How To Reprogram Your Subconscious Mind For Automatic And Lasting High Performance with Jim Fortin

Reprogramming your subconscious mind is an effective way to help improve your performance in life and in business. Jim Fortin is a certified NLP master practitioner who is on a mission to help entrepreneurs and sales professionals take their act to a higher level by deeply understanding how the brain works. Illustrating the foundations that built who we are, Jim starts by doing a little activity about identity levels. In this episode, learn how to reprogram your subconscious mind and what traits are necessary to become a successful entrepreneur.

Some Topics We Discussed Include:

• Neuro-Linguistic Programming and how it works
• How subconscious programming influences our success, happiness, and fulfillment in life
• Where permanent change comes from
• Determining your identity and its role in making long-term change
• Neuroplasticity and how we are susceptible to various degrees of change
• How to disengage from running on autopilot and take back control
• The reptilian brain and why changing your mindset doesn't work

Check out Jim’s FREE introductory video training at www.SalesPsychologyAcademy.com/Brain.

About The Guest: Jim Fortin

Jim Fortin is the founder of The Sales Psychology Academy, and a personal coach and trainer to some of the highest-producing selling and business professionals in the United States. Enjoy and take a lot of notes. Want to learn more on how to break any bad habit without using willpower?

 

 

How To Reprogram Your Subconscious Mind For Automatic And Lasting High Performance with Jim Fortin

I'm excited to have my guest on the show, Jim Fortin. I've known Jim for years. I'll tell you all about him in a moment.

Before I jump into that, if this is your very first time to this show, maybe you scanned across the title of the episode and you're like, “That looks cool,” this is my platform for interviewing amazing people and getting to sit down with them.

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I want to jump into the show with Jim Fortin. I've known Jim for many years now. We go back a very long way.

He is a certified master practitioner of a discipline that I'm also a certified master practitioner called Neuro-Linguistic Programming or NLP. He's a master hypnotist and he is an expert at helping people perform way beyond the expectations that they have for themselves.

If you're in sales or you're an entrepreneur or you're a business executive and you want to up a level, Jim is America's mind authority.

He's on a very passionate mission to help sales professionals and entrepreneurs take their performance to a level by understanding the way the brain works, our minds work, our subconscious of what holds us back and how to break through that.

He's been doing this for a very long time. He had spoken with some of the top experts and professionals from Tony Robbins to Dr. Phil, George Foreman, Robert Kiyosaki and even the president of the United States.

He operates at a very high level. It is my distinct pleasure to bring you Jim Fortin to the show. How are you? We've been friends for a long time. I've been to your live event. My wife and I went to one of your Zero Effort Selling.

I want to preface this to the people. I mentioned NLP and that's the microcosm of what you do but Neuro-Linguistic Programming is something I've always been fascinated with. It’s how the mind and the subconscious program as very much like computers to either operate effectively or not.

As we're raised, as we go through life, we are constantly subjected to a lot of programming from the world around us. You may have non–supportive parents and if they're always telling you, “You suck at life,” they're programming you and it takes a lot to rewire the programming to where we want to go.

I think so few people realize how much that subconscious programming has to do with not only our success but our happiness and fulfillment in this life. That's why I'm excited to dive into this with you.

Brad, you being an NLP master practitioner, you're familiar with the logical level.

It’s one of my favorite things in the world.

Let's concretize this for everyone. I want everyone to pull out a piece of paper and draw a triangle. What I want you to do is I want you to follow me as you're drawing a triangle. We're going to start a ladder from the bottom up.

Brad, I'm going to eliminate the source part of this, but we're going to start out at identity. What I want you to do at the bottom of the triangle, at the base, is I want you to write the word identity.

Next, write the word beliefs above that like a ladder. Everyone, write the word beliefs. Above that, write capabilities. You've got both identities at the bottom, beliefs above that, capabilities above that, behavior above that and environment at the top of the triangle.

Let's dig in here and use this. Brad, as you know, at the beginning or not just the beginning of the year, New Year's resolutions, but we all want to go to a higher level.

As we go through life, we are constantly subject to a lot of programming from the world around us. Click To Tweet

We all want to create some change in life as entrepreneurs or selling professionals. We want to make more money. We want to grow our business.

