You Want Negativity Deficiency

I am so stoked today because I got a dude who is just incredible, badass and deep and just all the things that are amazing for entrepreneurs and relationships and life and just incredible. So he has spent 447 hours with Tony Robbins, too, that was like the biggest star that was just insane to me, and today we’re talking about how you find your genius within, Mike Zeller!

 

Dude! So excited to be here, my friend. You know, I’m always honored to connect with brilliant fellow entrepreneurs like yourself. So this is a highlight of my day.

 

I was reading your bio brother and you know, because we’ve known each other now for maybe about a year or so, right? Just talked here and there and just really connected in person by mistake not two months ago. Or by coincidence I would say better probably not mistake but when we started talking it’s like oh my gosh, there’s just so much that we can talk about between the two of us know that you’ve got all your successes, bro right you know, because I see you’ve got you’ve generated over 100 million in revenue across 16 different endeavors which, like any serial entrepreneur, it’s a crazy amount of things right fashion, real estate, automotive marketing coaching, a whole bunch of things. Right? Where was it? I’m curious because where were the low points? Specifically, the tipping point to come out of that low point?

 

You know, I had I would say there’s really two low points. Two significant ones are one and 2013. You know, I was engaged and technically legally married to a French girl and in the season of living abroad, we ran into some legal complications around immigration and my businesses just kind of hit the gutter. I had about three different businesses at the time, and I was flying back and forth from Argentina once a month and men were in the gutter at one point and I had to fly back. I was brokenhearted. And when we decided to end our relationship, my businesses were not producing any income really for the next four months. It took me four months to get them back on their legs and so I was literally bouncing from house to house with friends for a little bit for a few months, even though I owned 1003 properties, but they were all rented out, and I had a few friends that were gracious enough to let me bounce for a week or two here or there and then finally another buddy moved in with him. That was a former client. No, it was remaking my soul and remaking my path and I don’t know if you’ve been through a season like that was the first major one.

 

Yeah, brother. I have been through a couple seasons. I wouldn’t call them cyclical in our lives. But those low points because if they’re cyclical, that’s bad, right? Because you’re always coming back to the same point but you could have similar situations and take your learnings from the previous low point and apply it to where you’re at right now. What you were saying there is I’ve seen this a lot right and experienced that myself too, that, relationships can freaking devastated you. Yeah. Right when they’re when they’re bad, and it’s not just affecting you as a person who’s your soul. Like it’s like this ripple effect that affects everything outside of you too. That’s why it’s so key to lock those in. But you know, that all sounds great and cliche. It’s like hey, lock in good relationships and get surrounded with good people. Let’s play Instagram coach right but can we open that up a little more? If you please share your personal experiences too. But what are your thoughts around having those key relationships? The part of your books about this too, right? Yeah. What are the pillars?

 

Exactly? It’s one of the four main pillars and you know in those Personal life Relationships when you’re going through that. What I see happen is like, man, your soul is grieving and your soul or your emotional center is the birthplace or the genesis of a lot of ideas or creativity. It’s just bone dry if it’s a desert because it’s aching and grieving, then it’s hard to generate. It’s hard to create, it’s hard to birth something new until you move through the grieving season. But, you know, then when you move through the grieving season, part of what actually helps you is relationships. In fact, I think one of the crazy things is one of the reasons women rebound a lot faster from broken relationships, is because they have a lot more significant relationships with intimacy men, we have a lot fewer so if we, it takes an average man, about twice as long as an average woman to rebound from a divorce are broken engagement, whatever, and, and so it’s it’s such a centerpiece but then also, I look at relationships in terms of the genius and clues for your genius relationships. They really indicate based on who gives you life versus death. 

 

So you do an inventory of like the people in your life that you just enjoy being around like, you’re like, hey, I could spend more time with that guy or that girl, and or I didn’t, I can. I can spend another day, another hour. I don’t want to have lunch. With that person again. It’s like my soul dies if I’m around those sorts of people or whatever. So just being honest with that, but then like now I have almost zero people in my life, barring some occasional annoying family members, maybe but I have almost zero people in my life, at least in my choices, and even family members or choice to some extent, that bring me death. Almost all the people are like yourself, where they’re expensive, they’re brilliant. They’re up to something good with their life. They expanded me, they helped me to dream bigger. Challenge me, we get to have deep conversations. So it’s really, really important. It’s one of the most probably the three most important things in your life is your relationships.

