The Thoughts You’re Thinking Right Now Are DESTROYING Your Future | Ed Mylett

What if the greatest upgrade you'll ever make isn't to your business or your body, but to your brain? In this mashup episode, I bring together some of the brightest minds in neuroscience, peak performance, and human potential to answer one of the most important questions you'll ever ask: how do you unlock the best version of yourself? So many people believe they're limited by talent, circumstances, or intelligence. The truth is that your brain is constantly changing, adapting, and responding to what you focus on every single day. When you learn how to direct your attention, strengthen your mindset, and intentionally train your mind, you begin changing your future long before your circumstances change. Jim Kwik joins me to break down how your brain filters the world and why your standards matter even more than your goals. We unpack the incredible power of your reticular activating system and how asking better questions literally changes what opportunities you begin to notice. Dr. Joe Dispenza explains how your personality creates your personal reality and why lasting transformation starts by rewiring the thoughts and beliefs you've been carrying for years. Together, we explore why your mind is far more powerful than you've ever been taught to believe. You'll also hear an incredible conversation with Dr. Amishi Jha about the science of attention and memory. She reveals why attention is the gateway to learning, performance, and lasting memories, and why the ability to stay present has become one of the greatest competitive advantages in today's distracted world. We dive into how every experience is shaping your brain, why focus strengthens memory, and how training your attention can improve every area of your life from business to relationships to personal fulfillment. Throughout this episode, I challenge you to stop believing that your current thinking has to become your permanent reality. The brain is designed to adapt. Your identity can expand. Your focus can improve. Your habits can change. When you begin controlling what you repeatedly think about and where you intentionally place your attention, you start creating a completely different future. Your greatest asset has always been sitting between your ears. The question is whether you're training it with the same intensity you train everything else. Key Takeaways: Why your attention determines the quality of your life and your future Jim Kwik's explanation of how your brain filters opportunities through the reticular activating system Why your standards shape your results more than your goals Dr. Joe Dispenza's insight that your personality becomes your personal reality How changing your thinking creates lasting personal transformation Dr. Amishi Jha's explanation of why attention is the gateway to memory and learning How being more present improves performance, relationships, and decision making Practical ways to retrain your brain to create greater focus, confidence, and success Your brain is the most valuable asset you'll ever own, but most people spend more time upgrading their phone than upgrading the way they think. If you're ready to become more focused, more intentional, and more capable than you've ever been before, this episode will give you the tools to start transforming your life from the inside out. 👉 SUBSCRIBE TO ED'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL NOW 👈⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ → → → CONNECT WITH ED MYLETT ON SOCIAL MEDIA: ← ← ← ➡️ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠INSTAGRAM⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ➡️⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠FACEBOOK⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ➡️ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LINKEDIN⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ➡️ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ➡️ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠WEBSITE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Ed Mylett

  I hear so many small business owners say the exact same thing. They just never have enough time in the day. Well, I measure time differently. I've compressed, condensed, heck, I've bent time. My first day is 6:00 AM to noon. My second day starts at noon and goes till 6:00 PM. And my third day, 6:00 PM to midnight. I now get 21 days a week. Stack that up over a month, over a year, over five years. And my life's completely different than it would have been otherwise. And if you want to win as an entrepreneur, you have to compress your time too. And you definitely can't afford to waste it. Waiting weeks on a big bank for capital? Your best bet's to work with my friends at Cardiff. They know how to compress time for entrepreneurs. They get your business approved in minutes and funded the very same day. They're America's favorite small business lender and for good reason.

• 0:45Ed Mylett

  Over 20 years in business, over 12 billion deployed to small business across America. Stop letting bank delays slow down your momentum. Head to cardiff.co/ed. That's cardiff.co/ed. Cardiff.co. Real growth, fast funding. Cardiff, borrow better.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 1:36Ed Mylett

  This is the Ed Mylett Show.

• 1:40Ed Mylett

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to my weekend special. I hope you enjoy the show. Be sure to follow the Ed Mylett Show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. You'll never miss an episode that way. Now on with the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. I'm so grateful to be with all of you today. And I think today could be one of these quantum type leaps for so many of you and the way that you view your life. And so what we're going to discuss today is the filter or prism in which the point of view of which you view your life. And there's really two ways that we look at our lives, the filter we see it through. And I wrote about this in The Power of One More in my book. There are certain percentage of people, a very small percentage of people, who operate out of their vision and imagination, their dreams. That's their frame of reference.

• 2:24Ed Mylett

  They're almost like a child in their, they dream in their life. They operate out of vision and imagination. They allow that to be the dominant filter and prism at which they see life. The vast majority of people don't do that, however. Most people operate out of history and memory. And they wonder why they keep repeating the same life over and over again with a different set of people and maybe a different set of circumstances, but the same results, the same emotions. And so the first thing to ask yourself today is which one are you? And it's okay if you're the one that you wouldn't prefer to be. But do you, for the most part, operate out of your history and your memory? And you think a lot about those things? That's what most people do? Or are you one of the rare few people who operate out of imagination?

• 3:06Ed Mylett

  Because if you can operate out of imagination, see, kids teach such a great lesson. Why do most kids operate of imagination? They're going to be an astronaut or Superman. They pretend, they play games, they have joy. That's what imagination gives us. That's what vision gives us. Memory doesn't do that for us. And so why do kids have that? Because they have no history. They have no memory. So they're forced almost to operate of it. At some age, the crime of life, the tragedy is that we begin to operate out of a history and a memory. And oftentimes that history and memory are the things that we least want to repeat. They're some of the most emotional or scarring times in our life. And so most human beings involuntarily go through their entire life

• 3:50Ed Mylett

  operating out of this point of view, out of this filter, unknowingly, unconsciously. They just don't know they're operating this way. And so I want to challenge you today, and I'm going to give you some keys to start to operate out of your imagination and your dreams and your vision. See, because that point of view allows you to be present. There's really three points of reference, isn't there? There's the past, there's the present, and there's the future. And I think the happiest people are present an awful lot of the time. And the rest of the time, or most of that time, they operate out of their vision and their imagination and their dreams. I'm not suggesting that evaluating your past can't teach you lessons. You can't heal some of it.

• 4:33Ed Mylett

  But spending most of your time there is not something that's productive. Deepak Chopra has this great quote where he says, "I use memories, but I don't allow my memories to use me." And too many people are operating out of their memories or using them. It's okay to look back and to heal and to evaluate and to gain wisdom from our past. But that should be a small percentage of our time. We should be fully present and focusing on the future at the same time. And so how do you do that? Well, we're going to talk about it today a little bit. I think I can give you some keys. First thing is this, there's a term that I want you to understand called cognitive immobility. And what that means is, is when you're really mentally trapped in a place from your past,

• 5:15Ed Mylett

  most people have some form of cognitive immobility where they just can't move out of it. And what happens is everything they see currently, they reference to the past. You know, our minds work this way, even reading. There's a lot of research that says the way that we actually read is our mind actually sees the beginning of letters and it references the past where we've read it. And it tells us that's what the word means. That's why you can read very, very quickly. So your mind wants to take something it sees now and reference it to something else. That's really what thinking is. So that's why this takes work. If you're left to your own devices, most of the time, what you're going to see will be referenced somewhere in the past. And so that's cognitive immobility. People that I think are happy, that create things, that take a life that's one way

• 5:58Ed Mylett

  and make a new one, have cognitive mobility. They're able to move forward. They're mobile in their thinking. So a really good example of being fully present but focusing on the future is actually physical training, is working out. I think it's one of the reasons why working out is so powerful. Because when you're lifting weights or working out, it forces you to be completely present on the task right in front of you because you're lifting heavy things. You have to focus on the present moment. There's actually a threat to you. You could get injured, you could get hurt. So that's why I think so many people say, well, the reason, man, when I work out, I've got all these endorphins flowing and my, you know, my neuro biochemistry is changing. And yeah, that's true. But one of the other reasons is it's a metaphor. It's an example of how to live our lives, which we're fully present in the moment.

• 6:42Ed Mylett

  But one of the reasons we're training is not the pain in the moment. It's the future payoff. So physical training, working out is one of the great models in life. It forces you to be present. You can't be lifting something heavy or bench pressing or squatting or running and not be present in the moment because you'll trip and fall. You'll drop the weight. There's a threat physically to you, to be fully present and focused. But you really aren't doing it for that moment. You're doing it because there's a payoff. Your heart will be stronger, your cardio will be stronger, your body will look stronger or better. And so physical training is a great example of how to be fully present but focused on imagination and vision and dream as opposed to history and memory. When you're working out, you're physical, you're not thinking about your past. It's almost impossible, right?

• 7:27Ed Mylett

  So that's a great metaphor. You know, actually, at one time in history, nostalgia was considered a mental health condition. So that's how detrimental, to some extent, focusing on the past can be. You imagine that? They actually called nostalgia a mental health challenge. Now it's sort of celebrated. We're always looking back, we're always reminiscing with these phones we have. There's, the past is sitting in there all the time, isn't it? Called photos. We're constantly looking at yesterday, the day before, a year ago, five years ago. Your phone will remind you, memory of a photo two years ago. Social media will give you a reminder of the past. So nostalgia's become such a part of our culture. And then we wonder why we're not so mentally healthy. Because when you're in the past, you're not present.

• 8:12Ed Mylett

  I have to tell you, many of you know that I've been taking a break from social media. I've taken a complete step back. I've taken a break from a lot of my travel and my speaking. A lot of the things that in business that I just, I can't functionally do right now because I'm working on my physical health. I'm still running my businesses and I'm still doing coaching in the Arte Syndicate and speaking to some extent. But I've pared a lot of it back. And one of the things that's happened is I've pared a lot of it back. I've found I've really uncovered how not present I was all the time. I was never present. And so I'm learning, you know, nostalgia is fun, but it's, it can actually become a mental health issue. There's this physician back all the way to the 1600s. Johanns Hofer was the guy's name.

• 8:55Ed Mylett

  And he actually talked about nostalgia as an actual disease. It described anxiety and homesickness and insomnia and other symptoms experienced by these Swiss mercenaries that come back from fighting battle. So, you know, this is something to really evaluate. John F. Kennedy, the great president, said, this is in my book, The Power of One More. I use this quote, he said, "History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. Trying to hold fast is to be swept aside." And so what I'm saying to you is that if you're focused on your past, your future is swept aside. Your life will be swept aside. Your destiny will be swept aside. And so a couple more things about this that are important to know.

• 9:40Ed Mylett

  There's some different studies I want to tell you about. And then I'll give you a couple of keys, just three or four keys to breaking this pattern so you can shift from being someone who's in the past to someone who's at least in the present and has, using imagination as leverage. There's a research that a guy named Dr. Fred Luskin did at Stanford. And he says that basically in his study, a human being has about 60,000 thoughts per day. Are you ready for this? 90% of them are repetitive thoughts. I talk about this in both my books. Imagine this, that 90% of your day today is exactly the same as the day before internally. 90% of your thoughts? Are the same every single day. So you have a 10% variability. And by the way, that 10% can be as simple as what direction to take,

• 10:25Ed Mylett

  what to order off of a menu. So the actual way to change your life, if you're 90% of your thoughts are the same, isn't very easy unless you're intentional about it. Left to our own devices, we're going to repeat the same life over and over again. We're going to have nostalgia. We're going to have the same 60,000 thoughts, 54,000 of them are the same every single day. And we don't have any variability. There's another study researched by the National Science Foundation that said 80% of your thoughts are negative. Can you imagine this? So 90% of your thoughts are the same every single day and 80% of those are negative thoughts. And imagine why human beings are wired for pain, wired for failure, not wired for growth and expansion, not wired for bliss. Of those thousands of thoughts, 80% are negative.

• 11:10Ed Mylett

  And in that study, they say 95% of your thoughts are exactly the same as the day before. So I have to tell you, this is so important to be intentional about every single day. Depending on the study, somewhere between 90 and 95% of your thoughts are your same. And everything tells us 80% of them are negative. And most of them are nostalgic or pointing a reference to the past in some way. So the first thing is this, what do we got to be able to do? What are some of the things that you could do to change it? First off is to be intentional that I'm going to begin to operate out of my imagination. Okay, just operate out of it. Now I'm going to give you four steps before we conclude things today that I think that can help you change these patterns.

• 11:52Ed Mylett

  Number one, you've got to decide that you're going to be present and focus on the future. And I want to teach you a tool called possibility projection. It's something that I did not create. I learned it many years ago back in business. But when I had my sales team, I would draw up what I called possibility projections. You know, if I wrote five sales this month that did this and so and so wrote three and Dave wrote two. And, and I would possibility project the next month of what it would look like, what the possibilities were, and then I'd project them into the month. And then I would project what it would mean to me from a financial standpoint or from a growth of my business. And then I started doing that in other areas. I would possibility project my physical training. If I work out this many days a week, do this many reps on this, the, I can write up the possibilities that I would do,

• 12:37Ed Mylett

  and then project what it would mean to me in a month, in six months, and in a year. Same thing in your family, same thing with your money. And so I've become, I'm addicted to it. I do it on airplanes all the time where I'm writing and people are like, what are you writing? I'm possibility projecting what my finances will look like this month. I'm possibility projecting my podcast. If I could just get so and so as a guest and we record it there. And I possibility project. If we do that, man, this is what the downloads will look like. This is what the rankings look. These are the amount of people we could help. This is what the vision, and what I'm doing is I'm casting a vision consciously. You can do that with your family. Though over the next three or four months, the spring break's here and we're going to go to this resort or we're going to go to this beach, or maybe you can't afford to go anywhere. We're going to do this activity as a family.