Personally, we want to get in shape so we look good in a bathing suit during the summer. Women want to get in great shape for their wedding and everything else. We're always trying to go to a higher level.

Brad and everyone, beginning of the year, what's the first thing people do in January? What do most people do?

Join a gym, create their resolutions that they're going to lose weight, get rich, and find the love of their life.

Exactly, and 30 days later, where are most people?

They are doing exactly what they were doing on December 30th.

Exactly. Everyone look at this. If you look at the triangle you drew, we work like an onion from the inside out. We worked from identity on the inside to belief, to capabilities, to behavior, to environment.

As Brad knows and he stated here what most people do is they go to the gym and they try to change their behavior. They're going to change something.

They want to get a different outcome in their life and their environment so they're going to change their behavior. Their behavior might be lying on the couch and they're going to say, “I'm going to start working out. I'm going to do something different to create the outcome that I want.”

Here's the challenge. Most everyone starts at the level of behavior when the results they've already created in life have come from the level of identity, which is deeper down the pyramid. Brad, you're familiar with all of this so anything you want to add here, let's dialogue about that.

It’s funny, I always draw my pyramid the exact opposite. I draw the pyramid with the behaviors at the bottom and then the identity at the very top. It's the exact same stuff and it’s the way I learned to draw it, but I love this so keep going.

It's interesting you say that because I learned to draw it the way that I gave you.

Mine's right.

What's interesting here is that you do it the way that you were taught. I do it the way that I was taught and like everyone alive, which Brad alluded to earlier, we do what we're taught and what we're taught, we learn at the ages of one, two, three, four and five years old.

We set the foundation for who we are at the identity level and we live that for our lifetime never knowing that we're living from something we learned many years ago.

I want you to keep going on this because I can talk about logical levels for days whenever I have clients come in and work with me on my VIP days. I do talk about these. I get a little bit of metal with them. It's one of my favorite topics.

I didn't even know that you were going to bring this up. One of the things I see as for visually, for anybody who's not writing this down, I'll start on the other side just because I'm doing it off the top of my head.

It's environment, behaviors, capabilities, beliefs and identity. Those are the ones. I always looked at it like this too. What's the easiest thing to change? The easiest thing to change is your behavior. You can change it.

It doesn't mean you'll get lasting results. The hardest thing to change is your identity. As you go up or down the pyramid, however you're doing it on one end is super easy to change, one is hard.

If you had changed the behaviors, it's the easiest thing to change in your day to day life but it has the least effect on your overall life. It has at least a cascading effect.

Change is only temporary like for a couple of days for most people.

Right, that's why I put them because I think of a cascading effect. I put it at the bottom. That's why I put the environment, where you're at matters but then what you do where you're at is at the bottom.

 

I think of it as at the top where if you change your identity, that change cascades down and it changes everything because who you are, who you believe you are, and who you identify as will change your beliefs about yourself.

If you have great beliefs about yourself, that’s going hit the next domino, which means that I can go learn this new skill and become more capable.

Then as you become more capable, you start doing more things. Your behavior changes and then as your behavior changes, maybe you make more money, maybe you get out of an unsupportive environment.

Maybe you move to San Diego, maybe you go to someplace that you love and your environment changes. That’s how I looked at it as the behaviors at the bottom because it's the easiest to change but it cascades down. That’s my visual but I love it.

Let's help them with this because we're giving them two different perspectives. That's the same thing. We're talking about the same, what we call logical level. We have them organized differently.

Brad, what I want them to get is the big takeaway here is when most people want to create change in life, any change, they try to do something when they are in life is a result of their identity.

Because they try to do something and it's not consistent with their identity, they fail. Let me give you a great example here. Brad, we know who's one of the most famous people in the world that's been overweight her entire life?

Oprah.

Yes, and she can afford any trainer, any nutritionist, anybody she wants to help her get trim, fit and healthy. For years, you watch on TV, when she would do all these which she’s doing, she would do all these things to lose weight, yet she would always bounce back up to being overweight again.

Why? Because at the unconscious level, she was an overweight woman. No matter what she did and for any of you as entrepreneurs, selling professionals, husbands, wives, whatever, we try to get changed by doing things and that's not where the permanent change comes from.

