BILL HARRIS: You know, one of the things that I have noticed and I know you have noticed this too is that people will go to a seminar or training and they will leave with “seminar high” and they have the best of intentions then for going out and creating whatever it is that they want, but then within a short period of time, a week or so, their old habit of focusing on what they don’t want most of the time reasserts itself and that whole intention that they had kind of goes away and it seems to me that a good seminar is one in which the seminar leader manages to get the people that are at the seminar to focus on what they want, but a great seminar is one that manages to get people to continue to focus on what they want after they leave and I think that is one of the things about your work that makes it stand head and shoulders higher than a lot of other people, is because I think you are able to do that. Can you give some explanation of how you try to make this more permanent?
JACK CANFIELD: Sure, I think one of the things that we do that’s unusual is that we provide people with a mastermind group, or a set of what we call accountability partners so that as you leave the seminar, it is kind of like everyone makes New Year’s resolutions to exercise.
It’s much easier to keep them if you sign up for a gym and you have a partner you are going to go with and a coach you are going to meet when you get there, because then you have people saying “come on, lets go, lets get in our suit, lets do 50 "pushups”, whatever and you know on our own, we would tend to fall away from that.
We teach people how to create and maintain a support system that keeps them focused on their goals.
We also teach them a set of habits that we expect them to do for a minimum of 40 days, because research shows if you
keep something going for 40 days, you are more than likely to keep it going and then we also encourage them to keep it going for a whole quarter to three months if they really want to be sure, so what happens is, things like the mirror exercise, where every night at the end of the day before they go to bed, they look in the mirror and out loud they talk to themselves and appreciate themselves for everything they did that day.
What that does over a 40- day period, is it creates a habit of self-affirmation, self-validation, focusing on what you did do rather than what you didn’t do, so it creates some new mental habits.
Everyone leaves with a set of affirmations, which they put on 3 x 5 cards or put on their screen saver that they have to read every day. We ask them to do that for an entire year, then once a week they are talking to their mastermind group. I recommend that people hire a coach and study with the best!
One of my friends said that "training without coaching is entertainment", and I think there is a certain truth in that because a lot of people can relate to going and getting that training high you talked about and then a month later it was like they were never there.
Once we get the breakthrough, we need to sustain it, so it is like teaching a kid. You don’t expect them with one intervention to develop a new habit, like keeping their elbows off the table or chewing with their mouth closed, or going to bed on time, or studying with the radio off, but if you reinforce that over and over and over for days and
months, eventually they internalize it and it becomes a habit, and what I am looking to do is create what I call habits
of success and disciplines of success that become second nature.
When you have that and have developed four a year, at the end of 10 years, you have 40 new success habits and you are home free.
Bill Harris: I know that one of your mentors was W. Clement Stone, who co-wrote a book with Napoleon Hill 'Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude' and was a multi, multi, multi millionaire. Was he a billionaire?
JACK CANFIELD: Well, when I knew him, he was worth $600 million and that was in his 60s, so if you were to amortize that out today as dollars, he was a billionaire, yes.
BILL HARRIS: So, what was it like being around W. Clement Stone?
JACK CANFIELD: It was quite exciting. He was always positive, I mean to a fault. You just began to question was he normal. But he wasn’t and that was his strength. I mean, he literally believed the world was plotting to do him good. We used to call him an inverse paranoid. Literally. I mean, I think he is the guy who coined the phrase, I have been told this and I believe it, “If life hands you a lemon squeeze it and make lemonade”, which was kind of a more common way of Napoleon Hill’s statement, which was “inside of every negative event is the seed of an equal or greater benefit” and he would always believe that. I mean people came in to rip him off and they would be so...he had a foundation when I worked for him where he gave away a lot of money and some people just came to see if they could scam him for the money and by the time they left, they were so impressed with the idea that he really believed that he thought they could do something legitimate that the would go out and do it and he was a character. He was a genius trainer.
He trained sales people not by words, but by actions, by taking them out an modeling for them and then he would say, “Okay, what did you see me do?” They would tell him and he would say that they missed three things and here is what they are. "Next time we go in, just watch for those three things", and he would take the person back, have another cup
of coffee and ask "Did you see those three things?"
