The Golden Equation That Turns Desire Into Reality | David Bayer

David Bayer, entrepreneur and author of A Changed Mind, joins Lewis Howes to unpack the Golden Equation, desire plus non-resistance equals desired result, along with the Two States of Being, the Core Program, and the Whole Human Framework, a twelve-step model for personal growth rooted in Alcoholics Anonymous. Bayer also details his Decision Matrix for rewiring limiting beliefs.

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

• 0:02Lewis Howes?

  Everywhere I go, airports, events, walking down the street, people stop me and say, Louis, this show got me through one of the hardest seasons of my life. And it's one of the coolest things when people come up to me. So if you see me, please come up and say hi and let me know how this show, The School of Greatness, has impacted you. It lights me up because our mission at Greatness Media is to impact 100 million lives every single week. So if today's conversation hits home for you, do me a favor and push the follow button right now. It means that the next conversation will be delivered to you and will find you exactly when you need it. Again, thank you so much for being here and listening to The School of Greatness. Make sure to follow right now to stay up to date on the latest and greatest.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Desire plus non-resistance equals desired result. So whatever your desire is, if you want to make more money, if you want to heal your chronic health condition, if you want to find your soulmate, it doesn't matter what it is. You can become psychologically and emotionally non-resistant to the desire. 100% of the time consistently and predictably, you will crystallize that desire into your reality.

• 1:09Lewis Howes?

  He's an entrepreneur, bestselling author, and an expert teaching people how to unlock their potential by helping them raise their frequency. Please welcome David Bayer.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  The moment you have a desire, two things enter your awareness. Number one is of course the thing that you want. But number two is the absence of it. And the brain will give a meaning to the absence of it. Well, it's not there because there's not enough time. Well, it's not there because I'm not good enough. Well, it's not there because money is hard to make. If you can identify what the resistance is and do the inner work to transform it, you now become completely aligned and congruent with the outcome itself.

• 1:43Lewis Howes?

  What is the program or the belief that most human beings live by today?

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Well, I think there are two, so.

• 1:53Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to The School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. We have the inspiring David Bayer in the house. Good to see you, man.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Good to see you. Thanks for having me.

• 2:01Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the show. If someone watching or listening right now is feeling stuck in their life, they're feeling like they have a big scarcity wounds, they feel like they're just low energy, there may be anxiety consistently in their life. What would you say are three actionable steps they could take right now to get out of that scarcity state and feeling more abundant?

• 2:23Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the first thing at a root cause level is to get into personal growth, right? Like really start to understand the dynamics of mindset, how you think, your belief systems. Because that malaise and that anxiety and that depression is, it's being driven by one thing, one thing only, which is your thoughts, right? Your thoughts create your emotions, your emotions produce your results. And so, you know, if somebody is feeling stuck in their life, they've got to get into personal growth, right? And that, you know, that's a, that's a process. You know, normally you start with the books and you become a card carrying member of personal growth. And then you start going to events and you find the tools that work for you.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  You start living in a community of people who are focused on their personal growth. But that's really important. I think that's the second thing too, is it's counterintuitive. But you know, if you want to become abundant and you want to start feeling better, you have to hang out with abundant people or people at least focused on abundance and people who are committed to feeling better, right? So number one is understand, you know, get into personal growth. Two is surround yourself with other, other people who are, who are headed in the same direction. It's, it's really common sense, I think, when we look at any other area of our life. It's like, if I want to get good at yoga, I go to the yoga studio and I hang out with yogis. If I want to get good at, you know, recovery, which was part of my story, I want to get sober. You start going to 12-step meetings and you hang out with other people who are trying to get sober.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  But for the most part, we don't really think about that in terms of our emotional states. And frankly, it's not as easy. It's like, you know, there's no personal development store that you walk into, right? But, but we are seeing more and more emergent communities. Your communities that you've built, community that I've built, right? So I would say that's the second thing. And then the third thing, which is really related to getting into personal growth is just begin to audit your belief systems. Because you are creating your reality. We are creating our reality. We create through the mechanism of our habit of thought, our habit of emotion. And those are driven by our beliefs, right? That people call those, you know, programs, traumas.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  And so if you want to change your life, if you want to start moving out of scarcity into abundance, you got to take a look at the programs that are driving those emotional states and, and creating that reality temporarily in your life.

• 4:43Lewis Howes?

  What is the program or the belief that most human beings live by today?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Well, I think there are two. So let's, let's, let's talk about the, you asked about abundance. I think, I think it's important for someone to answer this question, not overthink it, but it's a really simple way of doing an audit or an inventory. And that is, is to answer the question, when I was growing up, money was blank. Right? When I was growing up, money was blank. Do you, anything come to mind for you? I know you've obviously changed your money consciousness, but when you were growing up, money was what?

• 5:20Lewis Howes?

  Scary to me. Yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Was what?

• 5:21Lewis Howes?

  Scary.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Scary, right?

• 5:23Lewis Howes?

  I didn't understand it. It was scary. It seemed like it was better than me. Yeah.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:30Lewis Howes?

  A lot of the. It caused tension in the family. Like it caused stress.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Right? All those things. So if that's what money is, at powerful subconscious levels, your entire system is going to keep you away from money, right? About 70% of people who just heard that question answered scarce. So it's the number one answer. And so for most people, when they were growing up, money was scarce. Which is an interesting way to complete the sentence because we don't use scarce a lot in our day-to-day language.

• 5:59Lewis Howes?

  But this is like, there's no food.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 6:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 6:02Lewis Howes?

  Food scarcity.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  But that's, I mean, I've asked that question to tens of thousands of people, whether it's online, offline, speaking events. And scarce is far and away the most common response that people have, which.

• 6:15Lewis Howes?

  Around money.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Around money. Yeah. Which explains why we see a handful of people with all of the money in the world and most people are without. Because if your beliefs are creating your reality, that would just make sense. You asked for the belief that most people have.

• 6:30Lewis Howes?

  The belief of the program.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  The belief of the program. And so it varies, right? Scarcity is a big one. I would also offer that another really powerful program that, that does vary from person to person, although we see about 18 to 20, it's called the core program. It's really your core trauma and it's, in fact, your personality is a compensation mechanism for this early trauma. You actually have become who you are as a way to cope with this.

• 6:57Lewis Howes?

  Trauma.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Original trauma. And that is to answer the question, when I was growing up, I never felt blank. Right? When I was growing up, I never felt blank. So for example, my answer is safe.

• 7:08Lewis Howes?

  Never felt safe.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  When I was growing up, I never felt safe, which is interesting. I mean, I grew up in an upper middle class, Orange County family. My parents were not physically abusive, sexually abusive. I didn't experience any type of physical or sexual abuse growing up. But there was this sort of constant hum of like, don't make a mistake, like, don't do it wrong. My mom never felt like she was good enough. And so that created this emotional climate where I never felt safe, right? I always felt like I was going to make a mistake or that I was never good enough, right? So, so, so that, those two, right? Really drive a lot of human behavior and a lot of what we create in our reality.

• 7:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I think that was probably, if I was going to answer that question, it'd probably be the same for me as well. When I was growing up, I never felt safe.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:51Lewis Howes?

  Never felt safe or maybe, maybe like safe or seen or supported. But I think safe is the core wound.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it is for a lot of people. Now, how that then compensates into our personality varies. So someone might be a people pleaser. Another person might chase success. Another person may actually just be living in depression or anxiety as a result of not feeling safe.

• 8:15Lewis Howes?

  Or all of them.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Or all of them, right? Or all of them. And, and so, and this actually isn't a problem. You know, what we have seen is that whatever happened in terms of the original wound, once transformed, becomes your superpower in your gift, right?

• 8:32Lewis Howes?

  So give an example.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Part of my core program is that there's something wrong with me. Uh, that's how I felt when I was growing up.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  I remember when I was in, before fifth grade, when my parents moved me into this sort of gifted and talented education program with the other nerds. Like, I always felt like I didn't belong in the, with, in the regular classroom. I always felt like there was something wrong with me. I also grew up with a dad who was, you know, was the best dad he could be. And according to a lot of measuring sticks, a really good dad. My dad was an attorney. He was super smart, critical thinker. We would describe him today as not having a tremendous amount of emotional intelligence. And so, um, he was a great problem finder. But when you're on the receiving end of that, you sort of experience like, I'm never doing it right. There's always a better way to do it.

• 9:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  There's something wrong with me. So I grew, I grew up with-

• 9:28Lewis Howes?

  There's not much affection or there's-

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:30Lewis Howes?