The permanent change comes from being things which then will take us into the Be, Do, Have as opposed to the Have, Do, Be.

Go ahead and explain that for the audience.

I'm going to slow down here guys so you get this. This is a big place where most people make a mistake is most people work from Have, Do, Be.

What I mean by that, I work with a lot of selling professionals and people will say things like have meant had. Let's look at online entrepreneurs.

“If I had more money, I could do something to grow my business, like doing Facebook ads and then I would be successful.” That's Have, Do, Be. If I Have then I could Do and if I could Do, then I could Be.

If you don't have now and you're not being somebody different to have, you'll never have in the first place. This is why this is a broken model.

The model you want to work from is Be, Do, Have. Who do I have to be, to do the things that I need to do, to have the things that I need to have?

Let me add one more thing there, Brad. We see all this on Facebook all the time, these little quotes and people will constantly post, something along the lines of, if I want to create different things in life, I've got to do things differently.

You've seen that all over. You've got to do something to get different outcomes. What everyone misses is who do you have to be to do what you need to do in the first place and we'll dig in more. That makes perfect sense to you when you've heard that before.

Let's get out of the realm there of theoretical and let's give them an example. Let's say that a struggling entrepreneur, maybe they're business owners or maybe they're trying to get started.

Maybe they're even trying to get into the business. Maybe they've got a job and they've always dreamt of being an entrepreneur and everything else.

I'm trying to take total devil’s advocate here not to be contrary, but to be like an example, “Are you telling me to fake it until I make it or are you telling me to walk around and tell myself, “I’m a successful entrepreneur.”

The hardest thing to change is your identity. Click To Tweet

How is that going to get me to the Have, Do, Be, to doing things? How tangibly can I use that without the “fake it until you make it?”

I want to go a different direction than that and say this first is that most people that want to be entrepreneurs, they don't have the traits to be entrepreneurs. I didn't say skills. I said traits to be an entrepreneur.

Let's say for example, you go over and you look at the DiSC profile. You've heard of that and that's a simple one, you’re familiar with that. I had an entrepreneur call me one time awhile back and they knew me on Facebook and their business was going nowhere.

For a couple of years, they've been making no money and I said, “It's going to be at least $500 for us to have a call. They didn't have that. That night I was up late and I'm like, “Let me see if I can help this guy.”

I had him go take a DiSC profile. He sent it to me. What a lot of people do is they say, “I'm an engineer. I'm a teacher, I'm a librarian. I want to be an entrepreneur now.”

To be an entrepreneur you need certain traits. On a DiSC profile, Brad, he came up when it comes to the C for Compliance, which is fear. I've never seen a C as high as his. His C was a 99 which means he is nothing but one big bag of fear.

There's no way he's ever going to be successful as an entrepreneur because he doesn't have the traits. These are traits we're talking about. We can all learn skills, but he doesn't have the traits.

How do you get the traits? Can you develop the traits if you don't have them? You pointed out the problem. What's the solution there?

This could be a whole big conversation. I don't want to confuse anybody. There's a whole field called neuroplasticity. You've heard of that before. Essentially, what you're asking is can an extrovert become an introvert? To some degrees, it’s a metaphor.

Everything is as susceptible to levels of degree of change. However, because it's soft-wired in the brain and partially hardwired, what I've never seen is anybody goes for like when a DiSC profile, which D is Driver.

I'm a high D. I'm a 90 D, I'm a 90 I, I'm about a 30 S which means I'm a typical salesperson. I can sell millions of dollars in training, but I can't find the paperwork. I'm a very low C about a 30 which is normal for most selling professionals and entrepreneurs meaning I'm not overly cautious.

I've never seen anybody go from let's say for example a low D to a high D. I've never seen people change the internal traits that dramatically. I've never seen people drastically change lifelong traits like that.

What’s the solution? Because I still don't understand. You've given the problem, which is you're not being the person you need to be. Let’s say Oprah, if you were coaching Oprah or anybody else who's overweight and struggled and yo-yo diet and tried to do all that.

You realize that their identity is that of overweight or a fat person as opposed to a healthy person, a fit person, and a body that has a little bit extra weight. How do you change that?

You know a lot of this stuff having your NLP training, let me ask you this, “How do we learn in the first place?”