They would say yes, so they would be walking into the next one, and just inside the door, he would say:" This one is
yours!"
The guy would freak, but he would do it and probably miss three things.They would go out for coffee , and he would say: "What did you miss?" If they knew, great, if they did not, he would tell them and then he would go and do those three things perfectly for them again. By the end of the day he had a perfect salesman who was confident and knew what to do.
Bill Harris: Anything else you would like to share with us about him?
JACK CANFIELD: You would see him and you would ask: " How are you doing? TERRIFIC!! The only answer that was appropriate was terrific and at first, it felt phoney to me, but after a while, if you say it long enough, things really are terrific, so you have to go through that stage almost of not believing a technique will work until it does and then all of a sudden you go, wow that is not faking it. If you make it, that really works.
BILL HARRIS: Well, I actually have a lot of people who when I talk to them about focusing on what you want, they will write me and say, “I tried this focusing on what I want, but I feel like such a phoney because while I am sitting there thinking about what I want to be, I know that I am a loser and that I am this, and I am that,” and then I get a chance for the second time to explain the principle to them, taking into account mis-perception. I cover every objection they can think of and they pretty much don’t have any choice but to start focusing on what they want.
JACK CANFIELD: Right, well you know one of the things that one of my mentors once said is that we give way too much credence to reality. Reality is simply something we created and as long as you realize you are a creator and we are all made in the image of the creator, if you believe any of the great religious texts in the world, then what happens is, the reality we are currently living with is simply one we created, so we get to either focus on that and have more of it, or focus on the reality we want and create that.
Most people think that statistics say that 80% of marriages end in divorce, therefore I have an 8 in 10 chance. So, that is what they start to believe and sure enough, they create it, as opposed to saying well that is just a statistic of what got created in the past.
I am different, we know more, etc... I am going to create it my way and that is what you do every day, that is what I do every day and it is what all of us that are teaching this stuff do. It is why we are the teachers, because we live it.
BILL HARRIS: It is really a challenge for people when they are going in the direction where they are focusing a lot on what they don’t want and getting it, to believe they are actually doing that and part of that is that they are really unconscious about what they are doing inside that is creating the reality. A lot of what I do is I try to show them that unconscious process so that they can go “oh.”
So they start looking inside their own head, and noticing what they are doing and the effect that it has. You know,
most people know intellectually that people that have been in personal growth, they know that beliefs manifest
themselves in reality. But until someone actually looks inside their own head and watches a belief create a certain
reality, they don’t really know it on an experiential level.
It is just information, and I see people all the time who nod and smile as someone like you or someone like me, or some of the other people we know express certain basic principles. Then, the group takes a break and I see them violating them two minutes after they were nodding their head about them.
JACK CANFIELD: Well, you and I know that information is not enough to change behavior. It takes an experience. When the body and the mind experience something better, it naturally goes toward that.
Give people seven days of experiencing what it is like to live in a constantly positive, loving, self-affirming, responsibility-taking, goal-seeking, reinforcing environment and as people do that, it internalizes. If we give them the tools to practice, they continue it. I think the other thing that I would say why I love meditation so much, and for years I practiced a form called Vipassana, which is a Buddhist technique of watching not just your thoughts, but any sensation.
Wherever your awareness goes, you watch your thoughts for 10 days in a row on a retreat and you become pretty
clear that most of it sucks. It is really negative, so you begin to become conscious and intentional about it.
Most of us are so out of awareness, we are not even aware we are thinking. So, the concept of meditation day after day, after day and learning to be in the witness position and the observer and then beginning to realize, wait a second, just because a thought comes through, I do not have to get on that boat and go down that river. I can let it go by and I can now choose to think a more conscious thought.
Our feelings re created by our thoughts. So, we are not feeling well, we are not getting what we want and the only question to ask is, “what thought would make me feel better? What thought would take me closer to my goal?”
BILL HARRIS: Yeah, when you pay attention to what is going on in your head, you suddenly begin to make the connections between what is going on in your head and what is being created in reality, and that is big. There are 60 or so success principles that you have in your book 'The Success Principles'.
JACK CANFIELD: My first chapter is on responsibility. Take 100% responsibility for your life and you are accurate, because I used to teach this, that you can’t take responsibility for that which you are not aware of.