 

Wow. You really hit a chord with me. It is like the bone dryness of when you have those people that are just like death. Because it’s almost like I think of The Matrix, right? Now, do you remember that now I’m showing that I’m 42 years old, right? Remember when he puts his hand in the mirror right? Then he just gets covered? By all that good in everything you know, that just like consumes him But in his case that was good because he was breaking free. But that’s like how I envision when you’re around bad people. It’s not like they’re even like, sucking energy out of you. It can literally be like they’re consuming you Yeah. and preventing anything else good from getting inside you.

 

Yeah, and at the end of the day, sometimes they’re not bad people. They’re just not aligned. Yeah, true. They’re like, if you get a group of accountants together, they’re having a ton of fun as a group of accountants, a group of lawyers, ton of fun group of government workers, ton of fun group of entrepreneurs, ton of fun entrepreneurs and accountants, or entrepreneurs and, and salary lifetime government employees. Probably not gonna be a great mix. Neither one of us are gonna be like, I don’t know what to do with you. I don’t know what to do with you, either. 

 

It’s like “Let’s go to a bar and watch some sports where we don’t have to talk.” That’s hilarious. That’s an interesting point, you know, because, you know, this isn’t. I’m sure there’s a lot of people that love doing that. Right. But that’s never been one of my things either, because I much prefer the conversations. I say this is this is a total tangent, you know, but if, if I ever go to a restaurant that has a TV and I hate going to restaurants with TVs in them because it’s like a natural thing, like your eyes are drawn to it and away from the individuals that that you’re they’re trying to connect with. But that’s almost like an analogy to the distraction and it’s like in that environment, TV is the death versus you know, another person being in your life and distracting you away from things that will provide life.

 

Yeah 100% and it’s like the nourishes our soul and then like the deep seeks the deep and the shallow those who want to swim in the shallow they there’s there’s enough people in lanes for the shallow but I think there’s also you know, you look at intentionality most people is something that hit me about 10 years ago on my goals, I would set goals at the beginning of the year and to get 20 or 30 friends and we create a vision board, and I was like, I am at the center of my goals. You know, you would I would have like four or five different quadrants, you know, relationships financial or I’d say you know, romantic, financial, emotional adventure, whatever. Then right in the center, I would put the Top 10 Top 10 people that could change your life. Have you spent more time with them?

 

 Who do you want to invest more time with WHO WOULD YOU who would your life be immensely better if you spent more time with them? I realized like no one set goals like that, or at least I haven’t seen anyone set where they put right in the center of their goal setting act activities. These are the people I’m going to go deep with because these people bring me life and these people will help me fulfill the vision that I have the desires and longings and the dreams that I have in my heart and just taking ownership of like hey, no, it’s okay for me to say you know what I want to I want to spend more time with this person and a little bit less time with this negative Nancy over here.

 

Yeah, for sure. That’s an incredible process, man. That’s it and you bring others into that process, too. Did I hear that right?

 

Yeah, at that time, I would get people together and we do a vision board and we do like a three hour goal setting exercise and just totally free and I was, you know, selling. I was in a real estate game at that point, andd so I didn’t do any coaching or mentoring on an official level, but I was still doing it recreationally.

 

That’s incredible, man. I can only imagine some of the things that came out of those times. Sitting with people and I also think some of the hilarity of it right? If you’re looking at somebody else’s body like wait, I’m not in your circle. Let’s go on

 

I bring you death. Yeah, all right.

 

Oh my gosh, Thanks for laughing with me, dude. We’re all here together. Just try to create this amazing thing and we’re not in each other’s circles. What’s going on?

 

You know what? I’m not valuable to you.

 

Oh, that’s awesome. So man 100 million in revenue across 16 endeavors. Know what’s the one that’s produced the most for you? What’s the one that’s produced the least?