I copied off the guy sitting next to me.

How about this? When you learn to ride a bike, how did you learn?

Kicking and screaming, afraid that my dad was going to let go of the seat.

I did that also. I got a brand new black when I was six years old on my birthday. I ran it off in ditch full of water.

We know this, Brad. I think you might remember is that the unconscious mind and the right-hand side of the brain do not know the difference between real and imagined. Do you remember that learning?

Yes.

Here's the thing. When we're young, ages of one, two, three and four years old, we learn through repetition. We master life or not through repetition.

 

We master anger through repetition, learning to get angry and then being angry and then the brain releases all kinds of chemicals, oxytocin and endorphin and dopamine and all this stuff. We learned that anger feels good and we go into anger.

Everything we have learned and everyone listening, everything you have learned, you've learned through repetition. When you were in first grade, you learn to read through repetition.

Because the unconscious mind does not know the difference between real and imagined, what we've got to do is use repetition, imagery and feeling over and over again to reprogram that unconscious identity.

Can you explain more tactically how to do that?

Yeah, it's pretty simple and people make it hard. I can't tell you the number of people I've said, “Here's what you do. Three steps.” People like, “No, it can't be that easy. I need five more steps.” Then five more steps to make it hard.

We live self-fulfilling prophecies. Whatever you think about over and over is what you condition yourself with. Most of us operate from, again, this is another way we operate backwards. We operate from our environment to ourselves internally.

Let me back up here. Whatever we have in the bank, let's say as entrepreneurs, we don't have the money we want in the bank. We don't recognize is that's because of who we are because of our identity because identity drives value and value drives wealth.

Then wealth drives identity again. We don't recognize is that I'm the person, me as a human being that created a lack of money in the bank. What we do is we look at a lack of money in the bank, which is something outside of ourselves and we let that effect inside of us.

I'm worthless, I'm poor, I'm broke, not recognizing that we're now living by circumstance, not living by internally driving and managing our own thoughts. Then we keep our attention on, “I’m poor and I'm broke,” because we believe that we go out and do the behavior and we repeat that.

To answer your question is we have to use repetition of imagery, of language and emotions. In the outside world, we have to use that to create new neural pathways in the brain to recreate the identity, a new identity.

I know affirmations are part of this visualization. I don't know if you know Kamal Ravikant but did you ever heard of his book, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It?

Yes.

It such a great book and he talks about that. He kept on saying, “I love myself. I love myself. I love myself,” because I hated myself at the time. He goes, “I wanted to form that new route, those new pathways. I wanted to dig and dig until it became natural and automatic that I finally did.” It reminds me of that and I think that's probably a lot of where you're going.

That's where I'm going with that. This conversation could go many places, but let me add there is that people don't realize based upon what you said is that most of us don't like our lives but we're the one who created it through repetition from the past.

For example, I grew up poor, working class. What I learned many years ago is that money's hard to come by. Why? Because I heard my dad say and this will resonate with 80% of people is we don't have money.

Money doesn't grow on trees. Money isn't easy to come by. You've got to work hard. You have to struggle for your money. That was my identity for a lot of years and I worked my ass off trying to make money because I would do things.

When I realized something, Brad, this is simple but the double-edged sword is that when I became rich in my mind and when I felt like I was rich, within 30 days, money started flowing into my life and I started charging amounts of money that I never thought I could charge.

When I became rich first in my mind, I know you've heard this, but most people have heard this but they still can't live it. I think the personal development industry is broken and let me tell you why. If we were to walk into Barnes & Noble right now, how many books would there be on personal development?

Probably a majority, outside of vampire fiction.

Probably 2,000 or something. There are a lot of books in there and you've read the book, Think and Grow Rich, we all have. If you could read the book Think and Grow Rich and become rich, how come everyone who reads Think and Grow Rich doesn't become rich?

I think the personal development industry is not broken. It works perfectly for the personal development industry. For the people selling personal development, it works perfectly for them because it keeps people from changing and it gives them hopium.

It works for people that want to sell books and make a lot of money on selling books. Let me add something here. What most of us do is we go to seminars, we go to coaching, we buy books, we online webinars and everything.

