are built, you know, and born to build businesses. That's what we do. But if we're linking our success to catching the rabbit. I mean, just imagine at the end of the race, you know, the greyhound turns to his friend and says, hey, listen. I ran three races this week, won two of them, still haven't caught that damn rabbit. I quit. Yeah, yeah. Right? No, right? They get to run. And so if you're building a business in order to catch the rabbit, your next quarterly goal or your shareholders' report or whatever it may be. And you think, when I get there, and of course, have you noticed that the rabbit always just seems that little bit ahead and I'm almost there. Right? What happens when you do actually get your goal? How happy are most people for how long? They're not actually happy. Maybe a day or two, but then it's like, oh, what next?

• 22:10Speaker 00

  One hundred percent. You know, that's the curse of the white rabbit. And why are they relieved at least for a short while? You know, why? Because they're no longer chasing. So I say, you know, when I, when I get my first million or my first Ferrari, I'll be happy. Yeah, I was twenty five, I bought my first Ferrari for cash. And I was happy for about a week. And, you know, make my first million, then I'll be happy. What happens? You make your first million. And you're not happy. And then you finally realize why, of course. And it's so simple. It's because I need two million in case I lose the first. Right, right, right. Oh, isn't it? It shouldn't be a Ferrari, it should be a McLaren. That will make me happy. That, that goes on forever. Yeah, or now I'm hanging out with people that make ten million and now I'm at the bottom of the rung.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  I've, I've worked with people worth seven hundred million who are on antidepressants because they're not a billionaire. Really? Oh, yeah. Come on. That game never ends. Yeah. It's the curse of the white rabbit. So how do you break that? Well. Understand that in order to do it, isn't require a new hack, a new ten X this, a new ice bath routine, and it would. All of that's out of world stuff. Out of world follows in the world. That's just buy me hacks on how to run faster east to find your sunset. Instead, if you realize ultimately, and some people just that they're not ready to hear this, but they will at some point.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  You break the curse of the white rabbit by understanding the reality. That you already are that which you seek. What does that mean? What do you really have to?

• 23:43Speaker 00

  For the Ferraris, or the money, or the body, or the house, or whatever. It's probably a feeling for most people. A feeling. There isn't a feeling that at your age, or most ages, by the time you're twenty, your brain doesn't neurologically understand or hasn't experienced at some point. You know how to create it. So what you're really saying is that in Buy Me, and this is kind of the curse of Buy Me, the White Rabbit, is that when I achieve a certain level that I have internally arbitrarily set as a point, I will then give myself permission to feel a feeling that I could actually feel now. But I'm refusing to do that because my rules for what has to happen for me to have that permission are set in some sort of achievement criteria externally.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Instead of just being now. So here's a great analogy. Let's say you win a round the world trip. You entered a competition, you're in a waiting room, you got bored, you're online, you entered something, and a month later you get a notification, you've won on all expenses, round the world trip, dream trip, twenty different destinations, everything on your bucket list, the northern lights, the pyramids, Antarctica, you know, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, all of these things. First class, you've got jets, you've got cruise ships, you've got everything. You are so excited, and you can take one person with you, and obviously if you would be Martha, right? But you call your friend and you say, oh my goodness, you're not going to believe this. Yeah, we're emotional creatures, we're designed to share, we experience emotion through connection.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  So you call a friend, or you're talking, I've just won this amazing round the world trip, I'm just looking through the itinerary, and before you can get to the second place that you're going to, your friend cuts you off and says, oh, what's your final destination? You're like, oh, I'll get to that, but yeah, we're also going here and we're going there. Well, no, I don't care. What's your final destination? You're like, well, I haven't even looked that far ahead, I just want to enjoy the trip. Yeah. That's life. So many people are trying to race to what they think is a final destination that'll make them happy, when I get this house, or that car, or this status, or that amount of followers, or this many likes on my breakfast, or other crap that goes on. You already are that which you seek.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  And when you realize that if I can give myself permission to be happy now, and what is happy, don't complicate it. Happiness is a byproduct of thinking happy thoughts. Case closed. So if I can give myself permission now. I can go and chase the dream, build the business, you know, do what have you, from a very different place of giving more of who I am to the world and the venture and everything else, rather than give less of me because I'm, I feel less than until I've got it. Does that make sense?

• 26:27Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm. What would you say then is the biggest block to unlocking the science of manifestation for most people?

• 26:37Speaker 00

  The biggest block is most people don't believe that there is an intelligence that's non-physical. Now, without getting into labels, because the mind loves to label.

• 26:46Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  And it's like someone says, oh, look, that's a tree. That's not a tree. That's what we call a tree. Because the mind likes to take a label so it can feel smart about understanding something. But there's certain things that are just above our pay grade. But if I, I try to simple it down a little bit.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  We are human beings, which is the perfect encapsulation of physical and non-physical in one beautiful package.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  But the real essence of who we are is non-physical. What makes Lewis Lewis? Well, it's not your body. You've got a different body now than 20 years ago.

• 27:21Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  You're gonna have a different body 20 years from now.

• 27:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  That's non-negotiable. That's part of the rule set. And you can put on creams and take vitamins, but you know, at some point, you're gonna look different downstream, right? That's just part of the game. But the real essence that makes you you is not physical. It's the non-physical. It's your personality, your sense of humor, your dreams, your goals, your aspirations, your values. All of that is what makes you you.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  Now, if I was to take that out of you and put it in somebody else, it would be you with a different body.