 

That’s a good question. I mean, my car dealership, and we were doing roughly about 30 million a year in revenue. So all together that business did. In my time of ownership, we probably did 140 to $200 million in revenue. But the thing I loved about that is we also gave away cars to single mothers in need. So we gave away over $300,000 where the cars and 36 plus cars to people in need and partnering with for four or five different nonprofits to identify the most worthy recipients we want to identify givers, not takers, that were the most giving causes it like these homeless shelters, family based homeless shelters or women’s ministries and and so I loved that and that was that was the first time I saw myself more fully as a business architect is architecting out the vision and the brand identity and in designing really the team and designing. Hey, like it’s where I got early practice. Different people have different strengths, and different wiring and you have to put people in the right positions. 

 

It’s like even though you don’t like sports, like you guys come from Chicago, Michael Jordan’s dream Team. Yeah, right Dennis Rodman.You don’t want Dennis Rodman taking the shot at them in the game, especially a three pointer even Jordan, Jordan is gonna take the shot maybe PIP and as a follow up, or John Paxson or Steve Kerr, but Jordan’s got the killer instinct to close the game out. And, and so it’s in business. I mean, I’m curious to know more about your failures as well and your big wins. But I think almost every time that I’ve seen in business, whether my own or friends were really harmed, it’s first who then what, and getting them in the right positions are extraordinary, extraordinary results. Consistently is preceded by great people in extraordinarily right positions over and over. 

 

How do you identify when you know if it’s a good person, but they’re just in the wrong position? And what can you do about that?

 

Yeah, first of all, you can look at whether each role has a different sort of skill set needed. For example, project managers are probably going to love detailed follow up follow through. Great salespeople have found there typically a very high di on the Disc profile. In the meaning 80 and above on D and I in minimum for extraordinary and then typically at least 60 above and above for DNI if they’re really good, and then other things like you know, you’re probably I don’t know what your profile exactly is, but I’m a creator on the wealth dynamics, which is my favorite personality test that shows you your natural pathway for building wealth like some people were like, Lord, you look at a look at a who would be a good lord Carnegie or Andrew Carnegie or Rockefeller, where they did the same thing for their whole life. Basically, their Lord, like they just built this empire creators. Steve Jobs did this. Now Steve Jobs with Apple had so many different companies? He would have been bored if Elon Musk was creating a new company every other month. Yeah, for sure. On Twitter, he just decided to tweet something and advertise a new company.

 

Or invest in Twitter and then you know, make 750 million on an overnight

 

Yeah, how does that play? So you know, so I think there’s patterns, the pop and what I would typically do with executives, or leaders, like I did one last week, actually, several one last few weeks. But we’ll do a deep assessment of their core team and leadership team. Like for example, one of the guys I work with, he’s got a massive podcast, a big public brand, he wants to get his company to a billion dollars, but he’s his head. There’s plateauing and it’s ultimately because he’s out of place and his genius. He’s a brilliant promoter, an amazing promoter if I went to Dennis in Strengthsfinder profile test. All like seven elements in the top 10 Or all influence, but almost none of his top 10 were in the execution side, and then the next step for him to solve his problem is to identify does he has player’s as executors on his team, especially in his leadership team because I’m not sure he does, and then we would start recruiting, developing or realigning certain team members and himself, you know, we all need to be aligned more deeply. We did our session, we did his own genius day and when we came out of it, he’s like, Man, I’m not he doesn’t hardly do anything that he loves. Like 10% of what he does in a given week is what is the deepest Joan Zona genius and what really brings them life.

 

Wow, that’s misaligned completely. You mentioned a couple of profile tests. Today there was a desk right then there was Strengthsfinder, which I know there was a wealthy one you mentioned in there, too. I hadn’t heard of that. Wealth dynamics. Interesting.

 

Yeah. So my thought process is really Ford is measures four different areas and it’s basically if you accumulate all the data from these four different areas, one your unique talents, which is where I do all the personality tests, Strengthsfinder, Myers Briggs Kolbe index, Wealth Dynamics and Disc profile in their own Enneagram or another test as a bonus. But then the second area is your defining life experiences. Like we know Michael Jordan  cut from the high school basketball team at age 16. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt grew up with asthma and an 1800s asthma. Even his own father thought he was destined to be a weakling. Yeah, he’s like, “No, the obstacle is the way I’m going to overcome that I’m gonna train outdoors so hard, so strong,” and eventually he overcame at a later in his teenage years 18 He’s strong as an ox is and then gets married at age 22. Wife having first baby dies right after giving birth. 