  It's more results driven.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Results driven, yeah, is a great way to describe it. So, so I, part of my core makeup was there's something wrong with me. And-

• 9:39Lewis Howes?

  Did he say it out loud or was it more just an internal feeling?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  It was, it was an internal feeling.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  I, I didn't have a self-awareness until probably my early thirties when, you know, I was running a venture-backed technology company. I was chasing success. I was like, I'm, you know, everybody expected me to be really successful because I was a bright kid and I, and I, and I, I felt like I needed to do that in order to be loved. So like, I was always, you know, kind of good, uh, at, at, at my career. But as, as that overdeveloped itself within me,

• 10:15Speaker 01

  and as I continued to not realize that below the surface, there were these wounds that needed to be healed, I was dealing with it through drug abuse, alcoholism, uh, sex addiction. And so in my early thirties, when I hit my bottom and I got into recovery, I started becoming aware that wow, in, in, in all these different areas of my life, the observation that I'm making subconsciously is there's something wrong with me. So I started becoming aware of it in my early thirties. And then what was also interesting was, um, in my late thirties, I ended up getting, um, a variety of like odd health challenges.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  I think it was in 2016, uh, I ended up discovering I had really high levels of mercury from an all fish diet. Uh, and then I started getting mold and mold exposure and like all these things. And my reaction to these health challenges was there's something wrong with me. So there's something wrong with me was manifesting into my body.

• 11:13Lewis Howes?

  And you were, you were reinforcing it and, and experiencing it by finding evidence-

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 11:18Lewis Howes?

  -as well.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  That's described as a psychocybernetic loop, right? It's like you, you have a belief system and so that's what your brain focuses on, right? There's that part of the brain in particular activating system. You find evidence for it, you ignore all evidence for it and just continues to build momentum.

• 11:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  So, um, how did that transform into my gift, right? Was the question. And, um, as I've done personal growth work and healing work, um, I have come to realize there's not only nothing wrong with me, um, but that I'm really amazing just the way that I am.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  That I'm loved by a power greater than myself. That there's actually not only nothing wrong with me, but there's nothing wrong with anything that happens in my life. All of it is really designed for my greatest growth, my greatest prosperity and my greatest evolution. And, and so I sort of transformed this idea that there's something wrong with me to, I can accept myself for who I am and I trust life, right? So I was living in this consistent fear that I wasn't good enough. But as I was forced to confront that, it became the resistance training for a development of an unshakable faith that's been building inside of me. Faith in myself, faith in my higher power, faith in life. And I think that's one of the things that I came here to learn.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Like, I'm, I'm a big believer that we sort of choose what our outcome is as we come in. And, and, and we're, we're born to parents who will set us up for that journey.

• 12:51Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  There are experiences that are almost predestined in our life that occur. I, I very much see it as a resistance training module, uh, module-

• 13:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  -that we go through, um, in, in order to become the opposite of the environment that we were born into in these original core programs, right? That, so we, we were born into the contraction, which some people might describe as the shadow side. And, uh, and at some point it becomes unbearable.

• 13:14Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  And we start seeking a solution to it and we transform that shadow into what some people might describe as the light, which is the expansive energy. And then we ultimately become who we came here to become.

• 13:25Lewis Howes?

  Yes. Or we perish.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Or we perish.

• 13:28Lewis Howes?

  Or we don't take the, the call to adventure.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Correct, correct.

• 13:31Lewis Howes?

  We don't go on the journey, we don't do the healing work, we go darker into whatever the addictive abuse it is that we're into.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 13:38Lewis Howes?

  And we lose ourselves.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Correct. Which is also okay because we get to the end of this life and we reflect upon it and we learn from that experience, which then motivates a desire for the next life and we play the game again, right?

• 13:53Lewis Howes?

  Hopefully, yeah, hopefully.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  But it would be, it would be, it would be nice, you know, that's kind of like playing Super Mario Brothers and having to do the same level over and over and over again, right? It would be nice to progress and we have more access than ever before to this progression technology, right? Because, yeah, I think about my parents' generation, I mean, they didn't really have that, you know, maybe someone could stumble into a Jim Rohn seminar or, you know, find some new thought movement book, right? And, and there are those folks and you see that their kids have been raised fairly well versus most of us. But I think that's what's so amazing about, you know, what, what you're doing and the technology that's available and social media and YouTube and all of these things is that consciousness and, and, and the laws by which consciousness functions and how this game works are more available to us than ever before.

• 14:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  And that is a part of this awakening that we're seeing, which is occurring simultaneously to this massive breakdown of the old system, right? These two things are happening simultaneously. Which makes this a really exciting time to be alive.

• 14:48Lewis Howes?

  Hundred percent.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:49Lewis Howes?

  Hundred percent.

• 14:53Lewis Howes?

  You know, I think a lot of people can resonate with what you shared around being really good at accomplishing success, but not feeling good at loving yourself. Do you believe that success is enough for someone to overcome their wounds, their traumas, their insecurities to actually love themselves?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Well, you know-

• 15:12Lewis Howes?

  Like making the money, accomplishing the big dream and getting-

• 15:14Speaker 01

  No, clearly-

• 15:15Lewis Howes?

  Is that enough?

• 15:16Speaker 01

  No, clearly the answer is no. And we, you know, um, from a coaching perspective, you know, those are the huddled masses that end up in our seminars, right? Our, our, you know, a, a segment of them are very successful people.

• 15:27Lewis Howes?

  High achievers.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Right, right. And that'll really mess with your head because when you, when you think that that's actually the solution and then you get there and it's not.

• 15:35Lewis Howes?

  You're like, I just spent 20 years chasing this thing.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:39Lewis Howes?

  And I still have an empty hole inside of me.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Correct. It's, I mean, one must imagine it's a terrifying moment, right?

• 15:45Lewis Howes?

  Horrific.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:46Lewis Howes?

  It's like the worst feeling, right?

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. And so, um, and there's an opportunity, which is a lot of what you do to like even slow down for a second and go like, well, wait, well, what, what are we even talking about with success? What is success, right? What is greatness? Uh, because there's a good portion of the world that is, you know, measuring it by how much money is in your bank account still.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  But, but I think we would talk about it in a, in a language of like, you know, being authentic, being vulnerable, being in the service of others, um, being willing to do the uncomfortable healing work that allows who you truly are to emerge, right? Like that, that's perhaps the best definition of greatness is like you actually become who you came here to become. And the beautiful thing is it's not about going out there and trying to figure out how to cludge together who you were meant to become. It's all here, it's all there, right? Which, you know, there's, there's a, a distinction that we teach, um, that I'm so grateful for because, you know, having been in personal growth and healing for the last, I don't

• 16:46Speaker 01

  know, 15 years, um, and, and doing all the stuff, reading the books, going to the seminars, you know, I, I remember walking into Landmark Forum the first day that I did that and going to Tony's events and, um, you know, then getting into meditation and breath work and, you know, dragging my poor wife, who was my girlfriend at that time to India because I thought, well, maybe, you know, some monks can solve my problem for me. Or doing the ayahuasca or the psilocybin or the, the therapeutically facilitated MDMA, like the whole thing, all the stuff, right? The stuff. What I became aware of was a really simple equation for me, and this is what we teach, that distills down all of personal growth and, and success principles, uh, in, in, into

• 17:28Speaker 01

  one formula, which is desire plus non-resistance equals desired result. So whatever your desire is, if, if you want to make more money, if you want to heal your chronic health condition, if you want to find your soulmate, if you want to have more intimacy in the relationship that you're actually in, if you want to become Prime Minister of Canada, whatever, whatever the desire is, it doesn't matter what it is. If you can become psychologically and emotionally non-resistant to the desire 100% of the time consistently and predictably, you will crystallize that desire into your reality.

• 18:01Lewis Howes?

  What does that mean? How do you do that? You have a desire, a dream, or a goal.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:06Lewis Howes?

  And you become non-resistant to what?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  To the desire itself, because what happens is the moment you have a desire, two things uh, enter your awareness. Number one is of course, the thing that you want. But number two is the absence of it.

• 18:19Lewis Howes?

  The lack.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not there yet.

• 18:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  And the brain will give a meaning to the absence of it. Well, it's not there because there's not enough time. Well, it's not there because I'm not good enough. Well, it's not there because money is hard to make. Well, it's not there because there's something wrong with me. Well, it's not there because other people have it and there's a limited amount of it in the world. There's an explanation. That's, we're great explainers.

• 18:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Right? And that explanation is actually a limiting belief. And, and as long as that limiting belief exists, it's not that you can't produce the result because reality is very gracious with us. Like, nobody has a perfect mindset. Um, but is, if you can identify what the resistance is and do the inner work to transform it, you now become completely aligned and congruent with the outcome itself.

