Hey, it's Jay.
I don't know what your day's been like, but I was just thinking about you for a minute.
And I hope you're being a little patient with yourself because you deserve it.
And yeah, I'll talk to you soon.
Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose.
Today's guest is Jim Curtis, a transformational coach and author who has spent more than 25 years helping people break free from the patterns keeping them stuck.
In his latest book, The Book of Possibility, Jim shares practical tools to help you rewire your subconscious, overcome fear and create lasting change.
I really believe that The Book of Possibility is this generation's answer to their subconscious mind.
Please welcome to On Purpose, Jim Curtis.
Jim, it's great to have you here.
I'm so happy to be on On Purpose.
I want to start with a really important question that I feel this generation, the people that I'm surrounded by struggle with the most.
What are we getting wrong about manifestation?
Isn't that a popular word?
Because we're all suffering so much that we're constantly looking to the future of what we want outside of us.
And so what I think we're getting wrong about manifestation is it's really an inside job.
Two things.
The realization that we're already it.
We are the I am.
All we have to start saying is, I am what we want, and it comes.
This is the I am that I am, the I am principle, the identity idea.
So the second part is, there are assumptions about our identity principles.
The assumptions of who we believe we are.
So we can't manifest before we start to get to the law of assumption that says, how do I change what I truly believe that I am so that I can have it?
Instead, what we're getting wrong about manifestation is like, I want to be a millionaire.
Instead, we haven't changed the assumption of whether I believe that I'm worthy of it or capable of it first.
So start with the law of assumption.
We have to realize and build awareness of what we believe, who we believe, and what we think we are, the identity.
And it's interesting, isn't it?
When you say that, I'm like, I think about all the assumptions I've had about myself growing up and the assumptions I hear from other people.
Oh, I'm just not that smart.
Oh, I just, it takes me a long time to learn certain things.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I was never good with money, right?
Or whatever it may be, right?
And we say these things and their assumptions.
Where do these assumptions come from?
We almost feel like that's just who I am.
That's just the way I am.
Like, where do they come from?
All of our assumptions come from two places.
One, you can start to think, is this mine or is this genetic?
Was this passed down from my father or mother's fears?
And did they pass this down into something, some type of protection within my genes that I'm now acting out?
Or two, was this learned?
Was this a learned pattern from my mother and father?
Did they say all these things that I'm in my theta state, children are in this
Theta state.
They're a sponge.
They're absorbing everything.
Theta brainwave frequency state.
So from zero to seven years old, you're absorbing everything.
You're absorbing assumptions about yourself based on what your parents are saying.
My father used to say, don't worry, you don't have to be that smart.
You just have to work twice as hard.
Hmm.
And I never realized why I was always working twice as hard and feeling as though like, you know, I'm just going to, and I worked 10 hours days and I would look at other people and be like, boy, I wish, I wish I had that insight and knowledge.
Until I realized I revealed the assumption about myself was a program given to me by my father based on his own fears that he was not enough.
And that's where they come from.
Mostly our parents, our grandparents, our teachers, and even in our genes.
What do we do that once we know we have these assumptions about ourselves?
Like when you said that one from you, like, oh, you don't have to be that smart, but you have to work twice as hard.
It takes so long to even notice it because it's just been your programming for so long.
Like how old were you when you noticed that particular thought?
Two weeks ago.
No, genuinely, really.
That's hilarious.
Like yesterday, yeah.
Literally, I was reading my book, you know, because my first time.
Oh, you're being serious.
Yeah, no, not that particular one.
But I was writing books, right?
And I've never read a book before.
And so now I'm reading and recording my own book and I'm reading this passage.
And what came to me was this realization of something that my father had said.
And so we start to reveal these assumptions about ourselves at different moments in time.
The issue is some people live their entire lives on the raft in the river.
That's how I picture it in my mind because the subconscious mind works in stories.
So I talk and picture in stories because when you change the story, you change all these assumptions.
So I think of it as we're on this river.
It's like a fast moving river and I'm on a raft.
And sometimes you're just like, okay, I'm in the river on the raft and just flow and flow and flow.
And you never really think about, oh, I have some paddles here or I can get out.
And so when you get out of the flow in the river, you can start to really become aware of what these assumptions are.
And then you can challenge them.
You can challenge, is that true or is that something that has been given to me by someone else?
And if it's been given to me by someone else, then do I need to carry it any longer?
And sometimes that awareness alone releases it completely.
Yeah, I think knowing where it came from is what I'm hearing.
And then knowing if you want to keep it.
Right.
This episode of On Purpose is presented by Ultra Running.
We all benefit from having a little more space.
So do our feet.
That's why ultra running shoes feature ultra fit design, giving toes more room for comfort, balance and strength.
They're perfect for running, walking or hiking, any pace, any level.
They feel right from the first step.
Go to ultrarunning.com forward slash on purpose and use code PURPOSE10 for 10% off.
That's A-L-T-R-A running.com forward slash on purpose.
Stay out there.
It's like that idea of, okay, I know now I got it from my parents.
I got it from...
My teacher at school, I got it from that best friend who didn't believe in me or the mean person at college or whatever it was.
Now do I want to keep it?
Do I believe that that thought, that belief has been useful in my life and helpful in my life?
Or has it actually been harmful?
We almost believe that these beliefs are protecting us subconsciously.
I love this example in the book because I think it's so common.
You said that one of your clients was like, I don't know what I want.
Like, I don't know what I want.
And you were like, no, you do know what you want.
That's just like fear and shame and embarrassment and everything else.
And I thought that was such a brilliant way of putting it because...
I think so many people say, I don't know what I want.
Can you just explain the idea of how I don't know what I want is actually guilt, fear, shame, embarrassment that's holding or blocking that back?
We certainly know what we want.
So I'll ask questions like, what if you did know what you want?
What if your best friend told you?
What if God or herself or the universe itself was to tell you what you want?
Then what would it be, right?
You remove all the fear and shame, right?
Because we say, we're not good enough to want that.
Or what if I say that I want that and then I fail?
Then what will people think?
Or what if I want it so badly and then I get it and lose it?
Or the fear of success.
Now, what if I get it and then I have the responsibility to keep it going?
So when you remove all those things, then it becomes really easy to see, okay, I can say what I want.
And now I just have to have confidence that I'm safe in achieving it.
Because mostly it's all protection.
Fear runs our lives.
Fear is running our lives in every way.
And we are making all our decisions on fear.
Fear is the thing that runs us most.
And it should be a tool.
I would never remove fear from anyone.
I think it's a wonderful tool.
It pushes us forward.
It keeps us safe.
But when it becomes the main programming of our life, that's when it becomes a problem.
So we start to say, is this fear protection or is it a prophecy?
It's never a prophecy.
It's this thought of idea and said, okay, what is it protecting me from?
And do I still need this protection?
That's the question.
And almost always it's no.
And so once you realize that you no longer need the protection, then you can start to say, if I was no longer afraid, if this issue was over, then how would I feel and what would I do?
And then
The last question is, if I was no longer afraid, what would I want?
And that usually allows you to start to identify it.
I remember I had a mentor who'd always look at me and repeat the words, you become what you think about.
Yeah.
He'd catch me off guard randomly.
And then he'd say, what are you thinking about right now?
Yeah.
And I'd say nothing.
And he goes, are you thinking about nothing?
You're going to be nothing.
You become what you think about.
Yeah.
So if you think about nothing, you'll become nothing.
That's so good.
