Focus Your Mind So You Will Never Be Lazy [MASTERCLASS] EP 1370

Today’s Masterclass episode is all about how you can destroy laziness and improve your ability to focus. Four experts share their tips and strategies for how you can increase your level of productivity and find more fulfillment in your life. In this episode,Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology at Stanford, teaches about the double-edged sword of dopamine and how it plays a role in our ability to focus. Greg McKeown, best-selling author, and host of the podcast, What’s Essential, explains why the secret hack to productivity starts with forgiveness. Rich Diviney, former Navy Seal Commander and author, elaborates on the difference between discipline and self-discipline and how to achieve both. Joe Dispenza, an international speaker, researcher, and author, shares how rewriting the story of your past can heal your body and transform your mind. For more, go to lewishowes.com/1370Full Episodes:Andrew Huberman: https://link.chtbl.com/1204-podGreg McKeown: https://link.chtbl.com/1102-podRich Diviney: https://link.chtbl.com/1058-podJoe Dispenza: https://link.chtbl.com/826-pod 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You have to be very judicious in your interactions with things that deliver pleasure. So the key is to take this dopamine system and set it up for you to be able to be motivated and focused. And the way to do that is

• 0:14Lewis 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.

• 0:38Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to this special masterclass. We brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful. So let's go ahead and dive in.

• 0:56Lewis Howes?

  You mentioned dopamine a little bit. Can you talk about dopamine focus and motivation? And how to manage our dopamine hits? Because it seems like every 30 seconds, we're getting dopamine now, whether it's drinking coffee, having candy, social media, email pings, dings on the watches, whatever it is, it's a dopamine overload, it feels like.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:17Lewis Howes?

  So how do we stay motivated and manage dopamine at the same time?

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, great question. Dopamine is the molecule of motivation.

• 1:26Lewis Howes?

  The molecule of motivation.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I mean, for years and years, people thought dopamine was about pleasure, but dopamine is mainly about craving and motivation and drive.

• 1:36Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  There's a simple experiment that illustrates that. But I would be remiss if I didn't first mention two excellent resources for people that want to learn a lot about dopamine. These would be perhaps interesting people for you to talk to directly. The first is a book called The Molecule of More, which is all about dopamine. The author is Lieberman. I don't know him personally, but I love the book. I wish I had written it. The second is Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. And the author there is Anna Lemke, L E M K E. She's a medical doctor and psychiatrist and runs the Dual Diagnosis Addiction Clinic at Stanford School of Medicine. She's a colleague. I consider her a friend, and she is world-class,

• 2:20Speaker 00

  second to none in all things dopamine as it relates to addiction. So wonderful reads.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  And so a lot of what I'm going to talk about is kind of paraphrasing elements from their book. So I want to be clear. So here's the experiment. Take two rats. Yeah. You give them a lever, they can press and they can get food out of that lever. They can get heat if their cage is cold. They can get all sorts of things that are great for a rat, including a mate to mate with if they press this lever. Both rats press the lever just fine. Now you take away dopamine from one of those rats. You can actually do that by using a toxin that can kill off all the dopamine neurons. Okay. There's an equivalent experiment that's been done in humans, but it was a naturally occurring death of these of these dopamine neurons.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Much in the same way that Parkinson's destroys dopamine neurons. What you find is that both rats or both people still experience pleasure from food, from sex, from warmth when they're cold, from cool when they're too warm, et cetera. However, if you take that rat, both rats, and you move them one rat length away from the lever. So they have to just do a little bit of work, little bit of work in order to press the lever. Or you take a human who has no dopamine neurons or very little dopamine and you make the pleasurable thing a little bit more challenging to get to. The ones with no dopamine do not pursue pleasure at all.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  That's just one example of what now are hundreds of examples in the neuroscience literature showing that dopamine is the molecule of pursuit, craving, motivation, drive. You know, pick your favorite word. Dopamine is a good thing in motivation. In provided it's in proper levels. Yes, that's right. If your dopamine is depleted, you will feel not motivated. Now there's a double edged sword here because many things, as you mentioned accurately, trigger dopamine release.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  Seeing positive comments, a compliment, food, the more palatable a food, a really tasty chip compared to a slice of a potato that's baked but doesn't have anything on it, one truly releases more dopamine than the other. I could list off a number of things, but we have a baseline level of dopamine. Nicotine, for instance, increases that by about 50%. Gives you more dopamine. More dopamine is released. You have two major dopamine pathways in the brain. There's one related to movement, one related to reward, broadly speaking. There are others, but broadly speaking, the so-called mesolimbic reward pathway. And then the other one, we don't have to throw out names, but then we'll just confuse people. But you have these reward pathways and dopamine is involved in movement.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  So nicotine, about a 50% increase. Cocaine, 100% increase, doubling. Methamphetamine, 1,000 or even, oh, thousand-fold increase. Holy cow. Huge increase in dopamine. That's why it's so addictive. So addictive, but what happens after that big dopamine increase is that the baseline levels of dopamine go below what they were before. How low that drop is below baseline is proportional to how big the increase was before. That's why it's so addictive to stay on these things. That's right. Well, and that's why if you're getting lots of little dopamine hits from things, as we call them, you're going to feel kind of depressed and those things don't feel as rewarding anymore.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Okay, now eventually the system can reset if you don't indulge. Let me give you an example. This is a true story example. Out of respect for the individual, I don't want to reveal his name, but in talking about dopamine, someone I know has a child. The kid is in his twenties. He was a decent student, excellent athlete, really charming, nice kid. I've known him since he was little. And he reached a point where his friends had graduated high school, he went to community college, and he kind of fizzed out of that. He wasn't into that. You know, this resonated with my earlier story. He was working a job, but then he wasn't feeling like working. And he was convinced he had ADHD and he was depressed. And he started taking off down the path of medication, which by the way have helped many, many people.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Most of the medications for ADHD, by the way, are Drugs that increase dopamine. Ah. Because dopamine increases focus, it increases motivation, and it increases drive essentially. The willingness to get into action in pursuit of goals, just like the rats that have dopamine or the humans that have dopamine pursue, the ones that have depleted dopamine do not. So this guy, who is a real story, was struggling in a major way. So about three months ago, he was watching a lot of videos online. He was texting a lot, he was mainly playing video games. Video games, video games, video games. But he wasn't really enjoying them as much anymore. And one thing you see with people with ADHD is they actually can focus if they're really interested in something. Right.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  Why? Because their dopamine levels are elevated and they're able to focus. He heard about the dopamine system and Anna's work, and I talked to him, and he decided to do what some people call it dopamine fast. But for him, that meant no video games, and he did two weeks of no screens, which at first, I think, was agonizing for him. Oh, my gosh. It's now three months later. It's a little less than three months later. I actually talked to his parent today. Working full-time, off all ADHD meds. Hmm. Has a girlfriend. I don't know if that's related or not, probably because he's got his life together a little bit more, which is an attractive future as opposed to someone who's spiraling out, doing nothing, living at home, which frankly is an unattractive future,

• 8:02Speaker 00

  regardless of boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. Yeah. He's very focused on his work. He's excited by things, and he allows himself a short period of time each day where he plays video games, and he enjoys them again like never before. Hmm. There is a simple explanation for this, which is that his dopamine system is reset. He's, when you're constantly pursuing things, eating highly palatable foods, engaging in very stimulating anything, any behavior that's very stimulating, there's a drop below baseline, and it takes an increasingly great stimulus, high-threshold stimulus in order to excite you. So if people are feeling bored, unmotivated... Unstimulated, most of the time, it's because they are over indulging in things that keep pounding

• 8:45Speaker 00

  this dopamine system, but the baseline of dopamine is going down, down, down, down, down. Now, there are a few hacks that can actually help, and Anna talks about some of these in her book. The main thing is to, if you are, if someone is engaging in any truly addictive behavior or substance, or a behavior that just doesn't feel like it's that great, but you're finding yourself doing it compulsively. Like, wow, what are some examples? Texting, Instagram. I limit my Instagram time to two hours per day, which itself just sounds like a lot. I'm a grown adult. But that's where you're... But I do a lot of work there, right? I'm trying to put out content that's educational. You're creating. But sometimes I think to myself, like, I'm a grown man. I'm spending two hours a day on Instagram. Well, that's a lot of where we spend our time now.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  But if you allow yourself four hours a day on social media, you'll probably find that it's, you're scrolling, you're not even sure what you're looking for. Like, what am I doing? Exactly. I just wasted this time. Exactly. And what you're looking for is something to jolt that baseline. So you want to limit those behaviors, or in some cases, if it gets really severe, like it was for this individual, you want to eliminate. Completely, for thirty, sixty days. Ideally, it's thirty days. Now, this is the same prescriptive that they give alcoholics, heroin addicts, et cetera, that, but some of those drugs, of course, have actual withdrawal symptoms that can be problematic. You know, these days, I'm not a pot smoker. I've never, I've never liked drugs or alcohol. I kind of lucked out that way. But, you know, there's,