We operate from our environment to ourselves internally. Click To Tweet

Here's where most people miss the boat is that is all content, which I know you're familiar with. If that content cannot be integrated into our context, which is our unconscious identity, that's where we work from the context of our life.

If we can't integrate the content into the context, the content is of no value. What authors and speakers do is they say, “Take my book. Go buy my brand new book and its content and it's going to revolutionize your life.”

If that book is not consistent with who I am at my identity level, then the book is of no value. I keep reading books over and over again, and on top of that, I start creating beliefs that there must be something wrong with me. Why can't I change?

Maybe I don't deserve money, maybe God's punishing me or whatever it is but the industry and of itself is not designed to help people get core level and long-lasting change.

Let me give you an example here. We and Brad and are using this word a lot. We can co-coach and co-do this webinar and we are, but if we taught this as a program. Brad, I didn't buy cigarettes today. How come?

Because you're not a smoker.

That's true. I am not a smoker. I want you to get this.

There's a big difference between saying you're not a smoker and you don't smoke.

Exactly. You are not using negatives, but we do know that I do not engage or I am only a person who breathes out clean air when I'm not in Mexico City or a polluted city. I get all that. We don't confuse them here. Everyone, write this down, “I can only do what I am and what you are is your identity.”

Let me take that one step further. People have said, “Jim, if this identity stuff and it's all unconscious or subconscious or non-conscious, whichever word you choose and it's unconscious, then how do I know what my identity is?”

That's easy. Look at your environment. Then look at the logical level that I and Brad that gave you when we started. Your environment is a reflection of your identity.

If you look at your bank account and you constantly have no money in the bank, what's happening is that in your mind you are a broke person ad then what you try to do is try to go do things.

You're not as effective and you're doing because your identity says you're not effective in terms of making money. It’s not something you deserve or not something you can do.

I want you to get also a couple of salient points here. Every one of you, me, Brad, all of us, we all function on autopilot.

There is some research done at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany in 2008. They ask people to make a decision between A and B.

They gave them a little thing. You press button A and B. What they discovered is that even while we think we're making our decisions, they put them in an fMRI machine to watch blood flow in the brain.

What they discovered is that our brain makes our decision for us, even before we even come to the realization we're making a decision.

I've heard about it in the throes into like, “Do we have free freewill?” If we're not conscious of the decision we're making before we make it, do we have free will? That's another topic for another discussion.

Let me give you a one-liner there is that they've discovered is that the last second, we can reconsider. We can stop our self at that moment and reevaluate, “Is this decision I want to make?”

We have that ability. Our brain makes our decisions for us and at the nanosecond, before we execute it, we can question that decision which means we do have free will based upon that argument but all of us, every one of you that got up this morning.

Brad, you posted something on Facebook. I loved it and I laughed my butt off. This was two years ago or whatever. Remember when you posted about brushing your teeth with the opposite hand?

Yeah.

 

You're like, “Why can I do complex tasks, but I can't change the hand I brush my teeth with?”

I can’t remember exactly what I said but that was something simple.

I can't do it. I even thought about that prior to your post. It's really hard to brush my teeth with my left hand. I'm right hand dominant.

Here's the point and then I want to take this in the habits is that you do the same thing day-in, day-out, the same sequence every single morning that you get up and every single day, all through your day, and every week throughout your month and every month throughout your year.

You do the same thing over and over again and it's all unconscious habit. We operate on autopilot. If you don't have what you want in your life and your business, it's because your autopilot is misprogrammed.

The autopilot is the greatest thing that we've got because it saves us from having to make new decisions and everything else all the time.

It also, you have to recognize when you are on autopilot and when you are in your routine, that is like, “Wait a minute, this isn't me. This is just my routine. This is my autopilot.” Disengage autopilot and you want to take back control.

We don’t have much of this awareness.

I'm coming back because I love the logical level so much. As I've seen it, as I've thought about this in my life and the way I've used as a tangible tool. Recognizing that identity is where I want to be. Let's say I want to be a very successful, fulfilled and happy entrepreneur.

That's my identity but if I don't feel like that at the moment if I don't have any of the physical representations, if I'm not in an environment doing things and if I don't have the beliefs in it, that's okay.

That's okay because as long as I know that it exists and I can start down at the environmental levels because remember that's the easiest to change. It may not have the most leveraged, cascading effect, but it's easiest to change. It's like, “Alright, one step at a time.”