• 13:20Ed Mylett

  And you start building towards this, hey, kids, on spring break, we're going to do these games or we're going to do this prayer work or whatever it might be. We're going to have this, and you possibility project. Have you ever had like a Monday morning and you got a grind of a week ahead, but somehow you got something cool you're going to do on the weekend? We've all had that before, like there's going to be a concert you're going to or a party or a get together at a park or whatever. And somehow, don't you agree? That thing coming on Friday or Saturday gets you through the week, right? Or even sometimes the morning, you know, you got a really rough morning, but you know that night, there's a game you want to watch on TV or your favorite TV show's coming up. Just knowing that's coming helps you be more present and go through what you need to go through

• 14:05Ed Mylett

  in the day, in the week. What you've really done is you've possibility projected the TV show that you possibility projected the party that weekend. You possibility project in your life. This forces you into imagination, vision and dreams. So you already do this from time to time. What if you made possibility projecting, future focusing, part of your routine regularly? Family, money, business, life, entertainment, physical, whatever it might be. Possibility projected. Maybe you're going to train in the gym because you know in six months, you're going to do an Ironman. Or you're going to do one of these mud runs, or you're going to be able to weigh at 180. Or you're going to do a bodybuilding contest, or you're going to do something, right?

• 14:49Ed Mylett

  So you possibility project, maybe you're going to pick up a sport once you're in different shape. So one of the healthy ways you just change your focus is you create a strategy like the one I'm describing. So I want you to challenge you to become a possibility projector all the time. By the way, it'll be awkward at first and then in three months, five months, six months, you won't remember your life without doing it. You could possibility reject your day, you could possibility project your week, you could possibility reject your year in every single area. And this focuses you on the future, but what it does is it causes you to do something in the present. Okay, huge strategy and tactic to switch from history and memory to imagination and dreams.

• 15:32Ed Mylett

  Number two, go on what I call a phone fast. And this is what I've been doing recently that I'm taking this step back. A phone fast means this, exactly what it sounds like. You put your phone away for periods of time. Now I want to challenge you, a, a, a great phone fast would be for an entire day. You turn your phone off and you put it away for a day. You know, I think you'll find that the world will be okay without you and that 99.9% of the things that are on that phone, you don't have to get to. When you start getting away from your phone, I really love social media. It's made becoming wealthy much easier. It's made building a brand easier. It's allowed average, everyday people like you and me

• 16:14Ed Mylett

  to build extraordinary wealth, the potential of businesses, the access to information and people in an unprecedented way. It's a wonderful part of it.

• 16:26Ed Mylett

  But I actually have begun to believe that social media has more negatives than positives. And the addiction to grabbing the phone, the responding in a timely manner, taking you off of focus, taking you oftentimes to a reference of the past.

• 16:43Ed Mylett

  The distraction of it, the stress of it.

• 16:47Ed Mylett

  The algorithm in our brain that is now wired to be in here, the feeding of the negatives and the toxicity, the comparison. And so many of us, it's like an unhealthy diet we eat all day, every single day. Imagine if you ate like that, you poured that into your body with never fasting, never cleansing. This episode is sponsored by Ro. A lot of people assume GLP-1's cost a fortune and that assumption keeps them from even looking into treatment. Ro helps people find a more affordable path to FDA approved GLP-1 treatment. Ro wants to help people lose weight. That's why they have more affordable GLP-1 options, whether you're paying with insurance or cash.

• 17:29Ed Mylett

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• 18:14Ed Mylett

  and I spent a fortune in the first half of the place. And I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore, but I want the best stuff. And that's where Wayfair came in. My wife wanted to get this new garden bed and Wayfair was the place that offered the perfect solution. Wayfair also helps you create a home that stands up to real life with quality products, great value and trusted reviews. Wayfair verified products are hand vetted by product specialists. They use a 10-point quality inspection system. Here's all I can tell you. The stuff has lasted over time. It looks great and I get compliments on it. Shop thousands of products across every style and budget, whether you're trying to refresh your space for fall or transform your space for Halloween. Use filters, custom photos and reviews to find the right fit for your home. More than 20 million verified five-star reviews, 20 million. So transform your space with the pieces that hold up to real life.

• 18:57Ed Mylett

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• 19:14Ed Mylett

  Strategy number two, to become more present in your life and focus on the future is getting off the thing that keeps pulling you into the past. You go, no, I'm actually getting updated on what's going on in the world today. You're referencing it to the past. That's how your brain works. It's stress, it's toxic, it's comparison. It's mainly unnecessary and unhealthy, isn't it? So take a phone fast. If you could do it for a day, do it. You do it for a week, do it. Could you at least do it for three hours? Could you do it for six hours? Could you do it on Sundays? I think if you build in a phone fast, you'll find yourself much healthier, much more present. Trust me, much more present and have a much more compelling future. You'll be much less nostalgic. Your phone's feeding you nostalgic thoughts like what you agree with politically,

• 20:00Ed Mylett

  things that you want to follow, things you've seen before, repetitive messaging just said a different way. Take a phone fast, step two. Step three, practice small box focus. What does that mean? Actually train yourself to begin to focus on small, specific things. This changes your brain in the way that it works. And so I've gotten actually pretty good at this. So I will take something very small and put all of my attention on it. That may seem silly, but literally oftentimes I'll take a pen like this and I will put all my focus on the top of the pen or on the pen, the point of the pen. And I'll just direct my focus right to that spot.

• 20:41Ed Mylett

  There's a tree right here in my studio. I'll go outside and I won't focus on the entire tree. I will zoom my focus in on one of the leaves. And I will break down that leaf. I'll look at its character. I'll look at the wrinkles on it. I'll look at the, how it's different from the other ones. And I will focus in on a very small spot. I'll do it with my little doggies. I'll just focus in, not just with them being with me and how grateful I am that they're there. But I will focus in my attention on just their precious eyes. Or I'll hold one of them close to me. Small box focus. What that does is it trains your brain to eliminate all the big stuff and narrow in on the full present moment. You can do this by going outside and picking one cloud in the sky.

• 21:26Ed Mylett

  You can do it in your office by picking one picture to put your focus into. Okay? You can, I'm blessed that I live near the ocean. I will not just look at the vast entire ocean. I'll pick one wave and watch it come on all the way in. I'll pick small things. You can literally be in a room, there's a chair right here in front of me. And with a bunch of squares on it, I'll focus in on one of the squares and just direct my attention to it and see what I can notice about it. See the distinctions in it. And when I do that, I've narrowed my focus down and I begin to build a muscle of what I call small box focus. You can pick anything, you can do it repetitively. Even if you're reading a book, you can focus in on one word. And just focus your gaze in on that one word.

• 22:10Ed Mylett

  What you're doing is you're training your brain to be fully present. Believe it or not, even when you're taking in beauty in the world, when it's the big picture, the big gaze, oftentimes your brain will now gravitate back to the past, back to nostalgia, back to your emotional home. But when you pick something small and specific, it forces you to be present. You can't look at something small and not be present in it. And then what you can do is the contrast. Go from the small gaze to the big gaze. So this one wave coming in to the entire ocean, back to the small wave. The one square on the chair, back to the entire studio, back to the small square, back to the entire studio, back to the small square.

• 22:53Ed Mylett

  This may seem kinda crazy, but what it's doing is it's training your brain to be fully present in the moment. What you're gonna find over time is that this is a muscle you build and you can hold small box focus longer, much longer. And it's training you to be present. And there'll become peace in it. And you'll find you don't need the ocean or some beautiful sunset necessarily to find peace, to empty your mind. It's just being able to get focused in on small things. I know it's probably something you've never heard before, but it's a strategy that I've used very regularly and it's helped me a great deal, especially in this time that I've been taking to my health. The next thing and the last thing is, name the dummy. Name the dummy. So you know that person who starts thinking all those negative thoughts and starts stacking them

• 23:38Ed Mylett

  and you're running that pattern in your head? Name her. Name him. For me, he's Eddie Spaghetti. So every time Eddie Spaghetti pops up, he's thinking negative, he's worrying about stuff, he's stacking negative thoughts, he's going to the past, he's comparing, he's beating himself up, he's getting tired. That guy, I've named him. That dumbass's name is Eddie Spaghetti. And I go, Eddie Spaghetti's showing back up? You can make that name a whole lot more aggressive than that, by the way, for you. But when you name the dummy, it changes your state. It immediately shifts you out of, cause you realize you are not your thoughts. You don't have to believe everything you think. In fact, most of the stuff you think isn't true. And happy people, successful people realize they think a lot of stupid things.

• 24:22Ed Mylett

  I'm 53 years old next month and I can tell you, I've thought a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't true in my life. I have convinced myself of a whole bunch of things that weren't true. I've thought a bunch of stupid things in my life and I cannot trust my own thoughts because the thoughts aren't mine. They're from the past and the past eye vision isn't even real. It's my version of the past based on some emotional situation that I've replayed over and over again. And it's probably not even an accurate depiction of what the past is. And so I have stopped doing that. And I've named him, when he shows up, Eddie Spaghetti. And I call him some worse names than that, that I won't say right here on a podcast. But when you name the dummy, the dummy loses power over you.

• 25:05Ed Mylett

  And it may not work at first, but if you do it over and over again, by the way, it can be anybody. You can go, there's slap nuts, right? There's Sammy, there's Sparky, there's dumbass. Whoever it is, you name it whatever you want. For me, because I gotta say this out loud sometimes, it's Eddie Spaghetti. And the reason it's Eddie Spaghetti is when I was a little kid, I got teased with that name. And I don't like that guy at all. I don't ever wanna be that dude again. So I've literally named it, this version of me that I can't stand. And then I don't like, and then I know isn't really me. And so when he starts showing up, Eddie Spaghetti, your meatballs are ready. Right? That was a whole thing that I used to say when I was a kid, that I don't ever wanna go back to.

• 25:48Ed Mylett

  And so when he shows up, I've named the dummy. And that dummy, and he is a dummy, and she is, or he is a dummy that's feeding you these negative nostalgic weak thoughts. You call them out by name and over time, you actually get a chuckle eventually. And it loses a lot of its power over you. So, we have the two points of reference we have to do. The four key things that I'm just giving you today and top of a whole bunch of other stuff I name in my books is, make sure you have possibility projections, number one. Number two, take a phone fast. Number three, practice small box focus. Focusing in on small things will make you fully present. On the beach, pick a grain of sand in the beach and focus in on that one grain of sand.

• 26:33Ed Mylett

  On the golf course, don't take in the whole golf course. Focus in right on the golf ball. And then if you can focus in on the T, entitlement, on that golf ball, you've really got small box focus down. It'll also help you play better. And then lastly, fourth, name the dummy. Those are four strategies to move you from nostalgia, the past, history, memory, into the present moment focused on your vision, your imagination and your dreams. Very short intermission here, folks. I'm glad you're enjoying the show so far. Don't forget to follow the show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. Now on to our next guest. Welcome back to Max Out, everybody. I'm Ed Milat. Let me ask you a question before we begin today. Do you have any sense right now, like you feel like you're just overloaded?

• 27:16Ed Mylett

  And you're overwhelmed with information in your life? Maybe you're having a hard time getting focused? You get distracted pretty easily? Maybe your concentration sort of suffers a little bit, your memory issues? Well, my guest here today is an expert on optimum brain performance, on learning, on learning quickly. And on maxing out your capacity to think and perform in your life. And it was really born out of some tragedy, out of some, some difficult events out of his childhood. He's turned those tragic events into becoming a world renowned expert on brain performance. And today, I'm really blessed because I've been chasing this guy for a while. I've wanted him to share his brilliance with you, the audience. And I'm grateful that he's here today because we're about to change your life and change the way you learn, think and perform.

• 28:00Ed Mylett

  So my guest today is the great Jim Quick. Jim, thank you.

• 28:03Jim Kwik?

  Ed, thank you so much. I've been looking forward to this so much.

• 28:05Ed Mylett

  Me too, brother. We've been, we've had great conversations off camera. And I'm so excited because I know, there are some shows I know that we do that are inspirational. And then there are shows I know that are going to inspire, but also by the end of the program, people's lives are just measurably better and they can perform better. And today is heavy note taking. If you're driving in the car, you're gonna wanna hear it, but you're gonna wanna get back and listen to the video or something too, to write the notes down we're gonna cover. So I wanna share something with you, cause it just happened this weekend and I just, from my folks here too. I think one of mine is that I am present with people.

• 28:39Jim Kwik?

  Yeah.

• 28:39Ed Mylett

  And I do observe people. And so it's really interesting because I think that's one of the things that I love about doing the show. And it was fascinating because I never gave any thought as to where that came from. Because I mean, your brain brilliance comes from the fact that you had this damaged brain as a child. Yet it's one of your great gifts and one of the great things you're intelligent at, one of your, your geniuses. And so this weekend, somebody had asked me, why do you think like on your show, or even we were at a dinner, you're so present, you're listening? Where do you think that comes from? And I didn't know, I didn't, I thought about it and I said, you know, I'm not sure, but you know, it's interesting. My dad was, my dad's sober 30 years now, but when I was a little boy, my dad was, had a drinking problem.

• 29:22Ed Mylett

  And I never knew as a little boy, which dad was gonna come through the front door at night. And so unlike most kids who would run up and hug dad, I would observe dad when he came home. And so when dad walked through the front door, I'd look at his physiology. I'd look at his eyes, his face, his lips. I'd listen to what his first few words were. And I think since I was about a four-year-old little boy, I was sort of, through that unfortunate circumstance in my family, I developed this intelligence of being present and really being with someone and understanding them and connecting with them and seeing where they really were. And it's ended up serving me as a 47-year-old man with you here today. Isn't that interesting?

• 30:03Ed Mylett

  And so many, for some of you listening, I would just say to you that sometimes some of your great genius could be coming from some of what you would think might be some of the more tragic events in your life or difficult events in your life. So just think about that.

• 30:15Jim Kwik?