• 19:04Lewis Howes?

  So give me an example of this around either love or money or?

• 19:08Speaker 01

  I'll give you a personal example for me.

• 19:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  I started my podcast back in um, July 4th. It was, it was the 4th of July in 2023.

• 19:16Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  And I was recording an episode uh, every single day. Uh, sorry, every single week, every day. Can you imagine? I was recording.

• 19:23Lewis Howes?

  That's kind of me.

• 19:26Lewis Howes?

  It's almost.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Yes, I can imagine, right.

• 19:27Lewis Howes?

  Almost every day, yeah.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Um, and uh, and it was about a, a year and it just wasn't performing the way I had expected.

• 19:34Lewis Howes?

  Once a week for a year, you're pretty about there.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  I'm just, I'm putting an episode out there and I'm like, I don't really understand. I took some Ali Abdaal, you know, YouTube optimization course and you know, I'm requi, I'm doing all the best practices and I'm, and, and, and I'm looking at the content. I'm like, it's good content. The hook is good. And I'm looking at other shows. I'm like, I think it's as good. Maybe it's even better than this other stuff. Why isn't it performing? That's all the resistance. The desire was a podcast that reaches a lot of people. The resistance was, why isn't it reaching more people? What's wrong with me? What's wrong with it? Why isn't it happening sooner?

• 20:08Lewis Howes?

  I need to fix something.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Maybe it'll never happen. My son was born. And when my son was born, I stopped really paying attention to a lot of other things in my life.

• 20:17Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Cause my son was here. He's what mattered. And I stopped making the underperformance of my podcast matter, because that was the resistance. One of my mentors said, what you make matter becomes matter. Right? That's what we do. We're human beings. We are able to take something and create it in, uh, nothing and create it into something.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  And so when I was making matter was the underperformance of my podcast. As soon as I withdrew my attention from the underperformance, in other words, I dropped the resistance. And I redirected my energy over to my son. Within 90 days, my podcast took off.

• 20:51Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Right? And this is the challenging thing. We're supposed to, as Napoleon Hill talks about, have a burning desire for something. But then not pay attention to the absence of it.

• 21:00Lewis Howes?

  And be kind of unattached.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  And be unattached.

• 21:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  So, um, now you said.

• 21:06Lewis Howes?

  Which is hard to do when you focus your energy on a desire that you want something.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 21:11Lewis Howes?

  And in some ways, you should be obsessed about it.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 21:14Lewis Howes?

  Some ways to be like, I need to master this. I need to develop consistent habits and actions towards it. And I need to, you know, uh, conspire the world and people around me to support me in this in some ways. But also not be attached to the result.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 21:29Lewis Howes?

  And the lacking of the result not happening right now?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the challenging art of a human being.

• 21:33Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  It's the challenging, you know, Neville Goddard talks about this, right? He's like, um, ignore your reality. Right? Have a desire, but then ignore your current situation. Cause if you keep paying attention to your current situation, you keep paying attention to the absence of the thing that you want.

• 21:47Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  And you get locked into the absence of the thing.

• 21:49Lewis Howes?

  So what do we do instead? Instead of the focusing on what we are lacking, no matter how hard someone's working, how much they're trying and it's failing and it's not working yet. The podcast, the relationship, the financial success, the health, whatever it is. How do we detach from the result not being in our lives now? So that it shows up now?

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the first step is understanding what we're talking about. You know, the, the, the greatest challenge human beings have is that we don't understand how reality works. We don't understand that we are given the right to have a desire. And that if we get out of the way, 100% of the time, the desire must produce itself. Now, some people will think that that means, okay, Dave, my desire is a million dollar business. And so I'm just gonna write it down on a note card or visualize it. And the Amazon delivery guy is gonna deliver a million dollar business to my front doorstep while I'm watching Netflix and eating cheesy poops on the sofa. That's not what I'm saying. So, w- w- we are meant to take daily consistent action towards the goals that we have. But notice when we start to move into resistance.

• 22:52Lewis Howes?

  And what does resistance actually look like? Is it an emotional feeling? Is it a frustration? Is it a thought?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  It's a great question.

• 22:59Lewis Howes?

  Is it a lacking of action? What is that?

• 23:01Speaker 01

  I have a feeling I'm gonna give you three distinctions today. Okay? The first one is desire plus non-resistance equals desired result. I would call that the golden equation.

• 23:08Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  That's how all, all outcomes are produced. So the question is, well, how do I know what I'm resistance? And for, for that, we go to a distinction called the two states of being.

• 23:18Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, primal versus?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Powerful states.

• 23:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Right? There's, there are only two states of being, primal states and powerful states. Primal states are states of being that don't feel good. States like stress, anxiety, overwhelm, anger, jealousy, depression, anxiety, boredom. That's when the sympathetic expression of the nervous system is active. We're in fight or flight.

• 23:37Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  And then there are powerful states of being, states like joy, curiosity, excitement, enthusiasm, peace, calm. Those are states of being that feel good. And that's when the parasympathetic state of the nervous system is active. You are always in one state of being or the other. You're never in two states of being at the same time. And what's interesting is that what determines what state of being you're in is not the experience. It's the meaning you're giving the experience. It's the thoughts that you're having about money, the thoughts you're having about yourself, the thoughts that you're having about life. Why is this important? Because everything that you want to create, all change that you desire, your vision board, your dreams, your goals, those will be produced from a powerful state of being.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  That's when you're connected to intuition, inspiration, uh, health, vibrancy, prosperity, abundance, presence, intimacy, connection. It's all in a powerful state. You don't get any of that when you're in a primal state.

• 24:30Lewis Howes?

  Uh-huh.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  And so when we are in a primal state, we're in resistance. So if we're playing the game called desire plus non-resistance equals desired result, what we start paying much more attention to is what state of being am I in?

• 24:46Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  And a root cause foundational way of starting to navigate life, which is a practice I'm in not all the time, but a lot, is noticing when I've moved into a primal state. Knowing that the only thing that is moving me into a primal state is my own thoughts and my own beliefs. And then observing those thoughts and beliefs and using whatever tools I have to move back into a powerful state of being. That's the practice. It's wax on, wax off.

• 25:15Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  If you do that consistently, eventually you'll produce the desired result.

• 25:20Lewis Howes?

  What is the thing that gets you in a primal state of being the most?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Me?

• 25:23Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Um, physical sensations of my body that I don't like. My, my health has been one of my mountains to climb.

• 25:31Lewis Howes?

  Like pains or like?

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Heart palpitations, aches, pains.

• 25:36Lewis Howes?

  So it puts you in more of a fear mind rather than a, a powerful frame of?

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Correct. It moves me into a primal state.

• 25:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Um, but there's plenty of things that move me into a primal state, you know? I, I, I have expectations on how my Tuesday is going to go.

• 25:49Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  And it doesn't go that way. Um, you know, somebody doesn't do a thing that they're supposed to be doing. Or a marketing campaign doesn't work the way I expected it to work. And I move into a primal state, right? It's, it's a.

• 26:04Lewis Howes?

  What does that feel like when you go to primal state? Is it a anxiety? Is it a depression? Is it, I'm not good enough? Is it, uh, something's wrong? Or what's the?

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Sure. It could be anything from frustration. So emotionally, well, let's back up because thoughts generally create emotions. The thought might be, um, why aren't they doing what they're supposed to be doing? What if this doesn't work out? How come, how come they did it this way? Um, uh, am I doing something wrong? Right? All of those thoughts are conducive to some sort of what you could call a negative emotion, right? A primal state. The emotions for me that are habits are, um, frustration.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Anxiety, some other form of fear, shame and guilt, right? Those are my go-tos. And really, what we're talking about in all this work, there's so many ways to describe personal growth, but what we're talking about is building a different neurology. I think about how amazing it is as human beings, we're able to use our minds to reorganize and rewire our nervous systems in our brains. And so every time you catch yourself in a primal state and you observe the thought, and you, we have a great set of tools, but there's a lot of great teachers out there to sort of interrogate the thought, and you actually see that the thought isn't necessarily true, you're building a new nervous system, you're building a new capacity.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  So many people want to have more in their life, but like, are you capable of handling it, right? And so this is, this is a beautiful logical process that whatever you believe our Creator is, created for us, which is, you know, we, we, we start to see the deep unreality that we've been living since we adopted those early age programs, and you start to reorient yourself to a proper perception of reality. And the reward for that is you get to create more of what you want to create, but the real reward for that is you start living in joy.

• 28:00Lewis Howes?