• 10:09Speaker 00

  and I'm not trying to demonize, I'm not passing judgment, but, you know, cannabis, for instance, is pretty prominent use, and a lot, and a lot of people, the idea of thirty days without that is, I think, they probably say they could do it, but it would be very challenging for them. But, and I'm not here to tell people what to do, right? Then there's about drugs, alcohol, or anything, but the idea is thirty days of no interaction with that thing, person, behavior, I mean, all sorts of things, so that you can enjoy other things. I like to say, you know, addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure, and, if I may, enlightenment is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. Right.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  All of that hinges on this dopamine system. So you have to be very judicious in your interactions with things that deliver pleasure, or else they will soon not deliver pleasure, and they will diminish your pleasure for everything else that you interact with. So the way to think about this is just to set up constraints. And as I'm stealing Anna's words left and right, forgive me Anna. She has many more important things to say and she says them much more eloquently than I. But she says, you know, we don't give our kids chocolate cake for breakfast. But we, we sort of understand that dessert comes at a certain time of day. And after completing certain things. But we, for some reason, we just allow ourselves to just dive into this immense dopamine sensory landscape of social media.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Because social media isn't just comments. You and me say, oh, like Louis put something up. There's that, that stuff's great. But then there's also a lot of violent stuff, politically intense stuff. There's a lot of friction, there's a lot of joy. I mean, you're essentially going to the dopamine carnival. And, and so you need to restrict the amount of time. And especially if you're somebody who wants to get work done and your work is not the, you know, social media. And I'm pointing at social media, but this could be anything. Anything that you enjoy. Food, for instance, you don't want to overindulge in highly palatable foods. It's just bad for us, we know this for a number of reasons. So the key is to take this dopamine system and set it up for you to be able to be motivated and focused.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  And the way to do that is to make the experiences around that thing that you want to be motivated to do. A little less or a lot less exciting. What do you mean? This is why I don't listen to music these days or check text messages while I'm in the gym. And sometimes I'll listen to a book or a podcast, but I really try and just be, just work out, including while I'm running. Why? Because these days we are layering in dopamine. We're getting dopamine from the energy drink we're drinking. Okay, big increase in dopamine. I forget the actual numbers, but I think it's 1.8 times increase. And some of them have L-tyrosine, which is a dopamine precursor. Some of them have caffeine, which also increases dopamine and upregulates dopamine receptors. So you're getting it from the energy drink.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  Plus, it's the video game you're playing. Plus, you're with your friends. It's just a dopamine soup, which sounds great. Except that other things that you do afterwards are going to seem understimulating. And you're going to think, I can't focus on this. So I also kind of wonder whether or not you were having trouble focusing in your class. Because the Canelo fight was that awesome. It was insane. It was, yeah, he's amazing. He's amazing. I'm a, I am a boxing fan. It was crazy. And he, if you had to like build a boxer, you'd build him like that. Just his head, his shape, the, yeah, the right hook. And it was just like.

• 13:37Lewis Howes?

  The roar of the crowd and just the energy was amazing.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's great. There's a, there's a beautiful story unfolding there with, with him. But so that could be it too. You know, there's a kind of a letdown. And so I think it's, it may be helpful for people to understand that the postpartum depression that people feel after a big celebration.

• 13:56Lewis Howes?

  It's real.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  That's real. And if you just wait a little while, that system will reset. You don't have to necessarily wait 30 days, but if you just had a great party, you should expect that there'll be a long tail of joy, but then you might feel a little low, a little underwhelmed.

• 14:10Lewis Howes?

  So true, man.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  And if you're gonna sit down and try and do work and you're finding yourself not that focused, you might want to think about some of the behaviors that led up to that work. So I really try to get into my work in a focused way by making the, the period right before. It's a little boring, frankly, going outside, getting some sunlight, drinking my mate. It sounds like a pretty boring life, right? It's not like blasting a bunch of music and getting really amped up. But I'm able to get a nice peek of dopamine during that work bout. And I think that's a functional dopamine increase. And then afterwards, yes, indeed, there's a drop. Now, there's some other hacks that Anna talked about. And again, we can look to our friend Wim Hof. Other people have done this, although this was happening long before Wim.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  There's a beautiful study published in the European Journal of Physiology showing that getting into cold water. So this could be cold shower, could be ice bath, could be any number of different plunge type things or an ocean or whatever that people want to use for anywhere from three to six minutes. Creates a 2.5x increase in dopamine that lasts many hours. So it's a unique stimulus because it's not like a spike and then it drops. It's like a long arc, increasing your baseline dopamine increases alertness, feelings of well-being. Some, they did blood draws in this study. So these are real data, you know, they weren't, it wasn't conjecture. They really know this. And there are some cases of people who were full-blown addicts

• 15:35Speaker 00

  or people who are struggling with ADHD, who'd start doing regular cold water exposure, you know, three to six times a week, three to six minutes at a time, and discover that, wow, they actually can focus because they're getting that dopamine increase.

• 15:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. This stuff is fascinating, man. It's really interesting to me because dopamine, you know, coming up in neuroscience, I've been in the game a long time now, almost, you know, gosh, almost thirty years. But dopamine was always thought of as like pleasure. But it's confusing because it's associated with pleasure, but it's not the actual experience of pleasure. And immediately after sex, immediately after any powerful experience that's very pleasurable, dopamine system crashes down. What happens in the body when dopamine crashes? Well, there's an interesting thing that happens because there's a hormone called

• 16:27Speaker 00

  prolactin, which is actually involved in milk letdown for nursing, but is also increased in both men and women in anticipation of childbirth. This is actually responsible for the so-called dad bod. Prolactin lays down body fat stores, tends to make people a little more sedentary, and this has been shown in humans and in animals. It tends to reduce libido and sex drive. And so if you think about, dopamine is a currency of motivation that biology has used for hundreds of thousands of years. So, you know, whether or not, you know, we think about currencies like dollars or euros or bitcoins or ethereum, all of those actually relate to dopamine.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  Dopamine is the fundamental currency that we're all working for. And dopamine has this quality of making us focused on things outside our immediate experience. This is why people are on cocaine or methamphetamine, which is a really extreme version of dopamine increase. They tend to be all about plans and action. They're not sitting there thinking about how wonderful they feel in their own body. Whereas drugs like cannabis and psilocybin and drugs, these are not drugs I recommend people use recreationally. I'm not passing judgment, but I just want to be clear about what I'm saying and not saying, that any drugs that increase serotonin tend to make people kind of still focused on their internal landscape, their thinking, it's kind of an internal reflection thing.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  So the serotonin system and the dopamine system are kind of antagonistic to one another. And the prolactin system is associated with the serotonin system. So prolactin is kind of about, it's a mellowing out. Interesting. And just to nail the point, there are many people in the world who suffer from schizophrenia, one percent of the world's population, a huge number. A very sad thing, psychosis, hearing things, et cetera. And most of the drugs designed to treat schizophrenic psychosis are drugs that reduce dopamine. And oftentimes you'll see people on the street who are taking these drugs, and they'll be writhing like this with their face. Sometimes men will have gynecomastia, they'll have breast development,

• 18:35Speaker 00

  because these drugs block dopamine, increase prolactin, and disrupt the motor pathways that are associated with movement.

• 18:41Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  I say this for two reasons. One is it illustrates the relationship between prolactin, dopamine, movement, et cetera. But the other is to hopefully invoke a little bit of empathy for people that oftentimes we will see people who, if they're shouting and acting crazy, that's probably an unmedicated person, who's bipolar or has schizophrenia. But if you see someone in their catatonic, or they are writhing and acting very strange, that's a person who's, we don't know for sure, but very likely is actively trying to treat their own psychosis, to eliminate the voices and things of that sort. So I say that because, you know, we have a big homeless population issue in California and elsewhere too. And oftentimes we see people acting crazy and we think, oh, they're, you know,

• 19:25Speaker 00

  we make this disparaging judgment, and everyone's prone to doing it, of course, but they're crazy. But oftentimes that, those crazy movements and the things they're doing are the reflection of drugs that block the dopamine system.

• 19:35Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I don't mean to make it dark, but I think that there is a, you know, 1% of the world's population is a huge number, and a lot of people suffering from these things.

• 19:48Lewis Howes?

  Is there a way to create effortlessness when you also need to work hard and be diligent in your practice and all these things? Or do we not have to work hard and it can be effortless in accomplishing what we want?

• 20:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, look, I mean, to me, essentialism is about, was about rethinking prioritization. What really matters? And figuring out what is essential.

• 20:15Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Effortless is a cousin to that, and that's about rethinking simplification.

• 20:22Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Which is that sometimes we just make getting great results, breaking through to the next level, harder than it needs to be.

• 20:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  So it's not saying, hey, you should never work and you should never work hard and should never put an effort. I, I believe that you're supposed to put in effort. The point is if you can't work any harder, you've got to find an easier path. And yet in a grind culture, sometimes people start to get burned out and their answer is push even harder rather than think different, think smarter, find an alternative route.

• 20:52Lewis Howes?

  Rather than take pause, re- reflect, have a better strategy. It's more just go hard, hard, hard, more, spend more time, more hours on the thing.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:01Lewis Howes?

  As opposed to reevaluate simplification.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:04Lewis Howes?

  How can we, how can we do it uh more effortlessly in a simplified version, not just hard push, push, push?

• 21:11Speaker 02

  One of the things I think we can do is, is just, well, the, the, the book structure, the model is to have an effortless state, like three concentric circles, effortless state, effortless action, and effortless results.