  And the self-talk also, you know, when I said, I had, you know, at age nine, a teacher looked at me and said, that's the boy with the broken brain for the whole class. You know, and parents and adults have to be very careful because your external words become a child's internal words. Because every single time I did bad on a quiz, on a test, or not picked for a sports team, which was all the time, I would say, oh, cause I have the broken brain. That became my internal conversation. And I always tell people when they come to me and they say, I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough, I have a horrible memory. I always say, if you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. If you fight for your limitations, you argue for your limits, they're yours, right? And here's the thing, your brain is like a supercomputer and your self-talk is a program it will run. So if you tell yourself you're not good at remembering names,

• 30:56Jim Kwik?

  you will not remember the name of the next person you meet because you programmed your supercomputer not to. They say the two most powerful words in the English language are also the smallest, I am. Because whatever you put after that, complete that sentence with, is gonna determine your destination, your destiny.

• 31:12Ed Mylett

  I'm so glad you're saying this because this is typically said by like, you know what I mean too? But motivational people or inspiring people. Now we've got a brain person, science telling you this is a fact.

• 31:24Jim Kwik?

  So your identity is this. So let's say at a simple level, let's say people wanna change their behavior, they wanna stop procrastinating.

• 31:30Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 31:31Jim Kwik?

  But their identity is, I'm a procrastinator.

• 31:33Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 31:33Jim Kwik?

  Ooh, that's gonna be a tough one. They wanna change their behavior like, oh, I wanna stop smoking. But their identity is, I am a smoker? Wow, that's gonna be a challenge, right? So here's the thing, the reason why I bring these distinctions up is because it takes the self-loathing or the judgment out of it because you don't have to, if you're not good at something, you could say like, oh, you could address the level that's holding you back. Finally, below the level of behavior, and this is a big one, is the level of environment. Environment, because... You could, the behavior is you want to stop smoking, but the environment is around a lot of smokers. Because it's not, here's the thing, the people you spend time with is people you become. You know this, you teach this, because your mirror neurons are always imitating what's around you.

• 32:14Jim Kwik?

  And that's the thing. So I want to sensitize you to, because often the people that hold us back are the people that love us the most.

• 32:21Ed Mylett

  You know.

• 32:22Jim Kwik?

  You know, because you know why? They're like, oh, you're going to another event? You're listening to another podcast? Why are you reading another book, spending all that money? And they have good, they can have good intentions.

• 32:29Ed Mylett

  Sure.

• 32:30Jim Kwik?

  Right? Because ultimately, people are doing things for, you know, generally, I believe, for good reasons.

• 32:34Ed Mylett

  So do I, most people.

• 32:34Jim Kwik?

  But they can be sincere, but they can be sincerely wrong.

• 32:37Ed Mylett

  Sincerely wrong. And I love the, I'm not this yet.

• 32:40Jim Kwik?

  Right.

• 32:40Ed Mylett

  I also want to just repeat things that just, we just, you say brilliant things one after the other. And so this idea that as a parent, your external dialogue becomes your child's internal dialogue is just riveting. I mean, it's riveting. And it's also true, I think, of leaders in companies, too. Your external dialogue about your company or about that individual can become their internal dialogue. So what you're saying matters so deeply.

• 33:03Jim Kwik?

  There are six primary questions we learn in school. Five W's and one H, right? Now, watch this. The identity level answers the question of who. The beliefs and values answer the question of why. The capabilities answer the question of how you do it. The behavior is the what, and the environment answers the question of when and where. It is fully aligned. And so I feel like we have natural genius inside of us. And if we, when this is aligned with this, when people talk about their mind and their body and their values and their habits, when they're all aligned, things happen naturally and they're not having forced. And my goal for everybody who's watching and listening to this is that they're smarter than they think. It's just, we weren't taught how to do these things.

• 33:46Jim Kwik?

  And when you're in congruence and in alignment, things happen, your natural superpowers, if you will,

• 33:51Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 33:52Jim Kwik?

  come out, come out organically and not forced.

• 33:55Ed Mylett

  Boy, that's, man, brother, that's so good. I'm processing all of this with you. So you know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself wearing like on repeat all the time? That sweater that kind of just goes with everything or these perfect pair of pants? Those are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince focuses on high-quality wardrobe staples with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton. The styles are timeless, versatile, and designed to become the dependable pieces you reach for every day. It's what I'm wearing right now. They give you the softness and quality you'd expect from a luxury brand without the price tag. Quince also makes premium pants, fitted tees and polos, and breathable activewear. Quality basics designed to work with your wardrobe and hold up to everyday wear.

• 34:38Ed Mylett

  I love their cotton tees. I'm wearing one now, and I get a ton of compliments when I wear them on the podcast and when I speak. So find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com/ed for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. That's Q U I N C E dot com slash ed. So you know, I've been trying to take my health and my morning routine to the next level. And I used to do a whole bunch of different stuff, tons of different supplements. And then I found all-in-one in a drink with IM8. IM8 is the way to simplify your supplement routine, finally, once and for all. 16 supplements replaced 90 ingredients across nine major organ systems in one drink.

• 35:23Ed Mylett

  You can have all these supplements for $2.61 a day. I've changed my mornings. The whole IM8 routine has changed my mornings. I feel great and I bring energy to the entire day. Go to im8health.com/ed10 right now, or click the link in the description and use code ED10 for a free welcome kit. Five free travel sachets plus 10% off your order. That's code ED10 at im8health.com/ed10. Code ED10 at im8health.com/ed10. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. They'll be mad at me if I don't ask you a tactical question.

• 36:05Jim Kwik?

  Absolutely.

• 36:05Ed Mylett

  So can you give them, I'm going to get a couple more things, but thank you for taking the extra time. They'll, they'll, I'll get, I'll get DMs and emails if I don't ask you. Tactically, ask him a specific tactic to remember a name.

• 36:16Jim Kwik?

  Yeah.

• 36:17Ed Mylett

  So I have Max out.

• 36:18Jim Kwik?

  Perfect.

• 36:18Ed Mylett

  Do you do an association when you remember someone's name?

• 36:20Jim Kwik?

  I do, I do. Really fast. I would say, be suave. Be suave. I'll give you really quick. B is believe, right? Believe you can, believe you can. You're right. So stop the negative self-talk.

• 36:30Ed Mylett

  Okay.

• 36:30Jim Kwik?

  Right? So that, that's obvious. The second thing is E is exercise. We already talked about the power of exercise. Practice, because the bad news is it takes practice to learn someone's name. The good news, not as much as you think.

• 36:41Ed Mylett

  Good.

• 36:41Jim Kwik?

  Like, I'm really good at names, but after practicing for a couple of months, it's just become second nature.

• 36:47Ed Mylett

  Okay.

• 36:47Jim Kwik?

  Right? Just like parking your car or learning how to type, you do it without thinking. The suave is this. S stands for say the name. When tactically, when you meet somebody, you say their name back to them, right? Because you make sure you observe it correctly. The U is you use the name. Use it three or four times. We talked about that. The A is you ask about a name. This is really great, Ed, when you meet somebody whose name you haven't heard before. And you meet someone named Afzal or Ridiger. What can you ask about a person's name? You already said this. You already said, it's not travel entrepreneurship. What's everyone's favorite subject? It's themselves. So what can you ask about a person's name? How do you spell it? Where's it from? You know, what does it mean? I was doing this training at the country's largest life insurance company. 100 people in the room. The training director's name was Nankita. And I was like, in front of the whole group, I was like, that's a beautiful name.

• 37:32Jim Kwik?

  How do you spell it? Where's it from? What does it mean? She paused. I was like, Nahida, what does it mean? She looked at all her coworkers and says, she said it means graceful, following waters. And I was like, wow. And then her coworkers gave that kind of reaction, like a novelty. And I was like, wait a second, how long have you worked here? She was like, you know, X amount of years. With these people? Yeah, yeah, a lot of them are good friends or at my wedding. I was like, out of 100, I was like, raise your hand if you knew that's what her name meant. Out of 100 people, how many people raised their hand?

• 37:57Ed Mylett

  Zero.

• 37:58Jim Kwik?

  Zero. And talk about like caring. That became like a 10-year client, right? Because that's the power of a name, the emotion, right? So ask about a person's name. And then V in be suave stands for visualize. And here's a real tactical thing. We tend to be better with faces than names, right? Aren't you?

• 38:16Ed Mylett

  Far better.

• 38:16Jim Kwik?

  You meet a lot of people, right? People come and you meet somebody, you know, you say to them, I remember your face, but I forgot your name. You never go to someone and say the opposite. You never go to someone, I remember your name, but I forgot your face. That wouldn't make any sense.

• 38:28Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 38:28Jim Kwik?

  But here's the reason why, from neurological, your visual cortex is a lot larger than other parts of your brain. So you tend to remember what you see. Now, if you tend to remember which, there's Chinese proverb that goes, what I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand. What I hear, I forget. I heard the name, I forgot the name. What I see, I remember. I saw the face, I'll remember the face. What I do, going back to practice and exercise, I understand. So if you tend to remember what you see, try seeing what you remember. So quick visual aid is this. Play Pictionary. A person's name, for example, is Mark, take a split second and put a check mark on their forehead. And you're like, Jim, that's so childish. Who are the fastest learners on the planet?

• 39:04Ed Mylett

  Children.

• 39:04Jim Kwik?

  Children.

• 39:05Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 39:05Jim Kwik?

  How fast can they learn a musical instrument? How fast can they learn another language, right? They're sponges. And part of how they remember names is they make fun of people. Like, they go to somebody, you're like, you know, they go to someone named Jason, and Jason the Basin, right? And all of a sudden, like, Jason's in therapy for years, not knowing, you know, because he was T. But that's how you learn. Banana, fana, faux fana. You learn through imagery, right? And they make fun. And so that, remember, more emotion, too.

• 39:28Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 39:28Jim Kwik?

  Information, you forget. Information combined with emotion. So a person's name is Mary, imagine you meet someone, they marry, handshake breaks. Imagine she's getting married, or she's carrying two lambs under her arms. And here's the thing, it overcomes in business what I call the six-second rule. Somebody tells you something important in a conversation or their name, you have six seconds to do something with it. Otherwise, what happens?

• 39:48Ed Mylett

  You lose it.

• 39:48Jim Kwik?

  It's gone. Out of your working memory, short-term memory, it's gone.

• 39:51Ed Mylett

  Got it.

• 39:51Jim Kwik?

  So this helps you to focus uniquely on both the person and also the name. So if a person's name, so for example, is, is, let's say, Carol. Imagine they're singing Christmas carols.

• 40:02Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 40:03Jim Kwik?

  Right? A person's name is, is Mike. Imagine them jumping on the table, singing on a microphone for a split second. And then when you say goodbye to them 20 minutes later, you're like, oh, that guy was sitting on the, you know, karaoke on the microphone. What's his name? Mike, right? Because it glues it. And then, by the way, it's a short term, because once you know the person's name is Ed or Athena or Mike or whatever, what will happen is...

• 40:24Ed Mylett

  He just named everybody here, so you know.

• 40:26Jim Kwik?

  Sorry, sorry. Once, once you do that, then the pictures disappear because you know it. You just need something to glue it, because there's three parts to your memory. You encode the information, you store the information, then you retrieve the information. But most people can't retrieve it because they're not encoding in a way that makes it memorable.

• 40:40Ed Mylett

  Oh, my gosh.

• 40:40Jim Kwik?

  So you make it visual, you make it fun and interesting. So if a person's name is John, you can imagine, whatever.

• 40:46Ed Mylett

  Right, right.

• 40:47Jim Kwik?

  And then finally, that's the V. The E in suave stands for end.

• 40:51Ed Mylett

  Okay.

• 40:51Jim Kwik?

  You always end the conversation using their name, saying goodbye using a name. Because if you could walk into a room of strangers and leave saying goodbye to 20 strangers by name, who are they all going to remember?

• 41:02Ed Mylett

  You.

• 41:02Jim Kwik?

  They're going to remember. That's a standout skill, because it's not just what you know. Yes, yes, you can learn faster. It's not only who you know, but it's also who knows you.

• 41:10Ed Mylett

  Who knows you.

• 41:11Jim Kwik?

  And who's going to remember you. That's a standout skill.

• 41:13Ed Mylett

  That is awesome, awesome. And the six-second rule, if you don't use it, you lose it. So do something within the first seconds. That is brilliance.

• 41:19Jim Kwik?

  There are a few obstacles to effective reading, so let's go through them really quickly. Number one, what keeps you from reading slow is lack of education. You're not born with the ability to read. Nobody is.

• 41:29Ed Mylett

  Right.

• 41:30Jim Kwik?

  And so we learned it through class, through a training, right? But when's the last time you took a class called reading? How old were you?

• 41:38Ed Mylett

  Probably six.

• 41:39Jim Kwik?

  Six or seven years old, right? Exactly. So we are still, every single person watching this, for the most part, we're still reading like we're a six or seven-year-old. Because that's the last time we had training in that one area, right? The difficulty demand has increased tremendously, but we're still reading like a six-year-old. So that's number one. Get the proper education, lack of education. Number two, lack of focus. We could all relate to this.

• 42:00Ed Mylett

  Yeah.

• 42:00Jim Kwik?

  You read a page in a book, you get to the end, just forget what you just read.

• 42:03Ed Mylett

  Of course.

• 42:03Jim Kwik?

  Because your attention is everywhere. Your mind wanders. You're thinking about the dry cleaning, the clients, everything, the kids. So here's the thing.

• 42:11Jim Kwik?

  You just mentioned that if you read faster, you feel like you wouldn't retain as much and understand as much.

• 42:15Ed Mylett

  I know, it's not true.

• 42:16Jim Kwik?

  It's not. It's not, because we weren't taught differently. Right? And so what I would say is, the fastest... So I think it's a myth being spread around by slow readers that if you read faster, you wouldn't understand as much, because it's a lie. And this is interesting, because we have online academy, right? Of speed reading. And we have students in over 180 countries. So we have a lot of data. And we found the fastest readers actually have the best comprehension, because they have the best focus.

• 42:41Ed Mylett

  Okay.

• 42:41Jim Kwik?