• 27:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  So the essence of what makes us us has to be non-physical. So break down the word human being. Human relates to body, physical. We have a body that runs on a rule set that, you know, we abide by it, we look after it and take care of it. It'll last us quite well. But it's got a time limit. Whereas being is non-physical. You can't put being in a box. So if you identify more as your body, a center of gravity, we've got these two things, physical, non-physical, one package. If you take your associations to who you think you are, and you put that center of gravity

• 28:30Speaker 00

  over to the body, I am my body, I'm my physical self, and I identify in the physical world, the outer world. Your body has a nervous system that is hardwired for comfort, which is useful when you're standing too close to a fire. Yes. Now, sitting on an ant's nest. But if you identify with that, you're going to make the rookie mistake of thinking that life is a comfort-centric experience. And the journey to emotional maturity, one of the greatest days in a human being's life, is the day they wake up to understand that life is actually a growth-centric experience, not a comfort-centric experience. And so if you identify as the physical version of you, you're going to seek comfort by design

• 29:15Speaker 00

  because that's what your nervous system is wired for. If you understand that the real essence of who you are is way bigger than a body, the non-physical version of you, the you with a capital Y. Mm-hmm. Let's call it our soul. That's hardwired for growth. Everything in nature grows so that it can contribute, or it's taken out of the food chain. I didn't make that up. Look out of your window. No. It's two rules of nature. So if you identify more with you trying to carve your legacy out in the physical world, you're going to be calling problems, problems, rather than opportunities or challenges. You're going to be struggling and fighting an inertia that is designed to give you challenges

• 30:00Speaker 00

  and problems, because that's how you grow. We know that in the gym. Yeah, how do you grow the body? You push it past its comfort zone. Yeah. Whereas how do you grow spiritually through the challenges and problems we have? So if most personal growth is focused upon you trying to take on the outer world, to chase some rabbit that you think is going to give you fulfillment, which it isn't, why? Because the reality is you can never, underline, never catch the rabbit of fulfillment by running on the track of achievement.

• 30:35Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Not because you're not a good enough entrepreneur, or a good enough host, or a good enough person. But you turn up the speed of the game by design is designed that you can't do that.

• 30:45Lewis Howes?

  You can never win.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  It's.

• 30:47Lewis Howes?

  You know, it shouldn't even be about winning. You know, it's like, and if that's the game you're playing, you'll never be able to win because there's always something else you need to chase.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Exactly. There's always something that comes after and you go to your grave exhausted. Yeah, Rockefeller, famous for saying at the end, you know, how much more money do you need? Just a little more.

• 31:06Lewis Howes?

  Crazy, right?

• 31:07Speaker 00

  That's, you know, that's not the game you want to play.

• 31:09Lewis Howes?

  Is that what he said at the end?

• 31:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Now, I wasn't there. I mean, that's what you hear, but. And I had a business mentor, bless me, he's passed away and I've had three main business mentors, gentleman called Peter Thomas, who founded or co-founded EO, the entrepreneurs organization here, Beautiful Soul. And Dan Pena, who I've known for thirty five years now, Dan is, Dan is the king of by me. You want to hustle in by me, that's.

• 31:32Lewis Howes?

  He is the definition. By me is my middle name, right?

• 31:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love Dan for that. We go back a long, long way.

• 31:38Lewis Howes?

  But he's had a lot of success, it looks like, from the outside looking in.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  And I've got a whole video on what I learned from Dan on my YouTube channel that which explains, because he's actually in through me, because that's his, that's his passion, that's his, his, you know, natural gift for being able to give, but it's being able to take the low by me's to the high by me's. Okay, and then another gentleman called Errol. Errol is a plutocrat by every definition. I knew Errol for fifteen years. I never knew him earn less than about a million dollars a day.

• 32:10Lewis Howes?

  He, say it again, he only what? He made a million dollars a day?

• 32:14Speaker 00

  I never knew him earn less than about a million a day.

• 32:16Lewis Howes?

  Every day he was making a million.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  Three hundred and fifty million a year would be an average year for Errol. And he sold his last business for three point six billion in cash. And he's passed away now, earlier, but Errol.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  Was never really happy. Yeah, it was always, what's the next deal? What's I, you know, we lived together a couple of times. He taught me a huge amount in business. I was very grateful for him in business. He was a fiend on fifty and O in terms of businesses he built. I was with him when he started the three point six billion dollar business he sold. Um, and I learned a huge amount, you know, vicariously, but I also learned who I don't want to become with money. No criticism to him yet. Now he's not here to defend himself, but he'd probably agree as well. That his, his level of fulfillment just wasn't there. His level of significance through, look at me because I'm, I'm really good at doing this and this is a, a goal that I can, or of Neander. That was high. This is a lane I can swim in better than anyone. I get it.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  But imagine getting to the end of the game and realizing you're playing by the wrong set of rules. Because I've never seen a hearse with a roof rack. Never seen a what? I've never seen a hearse. What's a hearse? A funeral car. Okay. With a. With a roof rack. Uh huh. You're not taking it with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the only people that tried that with the Egyptians and what happened. Yeah. We dug it up and stole it. Yeah, of course. Eventually someone else takes it from you. Yeah. You know, so what is life really about? Yeah, it's, it's about who do you become in the process of achieving?

• 33:46Speaker 00

  I'm a great believer that the two organizing principles around setting goals are as follows. Firstly, if you have any idea how you can achieve the goals you set when you set them, they're too small. Why? Because otherwise you're focusing by me on how you can manipulate things in the outer world to line stuff up. And life doesn't work in straight lines. Yeah, there's no straight lines in nature. You see a straight line, it's manmade. So life is nonlinear. The river of life bends, every river bends, regardless of topography. Every river bends. So if you're in by me and you're sailing down the river of life towards your goal. Right, I'm heading north and then the river suddenly bends east. What are you doing by me?

• 34:28Speaker 00

  I'll tell you, I've seen so many people do and by the way, I come at this because in my twenties, I was the by me king.

• 34:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  I was working a hundred and thirty to a hundred and thirty three hours a week. I was falling asleep at stoplights. I was an asshole to work for. I was because everything was about how do I get over the? How do I achieve enough?

• 34:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  To get over the insecurities as a young man that I felt that I wasn't good enough. Which is the primary fear we have. So if you're going down the river and all of a sudden it takes a left turn, what do you do? Most people in by me take a shovel off their back and start digging a channel through the bank to try to go through the straight line. And through me, you surrender to the wisdom of the current. You go with the flow. Okay, if this has happened, what do we do next? You free up the energy of resistance and channel it into what's the next best move? So rather than fight the current, you're using your energy to position yourself better in the current.

• 35:23Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Make sense?

• 35:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. So most personal growth fails because it's really teaching you how to run east looking for a sunset, how to catch the rabbit of yeah, fulfillment by running on the track of achievement and how to run in straight lines towards your goals and go through them with energy, persistence, determination, desire. Hence burnt out Barry, stressed out Simon, heart attack Harry.

• 35:50Lewis Howes?

  If someone is living in a, in a life of insecurity or self doubt right now and they're trying to gain significance by achieving a goal, what happens when they create from a space of insecurity or self doubt?

