609 Train Your Brain with John Assaraf

I'M COMMITTED TO FEELING A CERTAIN WAY EVERY DAY. One of the most important things you can do to get your mindset ready for success is to have a strong morning routine. That's honestly why I wrote my latest book, The Millionaire Morning. We only have so much attention we can give out. To people, to goals, to anything. As a result it's important to have that strong foundation. For this episode of 5 Minute Friday I wanted to bring you this insightful clip from an episode with John Assaf. John is one of the leading behavioral and mindset experts in the world. He has written two NY Times Best Sellers, was in The Secret and has built 5 multi-million dollar companies. He shares why you should be concerned with your limited number of attention units and how you can start everyday ready to win. Discover all of that and much more, on Episode 609. In This Episode You Will Learn: What attention units are (1:01) John's routine to productively use attention units (1:55) Why you need to have a routine (2:53) How to change your behavior for success (4:23) What it takes to move from ignorance to awareness (6:30) How to get over your fear of failing (8:00) Plus much, much more Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:10Lewis Howes?

  For those that don't know who John Asorev is, he is one of the leading behavioral and mindset experts in the world with a unique ability for helping people release the mental and emotional obstacles that prevent them from achieving their very best in life and business. In the last 10 years, he's written two New York Times bestselling books that have been translated into 35 languages. He's appeared on Larry King Live a number of times. He's been featured in eight different movies, including the blockbuster smash hit, The Secret. And he's built five multimillion dollar companies. And today, he's the CEO of Neuro Gym, which develops some of the most advanced neuroscience-based brain training

• 0:52Lewis Howes?

  programs in the world, helping individuals and corporations maximize their fullest human potential.

• 1:02John Assaraf?

  Every morning when you wake up, you have, let's say, let's say it's 10 attention units. If you're using two or three or four or five or six of them on why you can't...

• 1:09Lewis Howes?

  What's an attention unit?

• 1:09John Assaraf?

  An attention unit is your, your ability to stay focused. And your ability to stay focused is happening at the conscious and unconscious level. So if you're processing stuff in the back of your mind, of something you're angry at, something you're mad at, something that's stressing you out, or you don't have enough money, or you don't have the right relationships or the contacts, or whatever, if you're stressing out about that stuff and that's eating up your attention units, that's like having your computer, okay, using up most of its energy in what's behind that you're not using. And we all have a certain amount of attention units every day. And so, one of the things that you asked me before that I can come back to on the rituals, is using the attention units in

• 1:52John Assaraf?

  a way that is highly, highly productive versus wasting a lot of time. And so, my ritual, we started earlier, I just remembered that, is, you know, wake up, meditation, exercise, plant-based protein smoothie, followed by reviewing my goals.

• 2:12John Assaraf?

  Every day you review your goals. Every day, five minutes. The goals for the day, the month, the year. Everything. I review my overarching goals. I could do that fairly quickly because that's my longer range goals. I could review the emotions that I want because I'm committed to having those emotions every day and feeling a certain way every day. And then I take a look at from five years out, three years, one year, ninety days, sixty days to today. Wow. And so I just review it and what happens. A piece of paper, the iPad. Laminated and on my computer. Really? Yeah, and I have it in a booklet also. So when I travel, it's really easy. Do you have it with you? No, no, it's a pretty big. Gotcha, gotcha. It's like a little manual. You have to send me a photo so I can see it. Yeah, I'll send you. It's called my exceptional life blueprint. I like it.

• 2:54John Assaraf?

  And so the question many people may ask is, why? Why would you do that? Well, because you're having thirty-five to fifty thousand thoughts a day. And your brain isn't certain like what's really important, what's not. But if you instruct your brain that something is really important, whether it's something you don't want or something you do, it will actually pay attention to you. Right. So by priming my brain early every day, here is what I want you to focus on. Here are the emotions I want you to express through me. Here's the behaviors that I need to take. And I am on a daily basis, setting the course for what I want my brain to focus on. I am cognitively priming the pump. And if I do it one day, that's great. If I do it sixty days, a hundred days, my brain goes,

• 3:39John Assaraf?

  hey, I'm just gonna make this freaking automatic because I want to conserve energy. Right. Right? I'm just gonna make it automatic. So not only will you focus on it consciously, I'm just gonna make everything happen behind the scenes to help you see, think, and feel things that are congruent with what you're trading your life for and what you want to achieve. So I'm just using the system better. So you start to see yourself at that new goal. You start to impress a new belief that seems foreign, unfamiliar, maybe even a little stupid at first. Ridiculous, yeah. Yeah, it's like, no, I'm not earning a hundred grand a year. Yes, I am. Well, no, you're not. And there's this battle. And you have to move from ignorance to awareness. So what do I mean by that?

• 4:23John Assaraf?

  If you don't understand that every brain has an error detection mechanism within it. What is that? Anytime you veer out of your comfort zone, the fat point setting, or the financial setting, anytime you veer out of it, the first line of defense is self-talk that's negative. That's the first thing that pops up because your brain is going, that's not true. So it's detecting an error between what you said as an affirmation, or even what you just visualized, or even what you just did against the predominant neural patterns that exist. So it's an 800-pound gorilla initially fighting the flea, right? Dan Heat's book.

• 5:06John Assaraf?

  And so what we want to do is we want to get the conscious goal, the vision, aligned with the non-conscious pattern. And as soon as you align that, you have neural coherence. And when you have neural coherence, that's like hearing your most favorite band playing your favorite song, and you're just like, oh, that's the best.

• 5:26Lewis Howes?

  Bliss, yeah.

• 5:26John Assaraf?

  It's just bliss. If it's not bliss, you're out of coherence. And so the key in why we start off early with meditation is awareness of, how do I tune in my vibration? How do I let go of that unempowered self-talk? That sentence, that thought that I had, or that disempowering? It's an unpleasant feeling. Beliefs aren't good or bad. They're only pleasant to unpleasant at varying degrees. When we're out of coherence, it's unpleasant unless our life is on the line and safety is there. For the most part, you know, a fear of failing? Where's that coming from? We failed our whole lives successfully.

• 6:07John Assaraf?

  But the meaning that we're giving, you know, what people will say, what people will think, you know, how I'll be embarrassed or ashamed, those are all the things that you need to really get in tune with. And when you do that, and you start to use affirmations, again, we just developed a mechanism using auditory brain stimulation to take the most powerful beliefs, the guided visualization, guided meditation, subliminal programming, to help people.