• 21:24Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  And that's sort of like three books in one. Each of them can make your life uh and the results you get easier to get. You want to first remove all the complexity in your mind, in your heart, that makes life more frustrating than it ought to be. Just talking with Tim Ferriss and I asked him a question about this. I said, look, how much of your mental and emotional energy have you given on stuff that, you know, holding grudges, being angry, stuff that just got in the way of your success? And he said, look, from age fifteen to thirty, he said probably sixty to seventy percent of my energy was spent on that.

• 22:02Lewis Howes?

  On?

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Angry.

• 22:04Lewis Howes?

  Angry? At what? Himself, other people?

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Other people.

• 22:08Lewis Howes?

  The world, anything?

• 22:10Speaker 02

  And awful things that happened to him that he was angry about from when he was young. He's talked about this publicly now, um of, of abuse that he'd been through and so on. But either way, he's making, his life is more burdened than it needs to be because he's spending so much of his cycles on this stuff that isn't actually propelling him forward or helping him achieve.

• 22:31Lewis Howes?

  His thought process, his energy on those things, right?

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:34Lewis Howes?

  Spending a lot of that time.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  That's right. Just you, you, just your mindset, what you're, what you're processing, how you're feeling is just burdened.

• 22:42Lewis Howes?

  Burn and energy.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  Burning energy instead of getting you going forward.

• 22:47Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  And so simplifying your state, I think, is a is a huge return on investment. If you can let go of a grudge, if you can let go of something that you keep on, you know, draining you, then you have, there's just more of you on offer. And that's not through grinding effort, that's through just removing burdens. You don't have to be hauling up the mountain at all.

• 23:12Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  You know, the number two area is effortless action.

• 23:16Lewis Howes?

  That's effortless state, the first.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  First one, effortless state. So you're simplifying all of your, you're basically all of that clutter that's in your mind.

• 23:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  So it makes it easier to focus on what matters.

• 23:27Lewis Howes?

  Before we get to the second, the second ring, how do people learn to let go of grudges?

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:33Lewis Howes?

  How do they let go of resentment, anger, frustration about others and about the things they've done? And that's really hard to do. You see my, it's a simple, I just let go of, just get clear minds. But, uh, you know, people have been trying to figure that out for a long time.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:49Lewis Howes?

  So how do we, how did you learn how to do that?

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Well, well, one of the things that I've learned is that specifically on grudges is that we need to learn, like, we have to ask an unusual question about grudges. And that is, what did we hire the grudge to do?

• 24:05Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  As Clayton Christensen says, with any product or service that you have, you know, you don't, you don't, you don't, no one wants a six, you know, a six inch drill bit. What they want is a six inch hole, right?

• 24:19Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  You, you, you, there's a reason that you're hiring that product or service. Well, you can do the same with grudges. Every grudge we hold, we hold for a reason. We've hired the grudge to do something for us. Maybe we hire the grudge to make us feel powerful. See, I am, I am one up, I'm above that person. See, see, they did this bad thing, I'm holding on to that. See, I'll show that I'm superior. We hold on to it for a sense of superiority. Or maybe we hold on it because we like that we get to tell a story being a victim. And people go, oh, yes, we get sympathy for doing it. Well, we hire grudges to do certain jobs. And what I think is that if we simply evaluate grudges, like we say, how are you doing in your job performance for me?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Are you actually protecting me? Are you actually making me powerful? Are you actually getting people to build a stronger relationship with me? Or if you evaluate them, and in the book, there's a section specifically, one by one, you can do this. Where you say, well, you actually find, well, actually, it's not making me powerful. It makes me more vulnerable. It makes me vulnerable with everyone because I'm carrying this wound still and not letting it heal. Is it helping me to build relationships? No, if you pay attention, you notice that when you tell these stories, you kind of have to find new people to tell them to because people get bored of it.

• 25:42Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  And so you're not building deeper trust relationships. You're actually kind of wearing them out along the way. And you can go one by one to suddenly discover that this is like a bad employee. We have grudges like you've hired them to do this. They aren't doing any of those things. They're using you, grudges use you, they burn you up, they waste you out, they make you weaker. And so just through this process, you start to find like I'm ready to fire my grudges. Ready to be free of it so that I can actually recuperate whatever the percentage is. Sixty to seventy percent with ten. Maybe it's different for other people. Get all of that back. And we can start putting that into the stuff we really wanted to do in the first place.

• 26:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, can you imagine? There's been different stages of my life where I felt like ten out of ten. A positivity of freedom of my thoughts from holding grudges or resentments or angers. And you feel like you're flying. And there have been many years of my life, many years, too many years, where I've held on to resentment, anger, frustration, a lack of forgiving other people.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:50Lewis Howes?

  Where you feel like you're at a six or a seven, maybe you get to an eight for a moment, but then something triggers you and you're back into anger frustration mode. And that really pulls me back into feeling tired, exhausted, drained and burnt out. Typically, not from the effort I put into my craft, but in the effort I put into my mind, thinking about the things I don't like.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, you've just, you've basically made the case for why effortless state is the first part of the effortless model. That's it exactly.

• 27:22Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  You, you use, think of the language you used. You feel like you're flying.

• 27:25Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Is that not just another metaphor for effortless?

• 27:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  I mean, what, what would be more effortless than I'm flying? That's the idea. That's why, even though you would never think of forgiveness as a productivity hack.

• 27:37Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Like, maybe no one's ever written that. You know, the productivity hack you need is to forgive people in your life. And yet, what else can you call it? If you could get back that much energy, that much of your own light and ability and capability, it's the best rebate available. There's a story that I came across in the research that I love of a man who was productive in his community. And then one day, he, he, he saw what he thought was a piece of string on the ground, and it was a piece of string. He gets it. He's like, oh, I can put that to use. Puts it in his pocket. On that same day in the marketplace, someone else had lost a wallet and lost some money. And they thought that they had seen him pick up the wallet and take it. Accused of it publicly. There was no way for him to prove his innocence.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  And so the word went out, this person has acted dishonestly, dishonorably, and so on. Now, at this point in the story, he has a choice. He can't prove his innocence, but he could have, in this moment, let go of the accusation of the harsh judgment, and he would have suddenly had all that energy back to be able to get back on to, well, what can I do something about? How can I serve? How can I make a contribution? How can I be successful again? But he doesn't. He gets fixated on it. Everywhere he goes, he talks about it. He nurses the grudge. He explains, it's a piece of string. Don't you see it was wrong? A piece of string, a piece of string. People started laughing about this guy. All he ever wants to talk about is a piece of string.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  And it makes him ill. And on his deathbed, final words of the story, you know, "A little piece of string, a little piece of string." And this is how the story goes. Now, that is a fictionalized account, but it illustrates the point of where are you putting your mental energies? If we put him on grudges, if we put them on things that have happened, we wish they hadn't happened, or even on our own mistakes where we go, I wish I'd been different, we're beating ourselves up for past mistakes. We're just putting tons of effort onto things that will exhaust us and burn us out, instead of moving forward to the things that really matter.

• 29:40Lewis Howes?

  So would you say that the things in our minds will hold us back from an effortless state and getting the actions and the results we want is the things in our mind first?

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Yes, definitely. There's a little story about that where I was staring at myself, dressed head to toe in a stormtrooper costume.

• 29:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  And, I mean, I'm in a, you know, I'm in a store of Halloween, this is like, this is expensive suit, it's like a movie quality stormtrooper outfit. And as I'm staring back at myself in the mirror, like, should I buy this? I'm like, how am I even here? Like, why? For 30 years, without realizing it, I'd had this goal of buying a stormtrooper costume, yeah. So when I reflect on it, it goes back to like when Return of the Jedi comes out, and my older brother says, oh, wouldn't it be cool to have a movie quality suit, you know, wouldn't that be great? And I'm like this, you know, whatever, 10-year-old kid, just amazed by this, like, yes, that would be cool. Forget about it entirely, but here we are, 30 years later, still pursuing that goal.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  It's still a part of me has been working on achieving this. Well, no part of me wanted that costume. I'm like, why am I even, what am I even doing here? Let's get out of this. I don't want this costume. And it became like a shorthand. My wife will say to me now, like, if I'm pursuing something that she's like, I don't know, that has a certain vibe about it, she'll be like, is this a stormtrooper? And I think you can use that for goals that no longer serve you, but also for grudges that no longer serve you. Could be relationships that no longer serve you, could be any mental clutter, any assumptions that are simply like that they were true to a point, but they don't serve you now. And one of those, one of those stormtroopers, I think is the idea that any problem can

• 31:26Speaker 02

  be solved by working harder. That alone is a really limiting idea. It'll get you only to here, it won't get you to there. So it's a good principle as far as it goes. But then we need to invert that question. Instead of say, how can I work harder? We say, look, is there a more effortless way of doing this? And so as you rid your mind of this old paradigm, you open yourself up to a new option, a new question. And suddenly, I mean, I almost think it's almost like magic. There's so many cool options once you're free of the idea that anything worth doing has to be exhaustingly difficult.

• 32:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. What was the thought process that stuck in your mind the longest? That was the hardest to let go of? That when you let go of it, life became more effortless? Whether it be in your relationships or your career or whatever it might be?

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, one answer to that question is...

• 32:28Speaker 02

  Well, I'll give you one answer though, which is that the work, what's essential,

• 32:35Speaker 02

  needs to kind of be hard, drudgery. And then you've got separate to that play and fun. And that those two things are just two different categories.

