296 How to Break an Addiction in 30 Days with Jack Canfield

"Going through anything alone is really difficult." - Jack Canfield If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, video, and more at http://lewishowes.com/296 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 episode number 296 with New York Times bestselling author, Jack Canfield.

• 0:08Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:34Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. And it's my intention to bring you incredible guests each and every episode, or incredible ideas to move you to the next level in your business, your life, your relationships, your spirituality, wherever you're looking to go. That's the intention for this. And I continue to get so many of you that come up to me, that say hi to me on the streets, or they message me online on social media that tell me your stories of transformation from the interviews that you listen to that really helped you get to your next level. So if you are inspired by this podcast, if you're getting results in your life, please share them with me on

• 1:15Lewis Howes?

  my contact form at lewishouse.com. Send me a tweet, a Snapchat, leave a comment on our YouTube channel at youtube slash Lewis Howes. Let me know how things are going in your life and your business because of the School of Greatness podcast. You know, I meet so many incredible people, but I never know who's listening until you reach out and let me know. So please say hi. Make sure to follow me online and leave a comment wherever I post my information. So thank you guys so much for being a part of this community. And please share these episodes out with your friends to bring the greatness to more people. Again, this is lewishouse.com/296 for this specific episode. If you want to share this

• 1:57Lewis Howes?

  out with your friends. And we have all the show notes and additional resources on each show note page. Our guest today is Jack Canfield. Now, Jack is an incredible guy. I've had him on before. There was an Extremely successful episode, we'll have that linked up as well. And he knows what motivates, drives, and inspires people to do the impossible. He's a Harvard graduate with a master's degree in psychological education and one of the earliest champions of peak performance. He's also the co-founder of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series and author of The Success Principles. And we talk about overcoming addiction in this episode, specifically alcohol addiction. We've got a new book on, but this is all addictions and really how this affects our lives.

• 2:43Lewis Howes?

  And even if you don't think you have an addiction, maybe it's not alcohol related, you might have some other addiction that you're not even aware of. But there are lots of people that are surrounded in our lives who do face addiction, where you could support those individuals as well through this message. And some of the things we cover today are why you eat more when you drink alcohol, why that happens, the big myths behind drinking that aren't true. In fact, the opposite is true. How alcohol and sugar addiction are so closely connected. The subconscious fears that keep us from choosing sobriety, essentially sobriety in anything. How to get your friends to support you in not drinking if you are drinking.

• 3:23Lewis Howes?

  Plus some crazy statistics about cancer related to drinking for women and so much more about overcoming addiction. So I hope you guys enjoy this episode. It's gonna be a powerful one. And again, make sure to share with your friends, lewishouse.com/296. And without further ado, let me introduce you to the one and only Jack Canfield.

• 3:50Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. Super excited about our guest today. His name is Jack Canfield. Thanks so much for coming on, Jack.

• 3:56Jack Canfield?

  My pleasure. Thank you for having me. I love it, Lewis.

• 3:59Lewis Howes?

  Yes, and he's got a new book out. It's called The 30 Day Sobriety Solution. I wanted to make sure you guys go check this out. It's out right now and it's an awesome book. So go check this out. It's how to cut back or quit drinking in the privacy of your own home. And Jack, for those don't know, he's also got another book called The Success Principles, How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. We covered this, the 10 year anniversary of this on another podcast and video, so we'll have that linked up somewhere in here and linked up below on the show notes. This is an incredible book. I read this, I think it was eight or nine years ago, and it definitely was an inspiration for me. You're also a 40 or 50 time New York Times bestselling author for Chicken Soup for the Soul series, 500 million copies, I believe, sold.

• 4:40Jack Canfield?

  That's right.

• 4:41Lewis Howes?

  It's incredible. It's like, has anyone else sold that many copies of a book or books?

• 4:45Jack Canfield?

  I think maybe the Bible.

• 4:46Lewis Howes?

  The Bible. What about the Harry Potter? What is?

• 4:49Jack Canfield?

  I think Harry Potter is right up there, but I don't know the exact number.

• 4:53Lewis Howes?

  Who knows? Yeah.

• 4:53Jack Canfield?

  Yeah.

• 4:54Lewis Howes?

  But was it, is it 40 times? Do you even know the amount of times it's been on the New York Times?

• 4:58Jack Canfield?

  Forty-seven bestsellers on the New York Times.

• 5:00Lewis Howes?

  Forty-seven bestsellers, different books.

• 5:01Jack Canfield?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Lewis Howes?

  Has anyone had more books than that?

• 5:03Jack Canfield?

  Well, and the most fun part, this, we had, at one time, we had seven Chicken Soup books on the New York Times list at one, on one day. We have a Guinness Book World record for that.

• 5:14Lewis Howes?

  Amazing. And they only put 10 in the top, you know, on the list, right? There's an extended list, but that's unbelievable. Do you remember the other three?

• 5:20Jack Canfield?

  I don't.

• 5:21Lewis Howes?

  Okay. It was irrelevant.

• 5:23Jack Canfield?

  It wasn't that interesting to me. I was too excited about ours.

• 5:26Lewis Howes?

  Amazing. Cool. Well, you've got this new book out, and I want to talk about a number of things, drinking and addiction with drinking, but also addiction in general.

• 5:36Jack Canfield?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:36Lewis Howes?

  Because I think more people, you know, are addicted to things than we know about.

• 5:41Jack Canfield?

  True.

• 5:41Lewis Howes?

  We were just talking about how people are addicted to video games, or eating a specific food every single day, or just addicted to getting angry on the road every time they drive. They don't know how to be peaceful.

• 5:51Jack Canfield?

  Right. And so they're addicted to sex, they're addicted to television, they're addicted to gambling, they're addicted to workaholism, they're shopping addicted, all kinds of addictions.

• 6:01Lewis Howes?

  So I think this is a really important and relevant topic for us, even if you don't think you're, you know, you're not addicted to alcohol. You were even giving me statistics earlier about how women, something about, giving me a statistic with women and breast cancer, if you, even if you're not addicted, or you're getting drunk all the time, but they're still...

• 6:18Jack Canfield?

  We're, we're, we talk in the book about the 30 day sobriety challenge. And while this was originally written by myself and my co-author Dave Andrews, who was a full-blown alcoholic who relapsed three times and... Until he found the human potential movement and realized through my book and Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy and others that there were alternatives. He literally was driving his car and someone gave him a Tony Robbins tape and he said, "Why aren't they teaching this in rehab? This is what we need to learn." Right. And so he started applying all this in his own life and as a result of that got sobered and started the coaching program. We have an 80% success rate with that coaching program. Amazing. Which we turned into this book, which also as a book has an 80% success rate. And I forgot your question.

• 7:01Jack Canfield?

  Give me the link with alcohol drinking and women. So what happens is with the 30 day sobriety challenge, we're saying even if you're not an alcoholic, but you just drink a lot, we know that excessive drinking is considered 13 or more drinks a week. If you have three glasses of wine every night, which would be splitting a bottle of wine with your friend, your husband, whatever, you fall in that category. And we know that- So what's the difference between excessive drinking and alcoholic? Well, an alcoholic is defined as someone basically where they can't stop once they start. Often they'll drink until they pass out. Wow. Or they'll drink to where they become dysfunctional, they become the kind of person everyone goes, "My God, you're slurring your words, you're not safe to drive."

• 7:42Jack Canfield?

