The 5 WAYS To Make People INSTANTLY RESPECT YOU | Lewis Howes

i just don't want to try to solve any deal with money when i could have solved it with emotional currency i'm saving my money thinking positive it's it's a fact people need to think more positive but every person takes it to how they see it and how they look at it at the end it's all about ever since i was about 25 i started paying attention to what i was saying and trying very hard not to say things that it doesn't matter if the world likes you but it does matter that they respect you in this video we bring on some of the most respected individuals in the world to teach you how to gain and earn respect from the people around you if you enjoy this please click the like button make sure to subscribe to our channel and share a comment below on your biggest takeaway so how do you deal in a negotiation with the kind of person who has to win who has to get everything they want they're very controlling alpha right and it's their way or no way well getting everything they want is actually third on their list first of all being in control is number one on their list and that's emotionally satisfying the second thing is the alpha type which is uh we refer to that as in the assertive the one thing that's more important to them than actually getting what they want is being respected and making sure that you know everything about what they're coming from so and it's a classic guy who's working for his boss and said you know what my boss didn't do what i wanted him to do but he heard me out or she heard me out i can live with the direction we're going as long as i know that my boss knows my opinion and so that the assertive type of negotiator it's really more important to them that they felt felt that they conducted themselves respected respectably that you respected them and that you knew what they were coming from and once they know those things they'll actually soften up on what they want if they feel disrespected they'll probably be more frustrated and angry and right demanding right right right right so you guys when they're very demanding what they're really saying to you subtly is i want you to know how important this is to me right i want you to know how important i am so how do you meet that person just come to them with respect or with calm or you know you could say look you're you're impressive you're phenomenal you've thought it's all out this is very yeah i mean clearly you know where you're coming from you know what you want um i'm lucky to be talking to you at all right i mean if where to sit down with donald trump i would in fact be lucky to be in the same room with him that'd be the first thing i'd say to him i'd say struggle you're an american icon right you know you're the symbol of american business certainly in new york city yeah you know stroking their ego it's not a bad thing one of them and you know it's a version of empathy because that's how they see themselves and you know the the the emotional recognition like emotional currency is not going to solve every deal i just don't want to try to solve any deal with money when i could have solved it with emotional currency i'm saving my money with emotional empathy currency intelligence right right my money's too important to me to waste it when i could buy something with satisfaction [Music] so yeah i'm i'm enormously tight with my dollars so many people or especially men in business deals i feel like there's a lot of alpha men who are trying to get what they want and so somehow they'll they'll lose money because they're not able to have empathy or they're not able to whatever they're not able to drop their ego yeah a lot a lot of a lot of money is left on the pay on the on the table over stuff like that or what they value themselves out like price is the most price is the most emotional term in a negotiation because you value yourself based on price but if i can get you to value yourself in another way it puts you on a magazine cover i mean stroke d going some other way it used to be you get donald trump in any magazine you wanted to if you put them on the cover you know imagine the amount of time and that used to be his deal if you want to do an article on donald trump the deal was he made the cover and and then he would knock himself out for the people doing the articles oh yeah on access anything answering questions imagine how valuable his time was they got to cover to the magazine anyway i put somebody on it right you know now they're trading something that costs them nothing right and he's giving him dynamic interviews and he's promoting him hard and he's sharing with everyone he's framing it everywhere and yeah interesting so you know you're buying donald trump with emotional recognition uh so what are the characteristics that make a great negotiator in your field and also how do those translate into the business and relationship world just in general outside of well let the other side go first um you know most people have are so so they're they're burning with their argument here's why you should make this deal and they've got that memorized and and that they're not going to listen to a word you say until they get it out so trying to talk to them is really like trying to talk to a paranoid schizophrenic because they're rehearsing their speech in their head and their logic and so they just you just can't get through to them so you let them go you let them go first and um another guy ned coletti uh former gm of the dodgers friend of mine here in town phenomenal negotiator he's not lectured at uh in my class at usc also you know and ned always likes to let the other side go first you know he did the barry bonds deal he's done a ton of deals across the board and ned says well you know in a two-hour phone call there's going to be 90 seconds of solid gold where my the person i'm talking to based on changes that they made in their tonal voice and the adjectives that they used i mean he's got an instinct for it he couldn't he couldn't identify he's just always saying there's 90 seconds to sock gold and i'd say what is that right and we we talk a true he says well yeah it's going to be a change in a tone of voice it's going to be a different kind of adjective so ned wants you to go first because he wants to know what's going to take to make the deal what they want right yeah what they what their burden for or how they characterize what they have or what they're not saying too maybe exactly right what someone has failed to say is often a lot more important than what they have said which is why give it a little if thought in advance all right what they're gonna what are they gonna say if they if they've got this so i i actually like to look for more of what they haven't said what's glaringly missing and that's going to take i'm going to need you to walk through it a couple of times before that jumps out of me um okay okay um who are the most difficult people to