• 36:06Speaker 00

  No amount of outer world validation is going to cover up an inner feeling of emptiness.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  It has to start from within. And when people understand, you were born good enough. I mean, look at the biology of it. It was four hundred million to one. Right? When you look at the egg and the tadpoles, right? Four hundred million, you made it. Why didn't you want to be here so badly? It wasn't to work forty hours a week for somebody to retire up with a cheap watch to say thank you for, you know, for wasting most of your life. No, you came here to give a gift, the gift of you.

• 36:45Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  The gift of something, level of uniqueness. That doesn't mean to say you've got to be an NBA champion. No, we all have a way to be able to gift. We all know, we all have the favorite grandma or auntie that just had something about them. They weren't driving Ferraris. They had an energy of, of about them that made them give the best of who they were to us. And so, you know, when it, it comes to how do we,

• 37:10Speaker 00

  you know, how do we reconcile that? How do we look at life saying, was I born good enough? When you realize that no matter what you've done, no matter what you've not done, you are worthy of love.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  Nothing to defend, nothing to conquer, nothing to prove. And when that becomes your ground of realization, which can't happen into me, is still trying to be earned in by me. And you start operating from a level where you accept your own greatness without having to go and tick boxes for it. You show up with a different energy. You walk through life up to something. And yeah, there's been times where, hey, I know what it's like not to be able to afford rent. And I was born on a low-cost housing estate. My parents had nothing. And, you know, up until very recently, I got absolutely wiped out financially. I, I don't judge my self-worth by tying it to my net worth. And if you do that, you are never going to have enough money like the seven hundred million guy to feel worthy.

• 38:11Lewis Howes?

  Why do most people tie their self-worth to their net worth?

• 38:14Speaker 00

  Conditionally. We've been told by society that the more money you have, the more successful you are because they can benchmark it. That that means that you're better than, fill in the blank. You know, it's the keep up with the Joneses. I was happy with my BMW until next door neighbor bought a Lexus. Yeah, now I don't feel as, whatever. And so if you really want to know what all the Joneses are saying, they're saying that they wish that you would quit so they could quit.

• 38:39Lewis Howes?

  Right, stop competing, yeah, yeah.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I'll share another

• 38:47Speaker 00

  concept that I think could help a lot of people here.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  I've realized that one of the biggest

• 38:56Speaker 00

  ankle weights on human potential is people living in what I call goop. And goop is a nasty, sticky, smelly, horrible substance that drains the life force. And goop stands for the good opinion of other people. And so many people make decisions through consciously or unconsciously the filter of goop. So how do you get rid of that? Well, you may find this useful. I firmly believe that we'll star in a movie called The Movie of Our Life. And I know that you star in the movie of your life, Lewis, because you're the only person who's in every single scene

• 39:34Lewis Howes?

  Right, yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  of your movie, right? So if we realize that we star in the movie of our life, that means that by definition, other people can only play one of two roles. At best, they may be a supporting cast.

• 39:49Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  A spouse, significant other, best friend, you know, coworker, you know, you're close to, what have you. But the vast, vast majority of people in your life are nothing more than film extras in your movie.

• 40:03Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Now, what is the definition of a film extra? Somebody you're not currently thinking about if they're not in your current scene.

• 40:11Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  Right, so to set that tone. So you may be thinking of your partner when they're not in this scene, for example, as a supporting cast. But the vast majority of people that most people suffer from goop for Of film extras. Now, here's where it gets interesting. Most people are walking around seeing themselves as the star of their movie, thinking that other people see them as the star of their movie. Of course, they don't because they're not starring in your movie. Whose movie are they starring in?

• 40:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, theirs.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  Theirs, which means by definition, we appear as only one of two characters in everybody else's movie. At best, supporting cast. But the vast majority of people you will meet in your lifetime. You are nothing more than a film extra in their movie. Now, how do you translate that into getting rid of goop? Simple. You understand that the reality is most people don't care enough about you to bother to even give an opinion. Why? Because they're too busy being worried about what they think you're thinking of.

• 41:12Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, them.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. In other words, everyone's walking around in this bubble of self-importance, thinking, I wonder what everybody thinks of me and my bubble of self-importance, not realizing that they're walking around in their bubble of self-importance, thinking, I wonder what everyone's thinking of me, my bubble of self-importance. And when you burst your own bubble and see it for what it is, the freedom that comes with that is refreshing.

• 41:31Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  That frees up life force, rather than you trying to run around as this chameleon, this adaptation machine, or if they don't like me this way, I'll be this way. If they don't like me this way, I'll be that way.

• 41:41Lewis Howes?

  It's letting go of the character that you've been playing.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  Yes, and a lot of that is driven by patterns. You know, I worked alongside, you know, as a trainer for Robbins Research for Tony for fifteen years. And I learned a huge amount from Tony, but he said one thing that was so powerful that it was in a leadership meeting one time and he came out. It was almost a throwaway comment. But it had such an impact on me. He said, if you want to get good at working with people, get good at spotting patterns because there's only so many of them.

• 42:09Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 42:10Speaker 00

  And I looked at that. So let's look at perfectionism. That's a classic by me pattern as well. Any perfectionist watching here will probably understand that, you know, what that's like. Now, the thing with perfectionism is that it sounds very altruistic. It's like, you know, oh, I, who doesn't want to be perfect? I just want to make sure it's the best it can be. It's almost like a self, you know, acknowledging I'm doing the right thing. But there is no perfectionism. Perfectionism is the lowest standard because it's unattainable. Evolution hasn't finished. So if nature isn't perfect yet, why do you think we should be? So what really is perfectionism? I'll tell you. The real language is, I'm scared of screwing up-ism.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  So it's got to be right, otherwise it has its basis more in fear of rejection.

• 42:58Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  Like shy, shy, shy is a racket. Because I'm just introverted, I'm shy. No, you're not. You're running a pattern that says, please don't let you discover me because I'm scared of your judgment. That's the reality.

• 43:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  Now, I'm not judging them for that. I'm just saying, address what the real thing is. Because what you're really looking for is the inability to handle rejection. Classic to me pattern. So you learn how to handle rejection. Why? Because if somebody rejects you, there's a difference between rejecting a person, rejecting their idea, their concept. And you realize that all people can ever do, Lewis, is project from their own model of the world onto you. Somebody comes up and calls you an apple.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Is that about you or about them?