  They get DUIs, their boss has trouble, like you need to quit coming to work hungover. Some people are drinking at work, you know, pulling it out of their drawer. Gotcha. But an excessive drinker is 13. If you drink six drinks a week, if you're a woman, you have a 40% higher incidence of breast cancer. If you drink up to 10 drinks, it goes up to 70% higher chance of getting- It's incredible. -breast cancer. So just the health benefits, one of the things that's coming out of England is research that if you stop drinking for 30 days, much like I do a fast every quarter for two or three days, sometimes a week, where I just drink, you know, vegetable juices or vegetable broth or soup broth, whatever.

• 8:25Jack Canfield?

  And, you know, it cleans out the liver, it cleans out the kidneys, you wake up brighter, you need less sleep and so forth. And so we're saying- Just cut back and what they're finding is people are living longer. It's clearing out their kidneys. It's arterial sclerosis is being reversed. You know, people are having all kinds of more energy. They're losing weight. I decided as part of this book that I would go 30 days. I'm a social drinker. I have three alcohol, well, four alcoholics in my family. My mother, my father and my sister and my brother. And the reality is, and I have two children who are alcoholics as well. They're both sober and they've been in sobriety and all that for about eight to 10 years.

• 9:10Jack Canfield?

  But the reality is it skipped me for whatever reason. I didn't have a problem. I can drink socially, but I said, I'm going to quit drinking for 30 days just to be part of the book. I lost, I did it for two months in a row, actually, and I lost 15 pounds. Amazing. And I did a little more exercise, which is one of the things we say in the book. One of the challenges with cutting out any addiction, whether it's watching TV or whether it's drinking or whether it's playing video games for three hours. So you're not talking to your wife, you're not playing with your children, all the stuff, you know, not doing your homework. Quitting smoking. You're not learning a language, you're, you know, all the things you could be doing that are useful is that when you stop, you have all this extra time, you know? And at first that can be a little disconcerting, but the reality is I, I got, I needed less sleep.

• 9:54Jack Canfield?

  I was getting more done. I was, I started writing more blogs. I was spending more time with my wife. I was exercising more, which is one of the other reasons I lost more weight. And when you drink, what happens is, and this is true with drinking, drugs and marijuana, that you eat more, you know, because your willpower goes down. In other words, you, you go out and you're gonna, I'm not gonna eat dessert, but then you have two glasses of wine. Oh, what the hell, I'll have dessert, you know? And so you're eating all these extra calories and you're eating them. You weren't gonna eat the rolls in the butter, but then you did because you had to do cocktails before. Right. So there's so many benefits that come from this. And then we say, if you want to, you can go back to drinking. What we're finding, if you do, the process is in the book because it says 30 day solution.

• 10:35Jack Canfield?

  There are 30 solutions on how to re-vector your life so that you don't desire to drink anymore. Right. And so what happens as you start doing these, you Find out that the craving for alcohol actually disappears for most people. And the craving for whether it's food, most of the things that we do that are addictions are to numb out our anxiety, to numb out our pain, to numb out the memories of trauma, to numb out our discomfort around being people in a social, being with people in a social situation, the fear that I won't have fun, I won't be interesting, I'm more relaxed, I'm more fun, you know, and that's the big myth is I won't have a fun life. What we're finding is people are actually having more fun because they start doing things that like they take music lessons,

• 11:19Jack Canfield?

  they take guitar lessons, they go to Toastmasters.

• 11:21Lewis Howes?

  Salsa dancing.

• 11:22Jack Canfield?

  Salsa dancing. Yeah, my wife and I just went to a country western bar the other night and was learning line dances.

• 11:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Jack Canfield?

  It was a kick.

• 11:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Line dancing is fun.

• 11:33Jack Canfield?

  Line dancing is totally fun. The thing that blew me away is there's about, I don't know, 12 or 15 different ones that everyone does, and they all know all the steps, you know?

• 11:40Lewis Howes?

  They know everything. It's unbelievable.

• 11:41Jack Canfield?

  Well, we learned most of them, but not perfectly.

• 11:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:44Jack Canfield?

  But you come out, you're like, you're just high off the dancing, you know?

• 11:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I hear you. So why 30 days? Why not a year or six months or 60 days? What's the point?

• 11:53Jack Canfield?

  Here's the deal. We say 30 days, there's 30 solutions. You could do it every other day for 60 days. You could do it every third day for 90 days. Some people are doing it one solution a week for 30 weeks. And the reality is that what we found is that with our online coaching program that started this whole thing, and before we turned it into a book, in 30 days was enough to get people to where they didn't want to drink anymore. Or they knew they could cut back, or they knew they couldn't cut back because they tried and said, no, I have to quit.

• 12:20Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 12:21Jack Canfield?

  And so each solution builds one on the other over time, and it's very systematic. It's like knowing the combination to a lock. If you know the numbers in the right order and the right sequence in the right way, the lock opens.

• 12:33Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 12:34Jack Canfield?

  You've got these lockers behind you. You know, one of the big challenges for kids in school is remembering their locker number.

• 12:40Lewis Howes?

  Exactly, yeah, yeah.

• 12:40Jack Canfield?

  Did you ever have that dream? This is a dream I had when I was 50 years old. I was back at my school and I couldn't remember my locker combination. And everyone's opening their lockers and I'm totally lost, you know?

• 12:50Lewis Howes?

  You're scared.

• 12:52Jack Canfield?

  Scared, and then I think it's just... Somehow we've lost the formula for success. I think that's what that dream is about.

• 12:58Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. I like that. Yeah. Now, when you say thirty solutions.

• 13:02Jack Canfield?

  Well, let me just say one more thing. If you say, why not a year?

• 13:04Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 13:04Jack Canfield?

  There are thirty solutions, but we're not saying you do thirty days and you're done. We're saying there's about fourteen of these that you want to keep doing as a daily discipline after the thirty days to keep yourself on track.

• 13:16Lewis Howes?

  Can you give me some examples of a few of the solutions and what people would be doing?

• 13:19Jack Canfield?

  Sure. One of the things we do on the first day is an NLP technique where we want to basically associate drinking with negativity and pain and associate not drinking with joy and pleasure. Because most people associate not drinking with pain and drinking with pleasure.

• 13:35Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 13:35Jack Canfield?

  And so we look at your life as it is, as you're currently drinking and say, if you keep doing this for five years, what is your life going to look like? In terms of your weight, your health, your job and career, your relationships, your kids and so on and so forth. And mostly, when you honestly look at that, it doesn't look all that great. And so we have you visualize that and really see it and feel the feelings of it. And then we have you do the opposite and take it out five years. What would be happening in your life if you were not drinking and you were healthier, happier, exercising, spending more time with your kids, sober, writing your book, whatever? And so then we have you actually revisit that on a regular basis throughout the program so that by the end of it, you literally... See, one of the big myths about getting rid of addiction is willpower. Willpower is useful.

• 14:20Jack Canfield?

  It takes willpower to sit down and do these lessons. But willpower is like, if you do willpower alone and you don't deal with the underlying cause of why you're drinking, there's a why you're drinking. If you don't address that, and we address that through a number of exercises like the Total Truth Process, the EFT tapping techniques, we can go into all that later. And what happens is, we use this metaphor, you're driving a boat and you're going north and you want to go east. So you, the boat's on automatic pilot going north. And now we take with willpower, we turn it to the east and we just keep holding this wheel like that and we're going east. But as soon as we let go of the wheel, what happens?

• 14:56Lewis Howes?

  It's going back north.

• 14:57Jack Canfield?