work with then would you say it's the alpha people or you say it's the uncertain people or what type of people are hard to work in negotiation with you know you're talking about a little bit of a tight match that has a has a tendency it's a little bit based on how bad i want to make the deal like i don't like liars or i don't like the most difficult people to work with in the long run are people who haven't thought anything through which is as bad as a liar only their heart's not in the wrong place they don't know what they want right specifically or they don't know how how they're gonna they don't know how they're gonna get this done which is again we go over and over again i go over and over again yes there's nothing without how like and the person who thinks like yes is gonna make a deal well yes it's not going to make a deal because you got to have how how we're going to put this together and someone who doesn't think things through a lot of times they're actually kind of dysfunctional on their own side so they'll make promises they can't keep and they have no idea they can't keep those promises right and so when they take your deal you think you've done a deal with them they take it back to their company their company goes like no we're not doing this it's a stupid idea we can't do this sure and that happens a lot i think in a private sector i've heard from a number of companies that fully 50 of the deals that they make that don't go through get killed internally because somebody cut a deal for them and they took it back to the company the company says no that that violates our terms and conditions right we can't deliver on that basis so you're dealing with someone who just has no uh doesn't have a clue as to what's going on on their side sure a lot of people like that when you're making a business deal what do you recommend as the amount of time to consider the deal before saying yes let's do it um here's the deal points here's what you want here's what i want okay should we sign it right away should we give it 24 hours should we take it to our team should it be a week you know what's like kind of a standard you think um unless you've got something in line ahead of time um the company name is a black swan group because we believe there's black swans in every negotiation which is something you didn't know that as soon as you found out it's going to change all the parameters the deal gotcha so you sit down at the table to find out the unknowns huh and you it's impossible to research all the unknowns plus a lot of the unknowns i'll find a lot faster if i just ask you right and i could research for two weeks something that i may be able to get you to tell me about in 10 minutes for example what do you mean something you'd want to ask um i'm do i'm uh speaking to a law for a long time client and they have another cup firm that i've been affiliated with coming doing a different block when i found out they were doing that block i could subtly reach back through my network to find out what the competing slash partnership firm of mine is what they're charging or i can just flat out ask them well i need to get the information a lot of information you got to get by not asking you got to trigger it you know the phrase ask good questions it's really get good information and a lot of times you won't tell me stuff if i ask but if i act like i already know or if there are other ways hostage negotiators trigger information without asking questions and hostage negotiators get that information and make you feel good about giving it at the same time so give me an example either in a hostage or a business deal what that kind of trigger could be well it's going to be it's going to be some sort of a statement i might say look i'm sure my my competing company's charging twice as much as i am oh and then they'll tell you the answer they want to correct me oh actually no it's the same or actually you're getting a better deal never underestimate the other side's desire to correct you wow because it makes people feel powerful and smart you know you're going to want to feel smarter than me one of one of my clients is negotiating a deal for a commercial office building in south carolina and it's uh it's almost 100 occupancy it's in a mixed use uh historic area so it means that the building can't be knocked down and nobody can build it because it's a historic area and so the building is basically impossible to replace and it's 100 occupancy it makes no sense to sell the building so they're genuinely thinking why is a seller selling first of all you can't ask why because why makes people defensive if i look at you and i say why did you wear a black shirt your instant thought is going to be like do i got to defend the black shirt why i'm doing it yeah yeah yeah so you need to find out why we can't ask why because it makes people definitely so what would you ask there well then again you don't want to ask at all because if you're smarter you change your white wise to what's and it's more likely to respond if you say you know what's making the seller want to sell so you know what is causing them to do that not why are they selling but instead what my student did was he said well seems to me the seller's selling a cash cow because of a disbelief in the market fundamentals of the future of the building now let me correct you this is why i'm doing it exactly and the other side would like no no they got they got a couple buildings that are underwater now i don't i can't imagine a real estate agent answering that question ever i mean this is this is highly confidential all right prior to the infrared you know my seller is desperate for money is is what the what the answer was but because it was a correction and people love to correct they'll correct you without thinking it through it's an involuntary response a desire to sound smarter than you and to be right and correct you which is a burning desire in most people because it makes me feel smart more powerful and i'll seize every opportunity feel smart or more powerful you're at the table gosh it's like a chess it's emotional chat emotional chess i love this and how do women and men compare as negotiators as counter as counter powers either against each other or woman man woman woman man man is there a difference see i think a powerful woman negotiates a woman who's really good at negotiation is almost unstoppable wow and i think that the reinforcement the societal reinforcement is constantly trying to pound men into being better negotiators and constantly trying to pound women away from it and i think that i think the um the step from sympathy to empathy is a shorter step and women are socialized to be sympathetic and i don't think that you know whether or not it's nature or nurture i know there's a lot more pressure societally and culturally culturally for women to be like that and i in my class women pick my style of negotiation up faster than the men do and