 

Second death happens 24 hours later, his mom dies. 24 hours later, is when he grieves by going into the wilderness of South Dakota and hunts for six months hands off his baby daughter today, because he’s like, I don’t know what to do with a baby daughter. Um, I just lost the two most important women in my wife and very lost my dad to cancer fighting against corruption and goes off and boom finds himself again. Comes back and falls in love even more with nature. Guess when he does his US president eventually preserves more national parks than any other president in history, and these defining life moments that pointed to the future you know, Steve Jobs said you can’t connect the dots looking forward you can connect them looking backwards. Well, I think you can see the next few dots if you know how to connect the dots looking backwards.

 

I’m with you on that man for sure. I like how you said the next few dots as well because you can never see all the dots. I think that we would, if we saw all the dots, we would probably self sabotage every single one of them if we knew that that was actually going to be what our destiny is. Yeah, because we’d see it like well, there’s no way in hell, I can’t do that. I can’t do that. I can’t and then the self limiting beliefs take over when we actually know the entire path.

 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don’t know about you, but it’s like even though I’ve been through enough failures and mistakes as an entrepreneur that I still have some almost like muscle trauma and memory. around it. I’m still irrationally optimistic enough that I’m gonna keep going, and I don’t see the challenges and the wounds ahead, just like I didn’t see them 15 years ago. I see him a little bit more so but not entirely. Otherwise. If I did, I would stop in my tracks. Because it’s the hardest freakin thing in the world to really grow and start your own business. I think. 

 

Yeah, no kidding, man. It really is. There’s stuff in your book about this too, right? Don’t you know about how people sabotage their own dreams? Yeah. What do you say about that?

 

Yeah, I think I don’t know if you find it in your own life or life of others, your friends, people you work with. But the two biggest saboteurs of our dreams. Actually, I’ll put a third one. unhealed trauma was definitely one like my wife, for example, suffered a lot of abuse as a child. We’re actively proactively doing about three or four different modalities to heal her of that trauma. I’m releasing some trauma of mistakes losing a million dollars and this or that, you know, different things, and then, so trauma is a big piece and because it becomes it’s almost like a muscle memory that gets trapped in your body. 

 

So there’s an involuntary reaction. It’s why you know, our minds are so brilliant at storing things and the human being can store things for and replay them for decades. Versus when I was a kid, my dad didn’t let us watch him on TV and those types of things. We didn’t have cable. We got to watch nature shows at night. So we’d watch this, you know, Lion chasing a wildebeest and then catch the world or be somebody Horner off and then somehow that abuse was still alive and then escape out of the drawers in line and run away and the line was too tired to chase it. Well. That will BS they will show the world literally two minutes later it’s eaten grass. Yeah. Like I mean, If I’m gonna be dead from a lion, I’m not eating grass. Two minutes later, I’m gonna be thinking about that lion for years.

 

Yeah, no kidding. I think because I mean, you mentioned you lost a million dollars. I lost a half a million a few years back, you know, but that wasn’t the first thing I did. Like, I’m gonna go out for some steak right now and what are you gonna have for dinner? You know? Like, I don’t want to eat junk. I just sucked ass. You know, like the worst in my life. Yeah, I want to do anything.

Yeah, it’s, it’s both the blessing and the curse of being human, where we can create and imagine things that have yet to be created like Walt Disney World, or Walt Disney died before Disney World was open, and he stole Disney World for years before anyone else saw it. It was all in his head. He was living in he was experiencing he was dreaming it and he was tasting it. Right. 

 

So you know, the second genius blocker, I think, is perfectionism. Perfectionism where we just put handcuffs, his handcuffs, us in handcuffs, our progress, and then the third one is procrastination, which I call it the twin sister of perfectionism. So they’re evil twin sisters, because procrastination is really sometimes disguised as perfectionism. But one of the big shifts that helped me is this concept called 80% 80% approach or what happens in like GE Six Sigma approach, which is the platinum standard for manufacturing excellence is that they want to make six iterations of 80% improvement. What happens is your mind relaxes a vote Oh, I don’t have to get all the way to 100% make an 80% improvement. Oh, that’d be better.

