The Masters of 'the Secret'

Interview between Bill Harris and Jack Canfield (Part 1)

Note from Helena Nyman, Success Coach: This Blog represents only the part of the Interview that is relevant to the Secret!

BILL HARRIS: Hello. This is Bill Harris, and I want to welcome you to the Masters of the Secret Series. Tonight’s guest is my good friend Jack Canfield. In addition to being one of the stars of the hit DVD movie, 'The Secret'...Jack is the originator and co-creator of the New York Times #1 best-selling book series Chicken Soup for the Soul, which has sold over 100 million copies in 39 languages, the last I heard, but Jack is certainly a lot more than that. He is one of the top self-esteem and success trainers in the world. His new book, The Success Principles, is a runaway best-seller. He has been on Oprah and Fox & Friends, and CNN and countless other
television shows and if we gave his whole bio we wouldn’t have time to have a conversation. So, Jack, welcome...I am really happy that you are here today.

JACK CANFIELD: It is always fun to be with you Bill.

BILL HARRIS: I don’t want to embarrass you by this, but there is something so human and warm about you and so approachable, that it’s almost hard for people to believe that you have had this mega success that you have had. How have you managed to maintain so much humanness in the face of all this success?

JACK CANFIELD: Well, I always say that success or money amplifies who you already are, so if you are someone who is an idiot and you make a lot of money, you can be a really big idiot, but what happened for me was that I spent a lot of time before I was successful working on myself, taking lots of seminars. I think, one year, I think I went to 38 weekend workshops from Gestalt therapy to Transactional Analysis, meditation, yoga, Tai-Chi, you name it and literally did a lot of clearing out of as much of my ego and as much of my self-defeating behaviors, etc., that I could.
So, by the time I was successful, I don’t feel like I am any different now than I was when I became successful, other than I have a lot more money and a lot more influence.

BILL HARRIS: You know, you have hit on of course, one of the success principles you teach, which is to find other people that have already done what you have done and to model what they have done and that is something that I have always done and it was kind of a revelation to me. I think it was maybe when I was 35 or something where I finally realized that most people don’t do that. It just seemed like common sense to me. When I wanted to become a pilot I went and I found the best flying instructor I could find and tried to figure out the best way to learn to become a pilot. When I wanted to become a musician, I did the same thing. When I wanted to learn how to do marketing, which has been one of the reasons that Centerpointe has been so successful, I found the best marketers and I learned what they had done. Why do you think most people don’t do this? They just don’t know?

JACK CANFIELD: I think there are several things going on.

Number one, I think they do not feel like they deserve it.

Number two, they probably feel like, “Why would the best person in the world talk to me?”

And what I found is that most of the best people in the world are great teachers and they are really magnanimous. There are a few who aren’t and you are going to get rejections, no question, but if it only takes 10 questions to get one yes, why not ask and Mark and I wrote a book called The Aladdin Factor: How To Get Everything You Ask For and basically we found that there are some world-class askers out there and again, we went and interviewed over 50 of them from Mother Teresa, on down to a guy who always buys everything wholesale and never pays retail.

We said, “How do you do it?”

As a result, we began looking at why don’t people ask and one of the things we came up with is fear of rejection, a sense that you are not worthy and a feeling that you do not deserve to have it.

BILL HARRIS: So, I am assuming that in your self-esteem seminars that you do, you deal with this.

JACK CANFIELD: Yes, we deal with the idea that you deserve to have anything that the universe has to offer, as long as you don’t hurt other people in the process of getting it. I believe it is an abundant universe. I believe there is enough for everybody. I think it needs to be distributed more equally and the reason people hoard, is that they do not think there is enough.

So, it goes back to creating the illusion there is not enough, but the fact is we have plenty of everything that is really important.

The most important things, you know are not things. It is love, the ability to express your creativity, the opportunity to both give and receive love, to feel confident, to make a difference in the world and to give and receive hugs, and all that.

That does not cost any money, but there are also plenty of material things to go around as well.

BILL HARRIS: Well, you know, my view is that the reason that someone would feel undeserving is because in some way they have been traumatized. Being told those things and taught those things and being treated in a way as if you didn’t deserve the best. When people are traumatized, they develop a generalization about the world that it is a dangerous place, or at least a potentially dangerous place and that they have to watch out for that danger in order to avoid it and as you know, when you focus on what you don’t want, what you want to avoid, your brain doesn’t know that you want to avoid it. It just knows that you are focusing on it and then it figures out a way for you to get it.

JACK CANFIELD: Absolutely.

BILL HARRIS: So, what exactly do you do in the self esteem seminar to move people to a place where they do feel deserving? You can’t just tell them “you are deserving” and hope they believe you.

JACK CANFIELD: There are a number of things you can do. You can imagine having the ideal parents, we call that resourcing. You know yourself because the brain does not know the difference between a real event and an imagined event, therefore you can actually put new memories in the brain and if you will, crowd out the old negative ones.

BILL HARRIS: I have taken a few quotes out of some letters people have sent me and I am talking about kind of what I see in each of these people that is causing them to write me about how miserable their life is and in every case, it’s that they are focusing on what they do not want,
pretty much automatically on autopilot, and not focusing on what they want, and in some cases, they even claim to not know what they want.

I continually tell people that I think the key to everything is what you focus your mind on, and most people don’t understand how powerful their mind is and that they are already manifesting exactly what they are focusing on.

JACK CANFIELD: Yeah, as I always say to my students, if you want to know what you are thinking, look at what you are creating around you and what you thought in the past is creating your current reality, and if you want your future to be different, you have to create different thoughts, because what you are currently doing will only produce what you are currently getting and that’s what most people don’t realize.

They keep re-creating the same reality over and over and they think they are stuck, but the fact is they are sticking themselves by maintaining the same habits of thought and imagery, and behavior and it’s not easy to change without some kind of external support, because we are basically habit-driven people and we get so habitual we are in a trance and it takes a coach, a book, a program or a training to break people out of that, to kind of almost shake them awake and then give them the tools, take them to deeper levels of consciousness where they can think a higher level thought and expose themselves to the deeper creativity that already exists inside of them, so that they can create a better life with less effort.

Interested in hearing more about Jack Canfield's Secrets?

Read Part 2 next week!