the women go to my class start cutting bigger and better deals faster than the men do in business or in life or in just in both gotcha so in in my view i think that like after they graduate they go on to do well in the class okay you got you got to negotiate with skin in the game in my class and almost all of my students are rising star business executives so um mock negotiations they're making more is what you're saying no in real life real life you can't take my stuff and put it in real life while you're in my class and you've got to write about it wow and uh one you know i've got everything from a billion dollar wall street transaction people in my class use the tools for i get a usc get a lot of commercial real estate state transactions wow a lot of people buying commercial real estate that are that are working on mbas i've got a lot of those transactions got you know my favorite my favorite way to say no which i got you know the how question before the favorite way to say no was how am i supposed to do that just real calm deference deferences great power and deference you know that's and that's what i did in kidnappings bank robberies everything how am i supposed to do what if they say i don't care figure it out or she's dead well then you know that you've pushed them as far as you can and that means you got to pivot to something else now and and that's actually where you want to get to because the strategy of negotiation is find out you want to max every term if you can and the only way to max that is to find out that i've hit you to the full limit without making you angry enough that you slam your hands down and walk away because even your reaction where you have someone or you shoot someone your reaction to this now it's like look you got to do it or things are going to go back and it was uh one of my one of my students here in town is negotiating for uh uh for a luxury client to rent a house in hollywood hills and you know 20 grand a month was a rental and they were trying to get the rental or they were trying to lease try to get it yeah and so the person said it's 20 grand a month right yeah and and it's for very well his clients extremely wealthy so you know and you negotiate a wealthy market the other side always thinks you got all the money in the world and so uh he just said how am i supposed to do that and they said okay well and they shifted the terms and he cut the price and he moved a bunch of other terms around then they negotiated for a while longer and then he said again on the price he says how am i how's my client supposed to pay that and the realtor says if your client wants a house he's got a pack bang you got a deal when the other side says if you want it you have to do it which will come out usually after the second third time that you said how am i supposed to do that so you knock it down a little more on a car real estate deal whatever it is now now you've maxed that term now you move on to something else so you make the deal but you needed to know that you pushed him as far as you could have without them storming out without them saying chris voss is not any fun to deal with i would never do business with him again then how am i supposed to do that in a differential way right they still feel in control they're not you're not saying screw you that's too much like what are you out of your mind you know right and if you don't make the deal at that point then what they say after the fact they say you know uh i didn't make a deal but i deal with them again um you know they're they're all they're all right to uh to deal with did they get the least how much did they get yeah they got it how much you know uh they they knocked it down to less than 20 and then they got some softness on some other terms yeah and then they then they cut the deal for the house they go and i wish i was paying 20 grand a month for a house that's a lot of money for us 20 grand a month wow that's a rich rich student yeah well usc they get they know that people that are involved in a lot of lucrative deals yeah yeah so you're saying what is the importance of empathy in a negotiation when i'm hearing you say this is extremely important and that's why you feel like a woman would be a better negotiator in general because they have more empathy in general or well it's the shortest most people have confused sympathy with empathy okay what's the difference um empathy is i can see you're upset it's just identifying how you feel uh sympathy is like wow i feel bad for you feeling sorry or bad for someone is sympathy sympathy it's it's it is in fact it doesn't help anybody like i don't care if you feel bad for me right i could care less so sympathy is not a good thing sympathy is a weakness as a negotiator it's a negotiation empathy is a good thing empathy uh and tactical empathy because we've really taken a past just empathy in general like we've been doing this long enough that i know what i'm looking for before we sit down i know that i need to find out the stuff that are negative emotions for you because i need to get them out of the way of the deal and i need to find out the stuff that are positive emotions for you because i want to reinforce that to make the deal and i know that the negatives are going to have be a bigger deal to you than the positives are so can you give an example of this in a business deal with that well if i don't if i don't if i don't like doing business with donald trump at all then if he get if he's annoying me to the point where i get enough satisfaction keeping money out of his hands i won't make that deal or if i'm in a business deal where the other side and i've thought about this like you annoy me so much that i don't want you to get anything dad i'll take less money to keep you out right so how did you eliminate something like that that negative in the deal so that you could well then then say like i if i think that you're negative towards me i'm going to say look i'm sure it seems like i'm greedy here if i say to you like i'm sure i'm going to seem very greedy here that sets me up to ask for a lot of money because there's actually science that backs this up now identifying a negative diminishes it every time so if i'm going to make a big grab for the money you're going to think i'm greedy and i need to get that out of the way because if i'm too greedy you're gonna you're gonna get some satisfaction by keeping me from the money even if you don't get any right and so i'm gonna say look i'm gonna seem real greedy here i'm gonna seem like i'm very self-centered and that i'm greedy and then i'm not looking out for you at all and i'll just let it sit and you'll take a lot more from me a lot a lot you you'll allow me to take more if i've said that in advance up front really yeah because i've diminished that your your thought is like i mean how i i can never seem too greedy that when i make that grab you're gonna say well he was honest with me he told me he wanted a