 

Oh, yeah, dude, that is so freeing, and I don’t fall. This isn’t really me a lot about perfectionism. You know, there might have been like one or two things maybe in my life, but for me, it’s like, hey, it’s, you’ve heard the saying I’m sure perfection hinders progress, right. You can choose one or the other. But with that, individuals that dive into perfection, I’m just not really sure how they even get to that mode to where they get stuck in it to begin with. It’s difficult for me to conceptualize, you know, because it’s freeing them when you’re like, just make it better. And you don’t even know what better looks like, it just doesn’t look like where you’re at right now. Yeah.

 

Yeah, I think there’s in our culture, Western culture and other parts of the world too. But we’ve got a struggle with what I call the middle class mindset, which is to avoid failure at all costs, trauma, trauma comes from embarrassing the family, getting bad grades in school, and whatever making a mistake. You don’t want to make mistakes, and that’s part of the middle class mindset is like, only do what you can. Like you’re likely to succeed versus the billionaire mindset. Sara Blakely is a good example. Do you know what her dad used to ask her brother everyday at dinner? No. What did you feel out today? Love it, and then you know what they had to do if they didn’t feel anything? They had to go out and fail at something before they could go to bed, and so they would have to go and try a new skill. Try something else, do something new and get comfortable with what you just programmed their comfort around failure. That failure is not the enemy’s failure is progress. So it’s a re- patterning and association of new associations around failure. So anyone that’s that, that helps me, it helps me like to repattern myself after failures too.

 

Such a powerful man. Absolutely Powerful. Right. And I’m sure impostor syndrome gets stuck into all three of these areas, too. You write about that as well, don’t you?

 

Yeah, Imposter Syndrome. I think the real impostor more often than not is our current reality that our highest self, the self that we know we’re capable of, that we longed to be the dreams that are placed within us. They didn’t come from us. So they didn’t come from us where they come from, maybe God universe, whatever. They were placed within us. You know, I’ve read probably about 30 different biographies from Washington. To Frederick Douglass, to Martin Luther King to Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, you know, all those guys, Warren Buffet, Rockefeller. What happens is lots of times these guys have big dreams. It was there, and they were just we know their names because they were courageous enough to pursue it and then not give up and they are their resilience, that fails forgiveness. I think we have to have that we have to feed that we have to feed what we want to live starve what we want to die and and just really embrace this higher level of self because what if, what if our current person the person that is playing small that is showing up right now I asked that myself because there’s smallness, I call it the disease of small itis. I’m eradicating smiles from my life. It’s still there. But I got to continually fight that pestilence. Yeah, and if I can do that, if I can conquer smite as I can show up, because the person that is shown up today what if that is the real imposter?

 

That’s mind blowing. As you’re talking about the small ideas, it’s almost I think there’s probably are there could be both external and internal versions of that, ya know, because it’s, we’ve got our own self limiting beliefs, but then there’s the limiting beliefs of those around this is coming full circle, man, you know, back to those 10 people. You know, and it should be because I suffer from it. I’m sure you do. It’s like a constant chipping away at the small itis from whatever our upbringing was whatever our our situation was, or we maybe we had a trauma come up you know, at some point in life has knocked us back a little bit we add some more attach onto us just to prove that see this bad shit does happen. Look at that you got to protect yourself from here on out, and we don’t go back out eating the grass two minutes later, like we talked about either, but the external versus the internal small itis because it we’re never gonna get away from people in general. In fact, I love being around people, man, it’s doing the most you know why we’re doing this today? Right? Yeah, but we can’t control them. We can control how it affects us though.

 

Yeah.

 

So do we allow it to connect and amplify our own struggles that we’re working with? Or we can actually use it to shine a light onto our own stuff and say, No, this This is stupid. I don’t need this anymore.