• 32:44Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  They don't have to be, but we often divide them up. And so we, we, we just have the fun and the play separate. But what if they, what if the essential things can be the fun things? What if you can make the, the things that used to seem like drudgery into like fun rituals?

• 33:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, how do you make cleaning your laundry or mopping the floor or cleaning the toilet a fun, enjoyable experience?

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Or, which is a specific example in my family, cleaning up after dinner.

• 33:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  So we, we, we have pretty good rituals around the actual mealtime. Like we actually eat together. I've got four kids and my wife and I, we, we will do like, you know, uh, we'll do toasts for each other at the end of each day. And like what's gone right today? And we have some good rituals around this. But as soon as the dinner is over, uh, my, my kids are just like gone.

• 33:32Lewis Howes?

  They're like, see you on the phone.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Disappear, like they're like ninjas, man. They're just gone. It's like so silent and like, where did they all go? Then I have the unenviable task of like come back and pulling them all back. Where did you all go? And oh no, I've got homework on, it's hard to argue with that. Go to the bathroom, okay, that's hard to argue with. And it's just this cat and mouse game to get them back in. So I'm like, okay, how do we make it effortless? And so we, we, we divide up the chores. So everyone's got a certain part of it, right? Many hands make light work. And we trained them on each piece. And I'm like, okay, we're going to set this up. We wrote it all down on a piece of paper where everyone can see it. Okay, ready to start. What happens? Nothing.

• 34:10Lewis Howes?

  Chaos.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  It is back to the same. They're gone. The next day they have gone like ninjas again. And it wasn't until my eldest daughter, Grace, added just a particular kind of music to the occasion, that it became like karaoke. There was like classic Disney tracks. It was, I mean, she's a teenager. She's just turned eighteen now. But it's just like sing along stuff that you can't not sing to, all kinds of music. And it turned it into just like a little party. And even now, we'll start to do it. We'll have the same problems as soon as someone puts on the right music. You all do it, you play and, and, and it's like that now. In fact, I didn't think people would believe me, but the other day I wasn't even helping them. Music got put on, everyone's doing it. I grabbed like five seconds of video and put it on Instagram just to like prove like it really is like that now.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  So the idea is, one of the ideas that's hard to let go of is that, is that essential stuff has to be the drudgery, you know, the, the important stuff is just hard work. Some things are just hard. And then there's fun stuff and that's play over here. But what if you make it, what if you combine those? What if you make essential stuff enjoyable? Well, then it becomes relatively speaking effortless.

• 35:14Lewis Howes?

  And I would add into that and say, if you don't make the essential stuff enjoyable, then you will be burnt out.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:21Lewis Howes?

  Even if it starts out as like fun, like practice and sports. For me, there are many different sports that I played growing up. And some of them I burnt out on because it came, it started to become a job where it was only like, you got to show up to practice, you got to work hard. This is a business mentality now, and it kind of lost the idea of having fun.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:42Lewis Howes?

  When we're playing a game, but it's like the business of the game.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:46Lewis Howes?

  And

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:47Lewis Howes?

  You almost have to, so what could start out as really fun could turn into drudgery.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:53Lewis Howes?

  And what could be like this thing that I don't like could be this incredibly fun experience.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:59Lewis Howes?

  Based on the parameters you create for yourself. I was a truck driver for many months.

• 36:05Lewis Howes?

  I got paid $250 a week.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:07Lewis Howes?

  As a truck driver when I was about 22, 23 years old. And I remember being like, this is miserable. This was not fun. This was not, you know, it's essential to just pay like for food for the week.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:19Lewis Howes?

  It was not like the path of my life.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:22Lewis Howes?

  But it was a season of my life. And I remember saying, okay, I have an opportunity here. Like this is going to be happening for many months. I can either be in misery and pain for six hours a day driving a truck.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:33Lewis Howes?

  Or I can make the most of it. And I downloaded CD with salsa songs and I started it visualizing myself while watching the road, but visualizing myself salsa dancing. Cause I was learning how to salsa dance at that time.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 36:47Lewis Howes?

  And so I would imagine myself doing the moves and the dance and the steps and everything. And it made the time fly. It made it more enjoyable.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:55Lewis Howes?

  But also sing songs as well and just see like, okay, how can I make this fun? Even if people are looking at me like I'm crazy, singing along to myself. But that made it more enjoyable where it wasn't like, ah, I have to go to work and do this thing, but I had a great time and time flew.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  I love what you're saying and it really is sort of a lot of what I mean when I say effortless state.

• 37:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Is it like, which is, there's nothing so hard that complaining and whining about it won't make it harder.

• 37:22Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  So some things in life, once you decide I'm going to do this thing, I'm dealing with this. This is a responsibility that's important to me. I'm taking on. Now you just have to decide, do I want to do it the hard way or the easier way?

• 37:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly. What happens when we complain and why do we complain so much?

• 37:38Speaker 02

  You know, I searched at one point when I was doing this research for like, just what are the easiest things to do in the world? Like just off the cuff, like what are the answers? And I remember that one of the first answers that people really agreed on was complaining is the easiest thing to do.

• 37:50Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  So I thought that was very interesting and I took on a little exercise myself with this and I was like, okay. Well, that's not a great state to be in. A complaining state is going to limit my creativity. It's going to make it harder for me to achieve. It's going to be harder for me to attract good talent and all the rest of it. So I said, okay, every time I complain, I'm going to say something I'm grateful for. I read this in the book. I like this strategy. Well, Really good strategy. Well, I like that you like it. What I noticed about was that. It didn't work? Well, what I noticed, not that it didn't work, I realized that I complained a lot more than I realized. Right, I read that too. Is this? How much were you complaining a day when you started that strategy?

• 38:32Speaker 02

  I don't know if it says a number for it, but I just found I would walk into a room and I'd be complaining. I'd see my wife and, oh, how you doing? Well, you know, this thing was a bit of a drag, that meeting took longer than I thought. And I'm like, why are you saying this? It's not even how you feel about your life. There's so many good things happening, but for some reason I was in a habit of just starting with a complaint. You see your kids, there's always someone to complain about. Well, why are you on that? Why aren't you doing this? Why haven't you cleared this thing up? There's an endless variety of complaints. And, and what I noticed was that the more I complained, the more there was to complain about. And as soon as I introduced this new habit, what I was surprised by is how fast the state changed. Because you can't be grateful and complaining in the same moment.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  You can't be fearful and grateful in the same moment. You can't be angry and grateful in the same moment. I mean, it is a, it is a dynamic, powerful, catalytic thing. It's not just, it was for too long, we think of gratitude as being like, well, that's a nice, mindful man. Be mindful and grateful over there. But when you got to do real stuff, that's not the real stuff. Gratitude is the real stuff. This is the way to be able to accelerate success in any area of your life, and it's instantly affected. So I found that as soon as I would say I was grateful, I could see people's eyes light up, just even my kids, my wife, just, it just brought a more positive feeling. So then we carry on with our kids and I'm like, okay, my son Jack, one time I'm like, he complained. And I'm like, okay, give me three things you're thankful for. He says this.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  I am so thankful that my dad wants to play this dumb game after I say something I'm complaining about, right? Says it just like that. We all laugh. It works even though he did it with the worst attitude ever. And by the time he's doing two and three, he's laughing and he's saying stuff and it didn't matter. Gratitude is that powerful. And so I think it's like the fastest way to get ourselves back into an effortless state. And I learned about it first in the extremity of, you know, a family crisis. I found that this thing would help even in the direst of circumstances. Yeah.

• 40:44Lewis Howes?

  How do we train our minds and our bodies to be motivated towards a goal and not stay lazy?

• 40:51Rich Diviney?

  Yeah. Well, at first it's know thyself because we're all different. And so one of the attributes I talk about in the book is discipline. And what I had to do with discipline was actively separate discipline from self-discipline.

• 41:04Lewis Howes?

  What's the difference?

• 41:04Rich Diviney?

  Okay, well, the difference is that self-discipline is internally focused, okay? Self-discipline is about managing oneself and it has very little to do with external requirements, right? So you or I can decide to get in shape, for example, and we can change our diet, we can work out every day. The external environment doesn't have a lot of say in that, you know, in us achieving that accomplishment. So self-discipline is about managing the internal. Discipline, the way I talk about in the book, is about achieving that long-term goal. These are those long-term goals that are going to take a while to achieve and the external world has a say. So getting that promotion, writing that book, becoming the famous singer, becoming a Navy SEAL, right? The external world has, starting a podcast, right?

• 41:47Rich Diviney?

  The external world has a say in whether or not you do that. And the discipline that is required to move through those wickets takes adaptability, it takes flexibility, it takes the ability to not get seduced by the highs, the successes, and not get crushed by the failures and continue to move towards that goal. And what I found was, because I'm a very un-self-disciplined person, I don't have a lot, right? And so I had to separate this because I've been able to achieve a lot of goals in my life. I say, what's the difference? Well, the difference is if you are overly, so those with very high self-discipline, sometimes, this is not exclusive, but sometimes have trouble. Achieving long-term goals because the achievement of long-term goals often takes

• 42:29Rich Diviney?

  an ability and by necessity to march into the unknown, into uncertainty, which is going to throw you off routine and throw you out of certainty. The self-disciplined person, the very self-disciplined, likes routine, likes certainty, right? That's how, it's structure, I mean, that's what it is. And so, and so, moving towards a goal like that takes oftentimes being able to adapt out of structure, you know, and say, "Well, I can't do that, like, I'm normal, I'd have to just go in, I have to go in unknowing," right? Now, the best, the most successful people are those who have both self-discipline and discipline, right? In terms of staying motivated for a goal, the way I would do it by knowing myself is I would, I would, understanding I'm not a very self-disciplined person, I would simply try to chunk a goal into smaller pieces, right?