lot of money he didn't try to say hey look let's do a win-win deal now give me all the money right because if i say i want to do a win-win day with you i'm like hey i'll be nice to you i'll look out for you and then you try to take 90 and give me 10. it's like oh it's not a good deal yeah but when you say it up front then you're more likely to get the deal yeah and get more of whatever you want right i'm going to seem very honest to you i'm going to you you're going to like that i was honest with you and you're going to say after the fact like look he was honest i always knew where he was coming from i didn't like the deal but i did it anyways or whatever yeah [Music] you don't win by checking off deal deal deal it's about long-term relationships and yeah playing the long game is is how everyone should be thinking never be closing you know it's never not about the club true yeah it's about the long long term value of a relationship i feel like that's all i've done because at the beginning of my kind of journey which was 10 11 years ago i didn't have anything to offer i was broke and i had nothing to offer and i remember being like i could really get something from everyone right now yeah but why would they give me something when i have no value to give them right so i started saying okay how can i be the champion of everyone's network yeah and just match them with someone that could really be beneficial to them yeah if someone needed to hire a sales rep or a marketing person or whatever it was i was just trying to find people for other people's needs yeah and i just continued to add that value and that became the value that i could add to people and over time they were like how can i help you back like this has been amazing for me like you introduced me to this person you helped me here and i was just like i don't need anything right now right and i would always just kind of delay the ask until i had a book or something really meaningful that i wanted to i guess close on yeah but the more that i think we do what you say which is just like delay the ask and don't try to close all the time just how can you give and give and give i think that's you guys do a good job with that too yeah yeah so what you hit on is um that idea of generosity which is sort of another uh idea there being generous yeah and one of the habits is like habitually giving something away at every every interactions whether it's a piece of advice it's a connection you know don't hold those connections like give them away freely yeah um it could be you know when you have something simple like a book or a story that you read that you like send it to someone you know you don't just post it for everyone to read you you send it to someone on a one-on-one basis and just building thinking about just habitually giving things away it pays off with compound interest you don't know how and you're not doing it so that one day you're going to sell a grip load of books you know you're doing it because it becomes a habit it becomes part of your character and then you know you don't know how but you know that that's going to turn into you know business success personal growth right and so that's a another one of the sort of principles in the book so there's a there's there's 11 habits to becoming a master influencer right and persuading people is that what it is to it's all about persuasion to buy into your vision your dream your products your company anything right into you and to you and and the idea is that we're all persuasion's sort of a loaded word you know but we're all persuading all day long yeah i mean you're persuaded i call it enrollment yeah we're either enrolling people into our vision or into our requests and they're enrolling us out of it that's right yeah and it's simple things like uh you're convincing your girlfriend what where to go on vacation exactly or where we're gonna go to for dinner where are you gonna go for dinner so all day long you're persuading your boss to give you a raise or a company to hire you or someone to publish your book like all day long there's micro instances of persuasion and this is really just about building a personal character and habits to allow enrollment to be more natural and freer yeah and it's also about being yourself and finding a purpose because that's what gravitates people towards you is really knowing yourself leaning into your quirks being able to be vulnerable i i remember when we did the um we had you at the white house before for the it's on us campaign it was crazy you you stood up and told the story and the whole place was just like in awe that you know a macho dude could be that vulnerable to that audience and uh it opens everyone else up and um you know unless you were really comfortable knew yourself knew where you were coming from you wouldn't have the power to do that you know what you were able to do yeah for context people listening i was what wasn't joe biden was there or something or was it like yeah we did a we did a campaign with uh joe biden called it's on us which was to end sexual assault on college campuses and we brought you and a bunch of in the room a couple hundred people at the white house yeah joe biden's talking yeah and i st and and someone said hey we're gonna ask you guys to like make a request on how you're gonna support this campaign yeah and so different people stood up and i felt called in the moment to stand up and share a story for a minute or two about being sexually abused myself and how i didn't think other people should suffer with this or go through this personally because the trauma it creates and what i was going to stand up for so um yeah you've got to be really confident in yourself and right know yourself like you said and be able to be vulnerable you know be able to not be perfect like we all come we all have flaws we all have issues we all have things we're trying to overcome and accomplish whatever wherever we came from whatever our background leading into those gives you power yeah you know not trying to push those down and suppress them leading into being vulnerable and things that you're going through and being able to talk about it creates power and we were talking about stuff beforehand which we won't go into here because it's not public information but your ability to be vulnerable in the middle of things in your life right now is powerful and allows you to connect with me and chase who is just connecting with as well yeah exactly that's what it's about yep now you've got these 11 habits and there's kind of four core uh principles principles and then there's there's kind of sub principles around that yeah right that's right so the first one is original what does that mean to be original so that's really about yeah being an original you know it's that oscar wilde quote you know be yourself everyone else is taken and it's it's sort of a few habits around um how to lean into your authentic self yeah and find your