• 43:46Lewis Howes?

  About their interpretation of something.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. They're having a bad day.

• 43:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  You look at that with compassion and understanding. This person is in so much pain. So much chaos or whatever's going on that they've got to express their frustration to people they don't even know. In ways that are potentially offensive or damaging. You hold compassion for that rather than judgment or reaction.

• 44:09Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  And you've got a different way of engaging in life.

• 44:12Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm. You've been around a lot of wealthy people. Who do you think are happier? Millionaires? Or hundred millionaires and billionaires?

• 44:22Speaker 00

  The wealth is not the issue. The number is not the, the answer. Again, seven hundred million antidepressants. And when you understand what money is, it can give you an insight. See, the two things that most humans stress about the most are money and time. And the only thing that, the only place in the universe they mean anything is in the mind of a human being.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  Nothing else keeps track of it. It's like you say time, people say, oh, I don't have enough time. Well, how do you run out of now? It's like you try to manage time. You can't manage time any more than you can manage the current of a river while you're swimming in it. It's the only area in life, whether you're born in a slum in Guguledu in Cape Town or in Beverly Hills down the road. It's the only area we've all been treated equal. That is, we get 24 hours in a day. So trying to manage time is, you know, manage your priorities, manage your focus. I don't think you can manage time because you're commoditizing it. You don't go to Walmart and buy three hours, 20 minutes on special offer for two hours and 10. It doesn't work that way.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Money is the same thing. It's conceptual. The only place it means anything is in the mind of a human. You and I are on a desert island with a million dollars in cash and the economy had gone. We'd set fire to it to keep warm. It's pieces of paper with dead people printed on it. It's, you know, shiny stones and hard rocks. So the concept of money was created as a way to try to level the playing field in the in the bartering section. So, you know, if you've got goats and I've got chickens and I want goats and you want chickens, then we're in business. But, you know, I want goats and you don't want chickens. We need a way to figure it out.

• 46:04Lewis Howes?

  And you find someone else who wants a goat and you do this and it's like, all right, let's just trade some, yeah.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Just a lot easier to do it that way. So we created the concept of money to help solve that kind of problem. There's other backstory to it, but, you know, to simplify it, let's, let's leave it there. But it's still a human construct. So I did an experiment. My dog got a Jack Russell. You know, I've got two, but his, my boy's called Archie. And I did an experiment, this went kind of viral on social.

• 46:30Lewis Howes?

  Archie the achiever?

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Definitely not, no. Archie the daddy's boy, but achieving when it comes to chasing balls.

• 46:36Lewis Howes?

  Yes, that's what I mean.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  But I got a ribeye steak. I put it on a plate. I got a thousand euros, you know, I live in Spain. A thousand euros in cash and I put it on another plate. I said, right, Archie, listen to me carefully. Do you know how many ribeyes you can buy for a thousand euros? Right? I'm gonna give you one shot, one choice. We know where this is going. Right? And it was, it was a fun way to kind of make a point. Of course, straight for the ribeye. But yeah, if you think that money is a measure of your success, no, money is a measure of how much value you add. Because the only time you ever receive money is by giving something a value for it first.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  You wouldn't walk in the gym. Yeah, you're in shape, you know what it's like to be a professional athlete. All right, you walk into the gym and you go to your personal trainer and you say, hey, look, these machines look a bit tough, you know something, give me the strength, I'll go lift the weights. Doesn't work that way. You lift the weights, you get the strength. You sit in front of the fire on a cold night and it's dead and you say, hey, negotiation time. Give me some heat, I'll go fetch you some wood. Doesn't work that way. Yeah, so most people say, give me the money and then I'll be happy. Give me the money and then I'll feel this. No, go add value, go give your gift, go be of service and you'll look over your shoulder one day and realize that money starts showing up. But you cannot, and this is a bigger conversation.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  I talk about the number one rule of coaching being that if you want it more for somebody than they want it for themselves, you're wasting your time. Yes. Number one rule in personal growth. You can never rise above the opinion of yourself. Hmm, what does that mean? It means that we have a financial thermostat. And if your financial thermostat, like a room thermostat, there's a program invisibly running in the background that monitors the current temperature. That if it drops below, the heaters kick in, if it goes above, the air conditioning kicks in. So if your financial thermostat is set for fifty thousand dollars a year. And all of a sudden you drop to thirty. The, yeah, the heaters kick in.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  You get motivated, you're up early, you're hustling, you're getting out there, you're doing something, you're following up on sales calls, you're figuring it out.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  You certainly go to a hundred thousand dollars a year and you're now comfortable, but that internal programming is running that says, too hot for you up here. Air conditioning kicks in. So what happens? You stop following up on leads, you don't get as motivated, you're not getting up as early, you're not putting as much time in, and you self sabotage. And we see this played out in every lottery winner example you can give. Yeah. Right? So your financial thermostat governs your ability to attract, earn, keep, retain, be a custodian of money. So how do we increase our financial thermostat to earn more? Well, the trap, as you alluded to earlier, is that if you have your self-worth to your net worth, you're caught in a negative loop. Mm hmm. Because unless I earn enough, I'm not good enough.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  But if I'm not good enough, I'm not earning enough because my frequency now is matching a lack consciousness, a poverty consciousness, a scarcity mindset. The people that I've seen that are constantly happy, whether they're millionaires, billionaires, centimillionaires, decamillionaires, or broke, are people who have an abundance mentality, a prosperity consciousness, and it isn't linked to money. Money is one of the aspects, again, it's almost a strange concept that we created. Hence, self-worth and net worth shouldn't be tied. But I mentioned earlier about gratitude and scarcity can't live in the same room. So if you want to create an abundance mentality and you don't have money, stop trying to

• 50:23Speaker 00

  focus on money to trigger the feelings of abundance. What should we focus on instead? What do you have an abundance of? Love, joy, presence, curiosity. Friends, yeah, oxygen, if you're struggling, I mean, yeah, I mean, focus on something that you're grateful you have more for. Mm hmm. And a contrast frame here is a powerful tool to use. Most people use contrast frames the wrong way. For example, let's say you're working at a new job, temporary position, and the boss calls you in on Monday morning, says, hey, John, we've been watching you, we've been impressed, you're a team player, you're not a clock watcher, you've been going the extra mile, we're going to give you a permanent contract and a 10% pay rise. How do you feel?