In other words, if I am standing on your foot and I am not aware of it, and at some level, I am not going to change my behavior, but as soon as you say “hey, you are standing on my foot,” and I become aware of it, now I have a choice.
I didn’t have a choice before. Now I have a choice, either keep standing there or get off.
So, people have all kinds of self-destructive behaviors. They are not even aware that their thoughts are creating it. They are not aware that certain ways they interact with people make people pull away from them. They are not aware that the way they interact with money makes them have less of it instead of more of it.
So every area where you can increase your awareness, you increase choice. That is why I love to read books. I have learned a lot about finances and leadership, things I wasn’t aware of until I read them and then when I reflected on them and applied them to my own life, it made a huge difference.
BILL HARRIS: So, would you say then that this taking total responsibility for what you create is the most fundamental principle?
JACK CANFIELD: Well, you know, I put it in my book first because I think it is, but I would go back and I would have to concede to what you just said, that you have to be aware. If you are not aware you are responsible, then you cannot take responsibility. The first thing is that you have to become aware of these principles.
There are universal laws and universal principles that have been codified in religion and have been codified in psychology, N.L.P., you know all the different practices that exist in he world and if you study them and learn them and then you act in accordance with them, I mean just for example, if you save 10% of every dollar you make or are given, you cannot help but end up wealthy, even if you only make $25,000 a year, you will be a millionaire by the time you are 65 if you invested in any even conservative stock market portfolio, or real estate, or whatever. So, that’s
something I never learned until I was in my 40’s. No one taught it to me.
BILL HARRIS: Yeah, the miracle of compounding.
JACK CANFIELD: Exactly. So, there are laws like that, like you know the law of reciprocity, you know, what you give out, you get back. There is a law called probability. The more things you try, the more likely one of them will work. The more books you read, the more likely one of them will change your life. The more of these kind of calls you listen to, the more likely you will hear something that will improve your relationship.
The idea of abundant research, abundant exposure to new ideas increases the probability that something will happen that’s good. So, I mean, there are all of these universal laws that if you know them, and you are aware of them then you can utilize them. If you are not aware of them, then you know, you get the negative benefit if you will. They still work, they just work against you because you are focusing on the negative and so on and so forth.
BILL HARRIS: You know, I would like your thoughts on something else that just occurred to me too. One of the things that happens quite often when you first give people a glimpse of how they are creating their reality, particularly if they are creating something that is unpleasant for them and doing it, you know, chronically, they feel ashamed of themselves. They feel like they are stupid for having done this, or even they go into denial about it because they don’t want to admit that they have been creating it. Somehow, they take the fact that they are creating something negative to be a commentary about who they are as a person, rather than just that they had the wrong strategy.
JACK CANFIELD: Well, when we were growing up, we all learned unfortunately, I think, that when you got caught
doing something wrong you got punished, and it meant you were a bad person, go to your room, you are grounded for a week, whatever.
So, we learn to avoid getting caught and, unfortunately, we have applied that to self-awareness, you know catching ourselves having self-destructive behavior. I used to do parenting workshops and I used to have to always say in the beginning: “Look, I am going to teach you lots of ways that parents unconsciously destroy the self-esteem of their children, and I am going to teach you lots of ways to stop it, and I am going to teach you ways to consciously enhance the self-esteem of your child.”
You have a choice: You can either feel bad that you have been doing this stuff, or you can celebrate that you are now realizing that you don’t have to do it any more.
So, I teach people to celebrate the new awareness and let’s start creating it the way you want it. Don’t beat yourself up for how you used to do it, because I believe in what one of my great teachers said once:“You are always doing the best you can with the awareness, skills and resources you have and you always did.”
Literally, if you could have done better, you would have, but you were missing some awareness. You were missing some skill. You were missing some resource, but now you have a new awareness, you have a new skill, you have a new resource, so now you can do better!
People almost always choose to do better when they can.
So, we never blame people for the past, we simply say “you were doing the best you could with the awareness, skills, and resources that you had. Now you have new resources, let’s do better.”
Helena Nyman: Are you doing the best you can?
To read the end of this interview, come back next week!
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