And it was just such a great little tool that started to make me think, oh, what am I thinking about all the time?
Right.
What am I thinking about becoming?
What am I thinking about being?
What am I thinking about doing?
What am I thinking about believing?
Whatever it may be.
And I think when you first hear the words, you become what you think about,
Or we become what we believe
There's a part of you that's skeptical to it right and goes come on like you know and so for anyone who's skeptical going that doesn't really add up for me
Talk to me about the actual because what i love about this book is that you have a really step-by-step programmatic approach to do this
It's not just an idea it's not
Just flow.
There's a set of steps that you're describing, that you're giving people.
Talk to me about how you talk to a skeptical person who's saying, okay, I hear the quote, we are what we believe we are.
And they go, hmm, I think it's really about what I do.
Right.
Or our life is a mirror of our assumptions.
What we assume, our life is a mirror for that.
So I've coached now thousands of people, either in groups or in hundreds of people one-on-one.
And in my past life as an executive, I'd always coach the employees and sometimes even lead meditations or guided visualizations.
And what I really found is that these three steps,
Is release, align, and become.
And within them, there are components.
So with release, it's building awareness of what these limited beliefs and things could do.
So as a skeptic that may say, no, it's what I do, and say, okay, then why are you trying so hard to make the change
But you keep having the same result.
You keep dating the same person, having the same breakup, never exceeding that certain threshold of wealth that you've always wanted, that your health and you fall into the same patterns and routines.
Why is that?
But until you release an old pattern that's familiar, you will go back into the familiar self.
Until you release the old identity of who you believe you are, for me, this Boston guy living in a blue-collar neighborhood that...
I shouldn't be the leader just as long as I worked as hard as I could.
I didn't have to be that smart, that kind of thing for my father.
As soon as I release that and I show others how to release it, that awareness alone leads us to a place where we get into alignment with what we want.
So for the skeptics out there, try to think your way out of your current pattern.
When we're talking about changing our thoughts or assumptions, is it simply by repetition?
Like what's the tool?
What's the practice?
Because when you think about weeds in a garden, you're like, okay, I'm going to go and I'm going to pull the weed out.
Right.
Absolutely.
That it can kind of feel like I can't tell the dirt from the clean part, right?
Like it's like, I can't tell the difference between what's me and the assumption.
Because they've been so close for so long.
Yeah.
And the assumptions are you, right?
If your beliefs and assumptions create your identity and your identity creates your reality, that is you.
So there's two things that you said there.
The first one is we don't take away beliefs.
We replace them.
Sometimes people think you go into your subconscious mind and you like extract something like eternal sunshine for the spotless mind.
You remember that movie?
It's like, I'm just going to forget about it.
Even with smoking or something, whatever it is, you replace it.
You turn the switches, just say you turn one switch lower and the dimmer switch on something else higher.
So when you start to have a story about something, that's what a belief or an assumption is.
That's your story.
You go in and you can actually visualize in a theta state, which is a theta brainwave state, which is a highly suggestible state.
And you can do this yourself.
I call it timeline therapy.
So you say to yourself, subconscious mind, take me back to the place where this started.
And your subconscious mind will certainly surface a memory.
And then you say, what can I have learned?
What wisdom do I get from this memory?
Does it continue to be true?
Does it need to be?
And then what do I need to release this?
And you can talk yourself through an unraveling of it.
And that's when you start to align the next step with what you truly want.
And you start to do the practices.
I call them the four A's.
You accept, okay, this is the belief I've had.
It's kept me stuck.
It's kept me stuck for some time and I accept it.
Real radical acceptance.
And then we can step into really appreciating it.
I love what this has given me.
I love that I'm here today, that it's driven me, it's protected me, and I no longer need it.
You step into affirmation.
And the trick about affirmations is if you want to be a billionaire, you don't start with, I am a billionaire.
Your subconscious mind has to believe that you can build it.
So affirmations that ladder up, I'm building wealth every day.
And then you get to the most powerful affirmation, no separation, I am wealth.
And the last part is action.
We can't just sit and meditate.
We have to go out there and take action.
And those steps start to really align and build new neural pathways, start to align and build belief.
And then with that action, that success, you say, oh, I am the identity of the person that can do that.
Oh, I can lead groups of thousands.
Oh, I can write a book.
And guess what?
Yeah, I can do it without working 40, 50, 70 hours a week.
And then that is when we become, we step into the identity.
Of everything that we want, and it's no longer separate.
We become the person who can have it, and it's no longer striving and manifestation.
We assume, of course, this is in our lives.
And when we do, it comes.
And of course, something triggers us and we step back, and then we have to unravel it again.
Like I said about my book, when I was reading that,
It literally happened to me and I said, oh my God.
And I put it into the recording of the book.
I said, I just had an incredible profound realization reading my own words and I explained what had happened.
So that's another fallacy that all of a sudden, poof.
We're done.
This is a consistent practice over a lifetime that will lead us to greater peace, that will lead us to greater joy, greater wealth, greater health, greater abundance.
But it's a practice.
I can fully vouch for those four steps because as you broke them down, I was thinking to myself, gosh, I wish I could take my audience back to how I felt about myself just 13 years ago.
Right.
And I remember.
How did you feel about yourself?
I'm talking about in a specific line of work, but like, so I take my same mentor, Thomas Power.
He'd always say to me, Jay, you're an entrepreneur.
And I'd say, no, I'm not.
I'm an employee.
And he'd say, no, you're an entrepreneur.
And I'd say, no, I'm not.
I'm an employee.
And it's almost like that was my belief.
Yeah.
And my belief was that I was an artist because that's who I believe I am at heart, an artist, a creator, a writer, a teacher in that way.
But I didn't want to understand or have to build businesses.
Wow.
I just wanted to be far away, as far away from that world as possible.
I didn't enjoy it.
I didn't want to get good at it.
I didn't like it.
I didn't think I was good at it.
I didn't think that's what I wanted to be.
I didn't think that's what my true nature was.
That was my belief about myself.
So let's go through your forays with my personal example.
Yeah.
So the first one you said was to accept.
Right.
So I had to, at one point, accept that that is where I was at at that time.
Yeah, I can't build business because I believe I'm not a business person.
Yes.
Yeah.
And then what I love about what you added, which I maybe subconsciously had it, but I didn't consciously have it, which is why I'm so happy you've consciously put it in there.
Appreciating the parts of yourself for how long they've served you.
Yeah.
I love that idea because I think it's so easy to just let go.
There's, I don't know if you have, have you ever heard of, have you ever heard the story that the Buddha told about the man in the raft?
No.
Okay, this is one of my favorite stories.
So the Buddha tells this story about a person just like you and me who's on a journey and they come across their first obstacle and their first obstacle on their journey is a fast flowing river.
And it's just flowing so fast that if they step foot in it, they'd get carried away by the current.
So they make a raft and they craft it and they build it and they put the bamboo down, they tie it up with rope, they build themselves an oar, they get on top and then they paddle with all their energy and all their might and all their strength and they get to the other side.
And they feel relieved and they say, I'm gonna take this raft with me wherever I go because it saved my life.
So they strap the raft to their back and they carry on walking forward.
The Buddha says this person now comes to their second challenge, but their second challenge isn't a fast flowing river, it's a tall wooded forest with trees dotted at every other step.
So when they're trying to walk through, the raft behind them keeps getting stuck and getting chipped and blocked and kind of hard to maneuver through all the trees.
And the Buddha says the person comes to a really important reflection point.