truth and you know one of them is uh the persuasive power of storytelling and really understanding what drives you how to tell your story and so there's sort of some work workshops in here about like how to do that and how to pull out your story how to tell better stories how to tell better stories and really understanding what your story is and what you stand for and that's part about being original that's interesting it's it's an art to learn how to tell stories yeah this can be very challenging for people i find it very challenging for me uh telling stories well it's kind of your job isn't it it is that's a challenge it's still challenging yeah for me i'm good at telling other people's stories right but i'm not good at like coming up with stories i'm on my own yeah yeah i'm good at like telling their story right right which i guess is still story stories but um someone told me one time you know facts tell stories sell and so if you're a guy or a girl or a person who's got a lot of facts when you're talking to someone it's not going to sell them or persuade them as much as if you tell a story that's right there's um there's this i go into in the book but there's uh a psychologist jonathan height who said the mind is a story processor not a logic processor and it's really about that facts and arguments kind of go in one ear and out the other like stats and numbers and data it might be important but stories really matter when you know martin luther king is talking about he has a dream you know that one day his four children will be judged by the content of their character and not to color their skin he's telling a story he's telling a dream he's not talking about socioeconomic numbers and this what this population has that this population doesn't have or you know the unfair balance he's he's making a really big proclamation and he's telling a story a dream he had and that that's what we remember you know that's the power of storytelling um to always think about it that way okay you got the power of storytelling power storytelling you've got you said never be closing that's part of being original because a lot of people are always selling something right they're trying to get the the sale as opposed to giving and adding value for something it's just transaction a lot of people check check check check and you know when you're transaction based things come and go and part of never be closing is also looking at when you you know philosophy of like when you hear no it's just no for now you know it's not no it's not over right like we i mean even at work we will have clients we won't win the pitch you stay in that relationship yeah maybe three five years later so they come back around six months later they come back around six months yeah they didn't have a good experience who know five years i mean brandon just won a piece of business that we had pitched i won it yesterday that we pitched two years ago really sort of stayed in touch with the with the client all of a sudden that someone made a mistake and he was right there and there you go he picked it up so uh that's part of that philosophy is okay it's switching your viewpoint and you say another habit is to turn and face the strange what does that mean so turning face to strange is all about my idol david bowie and so i learned i learned about uh this concept of being original really from david bowie and david bowie um he obviously he was a musician and when he started he his label wanted him to do folk songs like bob dylan and he was david robert jones and no those albums like tanked no one heard of him music was like somebody else it wasn't him and so he quit left the label went to like a buddhist monastery studied mime of all things you know strange dude he he started an experimental arts lab came back and reincarnated as david bowie created these stories ziggy stardust the thin white duke different albums and leaned into his you know he wasn't afraid to fly his freak flag was he man or woman you know was he homosexual heterosexual you didn't really know um but that was him you know that was him was stirring things up and being himself and now he's you know he became one of the best-selling artists of all time by leaning into authenticity and what he stood for and so that's why being strange being strange whatever you're trying to face is strange whatever your quirks are yeah lean into your quirks like don't try to be what someone else wants you to be don't do what the label asks do what's inside of you well the people that stand out and become more of who they are the ones that benefit the most in the future yeah if you're just trying to be like everyone else you're just trying to fit in a certain way yeah you're not really making a mark on on the world you're not making a big impact it's the ones that are willing to be strange and accepted that's that's the key yeah uh i love the show glee for that reason yeah he's like i don't know if you've ever watched logically yeah for me it was one of my favorite shows it's all about like the weirdos i saw the glee concert dude no way i did i do not have a glee concert i'm jealous yeah i saw the glee concert i don't even know there was a con it would have been amazing all the all the cash was there uh yeah the cast performed oh my god i'm saying that that's amazing but those were all like the kind of the weird outcasts i guess of the school but they're the ones that like when they finally accepted who they were that's when they that's why they shined exactly so you've got to learn to accept who you are yeah even if it goes against everyone else it should go against everyone else that's right but that's when you're going to shine the most yeah i talk about being generous this is another key principle in persuasion yeah this is kind of like the old law of reciprocity like when you give you know people feel inclined to want to give back yeah so why is why do you say you know give yourself away uh the pull of positivity and just a little respect so well they all come from they're all based on the same concept that you so some of these habits you inherently have you you inherently had generosity as one of your habits yeah and so you were connecting people when you didn't know where it would lead that was just who you were um other people could that don't have that they can learn that skill you know it's a these these are all skills that you can practice and learn like anything else they're they're muscles you got to work out and for for me generous is all about um not expecting anything in return and just giving away respect is another form of being generous and you know i cover a study in that in the book that harvard business school they interviewed 20 000 employees and the number one thing that they said made for good leadership was respect it wasn't it wasn't time off it wasn't a raise or money or promotion the number one driver was respect and if you respect the people you interact with and