• 43:12Rich Diviney?

  So, if I want to, if I want to lose weight, you know, then I can say, "Well, that's why cheat days are actually good for me," right? Because I can, I can say, "I'm gonna take this piece of it and move." So, I chunk my reward system in a different way, but I think, I think the way, the way one stays motivated towards a goal is highly subjective, but it would, in my, kind of, through my thought process and my experience, involve a, an active, or want to actively map out a reward system that helps someone move through that.

• 43:46Lewis Howes?

  Sort of creating a reward system first for the, for the goal in order to help you stay motivated.

• 43:52Rich Diviney?

  Depending on, yeah, depending on your, depending on your, how you show up.

• 43:55Lewis Howes?

  Not to say, like, "Okay, I'm gonna, my goal is to achieve this thing, it's gonna take me three years to accomplish it."

• 44:00Rich Diviney?

  Right.

• 44:01Lewis Howes?

  And that's the only reward I'm gonna get in those three years.

• 44:03Rich Diviney?

  That's right.

• 44:04Lewis Howes?

  But how can I reward myself every day for an action I take, every month for a milestone, every year for getting closer? So focusing on the reward system.

• 44:12Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, and that, and this is, this is, this is neurobiological, because dopamine, the neurotransmitter, is, you get, you get hits of dopamine when you, as a reward, when you achieve things, you know? There's many ways you get dopamine, but one of the ways is when you achieve things. So if you're able to effectively create a reward system that means something to you, it can't be, it can't be kind of inert, right? So, so if I want to run, if I want to run a marathon. And I haven't, and I can barely run to my mailbox, right? You know, then maybe, you know, buying some running shoes and putting them on one morning is enough of a reward system to get a dopamine hit. As someone who runs, you know, somewhat frequently, and you probably identify with this. Just putting on our shoes one morning is probably not going to give us that dopamine hit. We gotta, we gotta extend that, we gotta extend that task a little bit so that...

• 44:56Lewis Howes?

  If you've already accomplished a lot of something, you have to push beyond it a little bit.

• 45:00Rich Diviney?

  You have to push beyond it to get that, that reward system. So it becomes subjective.

• 45:03Lewis Howes?

  What would you say 20 years as a Navy SEAL at different levels? You were deployed how many different times? Are you allowed to talk about that?

• 45:11Rich Diviney?

  Well, you know, I mean, 13 and some change. Yeah, so...

• 45:15Lewis Howes?

  Deployments between, what, six months and over a year?

• 45:19Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, I never did year-long, but anywhere between, you know, three months to six months usually.

• 45:23Lewis Howes?

  This is Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 45:26Rich Diviney?

  For the most part, yeah.

• 45:26Lewis Howes?

  And other places, maybe not allowed to talk about. What would you say of that 20-year experience was the most challenging experience for you? Was it something within a mission? Was it learning how to develop as a leader? Was it having a relationship with your wife during that time? What was the most challenging point for you?

• 45:45Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, the most challenging thing ironically wasn't the job. Because you, because we were all so prepared for the job and we were around, we were around just the best people in the world. So, so the trust and the camaraderie was, to this day, you know, I look back on it very fondly, right?

• 46:01Lewis Howes?

  So not the day-to-day job, you mean even just like the, the missions you went out on?

• 46:06Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, that wasn't, that wasn't challenging. I think, I think if I were to, if I were to say, you know, the first foremost was probably having to leave the family. When you have to say goodbye to your family for a stint, you know, whether it's three months or six months, or some, some folks are deploying for a year, right? That is a rough deal that not many people can, can capture. Not many people with families can capture that. When you have to say goodbye to your kids and your wife for that, you know, okay, well, see you in however. And then, and then to add on to that, understanding their stress, or at least my kids were a little bit smaller, but understanding my wife's stress, knowing that I was going someplace and she, it was dangerous. Yeah, well, luckily with today's technology, contact was...

• 46:47Rich Diviney?

  Fairly easy, but we found was, you know, again ironically, we found that that daily contact was never a good idea. Because what happens is you establish a routine.

• 46:56Lewis Howes?

  You get comfortable.

• 46:57Rich Diviney?

  You get comfortable. So, so something happens. I'm working, I'm overseas and something, I'm, I have a mission that goes along or whatever. And I don't get to call her that day. Well, suddenly she's worried, you know? And it also makes time actually seem slower.

• 47:08Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 47:09Rich Diviney?

  Yeah. So we, we decided we were only going to talk usually once a week. My son, who had a real trouble, and he was young. I mean, he was, you know, he was born in 05, so he was, he was, by the time he was two, he was, he was having trouble with me deploying. And, and every time I went, it was rough on him. And we actually, for him, we actually almost had to, well, we literally had to just decide not to, I was not, I was not going to talk to him on the phone. It was too hard for him. He had to basically kind of forget me.

• 47:36Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh. So he had to compartmentalize as a child.

• 47:40Rich Diviney?

  Yeah. We had to help him compartmentalize.

• 47:42Lewis Howes?

  Survive.

• 47:42Rich Diviney?

  Yeah.

• 47:43Lewis Howes?

  And not go depressed or be stressed. Because that's one of the attributes you talk about is compartmentalization.

• 47:48Rich Diviney?

  Yeah.

• 47:49Lewis Howes?

  How do you do that if you're an emotional human being that's, you have these deep connections to your family and friends? How do you just detach in a sense?

• 47:59Rich Diviney?

  Yeah.

• 47:59Lewis Howes?

  And become more machine-like for a period of time and then allow yourself to feel deeply in other moments?

• 48:06Rich Diviney?

  Well, it never goes away. And I think the attributes, the, the way I talk about compartmentalization and the attribute is more, is more kind of surrounded by the way our brain functions and processes information. Versus, I'm going to block something out, so I don't have to think about it. However, I think most team guys, SEALs, Spec Ops guys, have a very high ability to compartmentalize away from things. They block out things that are, that are painful. I know that about me. And I know that about my, my buddies. Because you have to, because war sucks, you know? And at the end of the day, the mission has to be accomplished, you know? So if something gnarly happens on a mission, you can't sit there. These, these movies that show.

• 48:51Rich Diviney?

  These extended scenes of people mourning when their buddy goes down or whatever. Like, oh my god.

• 48:56Lewis Howes?

  You don't have that.

• 48:57Rich Diviney?

  No, you don't have that time. You have to win the gunfight, right? Because if you don't, then all of you won't make it home.

• 49:03Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 49:04Rich Diviney?

  So you have to. And I think the training allows you to do that. The training is so intense and so effective that it requires you to compartmentalize. Training teaches you to compartmentalize. You become very, very good at it. Now, that can be a detriment in a relationship. So I think those of us who were able to recognize that actively try not to do that with our families. And so it becomes much more of a precision tool versus a frenetic thing that just happens without us having control over it.

• 49:37Lewis Howes?

  What was the moment that was the scariest for you when you were deployed? Where you thought like, I may not make it?

• 49:45Rich Diviney?

  Um.

• 49:47Lewis Howes?

  Or our team may not make it? Or this is a really bad... I guess you're training for bad situations all the time?

• 49:53Rich Diviney?

  Yeah.

• 49:54Lewis Howes?

  But was there ever a moment where you were like, I don't know if we're gonna get out of this?

• 49:57Rich Diviney?

  No, I was fortunate not to have that moment. I say that with immense gratitude because I know there's a lot of friends of mine who didn't have that, can't say that. They had those moments where they said that. But no, I was fortunate enough to be always in a position, and my team was always in a position, that we had prepared, planned, and executed in a way that was highly effective so that when things went wrong, because things always go sideways, we had complete, or near complete, control, or we understood the pathways we needed to go throughout of. But I say that also, this comes back to compartmentalization. One of the things that you have to be able to do when shit goes sideways is to not focus

• 50:40Rich Diviney?

  on that thought you just brought up, right? The focus is not, oh my god, I don't think I'm gonna get out of this. Focus is, how do I get out of this? So the mental agility attributes, which are situation awareness, compartmentalization, task switching, and then learnability, right? So that's how information's coming in, how we're processing it and prioritizing, how we're switching between the necessary tasks, and then how we're learning from our decisions, right? So I talk about the parachute malfunction in the context of that. But ultimately, to even be able to do that in the first place, it requires a four-brain dominance in the sense that you're not letting your autonomic system take over into a fight-flight response, and you're able to think through... Stress, challenge, and uncertainty in the sense of say, okay, what can I control

• 51:25Rich Diviney?

  right now? And this is where trust in your teammates comes in, because now I have a team. I mean, I can say this with great pride and gratitude, that I can remember literally walking in areas, you know, when we're overseas and thinking, man, this is a bad area.

• 51:41Lewis Howes?

  Sketchy.

• 51:42Rich Diviney?