That they either put down the raft that saved their life and walk through freely, or they hold on tight to it and never make it through.
And so it's what you're saying is that actually in that moment, the Buddha was requesting us to appreciate the raft and say, you did save my life.
But now it's time to let you go.
Yeah, it's also this idea that our superpowers in the moment can also be our greatest weaknesses.
And how do we let our superpowers... You said this incredible superpower that I have...
Is also a protection.
It's protecting me from something.
So how do I release the protected need so I can make this superpower even greater, the superpower to overcome challenges, like taking the raft and disassembling it, whatever it would be.
But that's such an amazing story, and that goes right into your subconscious mind, that story.
I'm going to remember that.
I remembered it because of the forays.
And I'm so glad that I think what we often do as humans is we demonize something once it's useless.
And so as soon as we have a habit or a trait or something that we don't like anymore, we just go, oh, that was the worst, you know?
And we do it with clothes too.
Like, can't believe I wore those pair of jeans.
And you had great memories in those jeans.
You had the best time in those jeans.
But as soon as they're not fashionable anymore or they're ripped or whatever it may be, you start to go, nah.
And so I think your point to actually appreciate that which has served us up until this point is really, really powerful, actually.
And I love that.
And then your third step, which I think is one of the hardest ones, is finding the right affirmation.
Talk to me about that.
Because I think you're so right that the affirmations we do try and tell ourselves, like, yeah, I'm a millionaire.
I'm a...
I'm the person, you know, whatever it may be.
I think we say these things that we obviously don't inherently believe.
And then there's this kind of fight between
This outlandish affirmation and this minimal self-belief.
So talk to me about that balancing act and how you reconfigure that.
All our beautiful bodies and our mind want to do is protect us and survival.
And so that always makes me wonder when,
For a long time, I was mad at my own body, my own thoughts.
But everything that we have, even the bad thoughts, even the difficult things are for our own survival.
And so the subconscious mind will protect you.
And therefore, it has beliefs and it has patterns and it has familiarity.
And so if something doesn't fit into a familiarity belief in a pattern and you give it a direct command,
It will value it.
It doesn't fit in.
So if you have a belief that like, I have to work really hard to get money and perhaps I'm, you know, like my parents were a teacher and a nurse and could I be a multi, multimillionaire?
And then I say to myself, well,
I'm a wealthy 10 millionaire, you know, whatever it is, the subconscious mind said, no, you're not.
That's not you.
That's not you.
And you can say that as many times, but it's not you.
It also works when I'm talking to you.
Like if you have trouble taking compliments or you believe that, you know, like you don't look great in those clothes today.
And I say, those clothes look so good on you.
You say,
Or maybe he doesn't really know me.
If he knew me, he'd know.
So we start to tell our subconscious mind in different ways so it can accept it.
For the compliment, we'd put it in a question.
I wonder if you realize that blue is your color.
And then your subconscious mind says...
Yeah.
Could blue be my color?
Yes.
So same with affirmations.
Start with, I am working more today and even more tomorrow.
I am becoming better every day.
I am more today and even more tomorrow, building more and more every day, building wealth.
And after you do that for a while, you can start to ladder up.
Because you'll take an action that will make it true.
You'll notice, okay, in my bank account, I did go up.
I saved a little bit of money.
And then you can say, I have the possibility, I have the potential of building great wealth without so much effort.
And you say, oh, I found $20 on the street or whatever it is, you'll start to recognize a pattern and it will become true.
And then you move into the I am.
The I am that I am, the I am of creation.
Whatever we say I am, we become.
That's on the identity level.
But then the spiritual level, this idea that we are not separate from the universe, that we are the creators, we are the energy and the source, anytime that you say I am,
You are casting the most beautiful creation to the universe to create it.
You are the source.
So when you say, I am wealth, I am money, then how could you not have it?
There's no separation.
That's the more advanced as you start to progress.
In fact, I could even say, I am the on-purpose show.
As I was doing my meditations and I wanted to come on the show and I'm thinking about my book, I did my meditations.
I said, I am the on-purpose show.
Because how could I not be on it if I am it?
Right?
There's no separation.
And then I had to ladder up.
And then I met some resistance.
And I said, okay, I am going to spread so much knowledge and worthy of being on this show.
And then there was some resistance.
And I said, oh, something, you know, you feel resistance.
You feel like your subconscious mind say, maybe not.
Or you feel tension in your body.
We all know what resistance feels like.
And I had to say, what is the resistance here?
I had to question it.
And I say, okay, the resistance is maybe I'm not good enough.
Okay.
And then I say, what part of my life, as I visualize, see, or imagine, all you have to do is ask someone to imagine.
They go into a little bit of a trance because they go inward.
All of a sudden, they go into their mind.
I say, let me visualize, see, or imagine.
Where in my life
Did I learn this?
Where did I first learn that maybe I wasn't good enough?
And you picture a timeline and all of a sudden an image came up of me as a child, you know, in my family home.
My father, you know, worried that like, you know, we didn't have enough, that we weren't good enough to be enough.
And when I saw that, I said, okay, what is the lesson here?
What wisdom can I take?
And I got this message.
It said, the wisdom that you can be direct
Then explain this to people that others feel this way too.
And in that directness, in that focus, in that clarity, it will change people's minds.
And therefore, am I good enough?
And then the resounding response was yes.
And through that process alone, I changed a belief.
Then I had to take an action, that last part.
Which was to write you a text and say, can I come on the show?
Yeah, absolutely.
And you did all of that before you wrote the text.
Yes.
Because that prepared you to write a text that felt authentic and true to you.
It felt authentic and true.
And I knew that I had something of value and it wasn't just like, do me a solid and, you know, that kind of thing.
But I did that process.
Thank you for being so humble enough to share that process.
I mean, you're more than credible to be on the show and more than worthy to be on the show in so many ways.
But I appreciate the real time take on how that impacts us.
And you start thinking about the person out there who's listening right now, who's not applying for that job, who's not asking that person out on a date, who's not changing careers, who's not breaking up from that relationship.
Who's settling.
We're settling, yeah.
And what I just explained, that process of self-doubt, they have it too.
We all have it.
It doesn't matter which level you're at.
It comes up because it's a natural condition.
It's whether you let it blindly guide you
Or if you're questioning it and moving through it, we're all human.
And the funny thing is we're all hiding the same shit.
Why are we hiding it?
We feel shameful about it.
Yeah.
Right.
We feel shameful.
I don't want people to know that, you know, like I had some self-doubt.
I don't want people to know that maybe I feel like I'm not lovable in this situation.
And guess what?
As soon as we decide not to hide it.
We become more powerful, more attractive, more magnetic than we could ever possibly imagine because someone all of a sudden relates.
And so what I tell everybody and anybody that's listening is as soon as you release the shame, realize that as humans, we're all hiding the exact same thing.
It doesn't matter who you are, how successful you are.
As soon as you release that and just lead, go forward with your own vulnerability within reason, right?
Don't start bleeding on the street in front of someone you don't know.
As soon as you do that, then you become incredibly magnetic and incredibly empowered.
I would honestly say that I grew up, I wouldn't say I really would be someone who felt like I believed in myself.
Like I wasn't that way.
And I think now when people probably see yourself and your work and me, they might think, oh yeah, Jay must have just always like known who he was.
And I'd actually completely say that the steps you're laying out
Are steps that I subconsciously followed, even if I wasn't aware of them in the beautiful step ladder that you've created.