  So here's the metaphor. Your brain is this incredible supercomputer. But when you read, you feed this supercomputer one word at a time. Metaphorically, you're starving your mind.

• 42:57Ed Mylett

  Okay.

• 42:57Jim Kwik?

  Right? And even if we were to talk like that through this conversation, it would be like eight days to...

• 43:02Ed Mylett

  Right.

• 43:03Jim Kwik?

  And what would happen to people? Very quickly, if they were talking that slow, their mind would wander. They would fall asleep. They would think about other things. They would just... And isn't that... Aren't those the same exact things that happen when you read?

• 43:17Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 43:17Jim Kwik?

  Your mind wanders, you fall asleep, you start thinking about other things. Because if you don't give your brain the stimulus it needs, it'll seek entertainment elsewhere, in the form of distraction.

• 43:27Ed Mylett

  Got it.

• 43:28Jim Kwik?

  Third obstacle, this is the big one. Subvocalization.

• 43:31Ed Mylett

  Yeah.

• 43:31Jim Kwik?

  Okay, this is the big one. By far, we're talking about your inner voice. Subvocalization means... You ever notice when you're reading something, you hear the inner voice inside your head, reading along with you? You hear that... Hopefully it's your own voice, it's not like somebody else's voice. The reason why it keeps you reading slow? The reason why is because if you have to say all the words to understand them, you can only read as fast as you could speak. And that... This is mind blowing to me. Subvocalization. Vocal, speech, sub, like submarine, inner speech. If you're saying the words to understand what you're reading, you're doing it not right. Because New York City... You don't have to say the word "New York City", or "computer" to understand what those... Just like when you're driving, you see a stop sign, you don't say to yourself, "Stop." 95% of the words... Do you understand what that stop sign means, though?

• 44:14Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 44:15Jim Kwik?

  95% of words are words you've seen before. You don't have to pronounce the words. You know, leaders are readers, right? You read a lot, Tony Robbins read a lot. You know, like Oprah reads a lot, Bill Gates reads a lot. Like John F. Kennedy, you know, leaders are readers. He was a very fast reader. He was said to have read every morning, six newspapers with one cup of coffee. Most people, it's the opposite. It takes like six cups of coffee to get through like a newspaper, right? And that's the challenge. But he's... You know, let's say, you know, he was said to have read 800 to 1,000 words a minute. But if he could talk at the average talking speed, about 200, 250 words per minute, they're like 700 words per minute he's not pronouncing, right? You don't have to pronounce words you've seen before, but that's how we were taught as a kid. Like, a lot of what accelerated learning is, just like success, is unlearning, bad habits. When you're a kid, you had to say the words out loud,

• 45:01Jim Kwik?

  because the teacher needed to know you're pronouncing the words phonetically correctly. But later on, remember this? Your teacher said, "Read quietly to yourself. Read silently to yourself." And that's when you used that external voice, and you put it internal there. It's been there ever since. Here's a point. When we listen to podcasts or audiobooks, how many people like to listen to it at 1.5, or 2X, or 3X? And they can understand it, too.

• 45:22Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 45:22Jim Kwik?

  You can't talk that fast, though. And that's the thing, right? And so that's why subvocalization is saying, basically, if you're subvocalizing, your reading speed is limited to your talking speed, not your thinking speed. You could understand so much more, so much faster, but you can't talk that fast. It's a bad habit we picked up as a kid. So we did a whole podcast on how to reduce subvocalization.

• 45:43Ed Mylett

  Okay.

• 45:43Jim Kwik?

  And our programs, like over 21, 30 days, we teach people methodically how to do it, because there's difference in a tip than a training.

• 45:50Ed Mylett

  Sure, of course.

• 45:50Jim Kwik?

  Fourth obstacle, I would say, and then we go to solution? Regression. It's a very bad habit we picked up as a kid. Regression is back skipping. You ever notice you read something, you go back and reread words? Or you reread a whole line by accident?

• 46:02Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 46:02Jim Kwik?

  You know, upwards of 20, 25% of the time can be spent rereading words. So how do you... Now, I'm gonna give you just one tip on how to overcome this, which will make a big difference. This tip is gonna help you read 25 to 50% faster, with better focus. And that's a huge return, because like 25... Like, on average, our online program, 300% increase.

• 46:20Ed Mylett

  That was a great conversation. And if you want to hear the full interview, be sure to follow The Ed Mylett Show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. Here's an excerpt I did with our next guest. Welcome back to Max Out with Ed Mylett. Super excited to bring this gentleman to my left here today, because if you take his IQ, and you take mine, and you average them together, you may actually get an average IQ out of the two of us here. So this is Dr. Joe Dispenza. And Joe is... I think he's a peak performance expert, is what I would really call you. I think you help people reach their peak in their ability to perform in their life. But he's really an expert at the mind-body-spirit sort of connection, and helping you really be a happier version of yourself. And so we're gonna talk about all the details of that today with you. So, Joe, thank you for being here today.

• 47:00Joe Dispenza?

  You're welcome, and happy to be with you.

• 47:02Ed Mylett

  That's wonderful. And we are at Bulletproof Labs, by the way, in Santa Monica, California, which is one of the most impressive places I have ever been in, in my life, in terms of the cutting edge of human performance as well. And so check out Bulletproof Labs when you get an opportunity to do that. So let's max out our time here together today, though.

• 47:17Joe Dispenza?

  All right, let's go.

• 47:18Ed Mylett

  So you say all kinds of things that I'm fascinated with. But I think you're fascinating, because you've become this expert in a field that's very unique, really, to you. And the way you explain things... People always want to know how to perform better, how their brain works. And I think you show them how to do it, but also why it works. And I'm fascinated by that, so... But you didn't start out in this industry, right? So before we go to all the great stuff, how the heck did you become you? Like, I've read about you. You were actually... You're a chiropractor prior, correct?

• 47:48Joe Dispenza?

  Yeah, I started out as a chiropractor.

• 47:49Ed Mylett

  So tell everybody about you just a little bit.

• 47:51Joe Dispenza?

  Well, let's see. I got started on this, I think, most of the time when we wake up, we need a wake-up call. And I was in Palm Springs, California. I was in a triathlon. I was on a biking portion of the race. And I was making a turn, and I was passing two cyclists on the corner. And there was a cadet, a police officer, kind of pointing at me, waving on to make the turn, like this.

• 48:16Ed Mylett

  Okay.

• 48:17Joe Dispenza?

  And he had his back to the oncoming traffic. So when I made the turn, a four-wheel-drive Bronco going about 55 miles an hour caught me from behind and catapulted me out of my bike.

• 48:27Ed Mylett

  Oh my gosh.

• 48:28Joe Dispenza?

  Anyway, when you land that hard on your rump, or on your back, the force of that compression takes the columns of the vertebrae and compresses them. So I had broken six vertebrae in my spine. And I had bone fragments on my spinal cord and the very top segment, the eighth thoracic vertebrae. I broke T8, T9, T10, T11, T12, and L1. And T8 took the compressive force, and I flexed. And so when I flexed, it compressed that vertebrae more than 60%. And the arch where the spinal cord passes through broke like a pretzel. So I had multiple compression fractures of my thoracic spine. I had bone fragments on my cord, because when you compress a volume of something, the volume has to go somewhere.

• 49:13Joe Dispenza?

  So it went back on the cord. And the neural arch of the eighth thoracic vertebrae was compressing the cord as well. So anyway, a typical procedure for something like that is called a Harrington rod surgery. And they cut off the back parts of your vertebrae. It's called a laminectomy. In my case, it would be from the base of my neck to the base of my spine.

• 49:35Ed Mylett

  Got you.

• 49:36Joe Dispenza?

  And then they screw in these stainless steel rods. And the action of screwing into the bone causes a cantilever. It kind of pulls the column off the cord, in some cases,

• 49:48Ed Mylett

  Oh my goodness.

• 49:48Joe Dispenza?

  and opens up the nerve supply. And then they take bone fragments from your hip, and they paste it over the top, and they hope for the best. And so I had four opinions from four of the leading surgeons in Southern California. And it was unanimous that I needed that procedure. Now, I was in a lot of pain. I had some neurological problems. And they told me if I didn't have the surgery, I would never walk again. So I decided against the surgery. And I thought, I didn't want to live handicapped. I didn't want to be in a wheelchair. And I didn't want to be addicted to pain medication. So I thought, I might as well take a chance here. So I didn't really know what I was doing at the time.

• 50:28Ed Mylett

  I was gonna say, the chance on what? Did you know what the alternative was?

• 50:30Joe Dispenza?

  Well, I think that... I believed that this voice kept coming up in my head, saying, "The power that made the body heals the body." And I thought, well, God, this power is an intelligence. An intelligence is consciousness. Consciousness is awareness. Awareness is paying attention. It must be paying attention to me.

• 50:48Ed Mylett

  Can I ask a question?

• 50:49Joe Dispenza?

  Yeah.

• 50:50Ed Mylett

  Did you think this way prior to that incident?

• 50:51Joe Dispenza?

  Yeah, to some degree. I think that most of us are philosophical to some degree. You know, we have a philosophy about life.

• 50:58Ed Mylett

  So what?

• 50:59Joe Dispenza?

  But when you're initiated, that means you have to initiate that philosophy. So...

• 51:04Ed Mylett

  Love that.

• 51:05Joe Dispenza?

  I had to take what I knew and weigh it against what I didn't know. And I think one of the worst places we wind up as human beings is in decision. And so I had very, very strong authorities telling me, "You're never gonna walk again. You have a head injury. I don't know why you're deciding against the surgery." If it was my son, it would be on the operating table. Anyway, I checked out of the hospital, and I began the process. I wasn't going anywhere. I wasn't doing anything. I was laying face down. And I said, "I'm not gonna let any thought slip by my awareness that I don't want to experience. And if this intelligence is truly a consciousness, I have to be present with it."

• 51:48Joe Dispenza?

  And so what I did was I just start started reconstructing my spine and my mind, vertebrae by vertebrae. And then, you know, you'd start I'd start off doing that and the next thing you know, I'd start thinking about should I sell my home, should I sell my practice? And I realized that the template, the design that I wasn't was creating wasn't complete. So I'd stop, start all over again, get frustrated, then it would get harder.

• 52:12Ed Mylett

  It sounds like me when I began meditating.

• 52:14Joe Dispenza?

  Yeah, it's the same thing, yeah. Because meditation requires being present and that's a skill. You gotta practice it. So I didn't have a teacher at the time. I was just going off my intuition and it would take me three hours to go through the whole entire process just to complete it. And I'd start all over because I wanted it to be a complete model. So six and a half weeks of just a dark night of the soul. Because I think when we're traumatized or we're under stress, we tend to focus on what we don't want to have happen and what we do want to have happen. And I think in survival, we're always preparing for the worst case scenario. So it was a it was a battle that I couldn't get my mind to do what I wanted to do.

• 52:55Joe Dispenza?

  The end of six and a half weeks, one day, I went through the whole entire thing without breaking my focus and I swear it was like hitting a golf ball right in the sweet spot. It just it just clicked and I clicked. And from that moment on, my body started to heal.

• 53:09Ed Mylett

  That's incredible.

• 53:10Joe Dispenza?

  I started to have less pain, my neurological symptoms were diminishing. And the moment I started to correlate the changes that were happening in my body with what I was doing inside of me. I started doing it with more passion and more enthusiasm. Anyway, I was back on my feet in nine and a half weeks. I was back training again at twelve weeks.

• 53:30Ed Mylett

  Come on.

• 53:30Joe Dispenza?

  I was back in my practice. And, you know, they told me that I would have to wear this body cast for a year, six months to a year. And, well, gosh, I put it on once and took it off and said, there's just no way I'm gonna wear this. And so I just made a deal with myself. And the deal was, in those lonely nights where I couldn't sleep, if I'm ever able to walk again, I'll spend the rest of my life studying the mind-body connection and mind over matter. And pretty much that's what I've been doing.

• 53:59Ed Mylett

  That's amazing. So that's the, see, I'm a layman. So I start out introducing you as a peak performance person, because I see everything through performance, I guess, right? But that's incredible because the sophisticated version is that you're this, you've studied this convergence of like neuroscience, quantum physics, epigenetics, sort of the convergence of that, right? What would you say you do? In other words, if someone said to you, because I know we talk a lot about healing, but what would you say? Someone says, what do you do? What would your answer be to that?

• 54:25Joe Dispenza?

  I get that question every day, every week when I'm on a plane. Someone sits next to me, they go, so what do you do? And then I wind up talking to them for four hours. I I teach people really a way to live a better life and to to heal themselves and pass scars, to provide the tools for them to realize that they're more than they really perceive themselves to be. And and I believe that your personality creates your personal reality.

• 54:55Ed Mylett

  Can you elaborate on that? I was gonna ask you about that.

• 54:57Joe Dispenza?

  Yeah, so your personality is made up of how you think, how you act, and how you feel. So the present personality who's watching this show has created the present personal reality called their life. Means then if you want to change your life, your personal reality, that means fundamentally you have to change your personality. That means you have to start thinking about what you've been thinking about and change it. You have to begin to become aware of your unconscious habits and behaviors and modify them. Then you have to look at certain emotions that keep you anchored to the past and decide if those emotions belong in your future. And I think after all these years, Ed, I think that most people try to create a new personal reality as the same personality. It doesn't work.

• 55:40Joe Dispenza?

  You know, you literally have to become someone else. So the process then, most people, they're thinking the same thoughts, they're making the same choices, they're demonstrating the same behaviors, they're creating the same experiences that stamp the same networks of neurons into the same patterns, all for the familiar feeling that they call themselves. And if you keep doing that over and over again, there's a principle in neuroscience that says that nerve cells that fire together, wire together. So people begin to hardwire their brain into very finite signature, into these automatic programs. Turns out by the time we're thirty-five years old, we become a set of memorized behaviors, emotional reactions, beliefs, perceptions, unconscious attitudes, that function just like a computer program.