  Joy, peace, harmony, abundance, freedom.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Freedom.

• 28:04Lewis Howes?

  I think a lot of people don't feel free in their life, you know, and if you grew up not feeling safe, that means you don't have freedom.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  For sure, right, for sure.

• 28:12Lewis Howes?

  And at least that was for me, I didn't feel free. And it's like, I wanted to create my own sense of peace and freedom.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  That not feeling safe and not feeling free is pervasive in the nervous systems of human beings. And so, you know, not only do we create our own realities, where you end up in a career where you don't feel safe, you end up in a relationship where you don't feel safe, you end up with a bank account where you don't feel safe, you end up in a body where you don't feel safe.

• 28:38Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  But look at what we're collectively materializing at a macro level. Does the world feel safe?

• 28:43Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  No, I mean, you could, you could pick whatever you want, you could pick the war in Iran, you could pick what's happening in Gaza, you could pick the way the government is run, you could pick inflation, you could pick, all of these things are crystallizations of the unsafety that we have not as human beings yet learned to metabolize in our nervous systems. So you don't, you don't, we're not, we're never gonna change that out there.

• 29:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  We will change in here, and as we change in here, those changed people will have new thoughts and new ideas to create a new system that feels safe for everyone. But that's the big mistake right now, is everybody, you know, there's a war on terror, there's a war on drugs, there's a war on this, there's a war on that, it's all more resistance. But, but we're told, and by the way, you know, my equation is a derivative of the great teachings, right? We're told to be non-resistant, like Christ says, turn the other cheek. Right, this, why, what do you, that doesn't even make any sense, you're telling me when, when I'm confronted by something that I don't like in the world, I'm actually supposed to turn the other cheek, give it my cheek? And if you really look at what I think that teaching is, it's when you notice something in your life that you don't like, or you notice something in the world that you don't

• 29:45Speaker 01

  like, which would be your enemy, you turn the cheek, which is you turn your attention in the other direction, you use the contraction or the problem in your life as an inspiration for a new desire and a new solution that you can now crystallize into reality, right? It's a beautiful teaching.

• 30:01Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  But they're all there, right? Whether it's Buddha or Christ or whoever, and you could pick your guy or your gal, right? Non-resistance, but now we can see that just, it makes sense, because behavioral psychology tells us what you believe you think, what you think you feel, what you feel you do, and what you do are the results. And so if you're thinking and feeling resistance, you're gonna produce a resistant reality.

• 30:23Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Right?

• 30:25Lewis Howes?

  So it all starts with a belief, or does it start with healing the past so you can create new beliefs?

• 30:33Speaker 01

  My own journey was starting with my beliefs.

• 30:39Lewis Howes?

  And you were what, around 30, you said?

• 30:41Speaker 01

  In my early 30s.

• 30:42Lewis Howes?

  So you were very, you were successful in your career, making money, accomplishing?

• 30:45Speaker 01

  I wouldn't even call it successful, I would say like, look, if you think a guy running a venture-backed technology company is successful, fine, but that same guy was only paying himself $80,000 a year, had $3,000 in his bank account, two homes and foreclosure, and had been single for 10 years, like, how successful is that?

• 30:59Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Right? But yeah, I guess if you, if you took a quick look, right?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  But you know, I, it was the craziest thing, I was at Miami International Airport, and I, I just, I'd gotten about 18 months of sobriety under my belt, and I was like, man, if, if I can change this much, like, cause I never thought I was gonna stop doing drugs and alcohol and sexing and everything that I was doing.

• 31:22Lewis Howes?

  And how old were you then?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Uh, 33.

• 31:25Lewis Howes?

  33.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Right, especially pornography.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  I mean porno, I was like, I, I don't think there's any way this is gonna stop. And it stopped.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  And it didn't stop because I tried to stop it, it stopped because I was healing myself through the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, it's a phenomenal healing framework. And not only was I looking at my limiting beliefs and my resentments and healing them, but I was also, as I was clearing out, starting to find a relationship with a higher power, I didn't grow up in a family with a higher power. So I had all of that, and I was like, man, if this is possible, like, what else is possible? Like, maybe I could actually become wealthy, maybe I could actually find a soulmate, maybe I could actually, and so I was in this inquiry, and I went to Miami International Airport, I was flying somewhere, and you ever had that experience where like, there's a book on the bookshelf, and it like decides it's gonna have a relationship with you, like you just feel it?

• 32:20Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  And I walk over and I grab this book, and I look at the back cover, and it had four statements, it said, "Life is full of suffering," I was like, okay, I can relate to that, "The suffering is gonna happen to you, there's a way out of the suffering, and the way out of the suffering is the Eightfold Path of Virtue," and I was reading the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, and I turned this book over, and it's called Awakening the Buddha Within, it's got Lama Surya Das, I buy the book, I read it cover to cover on the airplane, I was like, holy cow. The message here with this Eightfold Path of Virtue of Buddha is very, Eightfold Path of Virtue.

• 32:51Lewis Howes?

  Eightfold Path.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Eightfold Path of Virtue, right? It says eight steps. And I was like, this is almost the same as the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I get back to my office, and my social media manager at the time left me a book, and I was not a reader, right? So these are miracles. And it was a book called Kingdom Principles by Miles Monroe, where he's explaining the teachings of Christ, I'm like, it's the same steps. And so I go to Barnes and Noble, and I, I don't think I've ever been into a bookstore, to be honest with you, I go to the little lady at the front desk, and I'm like, do you have a place for people who are like, trying to get their life sorted out or whatever? She's like, oh, the self-help section, I'm like, what a wonderfully named section.

• 33:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  And there was a little book laying on the floor in that section called Think and Grow It by Napoleon Hill, I just picked it up. So I, you know, I came into healing through thoughts and beliefs. I think eventually you go back and look at where these beliefs originated, and you find forgiveness, or you find proper perspective, and you heal it, right? But you don't have to go back there, because those things that happened then are showing up in your life right now.

• 33:58Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  You know, you're, you're, every man you meet is dad, and every woman you meet is mom, and those are your conflicts. And, you know, if you're living with a chronic health condition, or you're living in financial scarcity, your reaction to that reality are the same programs that you had back then. So we can work with the program at any level of the timeline, right? I do think eventually we end up going back and cleaning up those early misunderstandings. But that, to me, that can be a little bit harder than just working with the raw material as it's showing up on a day-to-day basis, it's right there for you.

• 34:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  You know, you don't have to get into a deep hypnosis, or get into EMDR, all great tools, right? But like, hey, it's showing up right now with the thing on Tuesday.

• 34:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah. What would you say then is the, the number one habit that most people are living and, and living by on a daily basis, that they think is positive, but is actually harming them in some way with their energy or their frequency to creating more?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Again, it'll vary from person to person, but if, if we like, focus that question on high performance, cause I know there's a lot of high performers that listen to the show, you're a high performer, it's, it's this, let's look at a bad equation, it's desire plus hustle and grind equals desired result. Right, it's desire plus sacrifice your health and relationships for success equals desired result. And so, and that's reinforced by a lot of hustle culture, I mean, you can throw a stone and find it on YouTube or Instagram, it's like, you know, if, if, if you're not working, somewhere someone is, and when you meet them, they will win. And like, I'm like, okay, well, maybe, but probably not, because Christ said, my yoke

• 35:44Speaker 01

  is easy, right? So like, there's gotta be an easier way, there's gotta be prosperity and abundance and possibility available for all of us. And so that was a big part of, what I'm still down-regulating my nervous system towards, right, is this idea of like, no, I just need to be, do more, or there's not enough time. People are living in time scarcity all the time, like, you can't even breathe. And so, again, going back to what I have come to learn is like, no, my, I don't need to hustle, grind, I don't need to find more time, I don't need to do anything that would insert itself into that desire plus, other than non-resistance. And everything that shows up in that space that is not non-resistance, is the resistance that needs to be worked on.

• 36:30Lewis Howes?

  What would you say is the number one limiting belief of most people then?

• 36:35Speaker 01

  I'm not enough. Yeah, being not good enough. And it makes sense when you look at what happened when we were children, so, you know, you've got beautiful eight-month-old daughters, I've got a three-and-a-half-year-old, and what, what I see in my son is his expectation, rightfully so, of unconditional love from me. So we all expected unconditional love from our parents. But I don't care who your parent was, how good they were, and there are plenty that, you know, weren't great on paper. But your parents are never gonna have unconditional love for you, they're conditional, right? They're, you have the condition of your career, you have the condition of your relationship

• 37:19Speaker 01

  with your spouse, you have the condition of being a single mom or a single dad, you have the condition of your own trauma, you have, you have the condition of so many things. So there are always gonna be times when a child expects the parent to be present for them, and the parent is absent, because of conditionality. In that absence, the child subconsciously believes it has something to do with them. And so that is why we find, I am not enough, or I'm not good enough, everywhere, because it happened to all of us.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  But, and this has become one of my passions, like, really understanding the structure of reality, the structure, sort of like a, a metaphysical version of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, like, what's really happening here? Because if reality is loving, how do we explain all of these things that seem to be absent of love?