They were things that I was working on or doing, or luckily I met mentors who inspired me.
And I think that's why guides, teachers, mentors, coaches, therapists,
People, elders, parents, family members have such a powerful role to play.
Who was it that introduced you to these ideas?
How did you come across them?
I have a few really distinct people in my life, but it wasn't my family because, you know, when we talked about therapy or self-help, my family, my father would be, you know, I could do that.
I don't go to that.
I do that.
Of course he couldn't.
He would have terribly dysfunctional.
Yeah.
There are a number of people, but really I credit a lot to my own disability and illness because I was flowing through life with zero awareness, just body forward, you know, kind of just, and it was my illness that kind of woke me up.
And so through that illness, I started traveling all around the world.
First, just to regular doctors to see what was wrong.
And then I started to go to Ecuadorian shaman grandmasters of Kung Fu.
I started to go all over the place to try to figure out what was happening.
And I learned different pieces from each of them.
And I said, oh, there's something greater here.
Something bigger than our body or our beliefs, something bigger than all the surroundings, there is a greater energy, a greater something beneath the fold that we can't see, we can't identify, but it's having an impact.
And how do I get more into that?
Is that the subconscious mind or is it something, you know, how do I connect to this greater source?
So I became really curious about that.
And I'd go to more and more people and figure out how do I, is it meditation?
Is it hypnosis?
What gets into it?
And I became so consumed with finding out how to get in touch with that, that I wasn't looking at my own limiting beliefs.
I was just focusing out.
What out here can I find to help me?
And then I was running a company.
It was a fair-sized media company around health.
And I was the president and the CEO was my partner and good friend.
And he was Christian and he had Christian values.
And one day he said to me, why do you hate yourself?
And I get emotional thinking about it now.
And I just broke down.
It was such an impactful moment.
And I said, you know what?
I do.
I do.
And I have to figure out why.
That exploration of why, the exploration of am I bad, is really what put me on this path.
That gave me goosebumps just hearing that question.
Because if the answer's yes, that's a painful truth.
Mm-hmm.
Talk to me about what your illness was.
What were you experiencing that even sent you on that journey?
Because it must be excruciatingly painful for you to go that far and wide to find the answer.
I, at 20 years old, was very strong.
I was an athlete.
I was always kind of the most macho, strongest athlete, very body focused athlete.
And then I woke up at 20 years old and I got in the shower and I couldn't feel the hot water on my left foot.
I was living on Cape Cod that summer and I was riding my bike around everywhere because I was drinking so much.
One night I hit the sand,
Cape Cod's a beach town,
I hit the sand on this old 10-speed Schwinn bicycle, and I went flipping over the handlebars, and I really hurt myself, and I got up and I said, you know what,
That must have been a pinched nerve.
And then the next week, you know, that numbness and tightness went up to my knee and then went up to my thigh.
And then I went up to my waist and I called my mother.
That's what kind of 20-year-old boys do when they're hurt.
And she was an ER nurse, registered nurse.
And she said, we need to get an MRI.
And so what the MRI showed was there was a lesion on my spinal cord, and it was progressing.
Very rapidly, I lost strength in my right leg, and then I was in so much pain.
I didn't know what it was, but it was like my nerves were...
Just on fire.
So I started traveling all around the world to try to figure it out.
Went to Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, and I could not get a diagnosis.
Just knew that things were getting worse.
And so I had to really come to grips with, will this just progress until I'm dead or paralyzed?
And it did.
One day, you know, I tried to live a normal life because we couldn't find it.
I got treatments that didn't work, even working on the American Stock Exchange as a trader.
And trying to walk through crowds with a giant limp because everybody traded in groups on the floor.
And I'm trying to just live life and ignore what's happening.
Until one day I did wake up and I couldn't stand up.
And that was a frightening wake-up call.
Eventually we found something that could settle things down, but the limp never got better.
It took 15 years or 20 years for the pain to get better.
I had to consciously change my energy and my mindset to do that.
And then there was this new body, this new painful body, which had trouble walking.
And who was I?
It really fit in well with this kind of belief of, I'm bad.
I deserve this.
This is ugly.
No one will love me.
It still comes up, right?
But now I have the tools to say,
You know what?
No, that's a different idea, a different person.
This is actually a gift and it's getting better.
I can release that pain.
And with this gift, what can I do?
What have I learned?
What is the wisdom that I can help others with?
Through that pain, I was able to transcend into something greater.
So you're saying that actually a lot of the healing work, because there wasn't so much external help, a lot of it was changing belief patterns and the work that you're sharing with us today.
Yeah, it was a lot of changing belief patterns.
Yeah.
Even to the point where if I could visualize and tell my body to move, it would move better.
I went to a hypnotherapist.
There was a blackout in New York City maybe 15 years ago, everything.
And I couldn't walk two blocks.
I went to a hypnotherapist and we kind of changed the pattern of capability within my subconscious mind.
And a week later, there was a blackout and I was three miles away.
No train, no buses, no cabs, no nothing.
I was in the office and they were closing the office and I walked home.
And it took me four and a half hours to walk three miles, but I did it.
It was pretty incredible.
So I started to say, oh, there are two things at work here.
One is the mind-body connection, what we believe we can do, we can do.
And the second is we're made of energy and there's something greater.
There's something when we are not our bodies, we are the awareness of our bodies.
We are the conscious awareness.
And if I can tap more into that higher self, that more of that conscious awareness, then I can release the pain and suffering because I know that there is something much greater than this.
And when I was able to do that, some miraculous things happened.
When I hear stories like that, it actually makes me think about how much I don't realize how powerful my mind is.
Yeah.
I remember, I think, early on reading the story of Wilma Rudolph, who was told that she'd basically never walk without, at that time, those braces.
Yeah.
And then went on to become an Olympic champion.
Right.
So many stories like that.
Yeah, and then you've got Stephen Hawking, obviously, with the theory of everything.
Mm-hmm.
You know a 19 is told he's going to pretty much die in six months and then writes one of the best books of all time
But he only wrote four words a minute right you think wow like wrote four words a minute
Yeah like the level of painstaking patience you'd have to have while your body's collapsing on itself
But anything's possible tell me what you think about this
I had a mentor who would always say to me, you'll discover your potential when you're in pain.
And I'd always say to him, I'd be like, no, I think I know my potential.
Like I don't need more pain.
And then I remember moments of my life where I've been through lots of pain and I'm like, oh wow, I did find another gear that I didn't know existed.
It's hard though.
It's hard to say that to someone else, but maybe we feel it when it's us.
Unfair to say what you need your pain.
Yeah, because people have crazy pain in their life.
It's not something I think we should go around saying to other people.
I say it all the time.
I would never rob you of your suffering.
I would never rob you of your pain.
Because there is very few times that you were like on that beach reading a beautiful book while the waves were crashing softly that you had extreme personal growth.
That was your recovery period, right?
And it's all relative.
You don't have to lose your ability to walk to really experience pain.
Your pain is your own and it's big.
And so the question is, am I learning from this pain and releasing it?
Or am I holding it on because I have a belief that I need it to protect me some more?
All pain is protection, right?
So when you release it, when you learn from it, when you say, I'm going to take it and move forward, you become so much more powerful.
It's the doorway to your growth.
Fear, suffering, pain, they're really useful tools.
And so I would actually say that to people.
And I actually use that with my clients, with my people I coach.
I get them to feel the pain.