• 56:23Joe Dispenza?

  So when people want to change, they're using five percent of their conscious mind and they can think positively all they want, but the programs are running subconsciously telling them that they're negative. So so the only way to do that then is to get into the operating system. And getting into the operating system of that, where those programs exist, requires then, people beginning to do some inward work. If you sit down and you disconnect from your outer world, you close your eyes, we play some music in the background, you sit your body down and not smelling anything or tasting anything or experiencing anything or feeling anything, and you're not thinking about or anticipating the future or remembering the familiar past, that moment, that elegant

• 57:08Joe Dispenza?

  moment where you fall into the present moment is where the magic happens. And so after looking at enough brain scans in the process of studying the transformation, yeah, I call that getting beyond yourself. Because when you disconnect from your present personal reality and personality, now you're ready to create something else. And so what thoughts do you want to fire and wire in your brain? What behaviors do you want to demonstrate? And the act of rehearsing the behavior begins to install the neurological hardware in your brain, primes it to look like the experience has already happened.

• 57:46Ed Mylett

  Yep. Let's step back for a second. I want to stay on that. I want everyone to be with us. So a couple of things you said, because you said a ton there, right? And so this is, I want everybody to catch a couple of things here. A basic thing, a base model, is that people don't think about what they think about enough. In other words, just taking a second to think about what you actually think about is a breakthrough experience, just something that simple, right? And we have, you can correct me, but we have somewhere around eighty thousand thoughts a day. Is that about right? And at some point, seventy percent of them, I just want everybody to understand this, are the same thoughts on every.

• 58:17Joe Dispenza?

  Ninety.

• 58:17Ed Mylett

  Ninety percent of them. So ninety percent of those thoughts are the same thoughts on a daily basis. And we wonder why, if we really are what we think about, why our lives continue to sort of perpetuate themselves over and over again.

• 58:27Joe Dispenza?

  You got it.

• 58:28Ed Mylett

  Okay. And so we have these patterns. You've talked about beginning to consciously choose and decide what these thoughts and behaviors are that you would like. So is there a way specifically, maybe one technique you give today outside of some of the seminars and books that we're gonna talk about in a minute? But how do you break that pattern? And how do you become conscious of getting new thoughts that serve you, that create that person that you want to be?

• 58:49Joe Dispenza?

  Look, it's really simple.

• 58:50Ed Mylett

  Okay.

• 58:51Joe Dispenza?

  Your brain is organized to reflect everything you know in your life. Your brain is a record of the past. It's an artifact of everything you've learned and experienced in this moment. And feelings and emotions are the end product of past experiences. And we can remember experiences better because we remember how they feel. So most people wake up in the morning and they start remembering all their problems. And those problems are connected to certain people and certain things at certain times and places. The moment they start thinking about those problems, they're thinking in the past. Those problems have an emotion associated with them. And the moment they start feeling those emotions, the body, as the unconscious mind, doesn't know the difference between an experience that's creating an emotion and the emotion the person's fabricating by thought alone.

• 59:34Joe Dispenza?

  Now, thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body. And how you think and how you feel creates your state of being. So most people's entire state of being, when they start their day, is already in the past. So you have a choice. The choice is, you're either defined by a vision of the future or you're defined by the memories of the past. And when you decide to say, okay, I'm gonna change, and you decide one thing, I'm not gonna eat this food, I'm gonna wake up earlier, I'm gonna do something aerobic, I'm not gonna have sugar after six o'clock, whatever it is, the person, whatever choice a person makes, the moment you make a choice to do something differently, and the hardest part

• 1:00:18Joe Dispenza?

  about change is not making the same choices you did the day before, get ready, because it's going to feel uncomfortable. It's going to feel unfamiliar. There's gonna be some uncertainty and unpredictability. And that's the moment the game is on.

• 1:00:32Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 1:00:32Joe Dispenza?

  So then, most people, their their body has been conditioned emotionally to be the mind. So now, so the the body says, wow, I'd rather hang on to my guilt than take a chance and possibility. I'd rather live in fear.

• 1:00:47Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 1:00:47Joe Dispenza?

  Than trust in the unknown. So so once the person feels uncomfortable, the body goes, whoa, wait a second, we're out of the program here. And body starts influencing the mind.

• 1:00:59Ed Mylett

  That's right.

• 1:00:59Joe Dispenza?

  So it says, start tomorrow, you'll never change, you don't have the money to do this, you're not good enough, your mother told you you were this, your father's fault, it's your ex's fault, you know, all of the voices that come up. Now, here's the deal. If you respond to those voices, those same thoughts as if they're true, by the way, they're always going on behind the scenes of your awareness, but now they're amplified because you're outside your comfort zone. You believe in that thought, that thought's gonna lead to the same choice, which is gonna lead to the same behavior, which is gonna create the same experience and produce the same emotion, and the person's gonna say, this feels right. No, no, no, that feels familiar. Going from the old self to the new self is a neurological, it's a biological, it's a chemical, it's a hormonal, it's a genetic death of the old self.

• 1:01:44Joe Dispenza?

  And people will say to me, in that void, in that unknown, I can't predict my future. And I'll say to them, the best way to predict your future is to create it.

• 1:01:53Ed Mylett

  I love it.

• 1:01:53Joe Dispenza?

  Not from the known, but from the unknown.

• 1:01:55Ed Mylett

  I love it.

• 1:01:55Joe Dispenza?

  So close your eyes now and think about that vision. Once you start thinking about that vision of your future, you're activating the creative centers in your brain. And naturally, you begin to think about putting yourself in the scene.

• 1:02:10Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 1:02:11Joe Dispenza?

  And the act of doing that, when you're truly passionate and truly present, the moment you're defined by that vision, when the thought in your mind becomes the experience, you begin to feel the emotion of the event before it's made manifest. Now, you're giving your body a sampling, a taste of the future. And now, if a thought and a feeling create a new state of being, you're combining a clear intention with an elevated emotion, and now you're beginning to change your biology. And you're seeing a whole new landscape that you could never see before because you're no longer viewing your future through the lens of the past.

• 1:02:48Ed Mylett

  I love this.

• 1:02:48Joe Dispenza?

  Now, this this requires then, something really specific, because most people will wait for their their wealth to feel abundance, they'll wait for their success to feel empowered, they'll wait for their new relationship to feel love.

• 1:03:04Ed Mylett

  They'll get all these things when.

• 1:03:05Joe Dispenza?

  Yes. So so so think about that. The absence of getting those things. Causes people to live in lack their entire life.

• 1:03:13Ed Mylett

  That's right.

• 1:03:13Joe Dispenza?

  And so they're waiting for something outside of them to change how they feel inside of them. And if they're not creating a new life, then they're not applying the proper principles. Then they keep all their manifestations, all their dreams at arm's length. Think about this, if you get up feeling gratitude, if you get up feeling empowered, if you get up feeling whole, if you get up feeling unlimited, why would you, why would you worry about whether it was gonna come or not? You would feel like it already happens, right?

• 1:03:41Ed Mylett

  How do you do that when you are stepping into the, you give us one strategy, one thought, one technique that keeps us? Is it just, for me, candidly, for me, it's just always been because you're, you're explaining to me in a much more deep level, things I've understood through my own experience, right? Everyone that's listening to this has had an experience where these formulas, these concepts and these ideas have worked for you. They have, you've all had an experience like this. For me, it's just being conscious of it. For me, it's literally for me, taking control of it and being conscious about, how would you answer that?

• 1:04:11Joe Dispenza?

  Well, I absolutely agree with you, Ed. You're absolutely right. We're wired to create. This isn't something that you have to try to do.

• 1:04:19Ed Mylett

  Right.

• 1:04:19Joe Dispenza?

  You just have to get beyond the memory of your past and all the associations to create a new future. Now theoretically, that sounds, sounds really easily, but everybody's done it at least once in their life. What happened? You get a wild idea, you get a crazy idea and you think, what would it be like to be happy? What would it be like to be in love? What would it be like to be rich? Whatever it is.

• 1:04:38Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 1:04:39Joe Dispenza?

  And you, all of a sudden, you ask that question and you turn on the creative center in your brain.

• 1:04:43Ed Mylett

  That's right.

• 1:04:44Joe Dispenza?

  It turns on.

• 1:04:45Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 1:04:45Joe Dispenza?

  And then, now the frontal lobe is, is the, is the boss, it's the CEO, it's the symphony leader. And the frontal lobe as an executive has connections to all other parts of the brain. Now, when you ask that question, it's gotta answer it. So it's gotta look out over the landscape and see what kind of raw materials do I have? Well, you only have a few things, knowledge you've learned and experiences you've had. So it begins to call up different networks of neurons and it begins to seamlessly piece them together. And you get a vision in your mind, that's called intent. And if you're passionate, you start to feel the feelings of when it happens. Now, you're giving your body that energetic boost. Now, everybody's done this, the moment you've said that, no one can talk you out of it, no person.

• 1:05:26Ed Mylett

  That's right.

• 1:05:27Joe Dispenza?

  No thing, no experience, it's, you're possessed by it. So then what happens next? You start writing down all the choices you need to make.

• 1:05:34Ed Mylett

  Okay.

• 1:05:35Joe Dispenza?

  All the things you gotta do.

• 1:05:36Ed Mylett

  Okay.

• 1:05:37Joe Dispenza?

  All the goals and experiences you want in your future. And every time you write one of those goals or experiences down, you start to feel more of those emotions. And now, you're basically assembling more of your future. Now, the astute person does something really amazing. They start learning more information. You wanna be wealthy? Study wealthy people. You wanna be healthy? Study healthy people. As you begin to gain more knowledge, you're adding more stitches into the three dimensional tapestry. And you got more raw materials to dream in new ways. Now, here's the part that, that is the most important. Take out a piece of paper and say, what thoughts do I have to stop thinking? You know, I can't, I'll start tomorrow, I'm too hard, I don't feel like it, I have a headache, I gotta go to sleep, I'm tired.

• 1:06:19Joe Dispenza?

  List those thoughts and become so conscious of those thoughts that you would never let one of those thoughts slip by your awareness unchecked by you.

• 1:06:27Ed Mylett

  Can I say something about that? I wanna jump in on that. One of the powers of writing those thoughts down is you completely eliminate and weaken their influence over you. They become minimized when you write them, they lose their power over you when you grab control of them by writing them down. It's a significantly powerful exercise is to write down those thoughts.

• 1:06:43Joe Dispenza?

  Yeah, from a neuroscientific standpoint, what's called metacognition. Because the moment you can observe the thought and become conscious of it, you're no longer the program. Your consciousness observing the program and you begin to literally objectify your subjective self. And now you're pulling out. So then, write down the choices you have to stop making. Look at the things you have to stop doing. Do you complain? Do you make excuses? Do you blame other people? What do you do? List those things and be really honest with yourself. What experiences do you have to stay away from, from certain people at certain times? Stay away from them so that you are not in the environment that triggers it. And now here's the most important point.

• 1:07:23Ed Mylett

  Okay.

• 1:07:24Joe Dispenza?

  Write down those emotions that keep you anchored to the past. Because those emotions are literally residue from the past chemically. So then, the moment you start feeling suffering, the moment you start feeling guilt, the moment you start feeling unworthy, the moment you start feeling despair, the moment you start feeling any of those emotions, you're back in your past.

• 1:07:44Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 1:07:44Joe Dispenza?

  And you can't see the future. You're, you're, you're, you're, you're thinking within those emotional states. And we've looked at enough brainstans to say that when you think within a certain emotion, you're gonna make your brain worse.

• 1:07:55Ed Mylett

  Thoughts are physical. What are thoughts when they happen in your body? The power of this is great.

• 1:08:00Joe Dispenza?

  The stronger the emotion that you feel from any condition in your environment, the more you pay attention to the cause. So the higher the threshold of the emotion, the more the brain narrows its focus on whatever it is in the environment does it. And the brain takes a snapshot and that's called a memory. So now, people think neurologically within the circuits of the past experience. And they feel chemically within the boundaries of those emotions. Now you say to the person, well, what happened? The person say, this person did this to me, that person did that, then this happened. And the latest research on memory says that 50% of what you talk about in the past isn't even the truth. That you, you, you don't have the same brain then.

• 1:08:42Joe Dispenza?

  So you make stuff up, which means now you're reliving a past that you didn't even have, just to embellish it, to produce the emotions, to reaffirm your limited, limited state.

• 1:08:51Ed Mylett

  Very short intermission here, folks. I'm glad you're enjoying the show so far. Don't forget to follow the show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. You'll never miss an episode that way. Welcome back to the show, everybody. I'm excited to spend some time with you today covering something that you all ask about often, which is the topic of visualization. And I think it's a topic that most people don't understand, nor do they take advantage of. One of the key strategies in my entire life of producing the results that I've been blessed to produce has a lot to do. One of the key strategies is visualization. Mental rehearsal and understanding how to do it, understanding the power of it and the reasons why you should be doing more mental rehearsal, more visualization.

• 1:09:31Ed Mylett

  You know, I'm blessed that I've had an opportunity to coach a lot of top CEOs, entrepreneurs, entertainers, and yes, a lot of athletes. And whether that be in the UFC, in the MMA, or a golfer, baseball player. I get asked often, what do you work on with a lot of these athletes? And although we work on a variety of different things, one of them is visualization. Because it's really an accepted practice in sports that you visualize things. But most people, you can ask yourself this to begin, how much visualization do you do in a directed, intentional way? In other words, you're visualizing things, your problems, your worries, your fears, you're visualizing an appointment, let's just say. But how often are you doing that proactively?