For instance, at the time I was successful, but I sold my last business when I was in Dallas like five years ago and I didn't want to be in Dallas and I wanted to be around other people in my industry and I wanted to be in an environment that was better.

The first thing I did is I moved. I moved and we can all change our environments. Maybe it's changing the type of people you hang out with on a regular basis. That's changing your environment.

You do that and then you start doing things even if you suck at them. A good example, Facebook ads. A lot of people on my podcast do Facebook ads.

They may suck at it and they are like, “I am not a Facebook ad guy,” and you don't have to be, start doing it. Start doing it a little bit at a time and the principles of Kaizen, small improvements.

All of a sudden, do it for a month. In a month, you're going to have the capabilities that you didn't have and those capabilities are going to be able to build beliefs.

Pretty soon you can become the entrepreneur, you can become the Facebook advertisers and identity but if you don't know what you're trying to become, you can't get there.

I have a formula for those. I want to address two things here. I have a formula I've created that will wrap up within a bit that we'll put that together for them and then I advocate what you do is little by little. When most people have big problems, they look for big solutions.

The easiest way to fix the big problem is to start with little bitty steps like you're talking about micro habits. I've got a way to take everything you've said and I've used it in my own life and if it works on me, it'll work with anybody.

I want to give you a formula in a bit, but I want to go back to the environment. I remember when you moved and as that's your party downtown, a couple of days before you left.

People don't understand the power of the environment. We think we do, but we don't. There's been a lot of research done about children that were taken out of Romanian orphanages. You ever heard about any of that research Brad?

I don't think I had.

Identity drives value, and value drives wealth. Click To Tweet

Long and short about that is that in that environment as young children in their formative years, they had never touched or never held. No emotional support and physical support. They grew up to be people that are basically mechanical robots.

They're not bad people, so to speak, in terms of moral standards or any of that. They can't connect with people because of the environment they grew up in. Two more experiments are very quickly, one with rats and one with Vietnam.

Did you know that during the Vietnam War, the Pentagon was terrified because they had so many people hooked on heroin? They were afraid that all these soldiers would come back to the US and they would all be addicts.

They were terrified and they never released to the public how many soldiers were addicted to heroin. What they were shocked about is that when they came back, they miraculously stopped the habit.

Because they're in a different environment and that's the thing I love is it's easy to go, “I got to think about identity.” “No, you have to think about all of them. There are levels and they were logically aligned.

Working on rats I did with some university on the East Coast. What they discovered is if they put a rat alone in a cage, and they gave it water or cocaine water, the rat alone would drink the cocaine water until it died.

Then they made little happy rat communities, everything that a rat would like with all the trails, bells, whistles and everything else.

What happened is that they put the cocaine water in there and the regular water and when rats were in a healthy, an adjusted environment, whatever a healthy environment is for rats, they stopped drinking the cocaine water even though it was available because their environment changed.

Brad, I didn't know that would go there but thank you for bringing that up. All of you have to get is I coach people that.

For example, if one of your drivers is to be competitive and you're in a non-competitive environment, then that sucks the life out of you because you're not around people that challenge you.

If you're not in that environment, you will never do as well because you're not stimulated at what drives you subconsciously.

Revealing a personal thing, as you bring this up I’ve thought a lot about it. For me, and I guarantee this is one of the things that's probably limiting me in some ways or in a lot of ways from growing because I'm very cognizant of this.

I am an extreme extrovert. I do well around people and I love it. I get fully energized by it. I'm effective at it. I'm amazing at sales and creating relationships and do it. That is my jam right there.

I spend 90% of my day in my home office, behind my computer, talking to people, either on email, Slack, Skype, etc. I'm effective there but I realized that that is not where I'm the best at and yet it is hard to pull yourself away.

This is the car that's moving. This is the vehicle I'm in. It's hard to go, “I'm going to go get out more. I'm going to go try to do something outside.”

I'd never want to be an outside salesperson personally because I like building the business and do it all the things that have to happen indoors. What you said resonated because I realized that my genius is out amongst the masses and I'm not doing it.

Get into a high-end collaborative workspace where you've got people that are doing things that will inspire you and at the very least being around people and I notice what else you said.