  Automatic pilot takes over, we go north again. So we want to reprogram the automatic pilot instead of just the willpower of I'm not going to drink. You get to the point where I don't want to drink. I mean, I... Went through the sixty days, I told you, without drinking. And then I started drinking a little bit again, you know. I think when was it Valentine's Day, just a couple of days ago. And I woke up the next morning, I didn't feel as good. And I'm going like, I got six hundred bottles of wine in my wine cellar. I'm thinking like, I'm not buying anymore. Cause I'm not trying to keep drinking as much as I used to drink. Cause it's just not serving me. And I wouldn't have been aware of that if I hadn't stopped. You know, having that glass of wine every night with dinner or whatever. So, um, so that's one technique we talked about. Another technique is getting in touch with your core values.

• 15:40Jack Canfield?

  We all have core values, you know, it might be family, it might be adventure, it might be love, it might be authenticity. And then look at, what is my drinking doing to the expression of those core values? Well, when I drink, I'm ashamed, I lie about it. Well, there goes integrity out the window, you know? And I say I'm loving, but then I'm taking money that I could be spending for my family. And I'm buying drinks for everyone at the bar. I'm buying hundred dollar bottles of wine for dinner, or thirty, or, you know, Thunderbird if it's only. If you don't afford it, whatever. But the point is, I'm usually violating those values, okay? And then we create what we call your, your thirty day sobriety vision. What do you want to look like thirty days from now? What, what, what's the outcome you're looking for? And we know that if we visualize every day, the outcome we want.

• 16:24Jack Canfield?

  What happens is that the subconscious mind begins to figure out how to make that happen.

• 16:29Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 16:29Jack Canfield?

  Most people are not visualizing. Or if they are, they're visualizing the happy hour. Can't wait to get to the bar. And visualizing, oh, when the weekend finally comes, I can kick back and get with my buddies and we'll get drunk and have a good time. This is kind of the college thing. I have a twenty-six-year-old stepson who's now just getting to the place where he realizes.

• 16:46Lewis Howes?

  There's more to life than that, yeah.

• 16:47Jack Canfield?

  That's not working too well for me. He's working for a financial analyst company. And he's coming to work a little hungover on Monday and his wife's saying, I think you're drinking too much. And he gets a little cantankerous, doesn't get into fights anymore, which he did in college.

• 17:00Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 17:00Jack Canfield?

  Uh, but, you know, he's going, I think I need to shift this. And so, there's a, a way to begin doing that. Uh, you know, to jump ahead in the book, the solution thirteen is tapping. And tapping is this wonderful technique.

• 17:14Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 17:14Jack Canfield?

  Where you tap on acupuncture points on the head and the, and the chest and under the arm.

• 17:19Lewis Howes?

  Nick Ordner's done a great job of bringing that to the, the masses, yeah.

• 17:23Jack Canfield?

  Well, one of the things that's wonderful, we have a free companion website for, for the book. And literally that companion website is everything that used to be in a thousand dollar coaching program.

• 17:33Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 17:33Jack Canfield?

  So for the price of a book, you're really getting a thousand dollar coaching program for free. And what happens is we have Nick Ortner doing a tapping sequence for people. We also have a guy named Dawson Church, who's one of Nick's cronies and friends and mentors. And so they're both doing tapping and you can tap on the anxiety that's making you drink. You can tap on the craving. You can literally disappear craving. We took a group of people, had them have chocolate and take the little foil off the kisses, smell it, put it back down, glass of alcohol and other things that, you know, people crave, sugar, candy bar, whatever. And, and we, and they're like all, they're salivating, right? And after about seven minutes of tapping, they didn't want any of it.

• 18:15Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 18:15Jack Canfield?

  It, you know, and you know, when you get that craving for something, I need that chocolate or I need that, you know, whatever.

• 18:22Lewis Howes?

  For me, it's chocolate and candy and sweets. That's my thing.

• 18:24Jack Canfield?

  And here's the issue with alcohol. Alcohol is basically fermented sugar. And so we're all addicted to sugar. We drink, eat and eat way much more sugar. And so what happens for most alcoholics, when they stop, they become sugar alcoholics. You go to an AA meeting, everyone's eating cookies and donuts.

• 18:40Lewis Howes?

  Replacing it with something, right?

• 18:41Jack Canfield?

  Exactly.

• 18:41Lewis Howes?

  Something that satisfies a craving.

• 18:43Jack Canfield?

  And ultimately, we're saying sugar isn't really great for you, not a wonderful thing. Uh, we're not, if, if you need sugar while you're cutting out alcohol, great. But sugar's also an addiction.

• 18:54Lewis Howes?

  It is.

• 18:54Jack Canfield?

  If you can cut that out, the weight goes off.

• 18:57Lewis Howes?

  It's a huge addiction.

• 18:58Jack Canfield?

  And Mark Hyman, I don't know if you know Mark.

• 19:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, he's been on here.

• 19:01Jack Canfield?

  Yeah, he's a great guy. He's a good friend of mine and, and he wrote a book on sugar. And literally the moment you eat sugar, within a few minutes, you literally, there's brain cells in your brain that are exploding. You're killing brain cells. Not only with alcohol, we all knew that, but just with sugar.

• 19:14Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 19:15Jack Canfield?

  And you get that funny little headache, not headache, but kind of weird energy feeling in your head. That's your brain cells exploding.

• 19:22Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So what do you think is the number one reason people get addicted to alcohol? Or addicted to anything in the first place? What's the underlying reason for addiction?

• 19:30Jack Canfield?

  Well, there's a discomfort of being in your skin without it. Meaning that I'm, I'm, if, if I had trauma, a lot of people drink because of trauma. And so we see a lot of people, they lose their job, their parents get divorced, um, you know, whatever, they get divorced, they get fired, um, they were outcasts at school, people tease them, you know, they were bullied, et cetera. And so alcohol becomes a way to numb out that pain. Uh, for me, in my family, you know, we just watched our parents drink. We thought when you're a grown up, you drink, you know, when you're grown up, you smoke. So we'd all be up with fake cigarettes, you know, pretending to smoke because we want to be big. And then when my parents would go away for the night, we'd take alcohol and pour it in a glass and then we'd pour some water in so it looks like it's still there.

• 20:13Jack Canfield?

  And then we drank it and it was like the worst tasting stuff in the world back then, right? But there was this warm feeling that came over and you went, oh, I get it. It feels kind of good. And then you're not worried about school. You're not worried about your girlfriend not liking you, the kids teasing you, all that stuff. So it, it gets rid of those feelings of anxiety, discomfort, pain, awkwardness, not knowing what to do, feeling shy, all of that. And so, and that's true for all the addictions, whether it's food. You know, we get bad news, we go to the refrigerator, we eat ice cream or we, you know, chow down on carbs. I think we'll have spaghetti, you know? Right. And the same is with gambling. And with, some addictions are addictions to adrenaline. Gambling is why people get the adrenaline rush, you know?

• 20:54Jack Canfield?

  Even though you're losing money at the slot machine, every time you win, 96% back and they keep doing that until there's nothing left, you know? Um, there's a rush. And when the bells ring and the lights are going off and all that flashing is going on, that's what all those machines in Vegas are designed to do. Uh, kids who steal cars, it's not the car, they ditch them. It's the adrenaline rush why they're doing it, not getting caught and sneaking around. Uh, illicit sex, you know, all that stuff, watching porn, hoping you won't get caught. Uh, there's an adrenaline rush that goes with it. And so your mind is taking off the stuff. The, the problem is, it's like you have a fire alarm up here and it's making a lot of noise. And so you you cut the wire. Now there's no noise. Ah, pleasure.