• 51:09Speaker 00

  Better. Yeah, happy. Great, thanks. So, twelve o'clock comes, you're in the staff canteen, and you're chatting with Susie, and she's all happy too. Say, hey, Susie, how's it going? Oh, great. Say, oh, you're really happy? Yeah, I've had a great time. Boss called me in this morning. Give me a permanent con- she does the same job as you, by the way, right? Yeah, it says, yeah, give me a permanent contract and a twenty percent pay rise. Now you're not happy. We had nothing before, now you only have ten percent. So you're contrasting it to what she got, rather than contrasting what you didn't have before. Contrast frames are okay. When I was in, yeah, Pentonville, mentioned earlier, six months in jail. And I would be helping the prisoners. And I would give them Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl. And I would challenge them

• 51:55Speaker 00

  not to cry with tears of gratitude for the fact they were in Pentonville and not Auschwitz. Wow.

• 52:01Speaker 00

  Reframe. Yeah. Everything's reframable. And that was a, you know, a powerful lesson for a lot of them. And some people committed to to me don't want to change. That's okay. Your job is not to change anyone. We have no right to change anyone. I've got no right to walk into somebody else's movie, grab the scriptwriter's pen and start altering their scenes. That's, you know, even if you love them and you can see that they're self-harming, they're self-sabotaging there, and you want them, you can see the problem. You don't get to do that. All you get to be, Lewis, in this world, which is what you're doing with this podcast, which I love. You get to be the example, and you get to be the invitation. You can't be the invitation without being the example. Right. But you also cannot be the imposition. You can't push.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  Nobody changes because you tell them to. Yeah. Why? Because it triggers the primary fear that we all have, which is the fear we're not enough. Yeah. And ultimately, that we won't be loved. So if you try to argue with anyone or even help them by saying, yeah, oh, I've got a great way that you can, you know, get out of this problem. What most people hear isn't, oh, here's somebody trying to help. What most people hear is, oh, I'm not good enough doing what I'm doing now, and you're trying to fix me. Everybody will push back against that. And family member or stranger or work colleague, doesn't matter, because it triggers that primary fear, which is the fear we're not enough. And most people do almost anything to avoid that, including stay in their victim's story,

• 53:28Speaker 00

  so that, you know, at least they have some certainty that they know how, you know, how bad things are. Yeah, wow.

• 53:37Lewis Howes?

  What is the thing that you learned the most when you went to jail for six months?

• 53:42Speaker 00

  Well, again, I'll give you some context for the for the audience.

• 53:45Lewis Howes?

  People know what happened.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was in a litigation, a business deal with a multi-billion dollar company, you know, arguing over a multimillion dollar deal that we'd done years before. And it was a contractual dispute. I thought they were just bullying me. I didn't want to stand for it. I was the little guy there with the big guy. They had bigger muscles in the financial legal playground. And I stood my ground. I'm like, no, I've done nothing wrong. And to try to put pressure on a settlement, they issued a contempt of court application saying I breached a freezing order they'd put on, which was like, you know, financial handcuffs to try to put pressure on me. And I hadn't. And I read it and I looked at it and it was clever. You'd expect it from a hundred million dollar law firm representing a multi-billion dollar company. And I thought he'd get laughed out of court in five minutes. They sold it to the judge.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  He gave me six months inside as a civil prisoner. Never been arrested, never been accused of a crime, still no criminal record. Yeah, with anything connection to that. It was like, wow, I go from fifty staff, you know, helping hundreds, thousands of people to in jail, lost everything.

• 54:48Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  And and that was nine years ago. And including hundreds of thousands of legal debts that they piled on top of me. No credit rating. I came out, lost nothing, lost my wedding, lost, yeah, business, lost everything from literally that that quick. And here's an interesting lesson that I'll share with people again as a framework I think will help, especially if people are going through their own version of that right now. Not in jail, but losing loved ones, business failure, divorce, whatever it may be. We all face our challenge. And one of the biggest things I mentioned earlier about turning your mindset around.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  Identity is a key factor. The questions you ask, you know, the focus you have, the buy me or threw me positioning, a lot of it comes down to identity. Because people in personal growth learn things, they read the books, they go to the seminars, they they watch the podcasts. There's three levels that that lands at. And here's why most people keep running the rinse and repeat cycle.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  The first level is the intellectual level of understanding, means it makes sense. People listen to this in English, it makes sense. But if you only keep it at the intellectual level, then knowing and not doing is the same as not knowing. Smokers know they shouldn't smoke. It's not they don't see the warnings on the packet. You can't construct one logical argument as to why somebody should smoke. So why do they smoke?

• 56:19Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  It's not because they're not unintelligent, you know? So it's because it hasn't gone to the second level of understanding.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  Intellectual level means nothing.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  The second level is the emotional level.

• 56:34Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  That's where we call the penny drops. So now all of a sudden, you're a smoker, you know you shouldn't quit, but you do it anyway. Why? Because it just stays at the intellectual level. But now you go to the doctor and he says, "That chest scan we just did, you have one more cigarette, you could suffer a fatal stroke."

• 56:54Speaker 00

  Now you didn't suddenly become smarter.

• 56:56Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  You didn't suddenly get the warnings into focus. No, you went from an intellectual to an emotional understanding. And that is where behavior starts to change. Behavior doesn't change at the intellectual level. Or your daughter comes running up, six years old and says, Daddy, Daddy, "I don't want you to die, please stop smoking. I want you to walk me down the aisle when I'm older and I don't think you'll make it if you smoke."

• 57:18Speaker 00

  Right? It's like, whoa, cigarettes in the bin.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  But the intellectual, sorry, the emotional level only triggers behavior change. It doesn't guarantee it. We've known people that says, "I'm done, I've quit."

• 57:31Lewis Howes?

  And then they fall back.

• 57:31Speaker 00

  And then they fall back. Why? Because it never went to the third level. The third level is where it changes your identity. See, if you're emotional and you throw your cigarettes away and your identity is, "I'm a smoker who's quit."