• 38:06Lewis Howes?

  So how do you explain it?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Well.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  My own experience and what I've seen consistently with with other people is that that that not being enough creates a compensation, which we talked about before, that becomes your personality. And so you embark upon this journey with a nervous system that

• 38:31Lewis Howes?

  To prove or to

• 38:32Speaker 01

  To prove or to please or to whatever.

• 38:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  And what's what seems to happen is that compensation that comes out of feeling like you weren't enough, which is your personality, works for a while.

• 38:44Lewis Howes?

  It's a good strategy.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a it's a strategy and it has strengths, it has gifts. But also remember, it is a neurology, it's a nervous system. And so as it works, it starts to be applied into more and more areas of your life.

• 39:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  And what happens is at about forty years old, there's this emergence of what we would call the core program. It's between forty and sixty where people would describe it as, I don't understand the thing that I've always been good at that got me to where I am is starting to be the thing that's suffocating me.

• 39:17Lewis Howes?

  It's making me a prisoner.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  That's the core program.

• 39:19Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  It's a overdevelopment of that neurology. And that will bring you to your knees. So people have their long dark night of the soul or they hit their bottom. It doesn't have to be with drugs or alcohol. It's like, I just can't keep pleasing people. I have given no time for myself. And so now the aspects of myself or my health are starting to degrade. Or someone has built up this personality that is, I'm the one who's able to bring order to chaos. But now there's so much chaos that chaos just beats them down. And in that beat down, which again is a byproduct of this overdeveloped aspect of your nervous system,

• 40:02Speaker 01

  you are incapable of solving it on your own. So it doesn't matter what great personal development tool that you have. It doesn't matter what pills or potions you take. It doesn't matter what shaman you find with a great playlist. None of it works because that is meant to actually bring you back into a relationship with the higher power of your own understanding so that you can finally experience the unconditional love that is there for you, but was never meant to be given to you by your parents. And what's beautiful about that is when you reach that inflection point and you start to find that unconditional love, the next natural step is to forgive your parents. Because it was our misunderstanding, understandably so, right? We were kids.

• 40:46Lewis Howes?

  Trying to survive.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  But it was our misunderstanding. And so the core program is not actually, like, if you think about the super limiting belief that emerges between the ages of forty and sixty, it's not a thing that you're meant to get rid of yourself, you're meant to surrender it to your higher power. And now you get into this concept, which I think a lot of people don't understand, which is surrender. And so it requires these pieces, right? Surrender to what? To who? To a higher power? Well, how do you find that relationship? Well, you hit a bottom and you have nowhere to go other than look up.

• 41:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Right? So this is all this beautiful arc of how every human being's life emerges. And the challenging thing is when you don't understand the arc, it's like trying to fight an invisible boxer in a ring because you have no context for it.

• 41:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  And that's why I think so many people who get into personal growth or the work that we teach, they're able to actually start changing. It's not just about going, yeah, okay, my, I know I have my limiting beliefs, but how do I change them? Right? It's not about like, yeah, I understand that forgiveness would be good for me and resentment is bad. But how do I actually forgive? That's the integration piece that I think up until now has been missing in a lot of the historical motivation and inspirational part of personal growth, right?

• 41:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, because when someone is feeling typically, when someone's feeling pain, resistance, stress, overwhelmed, if they don't go to God or a higher power, they go to some other numbing mechanism.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 42:07Lewis Howes?

  Drugs, porn, sex, alcohol, success, money, whatever it is,

• 42:13Lewis Howes?

  workaholicism or whatever it might be. And they you realize after five, 10 years of doing that strategy to try to numb and feel better, it doesn't work. It's not giving you the peace or the harmony, the results that you want. And it's by going more into that and people are going to let you down and addictions are going to let you down. And all these things are going to let you down from giving you that unconditional love. So that's why we either need to be broken down or we need to create some type of awareness when things are good

• 42:44Lewis Howes?

  before it gets bad to say, oh, I'm not having everything I truly want inside of me. Let me connect to a higher power.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, amen to that.

• 42:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  And the higher power thing is interesting too, because we have a lot of, there are a lot of people who, it's where I started. I think I probably would have considered myself atheistic and then agnostic. And then I started building a relationship with the higher power. And for me, the higher power was the universe.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  But what I've learned over time for me, I don't have to put this on anyone else, is

• 43:16Speaker 01

  I was really inspired by the story of David in the Bible. I was like, I want that. I want that personal relationship with God. I want to be able to stand up to the Goliath of my life and say, you know what? I know who my father is. I know what he does for me. And and today I'm going to show the whole world that there is a God in my life, right? I wanted that because prior to that, it was the universe. Like I was in New Age and law of attraction and all that stuff is great. Like I'm a huge Abraham Hicks fan, like all those things are amazing. They're part of the journey. But I I felt like there was a difference between having a relationship with the Creator and the created. The universe is created.

• 43:53Lewis Howes?

  By the Creator.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  By the Creator, right? And so I didn't really know where to find that. And I just started, you know, but I had seen in my life that when I ask, I receive. There is there is this response, not always as quickly as I would like it to be, but and so I started just really saying, hey, I I want to know what it looks like. What can I do? What is available to me to have a personal relationship with God? And

• 44:17Lewis Howes?

  And what showed up for you?

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Well, we talked about like, you know, my my mountain is my body and my health, right? And so I

• 44:22Lewis Howes?

  You're fifty now, right?

• 44:23Speaker 01

  I'm fifty. Well, that's not why, but yes.

• 44:25Lewis Howes?

  Now, but you're starting to feel.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, yeah, no, there's there's a there's a there's a real thing, which is why, you know, focusing on longevity, like we talked about, is so important. But in 2019, I had this ayahuasca ceremony that I did. And it was probably like my 12th ceremony that I had done.

• 44:43Lewis Howes?

  It's a lot.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Well, people counted as days, so it was like three or four ceremonies because some of them were many, many days, right? And it was super intense. And about three weeks later, I like lost my sleep. I just couldn't sleep.

• 44:56Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man, that's not good.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not good. So my sleep has gotten better over time. And but I still wasn't sleeping great. And so I'm in this inquiry of like, I want to have a personal relationship with God. And I had a week or two where I wasn't sleeping well. And my wife was like, why don't you just get up early and journal? And, you know, rather than just go back to bed, I'm like, I don't want to get up at five o'clock and journal. Like, that's when I kind of squeeze in a few hours of sleep. Then I had revisited Paramahansa Yogananda's autobiography of a yogi. And in autobiography of a yogi, Paramahansa wakes up early and he writes. So it's like, okay, I'll wake up early and write. But I was like, no, no, no, that just doesn't sound convenient. Then I then I did a breath session, a very deep transformational breath session remotely with with with a woman that I work with.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  And in the breath session, at the end, my body sits itself up. My hand comes out with like with a pen in it and I start writing. And I was like, okay, three times. I don't need to get struck by lightning. So the next day I get up and I go down into my podcast studio, which is like my man cave. And I just start writing. And it just came out. It started out with, Dear Father, thank you. And I started, I started thanking God for all the beautiful things in my life. And it was such a unique experience because I've written gratitudes before, but this was like a love letter that had been building up for for forty eight years. And I was just like, thank you for all these beautiful things in my life. And then I started asking for things.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  And you know, it's interesting, when my son asks me for something, he's 100% convinced he's going to get it. There's no doubt because I'm his dad and I can deliver on anything, right? He's like, no, I want and I started writing and I felt this frequency of like, I know who I'm asking. So I know I'm going to get it. There was no doubt. There was no resistance. And then the third piece was, once I felt that, I started asking for other people. I started praying for other people. And so this has become my my journaling process. I call it communion journaling. I feel like I'm in a relationship with my higher power when I'm doing it. Do I do it every day? No. Should I do it more than I do? Yes. But it's there. And so that that was the answer to the asking that I had. And it has really helped me deepen my relationship with with my God.

• 47:08Lewis Howes?

  What if you ask for something and it's not given to you?