I'll say, what if this issue, whatever you're feeling, I want you to amplify it one year out, two years out, three years out.
Now five years out and 10 years out.
Now it's so big, so bold, so bad that
And now I want you to release it all, right?
And come back to this present moment.
And aren't you so grateful that it didn't happen?
So what actions can you take today?
How can we move the mindset so that you can release that before it actually gets that bad?
And that's what got me to get better as well.
You're a practitioner of hypnosis and you also talk about self-hypnosis.
I feel like our understanding of hypnosis is sadly so mired by movies.
And we just think of magicians and illusionists and people who do it to show off their tricks.
But can you talk to us about what hypnosis actually is and then how self-hypnosis works?
So as a coach, that's a tool in my toolbox.
As an entrepreneur as well, right?
So there's this fine line between how do I build a business as someone who coaches and leads people to a better way of life.
And so part of that is I'll teach people how to put themselves into a state of trance that bypasses their critical mind so that they can revisit stories and experiences in a different way and allow themselves to have breakthroughs.
Or I lead people through it.
But you can do it just as easily yourself.
I gave that example before of how I did that timeline.
I asked my subconscious questions.
Subconscious loves to answer.
Whatever comes up, believe it.
The image in your mind, the words that come up, and it leads the path.
It's because our mind is in frequency, brainwaves.
And so the frequency of brainwaves that is relaxation and allows us to take suggestion is the theta brainwave state.
And what hypnosis does, it allows us to relax by confusing the conscious and the critical mind.
Into a theta brainwave state.
And so those guys up on stage that are like kind of sleep and falls asleep.
Yeah.
You know, that's not what I do.
I don't think that's clinically correct.
But what I do is a progressive relaxation so that you're still very much, you could just open your eyes if you wanted to, but relaxed enough where I can speak to your subconscious mind or train you to do it so that you can release yourself.
Patterns that have been happening in your life so you can reframe fears so that you can experience things differently.
Think of a really yellow lemon.
Can you see it?
Do you want to close my eyes or not?
You don't need to.
I can think of a really yellow lemon.
And do you see an image of it in your mind?
Okay.
And so this is the freshest, biggest, juiciest lemon.
And then you can even imagine kind of how citrusy that smells when you put it up, right?
And so they had this big, juicy, citrusy, yellow lemon.
Now I want you to picture a knife because we're going to cut it in half and the juices are already flowing out of this lemon.
It's super sour juices.
Cause this is like the biggest, you know, California is at the lemon.
And so now we have a glass and you can even see visualize or imagine that glass.
And I'm squeezing that yellow, citrusy, sour lemon juice into the glass.
And now it's like very tall glass of lemon juice and the most sour, beautiful, citrusy, ripe lemon juice possible.
And now imagine, visualize, feel it.
I'm going to ask you to drink this lemon juice and feel it coming into your mouth.
Is your mouth watering?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do you feel it?
Absolutely.
And so if that's happening with an imaginary glass of lemon juice, just imagine what's powerful when we go a little bit deeper.
Yeah.
That's good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I fully feel like I just drank lemon juice.
Like fully.
I want some now.
So imagine what's possible when we get into your subconscious mind and allow it to experience something because it can't really tell the difference between fantasy and suggestion and what's actually happening.
And in fact, we feed it all sorts of fantasy and suggestion all day long that may not be beneficial to us.
So when we go in and we do this, we can change.
And the theta state could lead to a gamma state, which is a very mystical experience, which is maybe our connection, our doorway, the bridge to the quantum itself.
What are we feeding our minds that is actually detrimental?
Because what you just said is we can subconsciously go back to these places, release things, but really what we're doing subconsciously is feeding our mind with all sorts of stuff that isn't actually helping.
Yeah, when we follow every thought we have, every fear we have.
Remember we talked about like fear is running our lives.
And so do you follow every fear?
Do you follow every thought?
Are you focusing on the outcomes that you want or the outcomes that you don't want?
Most of us will focus on how do we protect against the outcome that we don't want.
I don't want to fail.
I don't want to be rejected when I ask someone on a date.
Instead of focusing on, imagine this beautiful experience of...
They say yes, and we have a romance, right?
And so we feed ourselves the fears, and those fears become suggestions into our mind of what's possible to happen, right?
And so we're programming our highly suggestible mind all the time.
We can simply stop that or fight against it by moments of awareness and then relaxation so that we can go back and release.
There was a man I worked with, and we can do this at any time, it's so powerful.
He was 80 years old.
He hadn't been to a doctor since he was in Vietnam.
It had been many decades.
He was so afraid of a doctor.
I couldn't figure out why, but when I saw him, because he had all sorts of problems with his knees and his quality of life was really bad, his daughter asked me to help.
And in one session, we were able to take him back to a place that was so peaceful that he had an experience with his brother showing up, who had died many years before.
And I asked him to speak with his brother and get some inspiration and some support.
And he felt this loving support so much so from his brother, whether it was, who knows, maybe the energy of his brother did come.
You know, maybe there's more than we can possibly see.
Maybe it was his own imagination and he was able to program and suggest that he was supported and loved.
And I fostered that.
Whatever it was, he had this experience.
And then through this experience, when we came up and out, I said, what's your fear of the doctor?
Zero.
He went to the doctor.
He got needles in his knees.
He got a full checkup.
His daughter wrote me.
It's absolutely amazing.
Zero fear of the doctor.
We can reimagine and re-experience and tell different stories to our subconscious mind at any time.
And with that, our life changes so dramatically.
It's good to know that you're never too late.
Because I feel like there's a sense we all have of like, oh, well, I'm 30 now, I'm 40 now, I'm 50 now, I'm 60 now, I'm 70 now.
And now it's too late for me.
Like now I'm set in my ways.
We always say that as well.
You can't teach an old dog new tricks.
Yes.
And those ideas just stay.
And of course it can be harder, I assume, when you've lived in a certain way for a long time.
Mm-hmm.
When someone's having a fearful or an anxious thought, what should they do?
Don't follow it.
Right?
As soon as you catch yourself in this spiral,
With this vicious circle, you can literally snap yourself out of it by saying no.
That's what I do, a snap and no.
There's two different, there's one, I'm having ruminating thoughts that are difficult, I know they're not helping me, and then there's like panic.
So ruminating thought's difficult and helping me like, I'll walk down the street, I'll stumble and I'll be like, yeah, these legs, this, I'll get up.
And I'll say, nope, you're doing great.
I'd literally say, nope, I'll snap.
And then I'll say, thank you so much for carrying me.
Thank you so much for doing your job.
You're doing great.
And every time I snap myself out of it, that's the ruminating thought.
Now, if you've gotten yourself into panic, then we need to actually speak to the body because the mind is now shut off and the body's like, okay, I got the signal, I'm taking over.
The way that we can do this is just by
One, the breath.
Okay, am I breathing?
And I always say this, if you focus on your breath, can you focus on your breath?
I wonder if you can focus on your breath.
And you ask yourself, I wonder if you can focus on your breath?
And all of a sudden, yeah, I can feel it on my nostrils.
Okay, now association.
If I was to say to you, can you remember a time when you were a child that you laughed with a friend so hard that someone spit something out of their nose or mouth?
And it's like, already you start to laugh.
So you say, what's the association around the room?
Find the color that makes you happiest the most.
And I found this green color behind you.
And that will get you out of a panic in 30 seconds.
I need you to fill out 37 forms about your listening history.
I'll wait.
Forget it.
That would be ridiculous.