 

Yeah, and I think it also reflects back how important it is to also choose that 10 people because you’re 10 people the way I like to think of my 10 people that I spend the most time with. It’s like they are my gravity, and so are they. The gravity that pulls me up by gravity can be reversed. It can pull you up as you think a lottery winner loses their 10s of millions they want in a lottery. Well, it’s gravity pulled them down, because they had that identity of poverty mindset or middle class mindset or whatever. That’s why the average 74% of lottery winners are bankrupt within three and a half years. Right. Same with a lot of pro athletes. But then you look at the multimillionaire that was self made that lost his wealth, his or her wealth, then remade themselves. Typically they’ll remake themselves, and 1/5 of the time period that it took them and then some and like their wealth and their income and all that will go way up proportionally. Because their identity pulled them up, but also their peer group and their circle. 

 

So it’s so important to find, hey, define who I want in that peer group, because they’re there. They’re like reading their mind mirrors back to me. They’re reinforcing like I had in my second rough period. I had friends that said, Mike, you know what? God’s letting you go through this because you’re meant to be a king. You’re meant to handle this, you got this, and this is and I felt that I was like, You know what, that’s true. So, choosing those people, your people, your peers that you intentionally create or unintentionally 

 

Mind blowing, man, heart throbbing, mind blowing, this is a love the deepness, a love the deepness. Thanks for that. I think, I think back to the, you know, I said 500k It was that you know that half a million and with your million and thinking about that, too, because I mean, it took maybe five years prior to that to get to the point to where I could even if you want to call it afford to lose that right. I don’t call it that way because it didn’t ruin me. Right. But it did put me in a really, really, really low point. But that is literally because it took really just five months after that to rebuild. It took five years to get to that point and crashed down to nothing and then just five months, the rebuild, and I think about the timing there too, because it was within that five months where I even signed the paperwork with the consulting team to take my company public. It’s crazy as I’m recognizing this, you know, as you think back about that, you know, that low point of losing a million. 

 

I went during that period in 2018. I got married as well during that season. So I was like, shuttering I was closing down. Couple old businesses, really my car dealership old identities, I was shedding old ideas, think of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly into a herd, right.

 

I did the same man with people and yeah, yep.

 

It was rough. It was, frankly, I think I went through. The first two years were the hardest. But now I’m back on the upswing, and it feels good. It feels really in a more aligned and I feel like the 100 million dollar venture or billion dollar venture is there for me the best selling books are there for me the films, the documentaries, the movies that I want to get from my wife’s books, they’re all there and I can see them and I wouldn’t have been I have that resilience, like it’s like I’ve been through boot camp. A longer and much more arduous boot camp. Maybe I’m not David Goggins running on broken feet. But I got an entrepreneur resilience at least.

 

There’s something to that man. If you want to call anything a disease that might be I’m happy to have that one. Yes, exactly. What do you want to call a deficiency of negativity or something like I don’t know. I like that phrase. It’s the first time that ever came out of my mouth. We’re booking that one.

 

Well, you know, I listened to a sports podcast on the host Colin Gower and said he’s never met a billionaire who isn’t an optimist because he just can’t become a billionaire and be a pessimist. You’ll never make the courageous and foolish steps and risk and faith that you got to make.

 

Dude, I would even that’s beautiful. I would even add on to that. You’ll never make it there. If you’re a realist. Yeah. It shows that reality is literally what’s happening right now. That’s it. That it has no bearing on the future whatsoever. You can make an immediate shift tomorrow and anything and everything changes for the better.

 

Yeah, and let’s rewind our reality for the years 2018-2019 Elon Musk is almost bankrupt with all of his companies. SpaceX is on his last of the last rocket launches if this one doesn’t work, and third, and like he kept on having to get his investors re up even though they said that was the last one. All right. Sunk cost bias kicked in and got finally a successful rocket launch. Tesla was on the brink of disaster. SolarCity is barely hanging on. Now he’s the world’s wealthiest man, after Putin has lost his whatever, you know, it’s four years later.

 

Yeah, four years later, more years.

 

Now everything he touches turns to gold.

 

Thank God, he wasn’t a realist.

 

Exactly. I mean, he’s trying to save the planet and also colonize Mars. Who in their right mind, are you freaking? Who are you? Are you on?