• 47:12Speaker 01

  You know, there's a great teacher in the early 1920s. I just did an episode about her Florence Gobel Shin. She wrote a book called The Game of Life and How to Play It, one of my top five books. It's a great book.

• 47:22Lewis Howes?

  Is she still alive?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  No. And she, so she, she, you know, basically says, and I'm not going to do her affirmation justice. I just wanted to give her some credit. But the idea is, is like, if it's mine, it's mine. And if it's not mine, I don't want it. So if I ask for something, now I may go kicking and screaming for a while. But but at some point, I I realize

• 47:45Lewis Howes?

  It's not for me.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  It's not for me.

• 47:47Lewis Howes?

  Let it go.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  And and at some point

• 47:48Lewis Howes?

  Why do you have the desire in your heart then if it's not for you?

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Well, I I think there's two types of desires. I think there's a desire that comes from a head and I think there's a desire that comes from the heart.

• 47:57Lewis Howes?

  For sure.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think authentic desires aren't things that we invent. They're they're they're transmissions that we receive. And, you know, that's part of the discernment that we develop as we do the healing work is you start to feel the difference. And so, yeah, you know, it's she has another really wonderful affirmation that says what's what was mine from the beginning is mine now and ever shall be mine. So whatever is mine can't be taken away and whatever isn't mine, I don't need it.

• 48:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. At the end of the day, it's not yours anymore.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:28Lewis Howes?

  You know, whatever you receive, I guess, you don't take it with you. I mean,

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:32Lewis Howes?

  Not that we're aware of. I mean, it's like you can't take the physical things with you.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:36Lewis Howes?

  So no matter how much money or the relationships you have, like that stays in this world or it's gone.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Hopefully, what we get to bring is who we become, right? Which is why this work is so important.

• 48:45Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Right? Like your essence, your soul, your spirit, so that you can just continue to progress. And I think that makes sense. Like, if you look at a lot of the great teachings and you talk about incarnation and multiple lives, it seems to make sense. In this life, I can see that I've I've gone through many lives. And each time I've learned and each time I try to get better. And so it would just make sense that I would do that life after life and that we would actually do that as a as a as a collective consciousness.

• 49:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  As a way of just evolving consciousness.

• 49:16Lewis Howes?

  Do you feel like you've had your biggest transformation yet?

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Never really, never really thought about that.

• 49:24Lewis Howes?

  You kind of say like in your 40s to 60, you go through this big kind of wake up typically for most people.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  It's funny. It reminds me of something my friend said where he realized that every time he goes through a transformation, it's, it's a contraction and then he gets into the expansion. So he's, he's afraid to ask for any more.

• 49:40Lewis Howes?

  Cause like it's gonna be painful.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Contractions. So have I gone through my biggest one yet? I don't, I don't know.

• 49:46Lewis Howes?

  Besides death, I guess.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Probably, probably not. I mean, look, um, drug and alcohol and sex addiction was really challenging. That, that was, that was 30 years of momentum that had been building up. Yeah. Maybe there's something that's going to be 60 or 70 years of momentum that I'm not aware of, but I do feel like, you know, if, if you think about personal growth is almost like cleansing, that one felt like a pretty big cathartic type of experience.

• 50:15Lewis Howes?

  How long were you addicted to drugs, sex, alcohol?

• 50:18Speaker 01

  I would, you know, I, I started looking at pornography when I was 13. Uh, and then college was, you know, was, was drugs and alcohol. Drugs for me was marijuana, but it was a cocktail.

• 50:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  All of it though, I, I, sex addiction was a really challenging addiction to overcome. Like I went to, I went to AA meetings and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, not, not to take anything away from those programs, but, but the people that I saw in sex addiction recovery, I could see why it was part of my intelligent design because unlike drugs and alcohol, technically I could like not call my pot dealer or not go to the bar. But the neurology of sex addiction continues to deepen even if you fantasize.

• 51:00Lewis Howes?

  Oh yeah.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  And so that.

• 51:01Lewis Howes?

  You're still living as a sex addict almost by not even having sex.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Correct. And, and you're, and you're still deepening those, those neural networks. So it really required a psychological, a level of psychological mastery.

• 51:13Lewis Howes?

  Discipline, mastery, awareness, shifting your attention constantly.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Correct. And fellowship.

• 51:19Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  I mean, there's no, there's no way, you know, I could have done it without other people. And I think that's a really important part of healing work.

• 51:26Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Is being in a community with other folks. You know, you and I talked about the stages that we're at where we don't, you know, don't have, aren't spending a lot of time with big groups of friends like we used to. But that's something that I realized recently, I really need to get back into is, is, is fellowship around personal growth.

• 51:40Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:44Lewis Howes?

  What do you feel like is the, the core root cause of all addiction?

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Unresolved emotional distress, you know?

• 51:53Lewis Howes?

  For anyone who's an alcoholic or sex addict or.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:56Lewis Howes?

  Porn addict or whatever.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  It always is, which is, you know, there's a lot of ways to recover outside of 12 step. There, there's great programs out there. But that's what's so interesting is like, you, you don't, the, the 12 steps aren't about trying to get you to stop drinking or drugging or sexing or eating or whatever it is. The 12 steps are about identifying the underlying root causes, which are the unresolved emotional trauma uh, and transforming them, right? And so when you do that, then you're no longer using in order to cope.

• 52:29Lewis Howes?

  In this 12, the 12 step program, it's with AA, right? 12 step program is always.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  It started with Alcoholics Anonymous. Yeah. Then you have all these other anonymous groups. Yeah.

• 52:38Lewis Howes?

  In the 12 step program, in your mind, what is the one step? That if you didn't have the 12 step program wouldn't work. Obviously you need it all, but if there, what is the one step like? Okay. If you had these 11, but this one was not there, it'd still be, you'd still be an addict.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Uh, it's not exactly a step, right? Because, because there's a step which is admitting we were powerless over our addiction. And powerlessness is a funny thing for people. Um, but it's just, it's just the acknowledgement. It was the acknowledgement that I have a problem.

• 53:13Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. The acknowledgement that I have a problem and I've been unable to solve the problem on my own.

• 53:18Lewis Howes?

  Do most people feel like they don't have a problem when they're addicted to something?

• 53:23Speaker 01

  I mean, I, yeah, I think for the most part that's, you know.

• 53:26Lewis Howes?

  They don't think they have a problem?

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the, the challenge with that is twofold. One, we've normalized drinking.

• 53:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, man.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  We've normalized sexual behavior. And to some extent we've, for me, we normalized cannabis, right? And so there's this normalization of these.

• 53:42Lewis Howes?

  You legalize it.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. There's a normalization of these behaviors. Um, and so that already creates a frame of allowance. And then it's a slippery slope. So you, you don't notice it's, it's the frog boiling in the pot.

• 53:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Right? So yeah, the, the majority of people out there, um, either don't think they have a problem or there are these glimpsing moments, right? Like of, of I have a problem and it's like, ah, nah, it's not really an issue for me. I'm not really an alcoholic. I remember, I remember when I had a conversation with a outpatient treatment group in, in Winter Park, Florida. And I sat down with the counselor and he's like, you're an alcoholic. I'm like, come on, man. Like that doesn't even make any sense. I'm not one of those. I'm not an alcoholic. I just go out on the weekend and I drink with my friends.

• 54:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  And then I chase girls and I smoke a little bit of pot. And he's like, cool, stop. And I'm like, well, I can't. He's like.

• 54:34Lewis Howes?

  You're an alcoholic. Wow.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  You're an alcoholic.

• 54:36Lewis Howes?

  Why don't you think you could have stopped?

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Well, I tried.

• 54:39Lewis Howes?

  You did?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  I had the awareness for years, right? There was a period of time where it's like, okay, I, I don't have a problem. Then I knew I had a problem, but I couldn't stop.

• 54:47Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 54:49Lewis Howes?

  Was it just, if you stopped, then what would happen? If you stopped the addiction, what would you have to face?

• 54:55Speaker 01

  No, I'd stop for a period of time. I'd stop for 30 days. And then something great would happen. So I'd celebrate or something bad would happen. So I'd go cope. It was just, it was, it was a well, well worn into my, into my nervous system.

• 55:08Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:09Lewis Howes?

  When was the moment you felt like this no longer has a hold on me, this addiction?

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 55:15Lewis Howes?

  Or is it still like, once you're an alcoholic, you're always an alcoholic type of thing?