Yeah, we all do it every time we need healthcare.
But the new Amazon Health AI is different.
It can connect your symptoms with your medical history to offer personalized care 24-7.
Amazon Health AI is here.
Healthcare just got less painful.
I like the no because it's simple.
And it's doable and it's easy and it's achievable and it's memorable and it's, and you're right because you're not going to gain anything from going down that lane.
Correct.
What do you do when your mind feels like it railroads that no?
Yeah, it fights against it.
Yeah, it fights against it.
Like right that next second it comes up.
Sometimes it takes three or four times, right?
And sometimes you have to fight back.
It comes up again or you're like, okay, I'm not going to get upset when they don't text me back immediately.
I'm not going to be upset if they do text me back or they don't do it.
And then you start to check your phone and it's like, have they text back?
And you're constantly looking or you've had that breakup and you're ruminating over and over again about what they did, why they did it.
Will they come back?
Who are they with now?
And sometimes it takes more than one try.
Yeah.
And you just have to first say, oh my God, mind, I love you so much.
Thank you.
I don't no longer need this protection.
I can no longer spin the algorithm that never ends of why they did what they did or who they're with.
And I'm going to release you now.
And then when it comes up and says five, four, three, two, one, no.
Release it.
And then sometimes it takes a little persistence with that.
I like what you're saying there is sometimes you have to practice when you're not in that position.
Pre-patterning.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
I feel like it has to happen before you end up walking down the street and your legs hurt because you know that's going to happen.
And so why not plan before?
I remember when I went skydiving, I've only been once, but when I went skydiving, they took us into this practice chamber where you're with your guide and they're walking you through every step of what's going to happen.
They're like, we're going to get up.
The door's going to open.
I want you to look up.
I want you to hook your legs behind mine.
Your face is going to be expanded.
The air is going to... And it's like when they've gone through all the micro details of it, now when it happens in reality, it's a dress rehearsal.
Right.
And you're ready for it.
And I feel like sometimes with our anxiety, we're almost so surprised by it
When the majority of our anxiety that we're having on a daily basis is somewhat repetitive, our fears are somewhat repetitive.
They're there every time you open your mouth in a team meeting or they're there every time you're about to tell your partner something when they get home from work.
Right, right.
They're there when you're about to like, maybe getting frustrated by the kids in the morning, right?
It's like, it's very specific and it's very clear where our repetitive or every time your in-laws say something or whatever it may be for you.
I was thinking about a client that was speaking to me yesterday.
It's always the same things, but it feels like we're less prepared for the same things that keep happening in our life.
Yeah, those triggers.
I love that idea and something that everybody should do.
It's focusing on the outcome that you want, meaning when this happens.
My wife comes home and criticizes something that is a mess or whatever it is.
And you focus on your response.
You focus on how you do it in a really beautiful, loving way that doesn't allow the ego to say, don't tell me.
And that pre-patterning, that practice is really essential.
I love that.
What do our triggers tell us about ourselves?
It tells us where our wounds are.
It really tells us what our ego is holding on to or where our wounds are.
And those things that we still have left to heal or that may be our shadows.
And so triggers are really those things that I love to look at.
Let's talk about the four core wounds that you talk about in the book of possibility, because I felt they mapped out.
Often we hear this word wounds in personal growth, but it feels quite vague.
I love the way you broke it down and made it simple for us.
What are the four core wounds and talk to us about how we become aware of them and how we address them?
The four core wounds, these are wounds that we got from childhood.
There are childhood wounds.
And so we have the abandonment wound.
We have the guilt wound.
That's the one that I have, this guilt wound.
Usually the guilt wound comes from how your parents treated you.
If you were abused in some way or if you had a really angry father or a physical, emotional, whatever abuse it was.
As a child, you really can't understand why they're doing it, right?
These people.
So you must think that it was me.
And how that manifests in today, you're always wondering, asking someone, are you mad at me?
Did I say something?
Or if someone doesn't text you back or they say something like, oh God, it must have been me.
I must have done something wrong.
We have the trust wound and we have neglect.
These wounds from childhood.
So trust will result in an inability to be vulnerable with someone.
As we grow older, we're very skeptical.
We don't allow anybody in.
And neglect often creates this...
This neediness, this attached and anxious anxiety in relationships or other ways.
And we carry these through as our shadows into our adult life.
And really, this still an inner child, it's still your seven-year-old self living within you, running the program.
You know, what's fascinating is that, and I'm sure you feel this way too, Jim.
It's like every year I keep doing this work on myself with my clients online with the world.
Yeah.
The more I realize how much the work is important.
So important.
I'm not growing older and feeling like I've done the work and it's less important.
I'm growing older and constantly feeling like this is all that matters.
Right.
And whether I look at friends, I look at myself, I look at family, I find that these four core wounds
Are the operating system of people's entire lives
Yes and it's the reason why people aren't having great connections in their relationships or great friendships or great uh careers or whatever it may be is because there's something here that just keeps coming back up
How do you become aware of which one you have
Is it as simply as listening to what you just said and saying, oh, that's the one I have?
And then what do I do about it?
In the book, we go through and we have a chart and we give all the information you can really identify with.
That speaks to me, right?
And so often we start to say, oh, okay, I've identified this wound and it's big, it's open, it's painful, it's bleeding.
And then we start to say, okay, how do I ask my subconscious mind and go back through journaling, through guided visualization, through self-hypnosis and find that child?
Because they're in there.
And when you visualize them, I do this hypno meditation that brings people back to their inner child and we find them in the family home.
And we say, what's that child feeling?
And when we see that, we say, okay, what does that child need that it's not getting now?
And we allow ourselves in real time to visualize, see, or imagine giving that child what it needs.
And so oftentimes people will say, it needs acceptance.
It needs love because we're mad at the wound.
Instead of saying, oh, this wound is trying to protect us, trying to serve us in some way.
It's there for a reason.
Instead, when we say, okay, I accept it.
I love it.
And now if I embrace it, how do I build awareness of it enough that I know that it's not about me anymore, that I can move beyond it?
And so the wound gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
So if someone triggers it, it may still flare up, but you can say, oh, okay.
That's just the inner child in me.
Put your hand on your heart and your stomach.
Accept and I love you.
We're in this together.
And okay, let's do some breathing and move on.
And it becomes less of an issue and we start to deprogram that pattern.
And then we put in a new one.
Always, whether it's inner child work or smoking.
Or love, like acceptance and building self-worth and love, you always replace love.
Smoking, it's with water.
With this, you replace that thought with an image and a vision of what you're stepping into.
So you visualize the inner child really happy.
And then the adult as your visualization, what you step into is successful.
The loving relationship, the job, whichever it is, it going really well, your relationships with the people within those settings, and then you say the affirmations that support it.
I am whole, I am complete, I am confident, I am lovable, whatever it is in that moment.
What's the biggest mistake we make when we're looking for love?
We focus out.
It's always that.
Yeah.
And questioning, what do I need to do to make them love me?
Who do I need to be to make them love me?
Instead of focusing total acceptance on yourself.
That's what I had to do anyway.
Walk me through that.
I didn't accept myself exactly the way I was.
I thought that I was broken in some way.
And when I would look for love, I would look almost for someone to validate me.
So I would find someone out here.
Their love would validate me until I couldn't accept that anymore, and then that relationship would be over.
And so the biggest issue in finding love, I think, is not first completely accepting and loving yourself.
I love that answer.
