Rewire Your Brain to Achieve Any Goal - John Assaraf (The Secret)

I have an interesting story I'd love to share with you today, as you may know, I came from a pretty rough and tough background in my childhood and I wasn't used to hang around with successful people or being part of the world of the wealthy. If I hadn't discovered how to retrain my brain to change my results, chances are I would have ended up in jail or the morgue. Now, for me, I had a very successful mentor named Alan Brown. And Alan took it upon himself to show me many of the secrets that wealthy people understood, which allowed them to have what I think is almost a magical ability to set and achieve goals. And it can seem impossible to achieve those same goals to people who don't understand how the process works. And so, as part of my training, Alan had me do something. I think it was very interesting. What he had me do is he had me write down one extremely specific goal with a date associated with it of when I would achieve it. But then he asked me to do something that seemed, I guess, pretty boring since I was 19 years old and it seemed redundant to do it over and over again. But he had me read this goal every single day with my fingers scrolling on the words of the page. He told me to do my best to feel the words with my fingers. Now, I know it may sound crazy, but he wanted me to feel the words and he wanted me to imagine that what I had written down was true and that the goal that I had written down, one goal, one date was becoming a reality for me. So he had me in essence read put my fingers across the words and see myself moving towards those goals. And what he shared with me is that when you see read and feel this goal in this way, you're actually sending an electrical signal to your brain from your finger up your arm to your brain, which does what? It makes you much more likely to achieve this goal. Little did he know that what he said would later be 100% validated by neuroscientific discoveries. Let me explain. There is a term in the brain research, a science field that goes like this, the neurons brain cells that fire together, wire together. What this means is that when you activate by hearing, seeing, running your finger on your goals, when you activate and wire the different brain cells together, they formulate a pattern. The more you reinforce that pattern, the more it becomes a strong automatic pattern in your brain that causes you to think, feel and do things differently so your reality changes. Now, on any given day, you have 30, 40, 50,000 thoughts popping up in your head. Some of these thoughts are caused by internal influences, such as your memories, your beliefs, habits that you have. Others are caused by external influences like text you receive, Facebook, cell phones, traffic, bird flying across, you know, the sky into your window. These thoughts cause your mind and even mind to be scattered all over the place most of the day with no clear direction or focus. And so, if you think of your brain as an organ, right, I'm going to pull my brain from right over here. I've got a brain, okay, right over here. It's not my brain, but it's a brain. If you think of your brain as an organ that you could put to work for yourself like a loyal servant, then what you also need to do is you need to direct it. And if you don't, it'll just wander all over the place with no idea what you actually want. So, if your goals are scattered, so will your focus be. But as soon as you set a goal and choose to consistently and consciously focus on it, your brain realizes that this is important to you. And then what happens is it starts to automatically notice ways to bring you things that you want from the perspective of teaching you how to focus on it. And this is one of the best ways to activate and create a new pattern in your non-conscious brain, which you've probably heard a million times is where your real power is. When you set a goal, that excites you. You're activating a part of your brain called the nucleus accumbens and the insula. Now, this is closely related to the motivational center of your brain, which is responsible for releasing the feel-good chemical dopamine. And even some adrenaline to get you going to achieve your goals and dreams. And this is like activating your goal muscle when you review your goal by seeing, reading and emotionalizing, achieving this goal. You're in essence giving your brain clear instruction. And specifically when you repeat it over and over again, this goes from your conscious thinking brain to your non-conscious brain. And when you do this for one day, seven days, 30 days, 60 days, you are basically differentiating that goal from the 30 to 50,000 other random thoughts you have daily. And when that happens, you're using your brain by instructing it what to use the non-conscious power center for. So the question is, does this work? A study at the Dominican University found the people who simply and clearly write down their goals are 42% more likely to achieve them? Now, if you want to know something even more amazing, you can supercharge the process and the automatic neurological response, your brain experiences. When you do this one thing, ready? Find a big reason why you must achieve your goals. For example, you might have a goal to earn or get a specific amount of money. Let's say you want to earn $37,000, six months from now, or $50,000 a year from now. The amount is irrelevant. Whatever your goal is, just by doing that and writing it down and reviewing it, you're more likely by 42% to achieve it. But when you write down three reasons why you must achieve your goal, not want to, but must achieve your goal, your brain realizes, wow, this is really important. And when you turn on that motivational part of your brain, the motive for action is your why. Let me repeat that. The motive for taking action is the why. This is one of the many simple ways to start training your brain to automatically think, feel and do more of what you want, unless of what you don't want to do. Now, you may have heard that if your why doesn't want to make you cry because it's so emotionally positive for you, where achieving it is going to make you feel so amazing about yourself and your life and being proud and having meaning in your life. Maybe you have the wrong goal or maybe you just haven't gotten fully associated with the deeper reasons why you want to achieve your goals. I remember my parents struggled so much when I was younger. There's an old saying that goes like this, there was always too much month left at the end of the money. And I remember my parents fighting about the lack of money in our lives and how they couldn't afford this and couldn't afford that. I remember that I hated that feeling, but I hated even more the fights and the arguments that they had throughout my childhood. I made a decision. Well, I was very, very young that I would never do that. But even more than that, I made a decision that I was going to be able to retire them in a way that they felt proud and meaningful and loved. And that was really one of my biggest reasons why when I was in my 20s and 30s and 40s was to develop the skills and to be able to use my mind the right way to retire my parents. And thank God for for me and my brother and sister. We've been able to do that and my parents are in their 80s now and the feeling for me of going back and remembering my Y, one of my big Y's, has transformed the way I think and feel and how I achieve my goals and dreams. And so, can you just associate for one big goal that you have? It could be for yourself or for your children, for your family or your extended family. What's one thing that you want to achieve? Get that in your mind for just a moment. Now, I want you to think and then feel why? Why would achieving that goal make you feel so phenomenal? Why? And what I think you'll discover is when you can dig a little bit deeper and find a big reason why you'll find the motive for your actions. And that's just a really good tool to use anytime. Get totally emotionally connected. What I'd like to share with you is I love studying the brain. I love studying how this works. How does motivation work? How do the fear circuit stop us from achieving our goals? Whether it's fear of failure or fear of success or fear of disappointing, you know, yourself or fear of disappointing a loved one? And what I've done by studying the brain for the last 35 years and also connecting with some of the most brilliant brain researchers in the world is a put together something called the brain of thumb. And we've got seven of the world's leading brain experts who are really amazing at showing people how to number one recognize what may be holding you back. Is it self-doubt? Is it lack of confidence? Is it lack of certainty? Is it past traumas you've had in the past? Is it your lack of knowledge or skills on how to really achieve your financial and life goals that's holding you back? What are the mental or emotional resistance points that once you remove them, get rid of those as obstacles would allow you to put your foot on the gas and really just achieve more of your goals and dreams? Thank you for listening. Continue strengthening your mind by subscribing and and listening to our other episodes.