• 57:47Speaker 00

  Another thing Tony said, very powerful. He said that the strongest force in the human personality is the need to remain consistent with how you define yourself. In other words, identity. Yeah. So if I'm a smoker who's quit, identity wins over time every time. So I'm a smoker, now I'm using willpower to quit. Well, that's got one direction. At some point, willpower falls down. Willpower's not on demand. Mm hmm. I've got all the willpower to hang on to a branch or, you know, on a tree over a cliff. But you come back on Tuesday, I'm not there, right? Yes. So that identity side is if you change your identity from I'm a smoker who's quit to I'm a non-smoker. I offer you a cigarette, you're a non-smoker, what's the response? No, thank you. I don't smoke. Yeah. It's effortless. Yeah.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  I'm a smoker who's quit, somebody offers me a cigarette, there's like, hmm, there's that push-pull. You're questioning it constantly, yeah. So when I was going to be set to, uh, sent down. The six months out of the blue, like into, oh, by the, into the most violent prison in the UK is the only non-criminal. Man. I immediately had to check in with my identity. Because it would have been so easy at that point for me to go in as a victim. Courtroom shenanigans, you know, big scary law firm, pulling stuff behind my, all of this kind of stuff, right? I could have justified that. And the thing with Toomey is the mind will always justify it. It's his job. But that would have sent me down a pathway that I'm, I'm, that's a tunnel with no cheese. No, yeah.

• 59:15Speaker 00

  Right, so I chose a different identity in that moment. I chose to be a secret agent of change. Hmm. I'm like, I've spent a quarter of a century at that point, helping people with their mindset. If the universe is going to find the only way to smuggle me into jail without ever being accused of a crime. My gosh. To be able to help people that would never normally watch this kind of podcast. And be able to go and help them, then bring me back out without even having a criminal record. I mean, eight, genius, right? But let me go do my work. Wow. Why? Because life as a growth-centric experience is going to have graduation events.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  If you're a health coach, expect a health challenge so that you can prove to people you can walk your talk. You're a relationship coach, expect a problem so that you can actually live what it is that you teach others, otherwise you've got no right to do it. So I went in as a secret agent of change and

• 1:00:07Lewis Howes?

  Now, is this right away or is this after a couple of days?

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  Oh, no, no, no, walking down the steps.

• 1:00:12Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  Immediately.

• 1:00:13Lewis Howes?

  You weren't in shock? You weren't like, I can't believe this is happening to me?

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  Twenty-five years of training. I mean, if I couldn't walk my talk at that level, I shouldn't be there.

• 1:00:22Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  So, yeah, it would probably take an adjustment period for some people. But now I knew because that's a slippy slope to climb back from if I go down victim.

• 1:00:30Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  So I went in and I didn't get upset, I got excited.

• 1:00:34Lewis Howes?

  Come on, you were excited to go to jail?

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  I went in smiling. Why? Because I knew it had to be, I had to reconcile it as if I live in a friendly universe or I don't, pick one.

• 1:00:44Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  You can't be a fair weather sailor. Yeah, good sailors aren't made on calm seas.

• 1:00:49Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  And I had a set of skills that I went in with and anyway, long story short, I ended up getting a lot of the prisons off drugs of stopping suicides. I redesigned the intake system to reduce violence between the wings that's now being used in prisons all over the world. I actually won a national award for the work that I did inside in the midst of losing everything. And every two weeks I wrote to my students, telling them what I was doing by hand. How I was coping with it. Were there times I was upset and depressed? Absolutely. Yeah, I'm not superhuman. There was times where I woke up at five in the morning because my body was trained to wake up at five. And I can't move because my cellmate doesn't wait till seven. You don't want to upset your cellmate.

• 1:01:28Lewis Howes?

  Sitting there.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  You know, and, and that's hard because you can't move your body to try to change your emotions. And there was times I doubted myself, there was times I, but how do you, where do you live? Where do you visit?

• 1:01:39Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  You know, if you live in the gym, you can visit McDonald's once in a while. It's not going to do a lot. But if you live in McDonald's, you visit the gym once in a while, it ain't going to do a lot.

• 1:01:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  Right? So I wrote every two weeks and, and when I came out. My, my students said that they'd learned more from the eleven letters than traveling around the world for the last couple of years following me on stage. Because it was real.

• 1:02:01Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:02:01Speaker 00

  I'm breaking down how I'm doing suicide interventions. How do you stop somebody committing suicide permanently? Not just in the moment. You can change anybody's mood in the moment, but permanently when they go back to their cell and think the same depressing thoughts that caused them to be suicidal in the first place. There's a lot of suicides in that jail, by the way. And I, yeah, I put it all down. And when I came out, private letters, never meant to be for the public. They said that they'd learned more from those letters and it would help a lot of people if I, if I shared them. Wow. So we put it into a book and called it The Inside Track. Yeah. And I'm so grateful because I look back now and I think that even though obviously it was tough. Running a marathon is tough, so why do people do it? Because you get a medal at the end, you feel proud of yourself. Mm hmm.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  But there's times at mile seventeen that you question yourself. Yeah, of course. There's times that I was questioning myself. But that book has helped so many people, changed the life of pretty much everybody that's read it. I'm an emotional, I'm sorry. And, and to look back and, and see now that, you know, one of the greatest adventures I ever had the privilege of living. And knowing that if you trust the universe to have your back, as dark as it can see at the time. You know, I wrote a, a sign and put it on the inside of my cell door. It was quote from Napoleon Hill. Said, every adversity carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit. Hmm. And I read that sometimes hundreds of times a day, I had to.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  And the problem is most people are so busy moaning at the adversity, they never take time to water the seed. But if that river suddenly bends left and you're panicking because your goal's over there and now it's going this way. If you surrender to the wisdom of the current, if you go with the flow, say, okay, the milk is spilled on the carpet, bitching about it's not going to put it back in the bottle. I free up the energy of resistance to what is. Yeah. Because unless you've got a DeLorean and you're Marty McFly, you're not going to change it. No. So you free up that resistance and channel it into what is the next best move? Hmm. Okay, I'm in prison, I can't change that. I've lost my business, I've lost my wedding, I've lost this, I've, I'm hundreds of thousands in debt, I've lost every. What's the next best move? Well, I'm clearly here to serve, let me go to work. Hmm.

• 1:04:13Lewis Howes?

  Man, this has been powerful. I want people to get a copy of the book. It's called The Inside Track, The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Adversity. It's about the 11 private letters that you wrote while you were in jail to your coaching students again over the six months. And I think it's going to inspire a lot of people. I've got a couple of final questions for you, but I wanted to ask you, or is there something you wanted to say?