  This is sketchy, and having complete and utter faith, right? Because I was around, because I was with my teammates, right? I was around people who just, I trusted. I knew that if something went wrong, we'd be able to handle it, you know? And so I think that's a necessity when you do this type of stuff.

• 51:58Lewis Howes?

  When you're going out on a mission, what's the process like of preparing for that mission? Are you planning more for all the things that could go wrong and how to get out of that situation? Or is it planning for, here's exactly how we would like it to go right?

• 52:12Rich Diviney?

  Yeah.

• 52:13Lewis Howes?

  But let's also have an exit plan or a plan for when things go wrong? What do you?

• 52:18Rich Diviney?

  It's the latter. You plan the mission as you'd like it to go, and then you, inside of that planning, you put together, you build contingencies within each factor.

• 52:29Lewis Howes?

  So when this doesn't go as planned?

• 52:31Rich Diviney?

  Right.

• 52:32Lewis Howes?

  What are the three ways to get out?

• 52:33Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, so you know, just like, I mean, just like any athlete would understand. So a quarterback coming out of a snap would say, well, I have two or three or four plays I can fall back on, depending on how this line shapes up, right? You have the same thing, you know? This is where experience matters. You do it over and over again. It's okay, well, during, as we're coming in on insertion, you know, there's a few things that could go wrong. So if this, then that, if this, then that. And you kind of do that throughout a phase, throughout the phase planning. But then there's what we call the 80/20 rule, and that is, you get to 80% of certainty, and then you recognize that 20% is just out of your control. And that's where confidence comes. You say, if something happens outside that 20%, we will figure it out.

• 53:16Lewis Howes?

  Figure it out.

• 53:16Rich Diviney?

  Because we're not going to figure out everything. And it's, you know, Murphy's Law will dictate that something happens that we haven't thought of. So you prepare yourself to deal with uncertainty.

• 53:26Lewis Howes?

  How do you train your mind to deal with chaos in the moment so that you don't freak out and freeze up, but you actually turn on a level of focus and attention towards achieving that goal?

• 53:39Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, so I think we're predisposed, each one of us, to what I've called, Huberman and I both have called this, is the autonomic set point. At what point do we start flipping into an autonomic response, into fight-flight, where our system starts, you know, taking over and our forebrain starts coming offline? If you and I use boiling point as the average, most of us might be average. There are those who start really freaking out at like 190. You know, so 212 is the average, at 190 degrees, they're starting to freak out.

• 54:13Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 54:14Rich Diviney?

  There are people who it takes till like 230.

• 54:16Lewis Howes?

  To boil.

• 54:17Rich Diviney?

  To boil, right? I think that the guys who make it through that training are predisposed to have a higher set point, first of all. In other words, we tend to, when bad things start to happen, we tend to slow down and start thinking through it versus get all hyped up. It's funny, you know, I live in a neighborhood, and in my neighborhood, there's four other Navy SEALs in the neighborhood. There's, you know, one across the street, one down the road.

• 54:41Lewis Howes?

  Must be nice.

• 54:42Rich Diviney?

  Well, it is nice, you know, A, because they're great dudes, and it's great, because they're great neighbors. But I remember my wife once saying, and she said, hey, I'm so glad these guys are here in the neighborhood. And I was like, why? She said, because if something went wrong, I know I could go to them and they'd act like you act. And I said, well, tell me. I said, because if something happens, they would immediately calm down and they'd start working the problem, right? And so I think there's, I think we show up predisposed. Training to it is difficult, you know, and I think, so Huberman and I are actually working on some stuff to help train, have to help teach people to do that. But it comes down to understanding your own neurology, and it comes down to understanding that, you know, here's how you have to think. Think through situations under stress. And then it's going to be about putting yourself into deliberate stress to practice that.

• 55:26Rich Diviney?

  You can't practice this type of thinking if you're not in stress.

• 55:30Lewis Howes?

  You need to put yourself in that. What are some things civilians could do to practice stressful moments on a daily basis? Where it doesn't hurt them, but it's actually preparing them. I talk about every day, I think you should be experiencing some type of pain. Something that's uncomfortable.

• 55:44Rich Diviney?

  Right.

• 55:45Lewis Howes?

  Seeking discomfort.

• 55:46Rich Diviney?

  Yes.

• 55:47Lewis Howes?

  Whether it be through a 10-minute workout, whether it be through a longer run. It doesn't matter what it is, an uncomfortable conversation.

• 55:52Rich Diviney?

  Yes.

• 55:53Lewis Howes?

  We should be doing this every day in a structured environment.

• 55:57Rich Diviney?

  Yeah.

• 55:58Lewis Howes?

  That allows us to grow.

• 55:59Rich Diviney?

  Yes.

• 56:00Lewis Howes?

  What do you think are some ways we could do this that's not putting us in harm's way or physically hurting ourselves?

• 56:04Rich Diviney?

  I can't answer that because it's so subjective. I can give some ideas and you just gave some. I mean, some people are very social people. So, starting a conversation with a stranger is a piece of cake, right? For me, that would be hard, right? Starting a conversation with a stranger would be hard. So that might be something I do. Giving a presentation. Public speaking for people is tough. So volunteering to give that presentation is a great way for a lot of people. Because, you know, that makes them anxious, you know? So, working out for some is like, for some people, they've developed a system where that pain point of working out is something they highly enjoy, right? So they're not practicing it. So, someone should look at their own makeup and ask themselves what fright...

• 56:48Rich Diviney?

  Well, in fear, again, it doesn't have to go all the way to fear. Fear is interesting because it's actually a combination of two things. It's a combination of uncertainty and anxiety. You can have each one of those and not have fear, right? So if you are anxious but not uncertain, that would be, I have to give this presentation on Monday. I hope it's going, I'm nervous about it, right? That's, you know, but there's nothing uncertain about it. It's Monday, it's 2 o'clock, I know what I'm going to do. I'm just, I'm nervous about it, okay? Uncertainty without anxiety, well, that's every kid on Christmas Eve, okay? I mean, so, but it's when you combine the two that you start to generate fear. Well, the idea is if you have fear, if you have uncertainty plus anxiety and it starts to manifest into fear, the key is to understanding which of those two factors... Can you buy down, okay? Anxiety.

• 57:32Lewis Howes?

  Buy down?

• 57:33Rich Diviney?

  Buy down, which means decrease. Anxiety can be decreased internally. It's an internal response, right? So things like, some of the tools, who room talks about, visual tools, breathing tools. You can begin to, you can begin to shift your physiology out of your sympathetic into your parasympathetic, come off of the autonomic response system, right? So that's, so that's how you could start, you know, kind of buying down anxiety. Uncertainty is largely external, okay? That means something around you, outside of you, you don't understand. There's unknown. The way, the best way to do that and the way we do it in the, in Spec Ops is we, we control what we can control. So some, some people have referred to it kind of, control your three foot world, right? But it doesn't have to extend. It's not a, it's not a three foot thing. It's, it's what in this moment can I control? And then take control of that, right?

• 58:18Rich Diviney?

  Because then you are grabbing onto certainty. You're taking what is uncertain, you're grabbing onto something certain. As soon as you've controlled that, as soon as you move through that, then you have to make another decision. What's, what's the next thing? This is basically kind of stepping through, right? Stepping through this challenge, right? So, so you can start to, you can start to practice coming off of fear or moving through fear by kind of understanding both of those, those, those pieces.

• 58:41Lewis Howes?

  What do you think is the greatest lesson you learned throughout the 20 years for yourself? That has helped you not only during that, but also after being with the SEALs?

• 58:52Rich Diviney?

  I think it's, I think it's, it's not fearing the unknown. It's the, it's the idea that I, you know, when you go through something like, you understand that, hey, I could pretty much do whatever I'd like to do. And I know that even though, even though I don't know how I'm going to do it, I know I can figure it out. If there's enough interest, if there's enough passion, right? You know, I'm not gonna, I'm not interested in becoming a pro football player, you know?

• 59:14Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 59:14Rich Diviney?

  So, so that's, you know, that's off my list, right? But I was interested in writing a book and that was a whole new process for me, you know? When I start, when I left the Navy, I started public speaking. I did not like public speaking at all, right? I did not like it. But I knew it was, it was, it was an edge that I wanted to conquer, you know? And say, okay, well, let me work through the things to conquer this. It's kind of like your philosophy. I think it's a really. It's not only a deep one, but it's profound. Because if we are consistently moving, deciding what our edges are, moving towards our edge, and then getting there, then we are growing. Because guess what we're doing at that point? We're looking for the next edge. And that's the growth process, is continuing to move to our edges and then finding the next edge.

• 59:53Lewis Howes?

  I mean, you say you don't like public speaking, but don't you have to speak to your teams and guys?

• 59:57Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, but that's not public. That's like, you know, that's the guys. So it's not the same. It's different, yeah. It's different, there's a lot more. And when you're, and when you're in the military, there's no expectation of, you know, kind of great articulation, or humor, or, you know.

• 1:00:16Lewis Howes?

  What's effective?

• 1:00:17Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, it's just like, hey, here's a word.

• 1:00:21Rich Diviney?

  And that's what's appreciated, too. There's no one wants you to sit there and pontificate. It's like, hey, guys, this is what's going on. So there's a directness that's appreciated and required. You know, but that's not public speaking.

• 1:00:32Lewis Howes?