work with i mean that's where that's where the action is you'll get more out of that you're getting that team yeah you'll if you respect them and see them as peers that's what is going to level you up interesting yeah yeah i heard these stories about how steve jobs was disrespectful to a lot of his product developers that he'd like throw the phone back in their face or whatever you know talk bad about people but maybe that's just one-off times but maybe he also had a level of respect for them somehow some other way yeah some other way or maybe he was that one in a million that was such a freaky genius or he had other other habits though yeah you just followed him because you're like i i don't like this dude but yeah he's amazing he's amazing he's a big he's got he's got a vision and he's putting it out there he's persuasive in other ways yeah he was an original though he was he wasn't original for sure he wasn't original and um okay so we got generous as one of the key habits give yourself away the pull of positivity what does that mean so the pull of positivity is is just simply um there's a lot of different ways you can take persuasion and i cover that sort of covers there's negative parts of persuasion which are also really effective like fear-based persuasion fear-based persuasion it's like my old football coach in high school or something it was just like screamed at you if you dropped the ball you're like ah you know did that was that effective it's not effective it wasn't i mean in some ways it it made me work hard but it made me constantly stressed and i don't think you want that out of the people around you you don't want them to be feeling fearful and stressed by your level of persuasion like if you don't do this then i'm going to scream at you more yeah yeah and so the it just sort of studies like the impact of negative versus positive persuasion and how positive persuasion wins out in the long run you know negative persuasion can certainly have its benefits and be effective um you see it in politics all the time that's crazy i mean that's all it is crazy that's all it is it's just fear-based attacks yeah there was um a 1964 uh lyndon johnson ad it was sort of one of the first like campaign ads like that that was called daisy and it shows um shows a girl uh in a field picking daisies and um then a nuclear bomb goes off and then this screen like fades to black and it's basically like the world's ending like if i don't vote for this dude oh my god my you know my family's gonna blow up in a nuclear war yeah that's crazy that's negative persuasion it was effective it works you know it works because that's fear-based and this just argues that the opposite is is more productive for society more sustainable more healthy gosh yeah politics it seems like it's gotten a lot worse right people win based on those fear-based tactics they do yeah i mean but i feel like obama won based on positivity he did and an image an ideal of something greater that is why he was right yeah he he broke through because he wasn't going to get down to that level and i mean look how from there to where we are crazy right it's the pendulum has swung like so far maybe it's always now it's like name now it's like bully bully name calling crazy yeah i know it doesn't seem productive but that's just me yeah so you got the the the be original you got the generous you know this giving mentality when we give of our time of our energy of our listening of our respect it doesn't have to be constantly giving gifts no that can be just our connection to be generous with our listening that's right time advice connections that you think of but you don't say yeah you know you're always yeah you're like oh i should and then you don't you know like like give those messages out there like give that positivity off that'll make you more persuasive that'll make you more persuasive yeah and then empathetic why is empathetic such a key to persuasion and being influential so really um that the basis of that is about um the idea that we are all connected and related you know human beings are we're the universes only storytellers um we all share 99.9 of the same dna but yet that being said the world is like it seems super fractured um and so that's really just trying to understand your audience and there's sort of habits on how to do that and not my dad doesn't have the same belief so we don't we hate we we're like complete opposites you still have you still share so much in common and it's understanding shared values we all at the end of the day want the same things and so safety love safety love connection connection human connection yeah that those are sort of the drivers and how do you understand how to look for those that don't shut people down try to be a little bit more open and be empathetic did you ever doubt yourself in terms of your ability and your research and your studies did you ever say to yourself like man if i can't you know figure this out then all of my work is for nothing well no i never thought it was for nothing but i certainly i certainly doubted whether or not we were going to be able to figure out figure this out yeah well if you thought you know and at that time you're extremely uh educated research you know you've seen a lot did you did that give you a fear of like well if i can't figure this out then no one of course of course well her prognosis was multiple early joint replacements and and that was like that was the good news because the bad news is well how many and and how many can you stand and when does that kill you like you know so her real prognosis was plenty of pain with an early death you know because uh well even now even now you know like the surgeon who talked to her yesterday said well because he talked to about the risk of amputation in the future it's like well this is the second joint revision it's like maybe this will last 15 years we don't know what the hell is going to happen then well so our response to that is that's 15 years from now it's like who knows well things are better now for how people understand how to replace an ankle than they were i think it was 10 years ago that she had this one replaced and it helped it wasn't perfect her hip is perfect the ankle has always been trouble but way less trouble than it was and so well you you struggle forward the best you can and so i suppose she could adapt to an amputation if that was necessary but at the moment it isn't necessary but multiple amputations is not something to really be looking forward to when you're 16. you know and they were going to put her on corticosteroids to control her her her inflammation and that would have produced cushing's disease and so that makes your face all puffy and it makes you gain weight and so it's very physically disfiguring so we decided not to go down that route and yeah well but you know it's it's worked out thank god it's quite the miracle and she had a baby a year ago and we were never