• 21:37Jack Canfield?

  The heroin rush, you know, the coke rush, the marijuana relaxing. But the problem is there's still a fire. And just because you cut off the the news that there's a fire. The problem is the next morning you wake up, the anxiety is still there, the pain is still there, the trauma hasn't been healed, the rejection hasn't been healed. And you haven't learned the skills you need to handle the emotions of anger and fear and rejection and upset. You haven't learned the skills of creating a relationship is fulfilling without having to be drunk to do it. And so that's the problem with with the addiction. It it's a temp. See, someone once said, I think it was Gwar Manti said, the problem with addictions is they work.

• 22:15Lewis Howes?

  Right, that's why everyone's addicted.

• 22:16Jack Canfield?

  But they only work temporarily. And they work less and less often, and it takes more of the addictive substance to make it work, which is why you're now drinking a whole bottle of vodka at night instead of two drinks. You know, or you need more sex, or you need more gambling, or you need bigger rushes, you know, to to feel the getting rid of it.

• 22:37Lewis Howes?

  It it, you know, it it seems like a lot of the things you're talking about with these solutions in here is is almost a lot of the same things you talk about in Success Principles.

• 22:45Jack Canfield?

  They are.

• 22:46Lewis Howes?

  Very similar approach to getting what you want in life is also the same approach to overcome addiction.

• 22:53Jack Canfield?

  They are. Originally, the title of this book was going to be The Success Principles for Alcoholism, you know, or The Success Principles for Sobriety. And then what we realized is The Thirty Day Sobriety Solution just had a little more cachet to it.

• 23:05Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure, of course, of course.

• 23:07Jack Canfield?

  And there's stuff in here that doesn't, I mean, there's some work from other people as well.

• 23:10Lewis Howes?

  Oh, of course, yeah, but I mean, it at the end of the day, it looks like, you know, you're talking about using the power of affirmations, confronting your fears. It doesn't seem like that these gimmicky thing, it's really addressing the core root of what

• 23:23Jack Canfield?

  Yes.

• 23:24Lewis Howes?

  everyone needs to to achieve success in their life, but also to overcome any challenge.

• 23:28Jack Canfield?

  And in this case, directly addressing it to alcohol, although you could also write in the word overeating or anything there. But there are certain fears that go along with not drinking. I won't be fun. Uh, people at work, like if you work in New York in the stock market, everyone goes out and drinks at night.

• 23:44Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 23:44Jack Canfield?

  A, a good friend of mine who runs a company called Grocery Ships here in town, walked away from eight million dollars in bonuses from Wall Street. The, and, and everyone was going, come on, drink, drink, drink. And he knew he couldn't drink anymore. And everyone was like, give him a hard time. What do you wish you, well, come on, be a man. And so that's part of the culture.

• 24:02Lewis Howes?

  It is.

• 24:02Jack Canfield?

  And so it's gonna affect my career. I won't know what to do when I'm out with the guys, you know, whatever. But we teach people, you can still go there and you order a club soda with cranberry juice in it or whatever, and people get off your case because they think you're drinking something. But the point being that there's a lot of cultural pressure to do these things. And, uh, most people don't have the tools. And what we're saying is affirmations related to sobriety. Affirmations related to getting rid of the addiction as opposed to just affirmations in general.

• 24:31Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 24:32Jack Canfield?

  And what people are saying, and you might know this too, Lewis, is that, you know, most people know these general principles now. And now they're saying, well, but apply them to me as a manager. Apply them to me being a good husband. Applying to me being a world-class skier. I want it more niched now.

• 24:47Lewis Howes?

  Yes, of course.

• 24:48Jack Canfield?

  And so that's, this book is an attempt to do that.

• 24:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I love this. And, you know, for me, I've never been drunk in my life. I don't know if I've told you that, but I've never experienced what it feels like to be drunk on alcohol. And then when I was in college, I played college football and same thing happened where every, uh, weekend after the games, all the guys went out and just got drunk and trashed at parties. And they were always pressuring me. They knew that I wasn't gonna drink. Cause I made a commitment for four years in college, I wasn't gonna have a sip of alcohol.

• 25:16Jack Canfield?

  Right.

• 25:17Lewis Howes?

  Cause I wanted to have every advantage to be the best I could be in football.

• 25:19Jack Canfield?

  Yeah.

• 25:20Lewis Howes?

  But they still tried to like give me every night, they would just throw drinks at me. And I was like, no, I'm good, I'm good, I'm good. And it's, uh, I can only imagine the pressures that people have with drinking from their peers alone.

• 25:31Jack Canfield?

  Yeah.

• 25:32Lewis Howes?

  Even if they don't want to.

• 25:33Jack Canfield?

  Right.

• 25:33Lewis Howes?

  They're just like, okay, well, I'll have one. And then it ends up being three or four because they wanna make, they wanna please their friends. So how do we set up our social circles so that when we do, we do wanna go out and spend time with our friends, but when they're drinking or they're going out and having a few drinks, maybe we don't want to, but how do we have a conversation with our friends? In a way that doesn't turn them off or make them feel like you're better than them or you're too good to drink or something like that, but also so they can relate and understand and not continue to pressure you every time and say, just have one sip, just try this. What's the conversation we could have with our friends?

• 26:08Jack Canfield?

  Well, for me, when I was doing my 60 days and where we recommended people in the book is to just say, you know, what I'm doing right now, I'm just doing a little, little 30 day experiment in my life to see how it works. And what I'm finding is, you know, I'm waking up earlier, I'm feeling better, whatever, I'm just gonna keep doing that for a while. And it's not about, I'm not one of the guys, you're still one of the guys, you were still one of the football players, you still did well at what you ever did, probably did better. And if you were to look back and say, take all those guys on a football team and see where they are right now and compare them to your success, I would bet most of them are not anywhere near New York Times bestseller, top 100 podcasts, whatever. So Donald Trump never drank. Tom Cruise never drank. You know, we have a statistic, I can't remember

• 26:51Jack Canfield?

  all the names right now, but seven of the top 10 grossing film stars of all time never drank.

• 26:56Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 26:57Jack Canfield?

  Yeah. And a couple of them actually did, well, two did drink and quit.

• 27:00Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 27:01Jack Canfield?

  And the rest, Samuel Jackson was a terrible drunk and then he stopped. And once he stopped, that's when his career took off and he's made literally hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, I mean, he's an amazing actor, plus his little credit card commercials. So there's, there's a lot of research on the people that don't drink tend to do a little better. But I would say the, the, the conversation for me would be, you know, I get it, you think I should be drinking right now, I'm not going to, thank you very much, I'm really happy the way I am. And, you know, just stop, it's not gonna happen.

• 27:30Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 27:31Jack Canfield?

  And just let people know. And what happens is, people are gonna press you, like a teenager's gonna press you over and over, can I have the keys to the car? Please, can I have the keys to the car? Come on. And eventually you get, that just doesn't lend the keys to the car.

• 27:41Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 27:42Jack Canfield?

  You know, it becomes a policy. Like, you know, I don't think many people are offering, you know, Donald Trump a drink. They know he doesn't drink and they respect him and they're just gonna not do it.

• 27:51Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 27:52Jack Canfield?

  So, and we actually give some excuses you can give to people on the list on the website too, they're a little more fun and sexy. But just generally, it's called, it's not against you, it's for me. That's a really good thing when you tell.

• 28:04Lewis Howes?

  It's not against you, it's for me?

• 28:05Jack Canfield?