  What do you think was the hardest lesson you had to learn through your 20 years? Something that you were struggling with, or challenged with, or you kept repeating until you finally learned the lesson?

• 1:00:42Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, I think the hardest lessons, the hardest lesson, maybe not one, the hardest lessons were just around leadership. What it takes, what leadership take, what it takes to be a leader. Because, again, being a leader and being in charge are often conflated. They're not the same thing, okay?

• 1:00:56Lewis Howes?

  What's the difference?

• 1:00:57Rich Diviney?

  Well, anybody could be in charge. As an officer, you know, in the military, I was pretty much in charge of something all the time. It didn't make me a leader. You don't get to call yourself a leader. It's like calling yourself funny, or calling yourself handsome, okay? Someone else makes that decision. You can't designate yourself that way. Someone else decides whether or not you are a leader, okay? And that's done through the way you behave in that position. So if you are in charge and you're behaving in a way that causes someone to make a decision, okay, this is the person I would lead. I mean, if we think about the leaders in our lives, the people who we consider leaders in our lives, it's not because they were just in charge of us. In fact, we could probably think of people who we would follow into hell and back, and they have no place in the hierarchy of our lives, right?

• 1:01:41Rich Diviney?

  They are just someone who just, they've behaved that way, in a way that's made us kind of endeared to them. So the attributes I talk about in the book, in terms of leadership attributes, are all attributes that actually cause behaviors that typically cause people to look at... Others as leaders.

• 1:01:58Lewis Howes?

  What are the behaviors that most human beings admire the most? That we want to follow that person or be inspired to be led by something that they're sharing or involved in, a community, a movement, whatever it may be? What are the three or four main behaviors that they have and we should be developing if we want to be better leaders?

• 1:02:17Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, well, I talk about five in the book, in the adwords. The first is empathy, okay? And again, I would say this, there's not an exclusivity in terms of what someone will decide, because there are people who will-

• 1:02:28Lewis Howes?

  Subjective, right?

• 1:02:29Rich Diviney?

  It's a subjective thing. Again, it's someone's choice as to whether or not they think. So empathy is one. Selflessness is another. And this is not just, you know, so let's just back up here. Empathy, not just, "I know how you feel, I feel how you feel," right? "I can, I can put myself into your shoes." And, and I, and that reflects in the way I communicate with you and I care about, it shows that you care about another human being.

• 1:02:51Lewis Howes?

  What is the best way to, to show that? I mean, give me an example. As opposed to saying, "I know how you feel," how do you-

• 1:02:58Rich Diviney?

  Feel.

• 1:02:59Lewis Howes?

  Empathize showing you feel how they feel?

• 1:03:01Rich Diviney?

  Well, first, deep listening. And so, so, so we all, so listening to another person, but, but true, like, deep, full-on, like, listening. Like, I am hanging on every word, listening. Often times, we listen to people and we're two things, one of two things is happening. Either we're thinking about what we're going to say next, right? Or we're thinking about how what that person is saying relates to our lives. And it's not from a malicious standpoint. It's really because we're trying to relate. So we're trying to say, "Okay, you're, you're talking about football." I'm thinking, "Okay, wait a second, you know, did I play, I played football in eighth grade, maybe I could talk about that."

• 1:03:32Lewis Howes?

  Relate, yeah.

• 1:03:33Rich Diviney?

  But what I'm doing is I'm not listening to you anymore. You know, I'm making what you're saying about me. You know, so, so what's, what deep empathetic listening is, I'm, I've, I have like a whiteboard in my mind, okay? And as I'm listening to you speak, if something pops onto the whiteboard, I erase it and I move on, I just keep on listening. You know, that is, if you do, if you, if you empathetically listen, like, look into someone's eyes, attentive behavior, facing each other, you are going, they are going to feel cared for because you're exchanging. Now, there's an exchange going on. There's serotonin being released, there's, there's oxytocin being exchanged, or at least released, and all these, kind of these bonding chemicals, right? So, so that type of listening shows someone you care about them. Empathy is a little bit tougher for some.

• 1:04:15Rich Diviney?

  Some people are just wired, we know, some people are wired to be, my wife is extraordinarily empathetic. I mean, she really feels other people. I mean, I am not. She's, I've had to really try to develop empathy. It's something that she's taught me.

• 1:04:30Joe Dispenza?

  Information was the thing that stimulated thought, stimulated new ideas. And, and as we learn new things, we make new connections in our brains. So, as we begin to add new stitches into that three-dimensional tapestry in our mind, we're beginning to cause our mind to function in new ways. But the key then is to apply it, to personalize it, to do something with it. And 10 years ago, when I went and got in front of an audience and talked about the application, nobody wanted to step outside that philosophical, theoretical, intellectual realm, right? Because doing something means you're gonna have to change something about yourself.

• 1:05:04Rich Diviney?

  Painful.

• 1:05:05Joe Dispenza?

  Yeah, you're gonna get uncomfortable, right? And I think we're in an age of information. And in an age of information, ignorance is a choice. And because of technology, we have access to so much content. And information creates awareness. And awareness is consciousness. And you can't have consciousness without energy. They're, they work together. So, there's an energetic change, I think, that's taking place in the world right now, where people are so informed that old models, old paradigms are beginning to break down. Whether it's the medical model, or the religious model, the educational model, journalism, the economy, you know, politics, it's all beginning to come to the surface. Because something else has to come out.

• 1:05:48Joe Dispenza?

  And, and I think that one of the things that people are realizing is that you don't have to be a Buddhist monk to do this, or a nun with 40 years of devotion. You've just gotta understand the formula. And just like any skill or anything you learn, you gotta go from thinking to doing to being. You gotta take knowledge, you create the experience, and if you keep doing it over and over again, you start getting a skill or you start getting wise about how to do it. And you, you know that you know how to do it. Well... In the last 10 years, we have assembled a scientific team. And let's see if you can really make significant brain changes. I don't want those changes to just be in your mind. I want them to be in your brain.

• 1:06:32Joe Dispenza?

  I want to be able to see before and after pictures to say, that person has a significant change after a traumatic brain injury, or anxiety, or depression, or a cyclic mood disorder, or a stroke. We want to see that there's been significant change. At the same time, let's measure your brain in real time. And let's look to see what that transformation process looks like. And in the discovery, Lewis, of that process, we gained so much knowledge about what that transformational process looks like. In other words, I can tell you without a doubt that if you're analyzing your life right now within some disturbing emotion, that 100% of the time, you're going to make your brain worse. You think about your life.

• 1:07:16Joe Dispenza?

  If you're stuck in an emotion, like you're frustrated, you're angry, you're fearful. Resentful, unforgiving. And you're thinking within that emotional state. In other words, you can't think greater than how you feel. That means then you were thinking in the past because those emotions are a record, a residue of the past. So, we see people in the process of change that are analyzing in duality or polarity. That kind of drives the brain into higher states of arousal and further away from true change. So, we did, we've done thousands and thousands and thousands of brain scans. And we now know that there's a formula to create greater brain coherence,

• 1:08:00Joe Dispenza?

  greater brain efficiency, to make your brain work better. And when your brain works better, you work better. At the same time, It requires a clear intention and an elevated emotion to begin to change your energy and to change your life. And nobody changes until they change their energy, right? So then, how do you get a person out of resentment, frustration, into joy and freedom? If, why would they feel grateful, or joyful, or free if the experience hasn't happened? So, most people are spending the majority of their life waiting for something out there to take away their emptiness, or pain, or the resentment in here. Well, if they're waiting their whole life in separation, or lack, then, and we create

• 1:08:41Joe Dispenza?

  reality, then the lack is driving certain thoughts, which is creating more separation and more lack. So, teaching people then, to begin to condition their body emotionally before the evidence takes place in their life, is breaking a significant habit, right? So, instead of living by cause and effect, now we're beginning to cause and effect. So, the moment you start feeling whole and grateful, we now know your healing will begin at that moment. The moment you start feeling worthy and abundant, your wealth is coming. You know, you're generating a certain amount of energy, a certain amount of wealth, and so...

• 1:09:15Lewis Howes?

  How does someone feel worthy, though, if they've always been told they're not worth it?

• 1:09:19Joe Dispenza?

  Yeah, well, so...

• 1:09:20Lewis Howes?

  Or that's the story they tell themselves. Like, "I'm not worth it because she didn't say yes when I asked her on a date. Because he broke up with me, because I got fired, because my parents left me. How am I worth it?" When there's so much evidence, or story, around a negative thing.

• 1:09:37Joe Dispenza?

  Well, let's stop telling the story of your past, and let's start telling the story of your future. And people who aren't defined by a vision of the future, for the most part, are left with memories of the past. Your brain is a record of the past, it's an artifact of everything you've learned and experienced in this moment. So, most people wake up in the morning, and they start thinking about their problems. And those problems are memories that are tattooed in the brain, that are associated to certain people and things at certain times and places. So, the moment the person wakes up, clean slate, they start thinking about the problems they're thinking in the past. If you believe your thoughts have something to do with your destiny, well... It's a possibility that your past is gonna be your future. Every one of those problems has an emotion associated with it.

• 1:10:21Joe Dispenza?

  So then the moment you start recalling the problem, you start feeling unhappy. Now your body's in the past because thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body. And how you think and how you feel creates a state of being. So people reaffirm their identity based on the past, right? And it turns out that the redundancy of doing that, conditioning only requires an image and an emotion. And most people are unconsciously conditioning their body into the familiar past, into the known. So now if you're in the familiar past and in the known, you're gonna crave the predictable future.