sure that was going to happen so congrats thank you yes yes that's for sure so now we have this respite where she's healthy and the last time i saw her she was looking great like she's just glowing she's so healthy i can't believe it it's just beyond belief congrats on all the hard work you've uh done to make it make it a possibility yeah we avoided the worst excesses of hell during the catastrophe so that's something yeah and it did allow her the space to figure out and my wife had always thought that diet had a relationship to it and we investigated that like there's a good literature that shows if you have arthritic symptoms and you stop eating if you fast they go away so that's interesting it's like well food must be causing it yeah but once you start to eat again what you eat comes back it turns out no not no matter what almost no matter what because she's sensitive to virtually everything but she isn't sensitive to meat and so it turns out that if you eat meat you can live so that's a big difference between being sensitive to everything and not being sensitive to one thing yeah and so so it's it's a harsh diet um it's made traveling difficult although i can eat in restaurants because most restaurants can cook a steak with nothing on it and that's made things much easier while i'm traveling but whatever whatever it's working and so thank god for that amazing do you believe do you think hypothetically if your daughter was healthy and never had any of these complications that you would be the man you are impacting people that the success the you know the attention you'd be getting do you think you'd have as much i wouldn't have written the 12th chapter right that's for sure do you think in general you would still be able to have the ideals the belief the fortitude that you have to reach people and really impact people yeah i think so but i i know what you're i know what you're saying you know your question is well to what degree is adversity character building and the answer to that is plenty but i was already like i said and it was the same with my wife we weren't naive people you know i because i had an extensive clinical practice i was dealing with with heavy level adversity always wasn't your daughter no no but there were you know there were other problems in my family and so forth that i dealt with as well and so we were already we'd already i think garnered most of what we could from confronting adverse situations you know um now did that add a different level to it it probably probably fire tested our relationship our familia it probably brought our family closer together all things considered i saw the same thing happen when my wife's mother died died she died of prefrontal dementia and she she developed it quite young about it started to really manifest itself in her early 50s and she died when she was 70 and she fell apart over you know 18 years and she was very physically healthy um and her husband who was quite the man about town when he was a young guy real extrovert he was a real character in our hometown he took care of her so well it was absolutely jaw-dropping every time she slipped he'd step up to the plate and he he took care of her until he couldn't lift her out of her chair anymore and he was getting old too and so she wasn't in an old age home for very long and then we were around when she died you know over the couple of days just before her death and her family her her sister is a palliative care nurse her other sister is a pharmacist and tammy's had the experiences that already described and then her father really stepped up to the plate so the whole family gathered around for that and they acted impeccably throughout it i would say they took care of their mother very carefully while she was dying and they pulled together and one of the consequences of that which was so interesting is that although their mother died and that was a terrible loss their bonds that connected them all of them strengthened to the point where i would say that was almost compensation for the loss of their mother so that was really interesting to see what happens even in a dire circumstance if people do do what they can now i'm not saying that that's going to work for every situation because i know people get cut off at the knees and sometimes you hit a tragedy that well that's fatal you know that you cannot rectify it's a real catastrophe but it was very interesting watching that because they were alert and awake around the death bed and they weren't fighting with each other at all there was no familial squabbling because you can imagine that that would happen because everyone's stressed and then you can just imagine how terrible that would make something that's already awful there was none of that they focused their attention on her you know they gave her water when she needed it and they watched her and they made they made this terrible thing the least amount of awful it could be and it definitely pulled them together like their that whole family including me is closer because of what they went through and also how they went through it and it's probably the case well i would say it definitely advanced the maturity of my son because he was called and i told him look kid like you can't add anything to this we're we're up to here yeah you have to conduct yourself properly because otherwise everything's going to shake and fall we can't have more of this you can't bring any anything unnecessary into this and okay it was an awesome star it was it was remarkable and and he who was only in grade 10 when most most of this happened and your friends are pretty damn important when you're in grade 10 and he stuck around a lot to be helpful so yeah it was really good for him man yeah well he yeah he's a good character he's amazing he's he's quite quite something and he was very helpful he was very helpful to his sister they had their fights obviously well she was often unreasonable and no bloody wonder you know well when you're strung out and you can't feel anything but pain yeah god she went through so much like even watching her withdraw from the opiates because she was on them for about a year and a half she just quit hey well as soon as she was done her surgeries like i'm not taking these anymore and she had formication which is the sensation of ants crawling under your skin she had that for like a month oh god unbelievable she was she just just sailed through it like i'm done with these wow yeah yeah you guys have been through a lot yeah what's your what's your biggest fear now moving forward in your in your own life oh making a mistake at the moment because like i've been i've been the subject of so much public attention in the last two years and like i've been in a situation where well even things i didn't say have also almost been fatal because people take them out of context right you know what um but i'm my biggest fear has been that i do something careless and and that there