• 1:10:10Ed Mylett

  Are you using it as a strategy for peak performance, a strategy for bliss, a strategy to be more productive and serve more people? Mental rehearsal and visualization is one of the greatest gifts you could give yourself. And it's a great hack to producing the results that you want. Because the truth of the matter is you are more than likely producing right now what you've already been visualizing. And so taking control of that and harnessing control of it is a really, really big deal. And why? Because we all have fears, we all have insecurities. These fears and insecurities will find a way to express themselves one way or the other. And so if we can't take control of our fears and our insecurities and we don't build up mental rehearsal and visualization,

• 1:10:52Ed Mylett

  the things we want, the things that give us confidence, one or the other are gonna end up expressing themselves. That's why it's so important that you really learn to take control of your mental rehearsal and visualization. And why is that the case? Here's the deal. You move towards what you're most familiar with in your life, okay? So there's a, there's a degree of familiarity in our lives that we move towards what's comfortable, what's safe, what's most familiar to us, because it requires the least amount of thinking. Your brain really wants to operate and conserve energy as much as it can. So the more things it can do habitually without having to think, the easier it is on your brain. And so it's constantly trying to get you to move towards what's familiar.

• 1:11:32Ed Mylett

  And so if what's most familiar to you is your fears, your worries, your anxieties, your insecurities, you will move towards them. If you wonder whether that's accurate or not, we try to avoid things that are unfamiliar to us. People have asked me, oh my gosh, I saw that golfer, he had a putt to win the golf tournament from five feet. And he missed it. And he missed it for two reasons. Either he was very familiar with the mental rehearsal and the visualization he or she was of missing. And they programmed that fear in, so they moved towards what was familiar and which was missing the putt. Or they didn't do any mental rehearsal whatsoever. And when they got into that pressure situation, their brain was not familiar with that environment, with that situation.

• 1:12:16Ed Mylett

  And so it wasn't able to function at its optimal level. And so the reason that we wanna make sure that we're doing mental rehearsal and visualization regularly in our life is so that when we get there, we're familiar and we're likely to move towards that result we've already visualized. If we don't, if we only take visualization about our fears and worries, which is what most people do, you will move towards those because you're familiar with them as well. Or the absence of any preparation, when you walk into a meeting to give a presentation, you've not mentally rehearsed the result, you've not visualized the result. If you've not done that, you've left it up to your own devices. And more than likely, because you're unfamiliar, your brain cannot perform at its optimal level. So that's why mental rehearsal, preparation, because your body doesn't know, your subconscious mind does not know

• 1:13:00Ed Mylett

  the difference between what's real and what's imagined. And so the more you rehearse it, the more your brain believes, your mind believes that you've already done it, you've already accomplished it. So when you enter the environment, you enter the situation, you will gravitate and more move towards what's most familiar. Think about it this way. How much thinking do you do when you walk into a room full of strangers? Right? You walk in, you don't know anybody in there. You're pulling up to an event and you don't know a soul. You're gonna walk into a room with 50 or 100 people. You're doing some thinking, aren't you? You're thinking about, well, how would I introduce myself? Is my hair the right way? Did I do my makeup correctly? What's a story that I could tell tonight that's funny? What if they ask me this? Your anxiety and nervousness level goes up no matter who you are, right? Because of the unknown, the unfamiliar.

• 1:13:43Ed Mylett

  And so what happens is you just start thinking and going into pattern mode. You're going into mapping mode because where you're going is unfamiliar. Now compare how much thinking you do when you walk into a room like that. Compared to just walking through your front door to your house where everybody's familiar. Do you really even have to think about it? When you walk from your kitchen to the living room where your family is? Do you do any thinking whatsoever? Does your heart rate go up at all? Is there anything in your body that's changing from a neuro biochemistry standpoint? No, you're almost doing zero thinking because you're familiar with it. And so in life, if you can begin to become that familiar, like you are with your own family and friends,

• 1:14:23Ed Mylett

  with your dreams, your goals and your ambitions, or maybe it's as simple as just a specific result in one occasion. The more you've done that, the more you're not gonna have to think nearly as much and process information. This is really called mapping. And so life is really better when you don't focus on what's going on around you, but you focus on what's going on inside of you. Okay, so think about that for a second. Life is always better when you don't focus on what's going on around you, but you focus on what's going on inside of you. So there's this great story that my producer was sharing with me. He's a big soccer fan about Wayne Rooney, who's one of the most legendary players of all time. And he said he would take his visualization to a level that blew most people's minds. And he would literally get with the equipment manager before a game and ask him,

• 1:15:08Ed Mylett

  what uniform are we gonna be wearing? And so he would get the actual uniform and know what it looked like. He would also wanna know what music they were gonna be playing when they came out, when they're getting ready to play. He would wanna know the exact song and then he would also wanna know the weather. So he would then get back and the night before the games would visualize that uniform, would visualize that music playing, would visualize that weather. So that when he got there, it was all familiar to him. You know, a lot of athletes and people ask me, should I only visualize me getting the yes? Because I'm mapping making the putt, making the putt, making the putt, or hitting the shot, or having the knockout, or closing the sale, or you know, getting whatever it is that you want. Should I only visualize the positive things? And that's a really interesting thing because the way your brain works,

• 1:15:52Ed Mylett

  it actually probably serves you most to be always visualizing the positive result. I do think that it's okay sometimes in life to also visualize something that isn't favorable. So in other words, because it's gonna happen. So do I let my athletes about 10% of the time will say, okay, let's just, let's, let's hit a bad shot. We've hit a bad shot, what happens in our body? Now we're walking to that shot. How do we deal with it? And so they now are able to deal with something that's inevitable. Or if it's one of our fighters and I go, listen, you just had the first, you know, it's bad round. He got to you, you took a couple of shots. Looks like he lost round one, you're sitting on the stool. Bam, how do we shift that and visualize from there?

• 1:16:34Ed Mylett

  Because if you don't visualize some of the unforeseen circumstances that take place and your response to it, in my opinion, when that happens in its unfamiliar territory, you're lost. But if you say, no, I've been there before, I've missed this putt before, I've missed a shot before. In sales, it's okay to visualize them not always saying yes, but objecting and giving you a reason for not doing it. They may have a question or a concern, right? So I don't think it's a negative thing sometimes, I don't wanna, I don't wanna pattern this, where it's a pattern I've created. But I think it's okay to, in sales, visualize getting a no, or an objection, or in a sport, having a failure happen and then from there, what you need to visualize.

• 1:17:19Ed Mylett

  So that when the inevitable happens, because life happens, you're gonna miss a sale, you're gonna not hit every putt, not every at bat's gonna be a base hit, right? Not every shot's gonna be in the basket. And so it's okay to say, okay, I just missed the shot. What do I visualize from there? So we're not really visualizing the miss. We're visualizing it's happened, what feels in my body, I know what that is, now what do I do? And so, because you'll watch in sports, most of the great athletes, it's not that they don't miss, it's what they do after they miss. It's not in life, whether you're gonna miss or get rejected, or have a difficult circumstance or situation. It's what do you do when it happens? And so I think it's okay that you spend a little bit of time in that zone and then your visualization is your way out of there. So we're not visualizing misses.

• 1:18:05Ed Mylett

  What I'm suggesting is, is that you're visualizing, okay, I've just missed. Now visualize the way out, mentally rehearse the way out. I think you can spend a little bit of time on that, just like the great Wayne Rooney did. I'll tell you one more story, and I don't know whether this is accurate or not. I don't remember the man's name, and I'm sure I'm messing the story up, so forgive me. But I think the, the premise of the story and the point that it illustrates is valid. And so the story goes, I was told this many years ago, that there was evidently a soldier who had spent some time in a POW camp. And when he was there, in order to keep himself sane, frankly, he would mentally rehearse and visualize himself playing an entire 18-hole golf course, round of golf.

• 1:18:50Ed Mylett

  And again, this is just a story that I was told. I, I hope I'm giving it justice. And the point of the story is that it illustrates the power of visualization. And even if I'm off by the facts a little bit, you know, indulge me a little bit here. But he would visualize playing each shot throughout the day, mentally rehearse and visualize it. And, and many years later, when he got out of the POW camp, he went home. I believe it was to Texas, somewhere in the Midwest, and his body was totally atrophied. He had no muscle mass left, he had lost considerable weight. He had been obviously hurt and injured and beaten when he was in the camp. And one of the first things he asked to do when he got on his feet was to go play golf. And the story goes that he went out and that first round of golf shot even par.

• 1:19:35Ed Mylett

  And afterwards, they asked him, how in the world did you do that? You've lost 50 pounds, you, you've had all these injuries, you've had this terrible mental battle you've had to go through. And he goes, it's easy, I haven't missed a putt in four years. Because what he had done is mentally rehearsed when he was playing those rounds, making that putt, hitting that shot. Now whether or not that's an accurate story or not, I don't know. But what I can tell you is that it's illustrative that I've seen something like that in many athletes and many business people's lives, where in spite of external circumstances, they've controlled the inside so well that when they, like I've said, they focus on the inside, that when these variables happen, which is life, a failure, a setback, an unforeseen situation,

• 1:20:19Ed Mylett

  that they're comfortable because they haven't missed a putt in years when they visualize their way out of that. And so inside of you, you can visualize. So give yourself the gift on a more regular basis of mentally rehearsing the meeting you're gonna go to. Do it three, four, five, six times and actually sit in that visualization. Ask yourself questions when you visualize, by the way. The way you get better at it is you do more of it. In the beginning, when we're visualizing or mentally rehearsing, we're not very good at it because we haven't done it before, we get distracted easily. Or we don't even realize, we don't even take control of what we're seeing. But begin to ask yourself, when I visualize, do I see it in black or white or color? I mean, make some distinctions about what you're seeing. Can I feel things? Do I smell things? Do I hear things?

• 1:21:02Ed Mylett

  Can I take this picture that I'm seeing, this result I wanna produce, this award I wanna win, this, you know, this situation I wanna get out of a, a date that I'm going on, this, you know, potential sale that I've got, this baseball I wanna hit, this putter? When you watch it, start to ask yourself and take a look at what you're seeing. Like for example, where's the camera? That'd be interesting, huh? Do you see the camera where you're looking at it out there? So you see it from your own perspective? Or do you see it from the person's situation who's watching you? Do you see it from above? Just taking it into, and you go, wow, I'd never thought about that before. Well, think about it. It'll help you take better control. You know, when I work with athletes, when they're baseball hitters, I'll often, often ask them. I'll say, close your eyes and visualize hill line drive up the middle. And they'll go, great, I did it.

• 1:21:47Ed Mylett

  And they'll open their eyes, I go, okay, good, where was the camera? And they're like, huh? I said, where was the camera? I don't know. I said, well, let's close your eyes and do it again. I said, the camera could be a lot of different places. The camera could be you in the batter's box and you're singing out at the pitcher in the field. It could be like you watch baseball on TV because you're familiar with it. And it's behind the center field fence, looking over the pitcher into the catcher. It could even be the view you get on deck. But the first thing is to at least see what you see. Now you have a chance to play the video. And so I'll ask them, can you see what you see? Yes. Okay. And they say, well, nope, it's for me in the batter's box. Awesome. So then we know and we go much more detail than this. But it's beginning to just see what you see, hear what you hear or don't hear, smell what you smell or don't

• 1:22:29Ed Mylett

  smell, right? For the most part, most people can very quickly go, I see things in black and white, or I see them in color. And then just start to take control of what it looks like. And then the only other thing to ask yourself, if you want to really reinforce a visualization is, you could speed it up a little bit, or you could slow it down. You could zoom in if you wanted to. And the more you just kind of play with your ability to visualize, the more it becomes a muscle. Zoom in, zoom out, change the color, add some music to it, right? Speed it up, slow it down, and then just repeatedly see something over and over again. It'll serve you. And so it's something that I teach the athletes that I do. It's not very complicated. It's just basically starting to take control of your mind's eye of what you think about. You don't have to be very specific with it.

• 1:23:11Ed Mylett

  It could just be the same thing you see every time. But the more you prepare, you will begin to move towards what you're most familiar with. And what's great about that is anxiety level goes down. And your brain, your subconscious mind, it doesn't know the difference between what you're imagining, and what's actually happening. And so you actually can get a hit every time you're up to the plate. You can make a putt every single time you stand over it. You can get a yes. And the more specific, when you start with a visualization, oftentimes in the beginning, they'll be very general. But the more you get good at it, maybe it gets more specific, where you can even see when you helped somebody out in your business, them thanking you and the smile on their face. Maybe you can begin to feel what it feels like with their gratitude. Right? I'll have athletes often, I'll say,

• 1:23:55Ed Mylett

  did you make the putt? How did it feel? Fist pump that thing, lock it in, right? So the more you do it, the more it grows as something you you build as a habit. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that. But I'm telling you, life is a whole lot better when you focus on what's going on inside of you as opposed to what's going on around you. And the more we just get internal, we begin to, you know, take some measure of control over the mental images we're feeding ourselves, the more we can produce a result that's incongruent with our goals. Before we start the interview with my next guest, just want to remind you all that you can subscribe to the show on YouTube or follow the show on Apple or Spotify. We have all the links in our show notes. You'll never miss an episode that way. Now on with the show.

• 1:24:37Ed Mylett

  Welcome back to the show, everybody. I'm so excited to have this lady here with me. I'm fascinated by her work. And because the applications in so many different areas of my own life, and I believe for the audience today, she's got a new book out called Peak Mind. She's a neuroscientist, professor of psychology at University of Miami. And I already like her. Amishi Ja, welcome to the program.

• 1:25:00Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

• 1:25:02Ed Mylett

  So good. I think that if you've had some success, that if it doesn't come with a dose of humility, that when you begin to walk into every room and every environment, I think you've already figured it out. You already know, this stunts growth as well because you're what you're saying is it blunts you taking in new data and new information.

• 1:25:18Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Correct. Correct. You get it. You totally get it. You are denying yourself better data, more data to inform the decisions that happen. So don't do that. Don't do that to yourself, right?

• 1:25:28Ed Mylett

  Give us the exercise. We've been building up. Give us one.