  It's not against you, it's for me. You know, when people say, can you do this? You say, no, no. And they say, well, you don't like me, whatever. You say, no, no, I'm not saying, it's not against you. I'm making a decision for me right now.

• 28:14Lewis Howes?

  I like that.

• 28:15Jack Canfield?

  I'm just experimenting with this, I'll let you know how it turns out.

• 28:18Lewis Howes?

  I like that, that's really powerful.

• 28:19Jack Canfield?

  Yeah.

• 28:20Lewis Howes?

  What do you think, um, what do you think is one of the biggest challenges for people getting started with this process of actually saying, okay, I don't want to drink anymore. Maybe for years they've known it doesn't feel good, but they're afraid.

• 28:33Jack Canfield?

  Fear is a big issue.

• 28:34Lewis Howes?

  Okay. What's the, what's the thing they're afraid of? They're not going to have that, that crutch. They're.

• 28:38Jack Canfield?

  They're afraid? Well, first of all, they're afraid they're never going to drink again. So would you tell people? Yeah. If you tell people you gotta go to AA and AA says you never drink again, that's why a lot of people don't go. I mean, they don't go for other reasons, public shame. They don't go for some, it's too religious for some people, whatever. But the big fear is I'll never drink again. And if I never drink again, I won't have fun again. I, it's like life's going to become dull and boring. And I can tell you from my experiment for my kids' lives and from Dave, my co-author. You know, Dave coaches basketball for his daughters. He runs marathons. He is a speaker. He dances. He's a big football fan with the, the, with the Denver team that just won the Super Bowl, you know?

• 29:21Jack Canfield?

  It takes his kids to the park every day. I mean, he's having a lot of fun and he thought it would be boring. Because he had social anxiety as a teenager and then when he went to college and he drank, all of a sudden he didn't have the social anxiety. He started having more fun, but it wasn't the fact that he wasn't drinking. In other words, nobody's not having fun because they have a deprivation of alcohol in their system. You know?

• 29:41Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 29:41Jack Canfield?

  It's like, you know, you're not, you don't have depression because you have a lithium deficiency.

• 29:45Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 29:46Jack Canfield?

  You have depression because you're depressing, pushing down on feelings you don't want to feel. So one of the things that does come up for people, and it's a valid fear, is that feelings are going to emerge. And perhaps past memories are going to emerge. But if you know what to do with them when they do, which most people don't, because we're a psychologically ignorant culture. We didn't learn this stuff in school, then it's scary. What do I do with these feelings? I feel, I feel like they overwhelm me. I can't, you know, whatever. My wife's father committed suicide when she was eight. And one night, about four years into our marriage, she just woke up screaming, daddy, don't do it. All of a sudden, all this pain. If I had loved my father more, he wouldn't have killed himself. You know, if I'd have been a better daughter.

• 30:26Jack Canfield?

  And so did she want to feel those feelings? Absolutely not. But because I knew what to do with them, because there's ways to learn to express them through, we have a thing called the total truth process, where you go through anger, hurt, fear, remorse and regret, unfulfilled I want. And then what I do want, and then forgiveness. And if you know that model, you can get to forgiveness and love and release it. With tapping, you can release guilt, you can release shame, you can release fear. And you can release pain, as Nick Ordner's new book, uh, you reference talks about. So if you have the tools, you know, you can heal. If you go into the jungle without a gun, you're going into Africa without a gun, you're a little concerned.

• 31:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:05Jack Canfield?

  You're gonna get eaten by a lion or hit by a hippo. But if you've got a guide and a gun, now you know you have the tools to survive in the jungle.

• 31:12Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 31:12Jack Canfield?

  Most people go into that jungle called sobriety without the tools they need. And most people can't afford the thirty thousand a month to go to rehab. Most people don't want to take that time off work, especially if you're a solo entrepreneur, you can't afford it. Uh, we had one guy, he's a number, one of the top sales trainers in America in the real estate world. And I won't mention his name because it's confidential, but he read the book, uh, when we did it in the beta test. And, uh, he had not been sober more than twelve days his entire adult life. Every night drank until he passed out. Totally ashamed, didn't want anyone to know. When we sent him the book, he went and got a post office box so it wouldn't come to his home or his office.

• 31:52Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 31:53Jack Canfield?

  He wrote, he wanted two hours of coaching, so we did that. He wrote a check on a cashier's check so no one would ever know where it went.

• 32:00Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 32:00Jack Canfield?

  And that's how ashamed he was. That's why he could never get help because he could never go to AA, he could never go to rehab. I don't even think his wife.

• 32:06Lewis Howes?

  He didn't want other people to know.

• 32:07Jack Canfield?

  Didn't want other people to know. And he's now been sober for four months and he's lost weight. He's happier, he feels better when he's running his seminars, more people are coming and enrolling because he's more wonderful up on stage, he's having more fun, greater sense of humor.

• 32:23Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 32:23Jack Canfield?

  I mean, it's changed his whole life.

• 32:24Lewis Howes?

  Amazing. And why do people love the AA approach or the rehab approach? And why do they not love it? And, and is there a support group that people will get when they go through this book? Do you guys have something like that?

• 32:38Jack Canfield?

  I have nothing against AA. AA was very helpful to my two sons for getting sober. AA, there are people there who care about you, they've been through it, they understand it.

• 32:47Lewis Howes?

  To give you mentorship.

• 32:49Jack Canfield?

  They give, yeah, they become a sponsor for you. Both of my sons have now become sponsors for other people. There is a camaraderie. Going through anything alone is really difficult, any behavioral change. If you decide to go run every morning. It's tough. It's so much easier if you know Bob's waiting downstairs at 6:30 outside your apartment. Yeah. Then you've got the accountability, this guy's gonna, "Where are you, Louis?" And it's easier, you're talking to him, you know, time goes faster, etc. So, basically AA has a lot of value, but a lot of people just won't go. You know, and the other thing we talk about with AA is you have to admit over and over, you have to say, in the beginning, you have to get out of denial, "I'm an alcoholic." But if you keep referring, if you keep affirming that for 30 years. Even 10 years later, 30 years later. Yeah, yeah, not great.

• 33:32Jack Canfield?

  And the challenge with AA, and this was a friend of mine named Tommy Rosen, who puts on Recovery 2.0, which is a teleseminar for recovery people. And he said, when he got his 20-year chip, his sponsor hugged him and said, "You're 1 in 10,000." And he said, "Only 1 in 10,000 people who join AA make it to 20 years sober." Wow. And he said, "That's when I knew something was wrong, something was missing." And when I would go to AA meetings with my kids, I would always want to jump up and say, "God, let me run an exercise here for you. If we could all do this meditation, if I could teach you how to breathe and relax, if we could do this thing where you forgive your parents, you could quit having this story about how you've been abused your whole life, you know? Yeah, you were, but you need to let it go, because this anger is killing you, you know?

• 34:15Jack Canfield?

  And so, they feel that anger, and then they don't know what to do with it, and they go, "I'll drink again." And they relapse, and they relapse, and they relapse. And then people feel ashamed to go back to AA because they've relapsed. Yeah. You know, because they're supposed to be abstinent, 100%. So, that's a challenge. And we know that 20, I think it's 29 million people have, they say they're in recovery, based on a survey that said, "Did you ever have a problem with drugs and alcohol, and is it gone now?" Yes. We only have 1.3 million people that belong to AA. So, we know people are getting sober without AA. The problem with rehab is that you've got a, well, first of all, AA, somewhere about a 20%, if you can believe the statistics, recovery. Only 20% of people go keep going.