Except that I also know me as 80D, extrovert around people it means I don’t get anything done.

You talk to everybody. I also notice what you said though. You said it's really hard to get out of this, which means where I want to go next is you're in the habit of doing what you're doing and the habit keeps you trapped into the habit.

Let's go with a habit for a second there because this is one of the main things I wanted to get across to everybody in our time together is this is all unconscious as well is that you've seen this, we've all seen this.

People will say, “I try to do everything and why do I keep failing? I start working out, I fail. I try to build my business. I tried a prospect, I tried to set my funnels up, I tried to shoot my videos, I tried to lead generate and I fail.” You've seen this before.

Then what people say is “I've got to change my mindset” and you hear that all the time on Facebook, “You got to change your mindset.” Changing your mindset doesn't work. You'll understand everything we're going to talk about here Brad and hopefully the rest of you well all along.

 

Let me slow down here for a second and synopsize this for you is three parts of the brain. The reptilian part of the brain is the oldest part of the brain.

The mammalian part of the brain is the middle part of the brain, the feeling part of the brain, the limbic system and then we have the executive part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex.

Anytime we say I need to change my mindset, Brad, which part of the brain are we using to make that statement?

Prefrontal cortex.

That's the thinking part of the brain, trying to change the older part of the brain. See, habits come. All of your habits come from the oldest part of the brain, which is a reptilian part of the brain. Its job is survival. Its job is to take care of us.

What we do is we say, “I don't like smoking. That's not good for me.” Let's say you have a habit of smoking. Saying you don't like smoking comes from the prefrontal cortex but smoking comes from the reptilian part of the brain, the oldest part of the brain.

What you have happened here is you've got one part of the brain fighting the other part of the brain, one part of the brain analyzing, saying, “I got to quit smoking because my wife yells at me.”

The reptilian part of the brain says, “No, smoking is a habit,” and every habit you have, the reptilian brain says, “I'm going to maintain for you because my job is your survival.”

Every habit you have, my job is to make you survive with whatever that habit is. If you think that habit is bad, which is prefrontal cortex, it doesn't matter. You've created a habit and I'm going to sustain that habit no matter what.

It’s doesn’t just want your habits to survive, it wants your habits to survive. It wants everything else to survive.

Even if we think it's a bad habit, it maintains the habit.

Beyond that, it’s like, “it's if I was a smoker, stopping smoking would cause me massive discomfort.” We all know that. Breaking, especially an addictive habit, creates a massive discomfort so that amphibious brain wants to prevent massive discomfort.

It's doing its job perfectly to protect you from discomfort because it doesn't know. It can't focus on the big goal that you want, which is healthy lungs. It's like, “Screw that. I don't want you to go to withdraw.”

Let me add everybody, the reason what we do is let's say for example, you're a smoker. What happens is you smoke on autopilot. The reptilian brain does it for you whether it's smoking, eating cookies, procrastinating, whatever.

What happens is the brain gives us urges. The urges are coming from the reptilian brain and the urge is any emotion or a feeling and the urges specifically, it's an emotion and the urge says, “Go smoke that cigarette because we need to perpetuate the habit.”

What happens is we get into the urge, which is we can feel that it's an emotion. Urge versus thinking. When your brain gets into urge on one hand and thinking on the other, then it becomes what I call a habit battle, “Smoke, don't smoke.”

The urge to smoke will always win over prefrontal cortex thinking, “Do not smoke because it’s bad for you.” Let me ask you this and this is going to piss a lot of people off and that's great because controversy is good in marketing.

I've done a lot of research on this and I can't find conclusive statistics but for the most part, I'll give you what I found. What do you think the success rate at AA, Alcoholics Anonymous?

I don't know because I haven't looked a lot into this, I would say it's high. I don't know a percentage because they've got a very systematic process and been around a long time. That's a very uneducated guess but I would say, I don't know, like 70%.

I didn't expect that from you. I've known Brad for a lot of years. He's really smart.

He’s going to tell you this is the first time he's ever heard me say something that was incorrect, then I get that.

Not the first time, but he's incorrect. The success rate based upon what I could follow from the National Institute of Health and Mayo Clinic, other research varies anywhere from 5% to 50% max, meaning 50% minimum of people who go to AA fail.