 

Yeah, no kidding. That’s awesome, man. This is incredible. I love our conversation. This is maybe the first of many, I think. 

 

Yeah brother.

 

Your book is the genius within, and I’ve only looked at a portion of it so far, but what I see is just incredible. Yeah, it’s on Amazon. It’s everywhere. And we can find you if it is the best platform, Facebook or Instagram.

 

Either one is great. Also on YouTube, Tiktok. LinkedIn, all under Mike Zeller. I love

 

I love it, brother. Thanks so much for coming on it. You know one more thing I want to hit one. More thing Okay, before we head out for 147 hours with Tony Robbins. So it just so happened right? I have known about Tony I’ve seen some of his stuff for years right? I even remember his cameo in shallow hell that was pretty funny, you know, sitting in the elevator but it was with Gwyneth Paltrow. I can’t remember who she started with and that shallow hell actually was the Jaguar. I thought it was wasn’t it? I think it was Jack Black but I don’t know. Anyways, that was actually when I was introduced to Tony Robbins. I’m like, Who the heck is this guy? You know? 

 

So you’re talking like a decade ago or something like that. But looking at a lot of his materials since then, just incredible. Right? I actually got to see him live for the first time just last year in September, which was powerful in then. No joke like just yesterday. No WiFi on the plane, right because it was like this regional international jet coming back from Canada. You know, of course, I’m a little bummed. I’m like I had stuff to get done. I got all these ideas and everything. But I’m like, I got nothing. You know, everything’s in Google Drive. I opened up my iPad. I’m like HBO, I don’t have anything downloaded right? Then I go to netflix. somehow some way. It was like three months. ago, and I never watched it. I had downloaded his documentary. I’m Not Your Guru, and I’m sitting there right. It was like it was a regional jet. I actually sat in the very back row, which was interesting because it was booked at the last minute for full flights, and I’m sitting there and it’s like my ears or my eyes are tearing up. I’m watching this because I’m seeing people’s lives being changed in an instance, and a lot of it is literally what we’ve been talking about today was the stuff that was getting in their way in their life. You know, and I’m not talking the suicidal people because that’s something totally different different level still came back to trauma, like hardcore trauma, but 447 hours, man, that’s, that’s got to be life changing.

 

Yeah, yeah, it was actually, you know, over the time, it ended up being over 14 147 hours. And it was like, and I was actually in that film that I didn’t see. Yeah, I had a buddy Scott back then you can see me in the audience in a few spots. But man in that experience, for example, I know people that were in that film The tall Mateus guy that was suicidal, I was there live seeing this guy and felt his pain and sorrow and pain. Four or five years later, like we’re Facebook friends, we messaged a bunch on Facebook. He’s still in a whole different headspace healed up a lot of his relationships healed up different things and shows up and in powerful magnetic way in in it partly my experience with Tony is Tony really hammers on identity and the power of belief and your this belief inside you inside you to find help you find it, and it helped me formulate that really it’s your identity that precedes your destiny. That’s why it’s so important to work on that inner identity. 

 

So that your outer world it’s almost like hey, if my identity is over here, my reality is over here. Well if I keep my identity over here, eventually it will force my reality to catch up. Is this gonna pull it up? Or is it going to pull it down? Like that lottery winner example. They pull it down because their identity says oh, it’s not safe. This is not right. I don’t know what to do with this money, and I didn’t earn it. I didn’t build the muscle to get it boom omega, get rid of it. So over and over healthy relationships, marriages, why do people that came from unhealthy relational patterns, reenter unhealthy relational patterns and stay in that cycle unless they break it, which is really hard to do. It’s because of their identity and still back there.

 

That’s incredible. You start with like, I am right as your identity and I’ve heard people try to fill in those blanks, you know, and even after years of work that I’ve done on myself to you know at the beginning it’s like, you have to keep going deeper you have to keep going deeper because that I am always almost starts at surface level. You know, because it becomes like a quality and it’s almost like you’re, you’re viewing yourself through the filter of everybody else in the world. Or, or like the cog that you think you play at your job or are you think you are even a cog in your marriage right or are a cog as a parent even and that’s your ‘I Am’ statements like sure you are a father you are a husband, you are an employee, you are an entrepreneur, entrepreneur, you are a friend. You are all these things. But that’s not your ‘I Am.’ Yeah, your I Am is tied to your purpose. Yeah.