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  Actually, before you do, I'd actually prepared a gift.

• 1:04:36Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  For everybody watching.

• 1:04:37Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  Because I'm, and by the way, this is coming out a third of a million in debt, no credit rating. I got excited about that. Why? Never climbed out of a hole that deep before. Let's see what happens.

• 1:04:48Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  And I went to work because I've got a high conscious, I've got an abundance mentality. So I knew eventually the outer world would catch up is what I teach. I'm doing very well now. Yeah, I'm back on my feet. Things are going well. We're helping thousands of people a week. I'm really proud of what myself, the team and the universe, if you want to call it as help. So I want to get this book into as many hands as possible. And so I prepared a gift for every reader. So if anybody wants a copy of the PDF or the audio, and it's my voice on the audio. Petersage.com forward slash Lewis. Put in your email and you can have it. No free plus shipping. No, here's a funnel on the backend to get more money. None of that. I just absolutely free. My only recommendation is please don't treat it like you didn't pay for it.

• 1:05:33Speaker 00

  Otherwise, you know, if you don't pay, you don't pay attention.

• 1:05:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  So I want, I want a copy of that because it's changed the lives of pretty much everybody that's read it. If I can help the people that are your tribe in a way that helps them. You learn one thing out of that that can get you into a life of more of through me and less of buy me or to me. I've done my work and that's why I'm here.

• 1:05:52Lewis Howes?

  That's beautiful. Yes. People can go to Petersage.com slash Lewis. Check out that you'll get it for free, audio or PDF version. You've got different programs on there as well. People can check out and your YouTube, Instagram is the real Petersage on Instagram or YouTube. I know you had a couple of cups here. I don't know if you had an example you wanted to share for something or did you have a talk about it already or?

• 1:06:16Speaker 00

  It's, it kind of sums up a lot of what we've shared.

• 1:06:19Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. And kind of brings it full circle. So this is an example that people can see visually. So if we take a glass of water like this. The stuff in the glass, the water, represents the content of people's life. It's your job, your business, your money, you know, money, your friends, your religion, your hobbies, it's the stuff of your life. And the glass represents the container. It's the context, it's how you hold it, how you look at it. What most people spend most of their life doing is trying to stir the stuff in the glass. In your twenties, you're stirring it like mad, right? You're trying to figure out who you are. Yeah, what do you like? You know, what food you like, what sex do you like, what people you like, what job or career do you like? So you're constantly stirring.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  Now, in your thirties, there's a bit more of a pattern to it. You're still trying to change things. But there's a bit more of a pattern, routine. You kind of know your preferences and who you are and what you like. Forties, still stirring. Fifties, still stirring. Sixties, seventies, explain. I say one day in your thirties, you wake up and say, my life's so transparent and boring. So you go to a personal growth seminar and you realize what's been missing. You need some blue in your life. Right? Transparent, boring, see-through, blue. Blue's where it's at. So what happens? You go out, you sell your clothes, you get blue clothes. You drive a blue car. Yeah, you find blue friends, all of that kind of stuff.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  And you're still stirring and trying to change everything in your life in order so you can see it to be happy.

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  What happens after a while? Curse of the white rabbit. Blue's just feeling.

• 1:08:01Lewis Howes?

  I mean, red, I need green. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  Whereas if you were to simply take a different way to look at it and you were to put the water in. Same stuff, what instantly appears to change in terms of how you see things in your life.

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  See, most people are spending their time, effort, money, resources, goals, trying to change the stuff in their life. And while that's fine, we're here to create, we're born to create as human beings, we're born to go on and experience and do stuff. But if you're trying to do it in order to change the color of what's in the glass, without changing the color of the glass, you're going to be on a hamster wheel to nowhere, running east looking for that sunset.

• 1:08:39Speaker 00

  So we gotta learn how to change. Context. Context, not the content. Again, ask better questions. Yeah, raise your level of consciousness. Outer world follows inner world. And again, two men sat behind pizzan bars. I know this one. All right, one saw mud, the other saw stars. The environment is exactly the same. What you choose to do with that environment is everything. Yeah, I was. Yeah. I was on the ocean earlier this year. And involved in something called the world's toughest row. And the reason I chose that was because I mentioned graduation event. Well, the Olympics is every four years. Yep.

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  And so I didn't want to, I wanted to choose my next one rather than actually have it chosen for me by the universe. And, and so I signed up for it for the world's toughest row. It's, it's an extreme endurance event, rowing unsupported across the Atlantic. Same route Columbus took from the Canaries to Antigua. Okay.

• 1:09:37Speaker 00

  And. Two months, is that what you said it was? Two months? How long? Two months. And that, just to set the scene, I mean, a marathon. Three hours as a pro, four hours plodding, five hours you could walk it. Ironman fourteen hours. You know, ultra marathon, probably a week. Toughest sporting event on TV, maybe Tour de France televised, twenty one days, grueling across the Pyrenees. We're talking, somebody has to be rowing at all times, as me and my best friend. So two hours on, two hours recovery. Two hours, two hours, two hours. For two months? Seven. For just under two months. Oh, my gosh. It's the most extreme endurance force event on earth. Nothing comes close. Twenty five times more people have summited Everest than have ever rowed an ocean. Wow.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  So this is like a, like two oars or is this like? There's no, there's no sail, there's no engine. I'm not even allowed to hold up a T-shirt to dry because they class that as wind assistance. And everything's got to be arms and oars. Wow. And. Is there boat next to you or is there boat? Near is safety boats, usually four, five days away. Oh, my gosh. So everything's self-sufficient. Holy cow. It's, yeah, two years of training. And including ocean navigation, survival, yeah, equipment. Wow. Yeah. What about food? And I've never rowed. All the food's on board, dehydrated. We've got solar panels, solar panels to power a desalinator to get fresh watered, you know, to put in the powdered food.

• 1:10:59Lewis Howes?

  How big is the boat?

• 1:11:02Speaker 00

  Beefed up canoe.

• 1:11:03Lewis Howes?

  Okay, wow.

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  And after, you know, four days, we had our first storm. Eleven meter waves, thirty five foot. Terrifying. I was on the satellite phone to Nadi, my partner, crying. I was terrified. You can never train for something like, I'm not a rower, I'm not a.