• 1:25:30Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Okay, so this is like this, I'm gonna give you a longer one, just to describe the steps, and then we'll do like one that you could do anytime, all the time. So this is like a basic mindfulness practice. And I call it, again, tied to what we're talking about in the book and attention, the find your, find your flashlight practice.

• 1:25:46Ed Mylett

  Great.

• 1:25:46Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Because oftentimes, it's not that we don't, we can't focus, it's that we don't know where we're focusing at any moment.

• 1:25:52Ed Mylett

  That's true.

• 1:25:53Dr. Amishi Jha?

  So the instruction would be, and I guide people to kind of ramp up to about 12 minutes a day that our data suggests is beneficial, do this. But to start out, like do 30 seconds of this, commit to that for a few weeks and see how that goes. So the practice is essentially find a quiet, comfortable spot and take this time seriously, even if it's 30 seconds or a minute. Sit in an upright, alert posture, like a dignified, you know, if we do it now, it's just like upright, alert, dignified. And first step is just acknowledge, notice, shine the floodlight on your experience that you're breathing right now.

• 1:26:29Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Then what you're gonna do is hone in on something that actually you notice is prominent in your experience of breathing.

• 1:26:39Dr. Amishi Jha?

  So do you notice anything that feels prominent, like the coolness of air maybe by your nose or maybe your chest?

• 1:26:44Ed Mylett

  It's actually the sound I'm making.

• 1:26:45Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Okay, great. Yeah, the, the sound, that's a great one, too. That's where you're gonna hold the point, the flashlight. That's your attentional target for this short practice. So direct that flashlight right there. Keep it steady. You can close your eyes if you want to, whatever you choose, just to limit the sensory input. And if it hasn't happened yet, it surely will, your mind will wander. And all you do in that moment is notice it. Ah, the mind has wandered away. Next step, take that flashlight, redirect it back to that same attentional target.

• 1:27:27Dr. Amishi Jha?

  And repeat. So it's essentially focus, point that flashlight, notice, use the floodlight, redirect, get the juggler to do its job.

• 1:27:39Ed Mylett

  Oh, my goodness. You know, one, can I ask about that?

• 1:27:42Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:27:42Ed Mylett

  When I first started this, there was like a judgment when I drift away.

• 1:27:47Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Oh, no, it's a total win. It's a win moment.

• 1:27:50Ed Mylett

  It's actually a win because it gives us a chance to redirect the flashlight, right? This is so important because I used to, I don't know, maybe you, maybe you're further along than me, but the beginning, I was like, gosh, man, I've gone this for like 24 seconds, then I'm out. But you're actually saying that's actually a gift when we drift away because it allows us to build this flashlight, I'll call it a muscle, so to speak.

• 1:28:09Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:28:10Ed Mylett

  That we're coming back. It's really good.

• 1:28:12Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Now I hope it makes sense why I wanted to describe those three systems, because we hit all three in this.

• 1:28:17Ed Mylett

  It does.

• 1:28:17Dr. Amishi Jha?

  And I think it's really important to not think of the wandering as a problem. The wandering, remember we started out talking about 50% of the time, it's the nature of the mind. I didn't say, Ed, if you happen to be one of those weird people with mind wanderers, like us normal people don't have that, you have mind wander. I didn't say that. I said, when your mind wanders, because it's gonna wander, for sure. Just bring it back. And not doing that with the added story, the added reactivity is so important.

• 1:28:43Ed Mylett

  You know, I was just thinking of the, I do, I did a lot of work when I was younger and I do now with kids. And I have so many parents almost judge their children for their, he can't stay focused in the classroom, he drifts away. And I'm just thinking right now, like what a breakthrough this might be for some parents who are listening to this to realize that that's actually, everyone is at 50%. Maybe your kid reveals it more than other kids do, doesn't conceal it as well.

• 1:29:07Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Right.

• 1:29:07Ed Mylett

  Maybe it manifests in talking out loud as opposed to scribbling on a sheet of paper. So it's more apparent. But this is something that even with, do you believe it, is there a particular age where you believe a child might be able to begin to build this, I'm calling it building a muscle, because everybody can relate to that.

• 1:29:23Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Yeah, no, I think it is. It's practice, it's strengthening. So the first thing to say is that this brain system of attention is one of the slowest to develop. We don't fully develop this capacity till we're about 25.

• 1:29:34Ed Mylett

  Okay.

• 1:29:35Dr. Amishi Jha?

  And one of the reasons is it relies on the frontal lobes, which are the slowest brain system, a brain region to develop. So, you know, it does kind of drive me nuts sometimes. And I feel for parents when they're, but when they're not happy that their children aren't paying attention, or their response is pay attention, it's not gonna help at all. And in fact, understanding that that's the thing that is, is it's your child is not not paying attention because they don't know that they should often, is that they don't know where their attention is. Just like we are saying, we don't know.

• 1:30:05Ed Mylett

  That's good.

• 1:30:07Dr. Amishi Jha?

  So I think that the thing to really, and by the way, yes, absolutely, there's a huge enterprise of offering mindfulness training in a developmentally appropriate manner to children as long, as young as preschool.

• 1:30:19Ed Mylett

  Really?

• 1:30:19Dr. Amishi Jha?

  We can do these in very useful ways for children. But what you're having them cultivate is not just focus, focus, focus. It's where are you right now? You know, where are you in a friendly, self supportive way? And is that where you want to be right now? You know, when you talk to yourself in that manner of like, where am I right now? Is that where I want to be? All of a sudden, the world doesn't feel as dire, like, oh, I'm over here. I think I want to be over there instead. I think that's what I should be doing right now is being over there. It's a different relationship. And if you, the younger that we can get people to start understanding that this is befriending your mind in a way that allows it to be used to your benefit.

• 1:30:55Ed Mylett

  That's fascinating to me.

• 1:30:56Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Punitive to yourself.

• 1:30:58Ed Mylett

  Yeah, that, I'm just thinking, I'm sitting here as a 50 year old man. I've done different forms of meditation, mindfulness, I'm relatively productive human being. And I'm confessing to the audience that oftentimes I'm going 24 seconds and I'm out of my attention where, well, my attention has changed, rather. So the idea that we're concerned about our eight year old, who might have the exact same, or does have the exact same scenario that I do. I'm just curious, has there been any data, are kids even more than 50% where their attention moves? Or would you assume that because those frontal lobes aren't as developed? Or is it pretty much the same?

• 1:31:29Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Here's the tricky part of having assessing that with children, by the way. What does it take for you to even know if somebody's on task or off task, right? They have to have the awareness. And something, it's something called meta-awareness, awareness or attention to your attention. That is also a developmentally slow process. So we're getting a fuzzy read on them. I mean, we could take them into the lab and look directly at their performance on tasks. And yeah, they, they mind wander a lot. Their attention can be off often, you know, off task often. But I don't think that's, the thing we want to help cultivate, which is the counterintuitive thing. And I mean, I've referred to it in the book, is like a peak mind pivot. It's like, we think that we have, if to focus better, we think we need to focus on, we need to train ourselves to focus. And I'm saying, no, to focus better,

• 1:32:13Dr. Amishi Jha?

  train your mind to notice when you're not focused.

• 1:32:16Ed Mylett

  Gosh, very good.

• 1:32:17Dr. Amishi Jha?

  So, you know, that's a totally different set of, you're, you're exercising the floodlight and the juggler. The flashlight will do its thing. It knows how to do its thing. But really pay attention to the Understanding of where your mind is moment by moment.

• 1:32:31Ed Mylett

  I did that during your TED Talk. You actually say something similar during your TED Talk. And then I thought, well, where am I now?

• 1:32:37Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:38Ed Mylett

  And then I'm back with you. And then where am I now? And then I came back with you.

• 1:32:41Dr. Amishi Jha?

  And that's it. You know, 24 seconds, if you're truly going 24 seconds, you are... We gotta bring you to the lab, because that's really good.

• 1:32:48Ed Mylett

  I made the number up. It's probably more like 2.4 seconds. I don't know.

• 1:32:51Dr. Amishi Jha?

  But I, you know, I actually asked a colleague of mine, who'd been practicing mindfulness for 30 years, because I was getting, in the initial stages, when I was just trying to understand what this thing is, I was like, hmm, I'm not going very long before my mind wanders. And will that be the thing that will extend as I practice more? That was my thinking. Like, that's a reasonable hypothesis. I might, if it's, you know, 5 seconds now, maybe it'll be 10 and 15 each year. I might get longer before wandering. And I was very humbled by what he said. He said, 30 years of practice. He said, hmm, 7 seconds?

• 1:33:21Ed Mylett

  No kidding.

• 1:33:22Dr. Amishi Jha?

  And, but, you know, so at first I'm like, oh, great. What am I being bothering? Like, it's still gonna be 7 seconds after 30 years? But what he said next really helped. He said, you know, what has happened is that my mind now, instead of being completely lost in a fantasy or a doomsday scenario, and I love that, it was like almost poetic. He's like, it's like I'm seeing the ripples, you know, the ripples at the distance of the placid lake. And I was like, oh, he is, really knows his mind. Like, he can tell a slight tug. He doesn't have to go full on into, you know, next vacation's been planned while you're trying to do 5 minutes of a mindfulness practice. That felt so much more like, he knows his mind.

• 1:34:03Dr. Amishi Jha?

  He knows where it is with that level of granularity.

• 1:34:08Ed Mylett

  Yeah.

• 1:34:08Dr. Amishi Jha?

  And in some sense, this is the part that I think is also really interesting, especially as we talk about athletes and military service members and, you know, special operators, et cetera. It's this sense that you develop, because you know your mind, a sense of, I'm gonna use the term, mental toughness. It's like, I know this space. I know the lake. It may not always be placid. It's usually, for me, like a rough, stormy place.

• 1:34:34Ed Mylett

  Right.

• 1:34:34Dr. Amishi Jha?

  But I can take anything. Like, my mind is here for it. And frankly, that's developing that same floodlight capacity. I am here. I'm present for it. I'm not gonna be thrown off. I'm steady in the middle of whatever's going on.

• 1:34:47Ed Mylett

  Very good. You know, I, I think some of the most self-confident people I know are just more self-aware. And I think that's actually what you're describing. There's an awareness of, there's an awareness of self. I'm loving this, and I wanna keep going. So, I wanna, I wanna ask you about, you've described things in visual terminology a lot. And I'd like to think that I am a visual person also, although I don't know that there's such a thing. I'm wondering if part of that self-awareness is, are some people more predisposed to be kinesthetic or auditory or visual in their, in the deductions they make, in the observations that they make? And is that something to be cognizant of about yourself when you're in a state of attention? That you are not just, I, I feel like I'm very visual, but maybe every single person is?

• 1:35:31Ed Mylett

  Or are there more auditory, predisposed people? Kinesthetic, visual?

• 1:35:36Dr. Amishi Jha?

  I mean, the jury is out. Most people say now that, like, the notion of learning styles or specific modalities is not all that well-supported. So, I would say, I don't, we don't know yet if that's actually the case. But frankly, the bulk of the brain as human beings, compared to our little dogs that run around, so dominant with vision. But you brought up something that I wanna actually, I wanna like, kinda ping that. Because that, what you described, is not what I'm talking about when I use the term meta-awareness. What you just described, very powerful thing to do, is something we call metacognition. So, both of these are tied to self-awareness. But meta-awareness is a different thing. So, metacognition is essentially knowing your tendencies, knowing your styles, knowing your decision-making capacities, your strengths, your weaknesses. I mean, everything you just described

• 1:36:21Dr. Amishi Jha?

  would be really great to know for your metacognitive style, for example. And yes, it can definitely, there could be differences, maybe not tactile or visual. But there are definitely differences in the way people operate metacognitively. So, you may be a maximizer in your decision-making versus a satisfier. You know, there's these different orientations. But I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about, when I talk about the floodlight, because remember, the floodlight system is really about the now. And meta-awareness is awareness of the moment-to-moment processes and contents within your mind. So, I don't, it doesn't really matter from the meta-awareness point of view, what your tendencies are. What is going on right now? Where is your mind right now? And I think that that, what's important now

• 1:37:06Dr. Amishi Jha?

  kind of orientation is so important in performance context.

• 1:37:08Ed Mylett

  Yeah.

• 1:37:09Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Because it doesn't matter what you're doing. I'm like, what's going on now?

• 1:37:12Ed Mylett

  Is it always important to be in the now? In other words, is it bad to be dreaming in the future? Is it bad or good? I don't even like that terminology, but...

• 1:37:19Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Useful.

• 1:37:20Ed Mylett

  Yeah, is it useful?

• 1:37:21Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Such a great question. I'm so glad you asked me that, because I don't want it to seem like I'm saying, always be here, right now.

• 1:37:28Ed Mylett

  Yeah.

• 1:37:28Dr. Amishi Jha?

  No, no, no, no, no. That's not what I'm saying. In fact, this capacity to mentally time travel, to, just like you did with your, what did you have for dinner last night? Right? Is so useful for us. In fact, it may be the thing that defines us in our evolutionary advantage as human beings. Right? We can displace ourselves in something called time travel. Right? We can rewind the mind. We can fast-forward the mind. You heard about me talking about that a little bit in the TED Talk. But it's not just about time traveling. It's also about mind traveling.

• 1:37:59Ed Mylett

  Okay. What's that mean?

• 1:38:00Dr. Amishi Jha?

  So, mind traveling is essentially putting yourself in the shoes and mind of somebody else. So, both of those are really, really powerful things to do. When we talk about mindfulness, it's really, it's a solution to a vulnerability in our capacity to do both of those things. So, the problem with time travel, though it's extremely useful for productively reflecting or planning, it becomes problematic under certain states. And I do think of the athletes, like, my heart goes, go, go out to them oftentimes when I see mess-ups. Right? Like, you did something, you totally messed up. And it happens. You glitched. If you can't stop rewinding the mind, you are no way gonna be able to succeed in the next moment. So, how do you get yourself to not rewind?

• 1:38:45Ed Mylett

  Very good.