I think we're scared of accepting ourselves because we think we're too much or not enough because we think we want something too big or we feel too small or we feel
No one will live up to our expectations or we won't live up to someone else's.
And so I feel like we don't want to accept who we are because it's quite scary.
It's quite vulnerable to say, well, what if I end up alone?
Because I'm not
I'm either too much or not enough.
I'm either amazing or I feel worthless or I'm either expecting too much or expecting too little or whatever it may be.
Even when you said that, I was like, wow, I love the answer and I believe it to be true.
But I go, how?
Because is that even possible?
The reason I'm saying is it possible is because most of us will think, well, I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life if I accept who I am.
A lot of people come to me about this, especially in the later years when they say, you know, now I've been divorced and what do I do?
Why is this stuff happening?
Or I haven't found the one and will it ever happen?
And so when we do look in and say either not enough, like you said, or too much, we have to say, is that true?
And so if I'm aware of that,
And I bring my conscious awareness to that belief, we say, okay, let's take that belief.
First of all, who is the belief?
Is it me?
No, I can identify it.
I can focus on it.
And therefore my conscious awareness that the belief isn't me and the belief doesn't live inside me.
I can't open up my heart to find that.
Then it is just a belief.
And so if we look at that, is the belief true?
Maybe.
Is it 100% true?
Is it always true?
No.
This is a framework that I didn't create, but it's so powerful.
It's good.
Repeat it.
It's all about questioning.
Is this me or is this a belief?
If I can put my conscious awareness on it,
That means that it is not me, right?
Same as this microphone is not me.
Same as the chair is not me.
I realize I'm the higher self.
So it's a belief.
The belief doesn't live within my organs.
I can't cut open my heart and extract it.
Therefore, it is just an emotion and a feeling.
So I can question it.
The first question is, is it true?
And we may even say to ourselves, yeah, it's true.
Okay, is it 100% true?
No.
Could there be any other truth that someone may find me enough, that someone may not find me too much, that someone will be perfect for me, that I could actually love myself?
Yes, that's another truth.
Okay, so now how do I really ingrain that, meditate on that, practice that, so that the voice that says, the fear that says, I'm not enough or I'm too much gets so small,
Or that I can love it enough and see that child.
That when I go out into the world, it's no longer dictating how I act and who I perceive.
And most importantly, my frequency and energy changes.
Because that's really what's attracting and magnetizing everyone else to you.
Forget about the brain.
All this stuff is to do one thing.
It's to widen your frequency and the frequency of love.
Because as soon as you walk next to a person, it doesn't matter what your physical disability is, what your issues, what your past relationships is.
You feel the energy of someone.
And if it's loving, you're attracted to it.
If we've built the frequency of love in our own experience of ourselves, we're better at noticing it when someone else has it too.
Like in the sense of, if you have got to a place of, I accept who I am, I accept what I want, I accept what I need,
Then when you meet someone who rejects it, it will be evident.
And when you meet someone who accepts it, it will be evident.
Because like you said, you will either feel that frequency of attraction and love and connection, or you'll feel the love of rejection, et cetera.
What do we do about the idea that when we've learned to accept ourselves, but then someone rejects that, and then that triggers back
That rejection that we had of ourselves in the past.
Yeah, it's a constant conversation with ourselves, right?
Because we can't be loved by everyone.
There's just too many people in the world and that's not our job, right?
If we're looking for love, we're finding those friends and families or whatever it is that we resonate with or the one person that we want to be in a romantic relationship with
If you want to be in a monogamous romantic relationship.
I love the sayings like rejection is protection.
I use all the time, I am divinely guided.
I know that I'm going to be in the right place.
I am divinely guided.
I've convinced myself of that.
And because I'm divinely guided, I can be in a beautiful, loving relationship.
And I don't have to worry about...
If I'm going to be rejected or not, or if it's going to last forever, and that kind of thing.
Instead, I know that I can stay steady because I'm divinely guided, something greater than myself.
That's a great question.
How do you think someone gets beyond that?
I think when it comes to our growth work,
We're all ultimately trying to get to a point where we're happy in our own company.
Yeah.
I think that's one of the biggest fears people have, which is being alone with their thoughts, being alone by themselves, and then being alone from someone else.
So we'd rather be in a crowded room even if we feel alone because it distracts us from ourselves.
Or we'd rather be doom scrolling because it distracts us from our thoughts.
And so I think the beginning of real self-work is being comfortable in our own company.
And therefore, if we are being rejected by someone else, we don't take it personally because we actually enjoy our own company.
So we realize that we just don't match.
And it doesn't become about the inadequacies of the other person either.
It simply becomes about we're not compatible.
We're just not a match.
And now it's not about your inadequacies or flaws or mine.
We're just recognizing that there isn't a frequency match here.
Yeah.
And that's okay.
I think before it's like, oh, well, you don't like me.
So what does that say about you?
And
You don't like me, so what does that say about me?
And then you realize, well, if we don't like each other, then all it says is we're not a match.
Like it's not complicated.
And so I think you're trying to get to that point, but to get to that point, you have to enjoy your own company.
Yeah.
Because if you don't enjoy your own company, then someone else is...
Feelings around you will always trigger you.
At the same time, you don't want to be around someone who doesn't enjoy your company.
Why would you want that?
I think it comes to being seen too, right?
We've all built up this identity of who we are.
And if someone doesn't see us like that,
We get worried that they're not seeing us as the way we want to be seen and we're attached to it.
Just the general world is not seeing us and therefore if they're not seeing us the way that we want to be seen and accepting us, then it's rejection and then are we truly the person we think we are?
Mm-hmm.
And so I think that's the work there too.
It's just being absolutely comfortable with knowing ourselves.
Do you want your partner to see you the way you see yourself?
If you have a positive self-image, right, it's all masks.
So you want your partner to see you in the most positive light.
And I think that the real cracking open of the relationship is when you can be a reflection and they can be a reflection of you, even the ugly stuff.
You know, even the shadows and they could say, okay, I can be vulnerable enough so that you can see all of me.
And then when you kind of mirror that and you see me differently than I wanted you to see me.
When you see my reaction to that and your mirror of that is disapproval, how I can still stay within my own empowerment instead of crumbling because you disapproved of something.
And I can still keep my self-worth and my value despite your disapproval of that, knowing that we'll get beyond it.
That's a profound question.
I remember one of my clients saying to me, he said, Jay, the reason I love hanging out with you is because we can talk about spirituality, we can talk about media, and we can talk about business, all in one person.
I really enjoyed that compliment.
Because it was the first time someone had seen me for all my paradoxical tendencies.
And so it was very vulnerable because it was someone who was seeing me beyond one caricature or one identity version.
So that's when I felt most seen is when people see that I'm very gated and I love interior design and fashion as much as I love wisdom and philosophy as much as I love, you know, and that's when I feel most seen when someone can kind of appreciate all of those aspects of me.
And again, of course, with the people that I'm closest to, the most vulnerable, the most stripped back, the parts of me that aren't all feng shui and aren't all curated, but the parts of me, of course, that are...
Fallible and flawed and real and wounded and broken and everything else that exists.
We want to put things in buckets.
And that's marketing and advertising, right?
As soon as you can identify a need and someone says, I have that and relate to it and put it in a bucket.
But we are so multidimensional.
We are so dynamic.
Yes, of course, things like fashion and spirituality, entrepreneurship and business and believing in something great, of course it goes together.
As soon as you identify like, oh, I'm a whole person with many interests and facets, right?