• 34:57Lewis Howes?

  20% of people like go to AA, keep going.

• 34:59Jack Canfield?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 35:00Jack Canfield?

  And, and that, that number is suspect because we don't know how, how clear it is, but let's, let's give it to them. Rehab, 15 to 30%, and that's also suspect because there's no real long-term longitudinal studies.

• 35:11Lewis Howes?

  About recover or 15 to 20%?

• 35:14Jack Canfield?

  Recover, that's what they say.

• 35:15Lewis Howes?

  Rehab.

• 35:16Jack Canfield?

  But we have 80%, 79.5% to be exact recovery rate after five years still sober. Um, you know, from the first coaching program and now after the book, it's, you know, when we did the beta test four to five months still sober. So the reality is that with, with rehab, you go there and I rehab has some challenges. There are some good rehab centers, like there's good therapists and there's bad therapists. But a lot of rehab centers, especially the ones with places like Malibu and places, they're basically real estate investment opportunities. I'm going to buy this big mansion. It's worth six million and 10 years it'll be worth 12 million and you're going to pay my mortgage every month because I'm, you're charging me 30, I'm charging you 30,000 for the 12 or 15 people there. And the staff, other than your therapist for a week, uh, once a week for a therapist, once a week for a counselor.

• 36:01Jack Canfield?

  You have a 12-step meeting every day, maybe a yoga class, maybe you get a massage. Now you got like 13 hours left.

• 36:08Lewis Howes?

  What do you do the rest of the time?

• 36:08Jack Canfield?

  What do you do? And you're sitting around with other people who have these addictive challenges, talking, it's like, it's like prison where the prisoners are like, how many better, better prisoners, you know, better criminals. And so they're bored and, and, and you've got really lovingly dedicated people who are young, who've been through rehab, who now want to help, but they don't have the skill sets they need.

• 36:27Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 36:28Jack Canfield?

  So one of the things we're saying with this book, if you're a rehab counselor, get a copy of this book, start doing this stuff with the people in your rehab center. If you're an addiction counselor, Bridget Lang, who's an addiction counselor, she's a psychotherapist up in, um, in Santa Fel. She's building a whole program around this book. She said, oh my God, this is what we need. This is what people need. They need a systematic approach. And that's the thing, if you don't have a system, you know, you went, you played football, your coach had a system.

• 36:55Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 36:55Jack Canfield?

  For exercise, for training, for fitness, nutrition, practice, plays, all that kind of stuff. And if your system worked, you, you won games and you won championships. And better systems beat bad systems, right? And so, this is a system. And as we said earlier, you could apply this to overeating, you could apply this to pretty much any addiction you wanted.

• 37:15Lewis Howes?

  I love it. And I'm curious to, to know about the difference between cutting back and cutting out cold turkey.

• 37:23Jack Canfield?

  Yes.

• 37:24Lewis Howes?

  Is there a better approach to say, you know what, I drink every night, two glasses, maybe I'll just start with cutting back to one glass a night? Or is it better to, you think it's more effective to cut out cold turkey? Which one's the way to go? Whether I'm talking about drinking, smoking, whatever it may be?

• 37:40Jack Canfield?

  Two aspects to that. Number one, if you're drinking a lot, you quit cold turkey, you could have seizures. So you should see a doctor. If you're the kind of guy that's drinking like, you know, 12 beers a night.

• 37:50Lewis Howes?

  Getting drunk every night.

• 37:51Jack Canfield?

  Yeah, every night. There is a possibility of, of, of DTs, delirious tremens. So you want to check with your doctor, do a blood test. We tell people that in the first chapter.

• 37:59Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 38:00Jack Canfield?

  If you're a casual drinker, a couple of drinks a night, we think you could just stop. And we encourage you to do that. Uh, when I do my Breakthrough to Success training, which is a seven day training, I tell people, you're not going to drink for seven days. I want you sober here every morning. You're paying way too much money to come in with a hangover. And if you can't show up and do that, you got a drinking problem, you know? So it, it's better to stop. And we tell people in this program, we give you a week to stop. And, but we don't want you doing this program while you're drinking, because you won't get the value out of it. At the end of 30 days, you can assess whether you want to start to try to casually throw another, you know, maybe drink once. And we, we find five to 10% of the people that go through this program can quit. But those, those were the people in the beta test who are serious alcoholics.

• 38:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:46Jack Canfield?

  So we haven't tested it yet with people that are just drinking a couple of drinks a night and want to cut back. With that, it might be 20 to 30% could cut back. According to the statistics, only one out of nine. Um, nine out of 10 excessive drinkers can actually cut back. Only one can't. So it could be that cutting back is a possibility, but we want you to do the program sober. And then at the end, if you feel like you want to introduce drinking again, try it. But if you do it the first two times, you get drunk again, you're not a candidate for that.

• 39:16Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And what's the difference between thriving in sobriety and just staying sober?

• 39:22Jack Canfield?

  Let me just say one more thing about, because we talked about different addictions. Um, there was a Harvard psychology professor, William James, famous psychologist, who said, when you're trying to change a behavior, uh, it's best if you can go cold turkey. Like, you know, you're going to stop smoking, stop drinking, whatever. Um, or you're starting a new habit, you know? Make a public declaration. So now everyone around you says, hey, wait, you said you were stopping drinking. You weren't going to eat sugar anymore. You said you were going to exercise and you're not. You're just sitting here being a lounge lizard, you know, whatever. So, and then have an accountability partner. So on our website, because you mentioned earlier about support, we have a forum. We have over a thousand people in that forum right now chatting with each other every day, talking about day nine, what comes up for them and how they're dealing with it.

• 40:06Jack Canfield?

  And the support is there. Plus, we have a psychologist who goes in every week and responds to questions for people. Um, and Dave's wife actually is a psychologist.

• 40:15Lewis Howes?

  Nice.

• 40:16Jack Canfield?

  Uh, and I go in and comment and give people support and encouragement and answer questions. And, um, it's, it's really important not to try to do this alone. So we would say if there's someone else you can do it with, great. If you want to do it alone because of the shame factor and you want to hide it, that's great. But if you can find a buddy, and when we're doing a 30 day sobriety solution for, or a 30 day sobriety challenge for normal folks who are not excessive drinkers, partner up. We have one woman who is the, um, the graphic designer for the book and things. And she said, well, I was reading the book, deciding what the graphic design should look like. And I decided I was going to start a book club on this. And so I got twelve women, we're all not drinking, we're up to twenty five now. We were gonna do it for a month, now we decided we're gonna do it for a whole year.

• 41:00Jack Canfield?

  Because I realized wine time was about five, when the kids were driving me crazy, they'd have my two glasses of wine. But then I was like, kinda not really there for them and my husband for dinner, I didn't really wanna cook. So now what I do, I go down in the basement, she had a little bit, it's a fitness instructor and a yoga teacher. So I go down and I work out for an hour. I'm spending more time with the kids, I feel better, I'm writing a book. You know, she's like, doing all this stuff now. And so she's got twenty five people, all in a support group, supporting her. Without some of the negative overlay of AA, where you feel like you have to go in and tell your drunk, we call it your drunk-a-log. You know, people go and tell about the terrible, how they got drunk and lost their job and stuff like that. But it's much more a positive kind of approach.

• 41:41Lewis Howes?

  If someone's got an addiction and they know they have it, they've acknowledged it, whether it's drinking, smoking, sex, something, workaholic, whatever it may be. Even fitness addiction, you know, there's people that work out all day.

• 41:51Jack Canfield?