• 1:38:46Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Right? So, or...

• 1:38:48Ed Mylett

  Amicia, that's really good.

• 1:38:49Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Yeah. And I think that the other part is, you may be, you know, not necessarily the athletic setting, but in our, like, even during COVID, like, if you, if you can't stop catastrophizing and worrying about the future...

• 1:39:01Ed Mylett

  You got it.

• 1:39:02Dr. Amishi Jha?

  You're stuck. You're gonna be, probably have a lot of anxiety. So, the reason we wanna, and frankly, the same thing goes with mind traveling. If I'm constantly preoccupied about your view of me, social anxiety is gonna set in. So, the reason mindfulness became such an important solution for me, going back to why we study in my lab, is because each of those things, ruminating about the past, catastrophizing about the others, overly caring about the viewpoints and evaluation on yourself, hijack attention. It depletes attention.

• 1:39:33Ed Mylett

  Gosh, you're so good. You describing, from a scientific standpoint, all the things that people listening to this go like, I know this is true.

• 1:39:40Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:41Ed Mylett

  And I think this, the rewinding thing, man, it's just huge. So many people are in the rewind and just beating themselves up and repeating the same story over and over again. But the other thing that I've figured out is that oftentimes, stress is time travel in the future.

• 1:39:53Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Yep.

• 1:39:54Ed Mylett

  Meaning that it's not so much the speech you have to give or the sale you have to close or the putt you have to hit that is stressing you out. It's you projecting into the future the negative result of it. And then on top of that, what other people are going to think or say about you when you miss the putt, when you don't close the sale.

• 1:40:12Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Exactly.

• 1:40:13Ed Mylett

  Is that not true?

• 1:40:13Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Exactly. You described both the mind travel and the time travel. Right? That's, those are the, those are what I would really call the kryptonite scenarios. Like, you're really, what all of that is doing is attention's still being used, and you're draining it out. You're draining the fuel in spinning in those directions. So, how do you, you know, it's easy to say, well, don't do that. Get back to here and now. It's easy to say it, it's very hard to do, because the tendencies are so strong. So, you gotta train for it, just like anything else that's hard to do.

• 1:40:40Ed Mylett

  You were gonna give us one other, I think you were gonna give us one other one.

• 1:40:42Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Oh, yeah, right. So, let me give you the other one.

• 1:40:43Ed Mylett

  Another training. And then, by the way, let's get Peak Mind. Let's get the book, so that we also...

• 1:40:47Dr. Amishi Jha?

  You get the whole thing, right?

• 1:40:47Ed Mylett

  You get the whole thing. That's the whole idea. But one more of them would be, I'm driving to my car, and I'm like, I wanted to get me one more.

• 1:40:52Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Well, the car's a perfect example. You didn't even know I was gonna go there. This other practice is just called the stop practice. Literally, S-T-O-P. And do it while you're driving. Do it while you're walking. Do it at any time you want. Stop is stop. Like, whatever the progression of your life is in that moment, halt it. Take a breath. And that's this conscious breath, aware that you're doing it.

• 1:41:19Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Observe, O.

• 1:41:22Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Proceed, B.

• 1:41:25Dr. Amishi Jha?

  So it's just, it's a mini mindfulness practice. And I really think it's useful because you know where your flashlight is at the end of it. I know it's right here, right now, I'm back. So use stop signs, use red lights to remind yourself to do that over and over again.

• 1:41:39Ed Mylett

  So good. I'm just thinking of something. When you asked me to do that, I actually did it with you. And I actually noticed a couple of things in my visual space that have been here the entire time that I didn't see. Isn't that interesting?

• 1:41:49Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:51Ed Mylett

  And we're going a little bit deeper probably than I should, but I... There's a lot of things that your brain does on habit mode, correct? Like if I'm driving to work and I take the same off-ramp every single day, I think my brain is storing energy by doing something that's habitual. That's how I've always understood it anyways, that I'm taking that same off-ramp. Whether I'm right or wrong, it doesn't matter.

• 1:42:09Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Okay.

• 1:42:10Ed Mylett

  The point that I want to make about that is that for me, I think for most people, being present is, even though yes, there's a benefit to being in the future and rewinding, there's a benefit to being reflective and reminiscing in the past and gaining wisdom from it. But for most of us, that's not a struggle for most people. The struggle for most people is being present.

• 1:42:28Dr. Amishi Jha?

  You got it.

• 1:42:28Ed Mylett

  And that's why this is so important, what you're teaching here. And for me, there's so many things in a given day that mindfulness practices make me just aware of being present, that I'm curious as to, in practical application, how much time a day? I know there's no formula, but if you were just saying, hey, Ed, I'd recommend to you, it's 10 minutes a day, it's five different times a day, it's once a day, do it at the same time of the day, doesn't matter when you do it. What would your advice be on just building this practice?

• 1:42:59Dr. Amishi Jha?

  As the habit aspect?

• 1:43:00Ed Mylett

  Yeah.

• 1:43:01Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Well, I mean, the last line of the title is invest 12 minutes a day. So that gives you a sense of, and that number comes out of many studies that have suggested, you know, if you get to that amount, we tend to see benefits, and the more you do from that, the more you benefit. But if you don't quite get to that, it's almost like, is going for a walk in my neighborhood, walking my dog, going to build my physical fitness? Probably not. It's not going to be bad for you, but you're not going to get to that level. So here's my answer to the question of, so the when would be, and you can get a deeper understanding of why I say 12 minutes if you read more about it, but just know that it comes from a lot of...

• 1:43:33Ed Mylett

  I did, I just want them to know.

• 1:43:34Dr. Amishi Jha?

  A lot of research, no, I know, I know. But I'm just saying, but your question regarding when to do it and the habit issue is, the best time to do it is when you're going to do it.

• 1:43:44Ed Mylett

  Okay.

• 1:43:45Dr. Amishi Jha?

  And that's kind of a, maybe a cop-out, but literally, the key to anything, and you'd probably say the same thing regarding physical excellence, right? The key is advantaging your capacity to create it and incorporate it into daily routine.

• 1:43:57Ed Mylett

  Yeah.

• 1:43:58Dr. Amishi Jha?

  And so what I suggest for people, like I just said with, when we were doing the short practice, if you think you can do three minutes, set the goal of a minute and a half and get the win of, I did it, I did it, I did it. And yoke it to something that you already do. You know, my recommendation is something that you know you're going to do every day without exception, maybe right after you brush your teeth in the morning, or maybe right before you have your cup of coffee, sometime that you know you're going to do it. And what I would suggest is just to play around with when that works for you, is to try it at different times of the day. What many people say when we say, try the morning, you know, play around with the time of day, is like, people say things like, I love the taste of my coffee so much more. It's like I've actually tasted.

• 1:44:39Ed Mylett

  Gosh, it's so true.

• 1:44:40Dr. Amishi Jha?

  You know, so...

• 1:44:41Ed Mylett

  It's so true.

• 1:44:42Dr. Amishi Jha?

  And why are you depriving yourself of that, right? Why are we rushing through? I mean, you're going to have the coffee anyway. Why not have a little bit more pleasure with that experience?

• 1:44:50Ed Mylett

  I have to just say though, I was going to tell you off-camera, but I'm so glad you said this because I forgot.

• 1:44:55Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:55Ed Mylett

  Which is that, I just want to give everybody the gift of this, that I, by the way, I'm nowhere near where you would be or other people. I don't think there's rankings either, by the way. It's not a judgment thing. But my sensory experiences, just in general, have been so dramatically increased by this practice. And people always say to me that there's this duality, maybe one of the reasons they even like me is that maybe I'm sort of like, maybe I'm a masculine dude, but I'm very emotional and very sensitive. I don't know that I've always been that way, but like, I do find that I experience my emotions on a deeper level over the last decade or so, that my laughter is a little deeper and more joyous, the taste of food is a little bit more pleasurable, my acknowledgement

• 1:45:36Ed Mylett

  and noticing beauty around me and the nuances and specificities of it. And not just the visual, but smells and wind hitting my face. I know this sounds ridiculous to some people, it's just richer.

• 1:45:49Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:49Ed Mylett

  Because of this practice. Never mind being far more present and productive. And I think also for me, peak is such a word that I've used over and over. When I'm fully present, it appears to me that I've got better access to my vocabulary, better access to insights in reading somebody. Do you, would similar experience for you?

• 1:46:09Dr. Amishi Jha?

  I mean, for sure. And it can be life-saving in many ways. And actually, you know, you described the plus side, and I want, I think it's so, it's so great. It's like, almost like, you mean, I can just have more joy by being here more? Yeah, you can. But there's another part that I think is very important in the context of our action and our humanity. We're also more present to the suffering of other people. We're also more connected to other people. We also have more sense and respect for the humanity of others around us and for the environment. And I think that at this particular point, kind of in our human history.

• 1:46:44Ed Mylett

  Consciousness.

• 1:46:45Dr. Amishi Jha?

  We need to be more aware of what the heck is going on. We have very little time to like, try to make things better for our planet, for example. And also with all the injustices happening and, you know, I was talking recently to somebody regarding this notion of burnout. And, you know, so many people are feeling so burnt out, can mindfulness help with burnout? And the answer is yes, mindfulness can help with burnout. But, you know, and actually, in the context of a conference I was at with critical care nurses, now, we know over COVID, that has been a group that has been very, very crunched, right? And the question was, can mindfulness help me with burnout? And I said, yes. And they said, but then, the system, that the organization of the scheduling is the reason I feel burnt out.

• 1:47:26Dr. Amishi Jha?

  And I was like, yes, but there's no way you're going to demand change or even conceptualize how to create change. If you don't have the capacity to see what's going on.

• 1:47:34Ed Mylett

  Yes.

• 1:47:34Dr. Amishi Jha?

  So just, you know, use that as the next step to give back to those who may not have this capacity yet. It's like, as the more present we are, the more we can enact change and empower other people to do the same.

• 1:47:45Ed Mylett

  It's so, you're so right. And I know you know you're right, but people have told me that the last 10 years or so, I'm just using practical experience for me. You're more patient than you used to be. That's sort of more like the, a symptom almost, that it is more what you have described, which is that I try to be present with people and see them and hear them and experience them more than fix them like I used to. And try to truly empathize and understand their experience and their reality. And I've always felt since I started this, like, I wish more of, I don't care what political party you're part of, I wish more political people had that ability for empathy and understanding

• 1:48:29Ed Mylett

  and just stopped and listened to people and didn't assess it all the time. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that I attribute some, if not most of that, to these practices. Because obviously, I'm a performer, peak performer, expert person supposedly, but it's the, it's the other benefits of doing this that have enriched my life far more than the fact that I've made more money because I'm more present with people or these other things. I'm actually curious about this. What about memory? So is it that my memory can be improved because of this, because I was actually present in more moments, so I have better recall because my attention was where I was more often?

• 1:49:12Ed Mylett

  Or is it that there's something happening in my brain where I'm developing the ability to recall and remember things better? Pretty good question, huh?

• 1:49:22Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Yes.

• 1:49:23Ed Mylett

  Yeah, right? So I'm, because is it, because you could say, well, yeah, your memory's better. Well, maybe that's just because I was more present. Or is there actually something operating in my brain where I'm, is there new myelin forming in my brain? I don't know.

• 1:49:34Dr. Amishi Jha?

  Well, first of all, everything, this conversation is changing your brain. I mean, I don't just mean because it's some kind of massively transformative thing. Every experience, every experience we have impacts the way our brain functions. So there's no like, there's no divide between experience and brain changes. They're just happening concurrently, right? So yes, it is the case. So you're such a great, you're such a great intuition about neuroscience, it's awesome.

• 1:49:59Ed Mylett

  Thank you.

• 1:50:00Dr. Amishi Jha?

  So yes, it is the case that the more we can get, the more attentive we are, the more granular, fine-grained the inputs are for our memory. In fact, attention is the gateway for memory. If you don't pay attention, there's no way that you're going to have the experience of encoding episodes in your life, gaining new information. Now, there are aspects of our memory that are outside the scope of something you need attention for after it's well-learned. So for example, if I, if I tell you, tell me across the board of a keyboard what the letters are. I mean, I can tell you, but if you give me a keyboard, I can type it.

• 1:50:33Ed Mylett

  Fascinating.

• 1:50:33Dr. Amishi Jha?

  So there's, that's an example of something we call procedural memory, which is, you actually don't need your attention for that. But for episodes and knowledge, you need attention to input the information. You also need your attention to pull it out. So remember, we were talking about the flashlight and your dinner meal? You had to, you have to have clarity of directing it to call up the right thing. So it is on both ends of that. And frankly, there's another thing to think about, which is that, you call, what did you call it, myelin? So yes, it ends up that long-term memory is a structural change within the brain. It's actually becomes like fixed hard in terms of neural connections that occur. That process is helped by having clarity of mind and actually just kind of to really tie the loose ends of this conversation together.

• 1:51:19Dr. Amishi Jha?

  We, current models suggest maybe that's where all this mind-wandering is actually happening. It may be a memory encoding process. The reason the brain pumps out thoughts isn't because it's just trying to mess with us, it's because that's the way episodic memory encoding happens. It's a replay button that just happens by default, and as it keeps replaying, things kind of harden into long-term memory.

• 1:51:42Ed Mylett

  This is so good. All right. Of course, I want everybody to get Peak Mind, I want them to get your book. The reason that I want them to get the book is because I think the application of what you're teaching is different for many different people. And I love things that have broad application. So I think if you're an athlete, you want to read this book. I think if you're someone who wants to find a little bit more bliss in your life and be more present, I think this is a book that you should have. And I think just having an overall understanding of one's self is why I think this work is so fascinating. And it's why my audience knows I love every interview that I do. I don't talk to people that I don't want to share with the world, but there are certain topics that just fascinate me because I like to understand why some of the things I teach work. I understand some of it.

• 1:52:27Ed Mylett

  And you're helping me so much with that.

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