 

So good, and in what you’re talking about your I Am is tied to your purpose. Sometimes when he goes through seasons of transition when you look at the great resignation, you look through our seasons of reset, you know, whether it’s relationally, marriage, business wise, whatever, when you go through those seasons of reset. There’s a gift of the pain, and one of the ways to shed this old idea and step into your more powerful identity is ask your alter ego as the part of you that is letting go that is like letting go of this old story, this old identity that was leading your life. And in in part of it like when I went through 2018 I had a named my disempowering Alter Ego I named him weak as Willie I asked myself if my heart what is of your disempowering alter ego, the person that is causing you just play small or to hide because I wanted to be I want to tuck my tail. Like I was talking with my tail between my legs. I like that idea is not gonna get me into where I’m, you know, I’m meant to be not gonna get me to my destiny.

 

So what’s the intent of weak ass Willie? We guess Willie wants to protect me from embarrassment, from shame from making other mistakes. He has good intent. All right. Yeah, literally you visualize and meditate. I have this on one of my YouTube sessions called Claim Your power into an NLP session. And it’s meditation where we actually work on the subconscious and rewire your subconscious on the spot, so that you identify your disempowering Alter Ego, and then you anchor in I was like, hey, what’s the part of me that is going to lead me into the next chapter of my life? And it was Magic Mike.

 

That’s awesome. Yeah.

 

Those were the words that came to mind. Now I got to Hollywood magazine, the entertainer and all this stuff. I was like, “All right, like literally now every morning, actually, I’ll play it for you. Play a second. Here we go.” Every morning. I play these meditations.

 

But we didn’t stop 10 minutes ago.

 

I know, right? So I play my meditation or my affirmations because I am literally one of the most powerful phrases in the universe, and something I just learned recently, the ancient Egyptians actually had it written in their language of course, not hieroglyphics on temple walls, all their temples had it and then Moses, and when he interacts with, you know, Jehovah or God, he, you know, Moses asked God on Mount Sinai, what’s your name? He said, The Great I Am. They knew the Hebrew people at that point, knew that phrase that I am. He’s the great I Am and that so then you look at guys like Muhammad Ali. Once he was right at the time, his name was Cashes Clay. He wrote this poem and 1964 Six months before in fights is a 71 Underdog when the biggest upsets in boxing history fought Sonny Liston and won, and he wrote this poem six months before they said, I am the greatest and he just goes on and on and on. Then he renamed himself two weeks after you beat Sonny Liston to Muhammad Ali. We’d like cashes clay as a slave name. I’m not a slave anymore. I’m not. I’m moving into this new destiny. That’s where I’m going. 

 

So how you think about yourself as who you become. That’s why we start our day. I don’t know about you, but I wake up kind of in a I don’t wake up in a great headspace every morning. I’m not all pumped up. I’m not David Goggins ready to go, you know, run 32 miles or something. I gotta like, just get through the lazy way and have a replay that tells me who I am. So here we go. I’m just gonna play 20 seconds of it. Yeah. I have a wealth magnet. I am attracting, earning and saving millions of dollars. I am worthy of extraordinary levels of success. I am a powerful force for good. So I just went on for two minutes, and I said it out loud. I often look in the mirror. It’s 6am-5am on an airplane, whatever. I’m listening and thinking it and meditating on it, you know, 98% of the mornings and anchoring me in so that I’m telling my mind where I’m going? I don’t, I’m going downhill.

 

That’s powerful. That’s amazing.

 

Thanks, dude.

 

I guess that’s where we stopped today because that’s just an amazing, amazing way to close this out. Mike, thank you for being my brother. Absolutely incredible.

 

Thanks for having me, Rick, and for your audience. If you guys want to pick up a copy of the book, I have it for free. At genius within book.com or you can text genius up to 474-747 If you’re in the US, and you’ll get that book, a free download plus option to pick up the book for free just cover shipping and handling, but thanks for having me on. Always a pleasure. Can’t wait to connect more.

 

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