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

  And I share this as an example for people because there was two reasons I wanted to do this.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  The first is, I wanted to see if I'm still qualified to teach. Yeah, I'm comfortable now. I'm back. I have back on my feet, all that kind of stuff. So again, where do I sit on my own totem pole of self mastery? Because I firmly believe if you can't master your mind, you will never master your life. So you can't engineer in a classroom, being a thousand miles offshore. Nearest humans in the International Space Station. The nearest land is five miles underneath you. You're hallucinating through sleep deprivation. You've got salt blisters all over your hands and your backside. You're exhausted and your alarm goes off at four AM for you to go row backwards in the dark in a raging sea for two hours. That's when your mind's going to give you every excuse, right?

• 1:12:10Lewis Howes?

  Get out of here, just make a call.

• 1:12:11Speaker 00

  I don't want to go to school today, right? So I want to find out where I sat there because if I'm not qualified to teach, fine, and authenticity is my highest value. All right, I need to know. And that's okay. I've had a good run. But I can't stand on stage in front of my students and tell them how to do stuff if I can't still do it myself. That's rule number one. But the other reason is everybody has their own row. Traumatic divorce, stage four diagnosis. You know, business catastrophic bankruptcy, whatever it is. I mean, Lee, my partner, my best friend and I rowed with, we were lucky. We just got the Atlantic.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  So how could I use, and we video direct the whole thing on my YouTube, how could using what we were using for our mental tricks and everything else and refrains and how to, you know, be appreciative of the rain because the rainbows were there and all of the other stuff and being grateful that we had hands rather than, you know, hands that were hurting.

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  How could we translate that for other people for what they're rowers? That was the other big reason that I did it. But the last lesson that I want to share and come back to your question is that I think sums up a lot of the journey. It was that there was one point. We had to go under the boat. We had a Rogue Wave snap our rudder. Carbon fibre, six times stronger than steel. And it slammed the boat. Lee was unconscious twice, by the way, on the, I rode solo for a week. Oh. Yeah, because he got slammed and hit his head on the side of the boat. That's another story. But I had to go under the boat in a raging sea to try to fix the rudder. Holy cow. And before I went out, and there's no option otherwise, because you can't steer a rowboat, that's it, it's game over.

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  So I recorded a video to my partner on my phone in a tiny little cabin. You know, I've got a tiny little, I can't even stretch my legs. And it was to say, look, if you find this video, but you don't find me. And if, I want you to know that A, I love you, but B, this was my decision. Wow. Yeah, I don't blame Lee. He didn't bully me into going under the boat. This is my decision. And I think I'm going to be okay because I live in a friendly universe, but hey, we all have a final scene in our own movie. Hmm. Yeah, and it was the closest I've ever come to drowning, by the way. I was being lifted out of the sea two feet, slammed two feet underneath trying to get under the boat. So I was throwing up seawater. I was in a fetal position back on the boat. It was, it was.

• 1:14:35Speaker 00

  And there was one point where I actually thought it was going to be the end. But when you realise that even though we star in the movie of our life, every single one of us, when it comes to the human, not the being, but the human, has a final scene. That's non-negotiable. So what do you want your final scene? What do you want to be able to say? Mm-hmm. If you're lucky enough to be able to choose the last words that come out of your mouth, I want it to be like, wow, that was spectacular. That is a movie that I would pay to watch again. Mm-hmm. And of course, what does a great movie have, Wes? Has everything. Yeah. Comedy, tragedy, romance, heartache, yeah, fun, adventure, yeah, abundance, scarcity, it has everything.

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

  You know, nobody pays good money to go to a cinema to watch James Bond rescue a kitten out of a tree for 90 minutes, right? That's not the movie you want. Yeah, and so many people are trying to live in this narrow little band of not too much risk, not too much failure. Get out and swing the bat. Yeah. Yeah, go film the movie you were born to film. And if you're sitting in victimhood, that's never going to be the starring role that you were born to star in. Right. Get out and play. Hmm.

• 1:15:43Lewis Howes?

  It's been powerful, Peter. I want to acknowledge you for the journey you've been on and how you continue to serve at this level, even with the challenges you've been faced. And it's really inspiring, man. So, congrats on everything and excited for people to get the book, The Inside Track.

• 1:15:58Lewis Howes?

  And check out all your work, PeterStage.com. Two final questions for you. This one's called the three truths. So, imagine, you know, you spoke about the last moment, last day potentially. Imagine you get to live as long as you want, but it is the last day, the final scene for you. And you've gone on the adventure of your dreams. But for whatever reason, all of your work has to go with you, all of your content, your message, this interview is gone. But you get to leave behind three lessons to the world. And this is all we would have of your content. What would those three truths be for you?

• 1:16:30Speaker 00

  Oh, beautiful question.

• 1:16:33Speaker 00

  The first is to understand you were born good enough.

• 1:16:38Speaker 00

  Nothing to defend, nothing to conquer, nothing to prove. And no matter what you've done, no matter what you're not, you're worthy of love. Stop trying to earn it.

• 1:16:49Speaker 00

  The second,

• 1:16:52Speaker 00

  stop waiting for approval from the outside world, from your partner, from, stop waiting for approval for you to walk your truth. If you feel this is your decision that is right to make, stop looking for agreement. That'll hold you back. You're starring in your movie, nobody else's.

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  Third,

• 1:17:15Speaker 00

  understand that

• 1:17:18Speaker 00

  the sooner you can swap your need for significance or your need for certainty, for growth and contribution to your highest values, your life will change forever.

• 1:17:31Speaker 00

  That would be it.

• 1:17:33Lewis Howes?

  The final question, Peter, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  Oh, I should have expected that.

• 1:17:40Speaker 00

  I would say getting to the end of your movie and being happy with your performance.

• 1:17:47Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it doesn't have to be a billion dollar company or, you know, impact the world or a thumbprint on humanity. No, you'd be the best mom you can be. You gave what you did for your kids and allowed them to do what they do.

• 1:18:00Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  Greatness is you walking your truth in conjunction with letting go of more fear and embracing more love.

• 1:18:09Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:09Speaker 00

  And if you can do that, that's a great life.

• 1:18:12Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, Peter, thanks so much, man. Appreciate you.

• 1:18:14Speaker 00

  My pleasure. Thank you so, so much.

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  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 episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. 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. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy and you matter.

• 1:19:00Speaker 02

  And now it's time to go out there and do something great.