• 55:20Speaker 01

  For many people it is. For, for me, I haven't, I haven't felt that way. I, I don't.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  You know, I'm, I'm not particularly interested in drinking or smoking pot.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Over the last 15 years since I've been sober, have I done it? Yeah. Like on occasion I've had a glass of wine with my wife or, you know, had a gummy at some event or something, whatever it was. Um, pornography, I couldn't treat casually for sure, but that was my real addiction. That was my core was sex addiction.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, it's just become a lifestyle. The other thing too is like, when you start allowing God in your life and then you start getting your mission from God, and then you start seeing what the rewards are for like living your mission in the world, even though that has its own challenges and its own insecurities that brings up. Um, it's like, it's just a better game to play.

• 56:04Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:05Lewis Howes?

  Than chasing the high.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:07Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:08Lewis Howes?

  When did you feel like you got your calling from God? And how does someone, if they don't know what their purpose is, tap into what their purpose from God really is for them?

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Okay. Two part question. So I, I don't know that I started that, my wife and I started the, the current business we have, the coaching business that has really been what we've been portraying to the world. We probably started trying to do it in like 2015. We had our first event in 2017. Um, and then we had a business. And I knew it was what I was meant to do. I wouldn't describe it as a calling from God yet. The calling from God came in 2021. In late 2021, I had a, well, I don't even know if I was in my midlife at that point, but I, I had a crisis.

• 56:58Lewis Howes?

  Uh, five years ago.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I had a chapter.

• 57:03Lewis Howes?

  What was the crisis?

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we, we just moved.

• 57:05Lewis Howes?

  You're at 45 then, is that right?

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. COVID had hit. Our business had to pivot to virtual. We were doing a lot of live events. Financially, the business was starting to contract. My wife was pregnant with my son. We were having a lot of friction. Um, some of it was chemical, some of it was just where we were in our relationship. We bought the home I told you about in Puerto Rico, but we were remodeling it. So we were living in an apartment in Old San Juan with my mother-in-law.

• 57:32Lewis Howes?

  So you don't have stability, your business isn't stable, you're spending more money than it's coming in, the relationship.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  And I had a bunch of health challenges going on.

• 57:40Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. So it's all happening.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  It was coming from every direction. And, um, I, I had this episode where like, I felt all that stress in my body. I've tried to walk it off. I tried to breath work it off and I couldn't shake it off. And so I got in the shower, a cold shower, and I, I just started yelling because I, I needed to get the energy. So yeah, my wife and, and, and my mother-in-law come running in, they're all freaked out. Yeah. You can imagine, right? And so, long story short, I had a bunch of really amazing people around me with a lot of different resources. But one of the people was my brother and he said, look, right now, your life feels unmanageable. Why don't you go back to where you were able to reestablish yourself when things got unmanageable before? And I was like, that's a good idea. So I started

• 58:26Speaker 01

  going to AA meetings. I hadn't been in years. And I called up a buddy of mine and I said, hey, you want to work the 12 steps with me? And he said, sure. What are you? Are you drinking again? Are you sexing? And I said, no, I realize I'm a chronic worrier. So I want to work the steps around worry. So we work those 12 steps. And man, I worked them seriously. And I saw things I had never seen before.

• 58:47Lewis Howes?

  Like what?

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Um, resentments that I had, limiting beliefs that I had, doubt that I had in my relationship with my higher power. And I also saw how the 12 steps connected beautifully to the frameworks that I had been building. From the golden equation to two states of being to some other ones. And, and I, and so I, what came to me was a 12 step structure for personal growth. It's called the whole human framework. And so we created this 12 step structure. And I started putting folks who've been in our community for years, whose lives had transformed through this 12 step structure. And they were like, holy, like, this is the most transformative thing that we have ever gone through. It included the core program. That's how I discovered the

• 59:30Speaker 01

  core program was through this process. So we had people who had like, one guy was so funny. He said, look, I've climbed the mountain with T Harv Ecker. I've meditated with the Maharishi. I've walked the hot coals with Tony Robbins. He goes, I've done it all. He's like, but this thing is what I've been looking for my whole life. And so as people started going through it, what we found was that they wanted to be in a daily rhythm and a practice around it. And so we created a, a community called the whole human network. And the network had the opportunity to facilitate the framework for other people. And so it just started growing. And what I saw, at the same time, I've sort of been a student of power in the world and how power works, centralized power. I had a lot of young kids who were conspiracy theorists

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  who worked for me, you know, years ago. And then I realized that there's nothing conspiracy, they're not, they're not making stuff up, right? Like, this is how a lot of the world works. And so I realized that like, hey, if we want to change the world at a macro level, we need to heal ourselves. And there's two things that are required to create an alternative system for humanity. Number one is we have to liberate our attention. Because if you don't have attention sovereignty, you cannot consciously create. And our attention is being hijacked all the time, intentionally. And in order to prevent the hijacking of your attention, the solution is heal. Because if you can metabolize fear off your nervous system, fear cannot grab you anymore. And now you become an intentional creator. So I was like, okay, if we can do

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  this at scale, now we've got tens or hundreds of millions of people who have liberated attention, who can direct it wherever they want. The second thing is, we have to start building the scaffolding of a new system, regenerative financial system, regenerative healthcare system, a system that is not about extraction, but we're like, one plus one equals three. And so, so that was the vision I had for whole human. That God spoke to me. So that, through that extraordinary compression and the vision that I've been given, which is what we're focusing on now, we have the coaching company, we have whole human. Whole human is this distributed economy of consciousness, where people help other people awaken, utilizing this amazing framework, and then supporting entrepreneurship in an ecosystem that begins

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  to become a parallel system to the one that's out there right now that's falling apart. What do people do if, thank you for letting me share that. I'm obviously super enthusiastic about it. But that's, that's God speaking to me. What does someone do if they're, if they're wanting to find purpose? Again, it goes back to the golden equation, desire plus non-resistance equals desired result. What is your desire? My desire is I want to know what I'm here to do. I want to find purpose. I want to know what my gifts are and how to leverage them in the world. I want to become financially abundant. I want to be in service of other people. But what, you know, it's inherent in all of us. What am I meant to do here? So, great, desire. Now be non-resistant to it. Well, what does that mean? Well, notice if you start moving into, but what if I don't have a purpose? Well, why haven't I discovered

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  my purpose yet? Well, other people seem to have a purpose. Well, what if my purpose is already taken? What if my purpose is already passed? That's all the inner chatter. That's the limiting beliefs that is the resistance. So if you have a desire, meaning you ask, and you're patient, you'll receive. It's 100% consistent and predictable. How will it occur for me, David? Well, you'll have some thoughts and ideas. You'll see something on YouTube. Somebody will say something to you. An opportunity will show up. You'll have the courage to follow it. It'll be baby steps. It won't show up all at once. Right? But hold on to the desire to know your purpose. And notice when you become resistant to that

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  desire, and use whatever tools you can to drop the resistance. Give it some time, like a dash of patience, and you'll become clear on what your, your purpose is.

• 1:03:17Lewis Howes?

  How does someone know when they should continue on their purpose versus pivot on their purpose? Because when you are clear on your purpose, or you feel called towards something, usually in the beginning, there is some luck, there is some signs and people supporting you, or there is some, oh, I tried this thing and it actually worked to get you going. But then there's usually some type of resistance, or obstacle, or challenge, or hurdle, or whatever it is. So how do you know when you're, you're supposed to continue through the challenges and obstacles and continue the patience of all the challenges

• 1:03:57Lewis Howes?

  and obstacles that may come your way versus, this just isn't for me anymore. Let me pivot towards something else.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Because also, we change over time, right? So you, you grow and evolve. And so your purpose grew. Like, look at mine. At first, I thought my purpose was building a coaching company, which it still is. Now it's whole human, right? And, and looking at that story, I was running into a lot of friction and resistance with, with the coaching company.

• 1:04:25Lewis Howes?

  So it had to evolve.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  So it had to evolve. And

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  the answer is step away. The answer is step away. Like, I don't, I don't think, I think we give ourselves a lot more credit for things than we deserve. In other words, you don't pivot. The pivot happens to you. And so how do you allow the pivot to happen to you? It's like, well, like you said, if you're working through the obstacles, and it feels exhausting, you step away from the problem. Right? And as you step away from the problem, you disentangle yourself from it. You give space for your consciousness to re-normalize. And in that

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  space, you'll have new perspectives, new thoughts, new ideas. Now, you may go back to the same obstacles and overcome them. You may move in another direction. Sometimes you move in another direction. Like, I started whole human in 2021. It was too early. And I came back to the coaching business. But we're very rigid about these types of inquiries a lot of times, too, right? It's like, do I, do I keep doing the obstacles or do I pivot? It's like, relax a little bit, right? Give it some time. You're not going to figure it out today. It may not be this week. But we're learning, you know, Bruce Lee talks about being like bamboo, right? Bamboo is strong, because it knows when to be rigid, but it also sways in the wind. Right? So we're learning to do that as human beings, because we grew

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  up with so much rigidity. So, you know, there's also that quote from Einstein that people quote all the time, you can't solve a problem in the same level of consciousness that created it. So you got to step away from your problems. And I would say, get into solution frequency. What is solution frequency? Well, it's the beautiful things in your life. Because at one point in time, the absence of them were problems. Now they've shown up in their solutions. And that's why, when you're trying to hammer through an obstacle, or you don't know whether or not to pivot, and you go for a hike and run in canyon, you have clarity.