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The reason why is. It is because the old AA from years ago is based upon the prefrontal cortex. Let's think. What they do is set you up in the middle.

Let's say you're sitting there and on your left hand, you shouldn't drink, sobriety twelve-step program, you're an alcoholic, you're diseased, all those things. That's what they teach you and you'll never be free of alcohol and you’re powerless and all stuff.

That's left brain prefrontal cortex and on the right-hand side you're up telling your brain doesn't care about any of that because it can't think so now it's pitted the brain against itself.

This is why people fail because they're trying to break a habit which is brain-based and they're trying to think their way through it with willpower. Willpower doesn't work and they fail consistently. It makes sense.

This whole program that many people need much of is based upon a faulty way that the brain works and sets people up for failure.

I've heard as many as 95% of people and then people, the 5% of whatever they've gotten success with, AA gets super pissed off when you tell them the program doesn't work. Why?

Because in their belief it worked for them but when you look the way the brain works, the program is not set up to help people achieve what they want through the way the brain processes information.

This is fantastic and I couldn't agree more with you. It is one of those things that on this podcast especially, I talk a lot about strategy and tactics in business and sizzling, hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat, but it all starts with what's between your ears.

All starts there, every single thing else flows down from there. If you're not where you want to be yet or at all and you're wondering how you're ever going to get there, no amount of stacking skills, buying courses, learning tricks and tactics are going to get you there.

I posted on Facebook that you can't copy-paste your way. You'll never copy-paste your way to success. I did that in response to a Facebook ad I saw said, “Copy and paste my proven template. It pissed me off.

It was by a very well–known marketer, it was very successful too. I'm like, “You can't copy-paste that. You've got to go deeper and you've got to figure it out for yourself. We've been talking about some amazing stuff. For those who want to see how deep this rabbit hole of your brain goes.

Brad, before you go there, let me give my final takeaway that will answer your question you started earlier that I didn't answer all the way. This is vital.

This is where you must work from because Brad asked earlier, “How do we get people from if they're not there yet, to where they want to be?” I'm going to give you the paradigm right now and write this down.

Who would I be? How would I feel and what would I do if I already had blank? Who would I be? I want you to find three ways of being, being responsible, being committed, being self-integral, being a visionary. Those are all ways of being disciplined.

Who would I be? How would I feel and what would I do if I already had blank? You create that roadmap. Now you know you've got a roadmap, you need to start working from. If you define these and you do not work from this roadmap, you will find yourself back in a ditch again.

I could not agree more. Jim, where do people get more information on you? Where do they decide, “This guy seems to have the answer for me or he might let me explore what Jim has the offer?”

I've got training for these if you want to, you want to learn more about your habits, go over to SalesPsychologyAcademy.com/brain.

I've got a comprehensive training there that will even walk you more and even further through how you're operating from habits, how they're unconscious and what you can start doing to eliminate those habits.

From there, if you find that you like what you find there, I've got an entire training program on my site connected to that domain SalesPsychologyAcademy.com. I've got an entire program on how to reprogram your subconscious mind and how to break any habit without using willpower.

I encourage everybody to go check that out. I've been friends with Jim for at least a decade. I would not have invited him on the show if I didn't think he would deliver some massive and deep profound insights to you and hopefully you've gotten those.

I think it has been a fun time. I don't get to talk about this as often and Jim, we don't get to talk or we don't make the time to talk to each other as often. We'll have to change that here soon.

Thank you very much for tuning in. The best thing in the world you could do is two things. Share this on social media, tag myself, tag Jim, let us know that you'll love it and send me an email to AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com.

I would love to hear from you. I would love to hear books that have helped change your life in positive ways and I would love to hear other resources and topics that you want to hear covered on the show. Until next time. Jim, thanks for joining me on the show.

Thanks.

Important Links:

• Jim Fortin
• Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It
• Think and Grow Rich
• SalesPsychologyAcademy.com/brain
• SalesPsychologyAcademy.com

About Jim Fortin

Jim Fortin is the founder of The Sales Psychology Academy, and a personal coach and trainer to some of the highest-producing selling and business professionals in the United States. Enjoy and take a lot of notes. Want to learn more on how to break any bad habit without using willpower?

 

 

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