• 1:10:56Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:10:57Joe Dispenza?

  Right, that's the known as well. And there's only one place where the unknown exists, and that's the eternal present moment. That's the sweet spot of the generous present moment. So you gotta labor to get that person beyond the emotions that keep them tacked or anchored to the past. And yes, it takes an effort to do that. But if you keep working with the formula, you'll reach that elegant moment where there's a liberation of energy. And now your body, as the unconscious mind, the objective mind is not believing, it's living in the same past experience 24 hours a day because you're liberating the body from that emotional state. So you ask the person, "Why are you so unhappy? Why are you so frustrated? Why are you so resentful?"

• 1:11:38Joe Dispenza?

  The moment you ask that, their brain is gonna associate that emotion to a past event.

• 1:11:43Lewis Howes?

  To a memory.

• 1:11:43Joe Dispenza?

  To a memory. That's because they have nothing to look forward to in their future. So if you're not being defined by a vision of the future, it just means to me that you're more in love with your past than you are with the future. So how do you teach people to believe in a future that they can't see or experience with their senses yet, but they've thought about enough times in their mind that their brain has literally changed to look like the event has already occurred? The latest research in neuroscience says that's absolutely possible. We know that. And how do you teach a person? To select a new possibility in their future and begin to emotionally embrace that future before it's made manifest to such a degree that their body, as their unconscious mind,

• 1:12:27Joe Dispenza?

  is believing, it's living in that future reality in the present moment and they're signaling new genes and new ways ahead of the environment. Now, so their body begins to change to look like the event has already occurred. We've proven that that's possible. Now, think about this.

• 1:12:42Lewis Howes?

  So the more you think about your desired future, the joy, the gratitude, the

• 1:12:50Lewis Howes?

  the feelings you want to have that are more positive, the more you think about it as a future thing happening, the more your body shifts now?

• 1:12:58Joe Dispenza?

  Exactly. So your body is believing it's living in that future reality in the present moment. Now, think about this. In some condition in your life, the more altered you feel inside of you, the more you narrow your focus on the cause and the brain freezes an image and takes a snapshot. And that memory now is embossed in the brain. It's branded in there. So then, people think neurologically within the circuits of those past experiences and they feel chemically within the boundaries of those emotions. And the stronger the betrayal, the stronger the trauma, the more the body's living in the past, right? So then, so how do you reverse that? So now, if you truly got passionate about a future, we've all done this. You get a wild idea in your mind and you start holding on to that vision and you're preoccupied with it.

• 1:13:42Joe Dispenza?

  All of a sudden, the thought in your mind becomes the experience and you start feeling the energy of the future. Now, the stronger the emotion you feel from that vision, the more you're gonna pay attention to the picture in your mind and now you're remembering your future.

• 1:13:55Lewis Howes?

  And vice versa, the stronger you pay attention to the feeling of the past pain, you're gonna create the pain in this moment.

• 1:14:01Joe Dispenza?

  Exactly. So then, so it requires a coherent brain and we now know that there's a formula for that and we've got beautiful research to show that people can do it. They just have to practice. And it requires a coherent heart because resentment, frustration, impatience creates a very incoherent heart. And when that heart becomes incoherent, you stop trusting yourself. There's no energy there. You stop trusting in your future. So then, if there's physical evidence in your brain and body... Physical evidence to look like the event has already occurred. It's quite possible you'll be thinking neurologically within the circuits of your future. And you'll begin to feel chemically within the boundaries of that emotion of your future. And how you think and how you feel is your state of being.

• 1:14:46Joe Dispenza?

  And now your state of being is living in the future instead of the past. Now, the moment you disconnect from the emotion of your future. Because of traffic, or some coworker, or your ex, or whatever people come up with. Now you're back to the energy of your past. And now you're gonna start looking for it, analyzing, why hasn't it happened? Well, if you're feeling the emotion of your future, why would you look for it? Because you would feel like it already happened. And that is the place where the magic happens. So then, you can't just do this, get up and then return back to your old state of being. You gotta maintain that modified state of mind.

• 1:15:24Lewis Howes?

  How do you maintain it?

• 1:15:24Joe Dispenza?

  That's practice. Well, let me finish.

• 1:15:27Lewis Howes?

  If I punch you in the face right now, how do you maintain?

• 1:15:30Joe Dispenza?

  Well, of course, of course. I mean, we all take blows in our lives. And, and we all react emotionally. But the question is, how long are you gonna react?

• 1:15:38Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:15:39Joe Dispenza?

  So then, if you can't mediate and regulate your emotional reactions. And those emotions linger for days.

• 1:15:46Lewis Howes?

  Years for some people.

• 1:15:47Joe Dispenza?

  Mood, and then months, temperament, years, personality trait. So then the person's personality is literally based on the past. But they don't know that, because they're doing it over and over again. And it becomes a subconscious program. So now, if it requires a coherent brain and a coherent heart. Then we have to train people, how to self-regulate. So, we've done thousands and thousands of measurements. We've partnered with the HeartMath Institute. To teach people how to create and sustain heart coherence.

• 1:16:20Lewis Howes?

  How do we do it?

• 1:16:21Joe Dispenza?

  Well.

• 1:16:22Lewis Howes?

  Besides going to your workshop, what's the simplified version? I'm sure it takes more time than...

• 1:16:26Joe Dispenza?

  Well, it really doesn't. It really doesn't. It just requires getting still, closing your eyes, putting your attention on your heart. Changing your breath, so that you move into the present moment. And when you slow your breathing down, you slow your brainwaves down. When you slow your brainwaves down, now you're accessing your autonomic nervous system. So then you train a person. How to open their heart and feel an elevated emotion and it takes a little practice. And just like a flower that takes time to bloom, it takes a little bit of time. But if you work in trading the resentment, the frustration or the impatience for gratitude, appreciation and thankfulness, and you keep at it, there'll come a moment where that system switches on and now you're feeling grateful for no reason at all.

• 1:17:10Joe Dispenza?

  Now, that's not a bad thing because gratitude, the emotional signature of gratitude means something's happening to you, something has happened to you.

• 1:17:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:20Joe Dispenza?

  You're receiving something or you just received something. So your body then, when you're feeling gratitude, is in the perfect state of receiving.

• 1:17:28Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:28Joe Dispenza?

  So then, that means then, you'll accept, believe and surrender to the thoughts equal to the emotional state of gratitude. If you're living in resentment, you're living in fear, you're living in patience, you could say, "I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy," with all you want and that thought's gonna stop right at the brainstem and never make its way to the body because the body is...

• 1:17:49Lewis Howes?

  Does your heart start feeling it or because why?

• 1:17:50Joe Dispenza?

  Because you're feeling resentment and that thought isn't... That thought is not consistent with the emotion of resentment. Resentment has a different set of thoughts, right? In other words, once you start opening your heart, it begins to move into coherence, it begins to produce a measurable magnetic field up to three meters wide. Now, that's frequency, that's energy. And all that energy, that frequency, carries information, carries an intent. So then, when you're feeling gratitude and your heart is open, you're broadcasting energy into the field.

• 1:18:29Lewis Howes?

  A frequency.

• 1:18:29Joe Dispenza?

  Now, a frequency, you lay the intent of the thought of your health or your wealth, that frequency can carry the thought of your wealth. It can carry the thought of your health. If you're suffering, you can't... Suffering does not carry... That energy does not carry the thought of your wealth. It carries a different set of thoughts. So then, so then we're teaching people... How to self-regulate because if you're gonna believe in that future that you're imagining with all of your heart, it better be open and activated. Right, right. And you better know how to self-regulate and you have to know the moment you disconnect from the energy of your future because of some circumstance in your life and you lose that feeling. If you're practicing it on a daily basis with your eyes closed, then the next level

• 1:19:13Joe Dispenza?

  is to be able to open your eyes and do it right in the moment and be able to self-regulate and change the frustration from some experience in your life back to the energy of your future. Now, that requires great awareness and great effort, but if you have a community of people that are practicing this on a daily basis and they're connected to their future because that's where their mind is, they begin to want the future more than the emotions of the past. So we've done enough measurements now, Lewis, to know that we can teach people how to do that and we have evidence that people can sustain it for 45 minutes to an hour. It's a skill now. They know that they know how to do it.

• 1:19:57Joe Dispenza?

  So now they have brain coherence and heart coherence. Well, once the heart begins to become orderly and coherent, it acts as an amplifier and it drives energy to the brain. So now the brain is getting more energy once the heart is open and then you're thinking a different set of thoughts and those thoughts produce different chemicals for you to feel more of that. And here comes nitric oxide from oxytocin and then all of a sudden your heart literally starts to swell.

• 1:20:21Lewis Howes?

  I hope today's episode inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a rundown of today's show with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me as well as ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast. If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend over on social media or text a friend, leave us a review over on Apple Podcast and let me know what you learned over on our social media channels at Lewis Howes. I really love hearing the feedback from you and it helps us continue to make the show better. And if you want more inspiration from our world-class guests and content to learn how to improve. improve the quality of your life, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter

• 1:21:05Lewis Howes?

  and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com/newsletter. And if no one has told you today, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.