  Yeah, we have people addicted to plastic surgery.

• 41:53Lewis Howes?

  Of course, yeah, there's all sorts of addiction. When we realize, okay, there's an addiction that I have that I wanna end, and I want to move on to something more positive in my life. And I'm sure you probably have this in here, but is there a process you think that everyone should follow in the morning? To get them ready for the day, and at night to get them ready for day, specifically focusing in on that addiction? Is there?

• 42:16Jack Canfield?

  Yeah, you wanna, you wanna get up in the morning and you wanna visualize going through the day with not doing the addiction. Okay, there's something in the, we call it the evening review at the end of the day, where you close your eyes and you say, where could have I been more on purpose, or more on focus for this commitment I have? Oh, you know, you did that thing, you did that thing, you did that thing. And so, you're just checking in, checking in, checking in. You wanna program your day, schedule your day, what are your activities gonna be? The problem is, see if something shows up at five o'clock and I'm bored, and I don't have anything to do. I'm in trouble. And there's this thing called decision fatigue. And there's also something called compassion fatigue. It started, they first learned this where they were doing federal, uh, in prisons where they're doing parole boards.

• 43:01Jack Canfield?

  In the morning, seventy percent of the people who were up for parole got paroled. In the afternoon, it was like anywhere between ten and thirty percent, depending on the prison. People got tired of making decisions. They just, oh, screw it, not getting out. Wow. And so what happens is as the day goes on, your willpower wanes. Willpower is like a meter. And so in the morning, if you're gonna do an exercise, if you're adding exercise into your day, do it first thing in the morning. Yeah. You know, we put your shoes and your running shoes, you have to trip over them before you go into the bathroom. And if you have a partner. Wear your shorts, your workout shorts to bed. To bed, there you go, there you go. And so, and then having that accountability partner, someone else you're doing it with, that you're, you're, you know, you can have it. Like, you could be my accountability partner for this. I call you every day, say, okay, here's what I'm gonna do today.

• 43:44Jack Canfield?

  This is my rule, at five o'clock, I'm gonna do this exercise. Or I'm gonna go do a solution in a book, or I'm gonna play my guitar for an hour. Whatever it is. And we give people a hundred and one alternative activities that bring joy into your life, other than drinking, in one of the chapters. So you can pick one every day and do it, or you pick one and stay with the same thing every day. And then, I mean, one of my favorite ones is listening to comedy albums. I mean, there's so many great comedians now. Yeah, amazing. Go to iTunes and download a comedy album. Yeah, yeah. Just laugh. And laughter secretes endorphins in the brain. Endorphins are natural opiate. You don't need to drink if you're laughing. You know, um, and so laughter is, is really important. So laughing is great. And you can do laughter yoga. Have you heard of laughter yoga? No. Laughter yoga is really cool. It was developed by a doctor in India.

• 44:28Jack Canfield?

  And he gets people, like, and I teach it in my seminars now in the morning, it's like a little warm-up exercise. And you just start laughing.

• 44:36Jack Canfield?

  See how you start to laugh right along with me? And then you do these stupid things, like milkshake laughter. You go like, you pretend you're making a milkshake, you go, mm, mm. And then instead of drinking it, you just throw it on the other person, and you go. And they're throwing theirs on you. Stupid stuff.

• 44:52Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 44:52Jack Canfield?

  But now you got fifty, sixty people all laughing together. But I can wake up in the morning and just laugh, or I can listen to a comedy thing in the morning and laugh. Uh, the other thing is you want to do a gratitude exercise. One of the things we found, and we were kinda surprised by it, we knew it was important, law of attraction, all that. But one of the top things when we asked people, what was the most important in the book? Gratitude. People, basically, a lot of them drink because they think their life sucks. But when you really start realizing that half the world lives on two dollars a day, your life doesn't suck that bad.

• 45:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 45:22Jack Canfield?

  You know, and we have, look at all the technology that you have in this office here, and the people that are supporting you, and the fact that someone made this table, and someone printed that book, and Steve Jobs gave you the computer, you got there, and it works really well, and you can communicate with people in Singapore. And you could just literally go around the room for five minutes and just appreciate everything, you know, gets you blissed out.

• 45:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 45:42Jack Canfield?

  So that's a really good thing to do in the morning as well.

• 45:44Lewis Howes?

  I love that. And, um...

• 45:45Jack Canfield?

  Oh, and meditation and breathing.

• 45:47Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm. Difficult breathing, when someone's feeling the overwhelm, and they're like,

• 45:52Jack Canfield?

  Yeah.

• 45:52Lewis Howes?

  "I really wanna drink this right now, or I really wanna eat this," or whatever it is.

• 45:55Jack Canfield?

  There's a tech, well, do the cravings, do the tapping, but, uh, Andrew Weil, do you know Andrew Weil?

• 46:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 46:01Jack Canfield?

  Andrew Weil is one of the greatest, uh, integrative medicine doctors, because his big white beard, and, uh, I've met him a couple of times. Anyway, he teaches this thing, it's called, uh, four, seven, eight breathing. And what you do is you start by exhale and you go,

• 46:15Jack Canfield?

  get all the air out, then through your nose, you inhale to the count four.

• 46:21Jack Canfield?

  And then you hold for the count of seven.

• 46:27Jack Canfield?

  And then very slowly through the mouth, exhale for the count of eight.

• 46:36Jack Canfield?

  You do four of those. I just did one, I already feel...

• 46:39Lewis Howes?

  Feel more relaxed.

• 46:40Jack Canfield?

  Yeah, more relaxed, and a little more energized, that kinda like funny feeling in the head.

• 46:44Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 46:44Jack Canfield?

  So you do four of those,

• 46:45Lewis Howes?

  Uh-huh.

• 46:46Jack Canfield?

  And it calms you out. So, again, why do people drink? Well, I'm gonna have a difficult meeting, you know? Or I had a little stress at work today, or I'm gonna go home and my wife's gonna be on my case because I forgot to clean the garage, whatever. Just do that breathing, sitting in the car before you get out, or before you walk in a meeting, or before the person comes in the door.

• 47:03Lewis Howes?

  There's a great quote, I can't, I'm gonna butcher it, but it's something like, "Master the art of breathing and you have the strength of ten lions or ten tigers," or something like that.

• 47:10Jack Canfield?

  Yeah, I've heard something like that, yeah.

• 47:11Lewis Howes?

  You know, I feel like, you know, we focus, it's interesting, someone else said recently, I think on the podcast, you know, we can go however many weeks without food, however many days without water, but we can only go a few minutes without breathing. And yet, we don't focus enough of our attention on breathing and mastering breathing. We just.

• 47:30Jack Canfield?

  It's true.

• 47:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, we're just gonna breathe.

• 47:32Jack Canfield?

  Well, Fritz Perls, who invented the Gestalt therapy, one of the great breakthroughs in therapy, said that anxiety is simply excitement without enough breath. In other words, you know, I'm about to go give a speech, that's exciting, but if I start holding my breath, and we always say, "Don't hold your breath," you know, we say, "Just breathe, take a breath, take a deep breath." We've known this forever, take a deep breath, right? Calms us down. It's one of the reasons people smoke. When you smoke, you irritate the avioli in the lungs, which requires you to then go

• 48:02Jack Canfield?

  and breathe deeper. And that, the nicotine certainly helps, but the other thing that's helping is the deep breathing. And so, basically, you know, you look at any athlete, before they do like a hundred-yard dash, they'll do some

• 48:16Jack Canfield?

  almost like a deep yogic, Kundalini yoga breath, breathing to build up a store of oxygen, and then they'll dive into the pool or whatever. So, it's both energizing and relaxing at the same time. There are many breathing techniques, but we love this one by Andrew Wow.