• 1:06:24Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  Right? You know, you go play with your furry friend, and something hits you. Go get a good workout in, and it hits you. But the other important piece in all of this is, man, give it some time. Like, we're all living in so much time scarcity. And one of the things we teach entrepreneurs is to stop paying attention to time and start inquiring more around what creates timing. Because timing is so much more powerful than time. Meeting the right person, running into the right opportunity, having the right resource show up. We all have 24 hours in a day. But time is a measurement of change. Timing is a measurement of alignment, calibration. So if you can become aligned and calibrated, which is living in a powerful state, which is trying to live in non-resistance as best as you can, we're

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  not going to do it 24 hours a day, you start to activate timing, the timing of thoughts and ideas and coincidences. So if someone is trying to figure out whether to keep pushing through, or whether to pivot, I would say, step away and see what happens.

• 1:07:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  And you know what? If you pivot, you can always come back to it. And if you keep pushing, pushing through on something, you can always pivot. So we make it a much bigger deal than it is.

• 1:07:26Lewis Howes?

  I love the idea of, of timing versus being afraid of like, time's running out. And it's, you know, I guess, we're technically, I mean, I'm 43, you're 50. It's like, all right, we're, we're getting close to halfway done, or who knows? You know, maybe there's more time, but it's not like we're seven years old and we have all of our lives ahead of us, right? So we have to start looking at life with a different perspective, I guess, through a different lens. Where how do we not get scarce around time? If you feel like it's running out, or you don't have your whole life ahead of you, and focus rather on timing? How do you do that when you're not 12 years old?

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's a couple of things. I was having a conversation with ChatGPT that has all my labs and everything that I was doing. And I said, hey, based on my labs and based on current.

• 1:08:19Lewis Howes?

  How long do I have?

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Based on current technologies, based on how healthy I am, because I'm actually incredibly healthy human being. And based on the current technologies that are out there, stem cells, CRISPR technologies, all the stuff.

• 1:08:29Lewis Howes?

  And what's coming.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  And what's coming. And great, AI can hallucinate. I was like, give me an estimate of how long I'll live. So in terms of like, health span, like living well, 125 years.

• 1:08:40Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Okay. So that's my intention. If it's 125 years, I got 75 years to go. But like, I have such insane compounding interest at 50. Like, if you ever look at how compounding interest works, right? If you were to set aside $100,000 a year, which is a lot of money for some people, and it's not a lot of money for others, $100,000 a year, and you just. Put it in some combination of the S and P 500 Bitcoin gold 8% average return. You could have a defensive position because the world seems like it's a little bit crazy right now. But if you just get an 8% annualized return at a hundred thousand dollars a year that you put into that over 40 years, you're worth 22, 24 million dollars.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  But what's interesting is that if you live 10 more years, it's another 32 million dollars.

• 1:09:27Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  So I'm just starting to hockey stick. So that excites me. Like I don't think I can even fathom what I can accomplish. So I could look at it as like, I'm almost halfway through. Or we got 75 years, bro, let's go. You know, so that's the way I look at it. And again, part of it is turning it over to my higher power. Like it's a very edging God out type of conversation to have, but it's certainly, I mean, when I turned 50, believe me, I had it with myself. Of like, like, where am I at? And, you know, checking am I as far along as I wanted to be now? And how much time do I have left? And your mind will do this mental calculation, right? But the mind doesn't understand the compounding interest.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  So, you know, we just, that's why longevity is so important.

• 1:10:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  But I do think it is important to understand that no matter where you are in your life, the accumulation of your lived experience has set you up for such extraordinary growth moving forward. And we don't give credit to that reality.

• 1:10:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. You've got an amazing book out called A Change Mind, which is go beyond self-awareness, rewire your brain and re-engineer your reality. This came out about a few years ago. What is the one thing in this book you feel like if people took away one idea, it would help them more than anything else?

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  I struggled with limiting beliefs for a long time. And there were some that I had shifted, but others that I didn't. And I was in this burning desire inquiry of like, man, there's got to be an easier way to shift my beliefs. Like, what is it that I need to know? My wife and I were going for a walk one day. And it's a two millimeter distinction, so it's easy to miss, but it is just absolutely dramatically changed the way I do my personal growth. And I see feedback from folks who have been in our work that it's this distinction. It's the distinction that beliefs are decisions. So when we were growing up, we came to the conclusion when our little buddy didn't show up at the drinking fountain, that we can't trust people, but it was a decision. And as a result of that unconscious decision, it, we've been living in a hallucination ever since.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  We've only been paying attention to anything that supports that decision and we've been ignoring everything else. And if that's true, then at any point in time, I should be able to identify a limiting belief and make a new decision. And so we have this wonderful process in the book called the decision matrix that helps people identify the limiting belief, make a new decision, which is always the opposite of the limiting belief. Then ask a really simple question, which is what evidence do I have for the fact that this new decision is true? And what you'll do is you'll actually source those memories that you've been filtering out. And as you do that, you build evidence for the new belief. And most often, by the time you're done with that little process and you look back at the limiting belief, it doesn't even make sense anymore.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  But, but the idea that beliefs are decisions, I think, demystifies the concept of beliefs, because we can get into trauma and this and that and all these things. But ultimately they were unconscious decisions. And as an adult, you have an ability to respond or responsibility when you find a limiting belief, and that is to make a new empowered decision.

• 1:12:36Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. The decision matrix.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  The decision matrix.

• 1:12:40Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. That's great. I've got a couple of final questions for you. This has been really powerful. I want people to check out your work before I ask the final questions. They can go to your podcast called A Change Mind. You're also on YouTube. You've got a great YouTube channel, sharing a lot of this information. David Bayer 33 on Instagram and YouTube. And wholehuman.com/greatness for anyone here watching or listening. Your team's created a free assessment that identifies people's two biggest limiting beliefs and gives you a powerful tool to transform them. So guys can, anyone can check out wholehuman.com/greatness to check out the free assessment as well. This question is called the three truths.

• 1:13:23Lewis Howes?

  Imagine you live to 125, healthy, whole human life, but it's the last day. Your creator says, time to go here to the next place. And you get to create and manifest anything you want from now until that moment. But for whatever reason, you have to take everything with you. Nothing can be left behind. Your book, your work, your content, no one has access to this information anymore. But on your final day, you get to leave behind three truths. Three things you know to be true or three lessons that you would leave behind. What would those three truths be for you?

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Oh, man. I've heard you ask this question on so many episodes. Now I have to answer it. I gotta answer it. I think one truth or encouragement is to believe in the certainty of the goodness of the future. That would be one. The second truth would be that life is always working for your greatest growth, your greatest prosperity and your greatest evolution. And I think the third truth, well, I think Jesus said it best, all things are possible to he that believe it.

• 1:14:32Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, yeah. I want to acknowledge you, David, for the journey you've been on. You know, for me, it's like you're, you're 50, you have a child who's three and a half, and you've gone through a big transformation in the last five years. You've got a lot of wisdom to share. So I acknowledge you for putting it in the book, for doing the, the weekly podcast, for sharing this information and for creating frameworks around the suffering and the pain you've experienced to try to give peace and resolution for people in their lives, so they can understand how to go through the process better. And I think when people have gone through enough pain and shame and guilt and beating themselves up and have done the work like yourself and all the different programs, you can take kind of the best of those programs

• 1:15:17Lewis Howes?

  and share what's worked for you. So I want to acknowledge you for doing that work, for suffering for as long as you did and getting through it on the other side, finding more peace and purpose in your life and helping so many people. It's been really cool to connect and hear more about the book.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  I appreciate that acknowledgement.

• 1:15:33Lewis Howes?

  Of course, man. Final question, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  Uh, greatness is becoming who you came here to be, living your authentic self.

• 1:15:44Lewis Howes?

  My man, thanks for being here, brother.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  Thank you, brother. Appreciate it.

• 1:15:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Powerful. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward.

• 1:16:25Lewis Howes?

  And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.