I'm not just this one thing that you see me as.
But with, you know, kind of so much information in the world, you know, our mind collates stuff.
We have thousands of pieces of information coming in in a minute.
So our reticular activating system says, I'm going to bucket this, I'm going to look for this, right?
And that's what happens, especially in public lives, when people say, oh,
J shetty spiritual
Jim curtis hypnotist
Right yeah and really the truth is that's not me at all
Right i can have many different beliefs and because i'm one doesn't say i can't do the other and i think people feel that way a lot like um how can i possibly go and do this thing
I have a
Or they want to step out on social media with some self-help videos, or they want to become a coach.
But everybody in their lives sees them as this person that works in finance or whatever they do, and they're like...
Or I'm a lawyer.
How could I possibly all of a sudden start talking about self-development on social media?
I was like, how can you not?
Right?
If you believe in it, there's no separation.
It's just the fear of how people bucket you.
So as soon as you drop that fear and realize that as a whole person, you have multi dimensions and you can be whatever you want to be.
I only wish that more people in business had more spirituality.
Yeah.
I mean, there are many religions that are the best businesses in the world.
Mm-hmm.
Why can't spirituality and entrepreneurship be the same thing?
We've been talking a lot about beliefs, assumptions, the subconscious.
I feel the most raw or the most vulnerable place people feel this is after a breakup.
Mm-hmm.
After a divorce or after a breakup where someone feels unattractive, if they've been broken up with, they feel unwanted, they feel unworthy, they feel unchaste, like they're the person that was broken up with and so they start to think,
I wasn't smart enough.
I wasn't good enough.
I wasn't clever enough.
I wasn't beautiful enough.
I wasn't nurturing enough, whatever it may be.
How do you work with people like that in that very raw, vulnerable state to re-begin to form their identities?
There's a lot of people that come after divorce and some of those divorces are very messy.
Some of those divorces are from abusive people or especially when someone's cheated.
And then your identity comes crashing down because it's been 20 years or however long it's been.
And it said, who am I now?
And so the way that I work with people is through acceptance.
You know, the first thing that I say, and it's something that really needs to be grasped that I say quite often is you're doing it exactly right.
Because the first idea is like, I've done something wrong.
I've screwed up this life.
I wasted this time.
And it's not true.
You're doing it exactly right.
You needed these steps to get to where you were, right?
You're here for a reason.
And
That's why you're here it couldn't have been differently because it's not and so you're doing it exactly right and so the question becomes what do you want instead of focusing back on what went wrong
Right.
Let's focus on the next outcome.
Who do you want to be?
You can step into an identity at any time.
So let's focus on what we want.
OK, I want to be recovered whole and complete.
I want to find someone who truly loves me for who I am that works better.
OK, so then what did we learn from the past?
And instead of talk therapy, which will go and rehash the identities of us, we can start coaching looks to the future.
And so how do we forgive?
Let go
We do these forgiveness letters um we we do all these somatic exercise
We really work a lot with the hono pono pono prayer
That you know is a powerful code of the universe that allows forgiveness to just permeate and then we create a vision for the future
Knowing that we have to grieve a loss of something.
And so there's a lot of space and acceptance.
But it's a real process of release, align, become.
Everything that I do has that process.
When I wrote Think Like a Monk, my first book, my three steps to it are let go, grow, and give.
Really?
Yeah.
And so when you said that today, I was like, we share a...
A similar philosophy and belief on how change occurs.
That's amazing.
Yeah, when I heard those words from you.
We've walked a lot of the same path from marketing and business and finding spirituality.
Yes, yes.
It's what you say in the book.
You talk about this idea of just, it's not that there is a quantum field and there's us.
It's that we are.
We are the field and we are the universe, whatever language people want to use, we are consciousness.
And I think when you live that way, I love the example you give of the cloud and like the storage, the pictures are not in our phone.
They're in the cloud, but we can all access them.
And when I read that, I was like, yeah, if, if we start to realize that we have access.
To this cloud of wisdom, insight, knowledge.
The universal mind, the collective consciousness.
Yeah.
It's where we pull our intuition from.
And they're like, I don't know how I knew that.
Totally, the amount of times I'll message someone and say, I was just thinking of you.
And they'll say, I was just talking about you.
Yeah.
And it's like, how do you know that?
I'm not psychic.
I'm not, you know, I don't have those.
Tendencies or practices or any of that but you're just tuned in and you can feel it
Have you ever seen the movie i heart huckabees no i haven't it is a tremendous beautiful amazing movie
Okay very funny
But what it does is it puts into perspective this idea of connectedness and separateness.
And so there's Mark Wahlberg and there's Dustin Hoffman.
And he's like, okay, he pulls off this sheet.
And he's like, here's the sheet.
This is the sheet.
And this is everything.
And he pokes his finger up to the sheet and he says, this is you.
And he says, this is a tree.
And this is a gas station.
And here's me over here.
And it's all the sheet.
Right?
It's like poking fingers up, but it's all the sheep.
So what if we're connected to everything?
It leads back to the I am, which is like, if we're connected to everything, then we are it.
We're the, you know, the way the energy that permeates through every leaf.
Where the same energy that creates the sun and the wind, and if that's true, then there's more possible than we could ever possibly imagine.
Jim, on that note, we end every episode of On Purpose with a final five.
These questions have to be answered in one sentence maximum.
Yes.
And so, Jim Cass, these are your final five.
The first question is, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?
Stop believing every one of your thoughts.
Question number two, what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?
Leave college and become a Wall Street trader full time.
Did you do that?
Yeah.
Why was that the worst advice of all time?
I mean, I have no regrets.
It was perfect, but it was just a difficult job for me.
Question number three, what's a lesson in life you wish you'd learned sooner?
When you are kind to yourself and your body, everything changes.
It's so interesting how we treat something when we like it.
Right?
Like when you get a new phone, you're like, oh my God, I got to make sure it gets no scratches and I don't want to leave it anywhere.
That's how we treat someone when we like it.
When you hate it, you just kind of like throw it around and you know, you don't care.
And so when we feel that way about our bodies and our mind, imagine what it does.
Try complimenting your body more often.
It really responds.
You'll have less pain.
You'll be in flow.
Literally wake up and say, I love these knees.
I love these legs.
Thank you so much.
Your body's always listening.
There's a book called The Body Keeps the Score, The Biology of Belief, Lipton and Van de Kemp.
Compliment your body.
Life will change.
And I feel like the things we most often say are, even with the I am, is I'm tired, I'm exhausted, I'm starving.
What's that doing to us?
It's sending the wrong signals.
Question number four, what did you used to value that you don't value anymore?
I used to really value material things.
I lived in New York City.
I wanted more and more and more.
I wanted the status of them.
And now I don't really care.
And fifth and final question.
We ask this to every guest who's been on the show.
If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?
It gets me crazy when people aren't respectful of others.
So I guess the, this kind of law around be respectful of others, give people some grace and some leeway and like be polite in traffic.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
The simple things.
It's the simple things.
That's what's coming up for me right now.
Yeah, and it is the simple things.
I feel like that's all anyone's after.
Jim, thank you for writing the book of possibility.
It's available right now.
Like you said, you also read the audio book.
So for those of you who fell in love with Jim's voice on this episode, you can...
Listen to it you can read it as well uh jim thank you so much for your time your energy your presence
Is there anything i didn't ask you that you wish i asked you i think we went all over the place
I really appreciate it thank you jim thank you so much