• 48:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's good. So, for someone who, you know, who is this for, this book specifically? Is it for people that are only addicted to alcohol? Is it people who have friends who are addicted? Or if you're not addicted to alcohol, but you have some other addictions, could they get this as well, and what would it apply to them?

• 48:43Jack Canfield?

  I, I think it's for, it's for anyone addicted to alcohol, for sure. A lot of people are buying this for their fathers, their mothers, their brothers, their children, their sister, their employees, or employer, or whatever, you know? But also, it's, it's for any, any, any addiction. I mean, we don't talk about other addictions. We say in the Benneken, "It will apply, but we're just gonna use alcohol over and over." But the other thing it's for is the social drinker who wants to just get a little more energy. This is the fast track to success. In other words, most people, like you in college, you said, "I want to get the most out of these four years, I'm not gonna drink." You know, and I know when I'm running a training, I never drink.

• 49:19Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 49:19Jack Canfield?

  When I'm like, I never drink thirty six hours before doing something like this, or if I'm gonna go on TV. Why? Because alcohol stays in your system for thirty six hours before it's totally flushed out. And if you drink consistently, it stays for longer than that because it gets stored in the fat cells. One of the things fat cells do is store toxins that the liver can't process fast enough. It's like putting things in banker's boxes. And then when you stop drinking, it goes, oh, now we have time to run those banker's boxes through the shredding machine.

• 49:44Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 49:44Jack Canfield?

  And detox. So it's for anyone who wants to get healthier, lose weight, ultimately be sexier. Because I will tell you, if you're a woman and some guy comes, hey, baby, you wanna come home with me? That is not sexy. You think you're sexy.

• 49:57Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 49:58Jack Canfield?

  But you're not. We have a little poster that we found that's in the book. It says, it says, Dear Wine, you were supposed to, it says, we need to talk. It says, you were supposed to make me sexier, funnier, a better dancer. I saw the video. We need to talk.

• 50:14Lewis Howes?

  I like that. That's funny.

• 50:15Jack Canfield?

  Yeah.

• 50:15Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so make sure you guys go get this book and get it anywhere books are sold. You can also go to jackcanfield.com. I think you can opt in to get some extra video training you have on this as well.

• 50:25Jack Canfield?

  There are also, there's a number of free bonuses you can get, yeah.

• 50:27Lewis Howes?

  At jackcanfield.com. Final few questions for you. Not necessarily related to the book, but what I ask everyone at the end of my interviews, I'm not sure if I asked you last time. So we'll see if the answers change. First one is, what are you most grateful for in your life recently?

• 50:43Jack Canfield?

  Recently, I'm most grateful that my wife has had a major internal shift in her consciousness. She was very judgmental for a long time of how much time I worked and spent on the road doing what I do because I'm passionate about it. And she's working with this Buddhist meditation teacher. And through these practices she's doing called prostrations, where every morning she goes down and then goes out like this and then comes back and surrenders her life, you know, to Buddha. You could surrender your life to Christ, but just a higher power. And she has to do 111,000 of these in a year. And she's up to like 22,000 of them. She does like a couple hundred a day. And all of a sudden, she's now become this total support system for me. She's like, get what you're about. I love you. I love the life you've created for me and our family.

• 51:28Jack Canfield?

  And I want you to be successful. And so that has just stopped. And that is like a huge gift in my life. So.

• 51:34Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's awesome. Congrats. That's a lot to be grateful for. I love that. Let's say in many, many years, it's your last day and it's a very happy, healthy, joyful experience. All your friends and family are there, but for whatever reason, the 100 New York Times bestsellers you have by then have been erased. All the work you've created is gone. All the videos, audios, everything. And they say, we have nothing else to remember you by, except for this piece of paper and pen. And we want you to write down the three things that you know to be true about everything you've learned. The three truths, this is going to be the thing that you leave us behind that we're going to remember and apply to our lives forever. We can't read anything else of yours.

• 52:14Jack Canfield?

  Right.

• 52:15Lewis Howes?

  What would be the three truths for you?

• 52:18Jack Canfield?

  Choose love, not fear. Anytime you're afraid, just what would the loving action be? For myself, for other people, for the animal kingdom and for the planet. What would the loving action be? Have more fun. It's, you know, it should be enjoying the ride. Joy is your feedback system at your own course. So have more fun, have more joy. If you're not having joy, take a deep breath and figure out where the joy would be and go for it. And the third one would be really appreciate, well, of everything, but certainly appreciate the people in your life more, you know, express that and be grateful for what you have.

• 52:57Lewis Howes?

  I love that. That's great. Thanks. Before I ask the final question, I want to acknowledge you, Jack, and I think I did this last time, but I want to acknowledge you again for your consistent commitment to serving the world. I know you're out there, you're passionate about what you're doing, you're training people in a lot of different topics without overcoming addiction, but also teaching people to become the best version they can be, teaching people to be trainers. You have a lot of different programs and classes going on, and I'm just so inspired. By your commitment to, you know, continually doing the work.

• 53:29Jack Canfield?

  Thank you.

• 53:30Lewis Howes?

  You've done so much, but you continually use yourself as a channel to serve so many people. And I want to acknowledge you for the incredible gift that you are to the world.

• 53:39Jack Canfield?

  Thank you. I appreciate that.

• 53:40Lewis Howes?

  You're welcome.

• 53:41Jack Canfield?

  And I will say back to you the same thing. You're doing it for your generation in a way that's beautiful. So I feel we're kinship, we're brothers.

• 53:50Lewis Howes?

  Yes, I appreciate it. Thanks. And the final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

• 53:55Jack Canfield?

  Wow. You know, for me, when I hear the word greatness, I think of somebody or a team of people who are committed to excellence, who are committed to fulfilling some higher purpose that makes a difference in the world. And it doesn't have to be building schools in Africa. It could be being the best football player so we all can watch the Super Bowl and really enjoy it, you know? Or it could be the best helmet maker so fewer concussions happen out on the field. But someone who is committed to really being everything they can be, to, you know, as Bertrand Russell said, you know, getting to the end of their life and there's not one little bit of wax left in the candle, that they have been fully used up and burned up in the service of some higher ideal.

• 54:36Lewis Howes?

  Jack Cantfield, thanks for going on. Appreciate it.

• 54:38Jack Canfield?

  My pleasure, Lewis. Thanks for having me.

• 54:42Lewis Howes?

  There you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please share it with your friends. LewisHowes.com/296. Go ahead and share that out. And also leave a comment on the blog back at that link. Let me know what you thought about this, if you found it valuable, and maybe the most interesting thing you heard today in this episode. Go ahead and leave a comment there. Also, make sure to check out all of Jack's stuff, his book and everything else. It's all back on the show notes. And I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. We've got some incredible guests coming up. Each and every week, we've got some great people coming on. I'm so pumped for you to get more inspiring people in front of your ears so you can listen to what they have to say. And I do my best every single day to improve my skills,

• 55:27Lewis Howes?

  to become the best interviewer I can possibly be, to get the information out of the people I bring on that they don't share. Anywhere else. It's my goal to get them to open up in ways that they would never open up on any other interview, or even in person. So hopefully you guys acknowledge that and can see and recognize that I'm gonna continue to give you my best and make you better in the process. I love you guys. I hope you enjoyed this. You know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.