are like serious cascading consequences too you feel like you've done something careless or well everyone's done something careless right you know but i've been pretty careful i mean i was fortunate so when this political scandal blew up around me in in canada when i opposed some legislation that i thought was reprehensibly constructed um you know the the the radicals on the left in particular came after me hard and but i was fortunate because you know they called me every name under the book um and went after my character and you know i suppose there was some degree of that was understandable to some degree because if you stand up against something if you stand up against the radical right well maybe you're a communist you might not probably not because you don't have to be a communist to not like the radical right but if you stand up against the radical left well maybe you're a nazi well probably not but you might be and so it's certainly in the interest of the people who are proponents of the philosophy of the radical left to assume that you're a nazi because then they don't have to deal with you and so that's what happens you throw yourself into the fray people try to localize you and they do that by saying well maybe you're this maybe you're this maybe this maybe you're this it's like well yeah maybe not too and and but i already had 250 hours of lectures up on youtube at that point so people could actually go and see what i had said because virtually every word i'd ever said to students in a professional capacity not not every word because i didn't tape every lecture but i taped multiple years of lectures and so people went over those with a fine-tooth comb trying to find out if there's anything i'd ever said that was and they couldn't find anything and that was because i've been very careful with what i say um 25 i started paying attention to what i was saying and not and trying very hard not to say things that i would trying not trying very hard not to say things that something in me objected to so and well that seems to have been provided me with a buffer and so people came to my website because they were interested in well before the political stuff blew up i had a million views on youtube which is nothing a million of anything is a lot but then when the political scandal started to break yeah then people came for them but stayed for the content and so and that's been very useful yeah well it's well and it's not that surprising well you know because of what you do it's like peop there's a great hunger for information that is practical and useful and that helps people find meaning in their lives and orient themselves there's a great hunger for that and most of my lectures were derived from solid psychology some of it experimental some of it biological some of it from from from the domains of neuroscience a lot of it from great clinicians it's not surprising that people find it helpful because well great clinicians were great because they were really helpful and so to distill that and to offer it to people in a digestible form to have that have a good effect on them well that's that's what you'd expect that's what the whole discipline is about and so that's been that's been great these these public lectures that i've been doing so i think i've done 50 of them in about 45 different cities now in about three months and the average theater size is between 2500 and 3000 people and they're unbelievably positive events because people come there and we talk mostly about the political spectrum and why there's room for voices on the left and why there's room for voices on the right and where the parameters of that should be because both of those can descend into extremism and that's not good and the role of individual responsibility and individual sovereignty and the necessity for people to develop a vision the sorts of things that we already talked about and virtually everyone that's coming there they're not coming for political reasons even though that's the story you hear from the more ideologically possessed journalist types because they see the world that way they can't imagine anything else could possibly be happening but the people who are coming to these lectures are coming because they are doing everything they possibly can to make their lives better and so and it's lovely to talk to people like that because it's amazing it is it's great it's literally great school greatness baby right exactly exactly i've got six minutes to be mindful of your time and your schedule and i want to ask you three final questions if that's okay yeah you bet so as much as i would love for you to go on for another few hours on these answers so i can get to the last question i'll do my best my brief i wish i could go on longer so love to have you come back next time here in l.a uh the first one is what is your purpose now moving forward through everything you've had in your life what's your purpose moving forward well i have i have specific i'm i'm what's my purpose what am i aiming at well i'm going to i did a series of biblical lectures last year i did 15 lectures on genesis i'm going to continue doing that so in november i'm going to start with the exodus stories and what i'd like to do over the next 15 years is make my way through the whole corpus of biblical writings so that's one major goal i want to write another book i i've written half of it already which will be a follow-up to 12 rules for life because i actually had laid out on a site called quora 40 rules and so i'll do that and write an another couple of books i suspect over the next few years um i the touring i'm going to continue i have 10 cities coming up in canada and another 20 in the u.s and then 12 in europe and i'm going to go to australia in february and then back to europe i think in april so there's lots of touring on the horizon and it's it's for the reasons i already described i'm having i don't the lectures differ every night although they're themes that constantly emerge and i'm using those as an opportunity to have a detailed and engaged discussion with the audience about how we might proceed forward individually and collectively so that we can make things consciously better and why that's associated with necessary meaning and why that's a moral obligation so it's a dialogue about responsibilities and not rights even though rights rights are only important in so far as they set up the space for you to shoulder your proper responsibility and as a sovereign citizen you have the responsibility for the integrity of the state resting on your shoulders and it's something that if you don't take seriously then the state shakes and that's not good and so i'm trying to convey that to people it's like you have there's actually something that you need to do you need to take care of yourself you need to take care of your family you need to take care of your community and if you don't do that then they'll be hell to pay and it's on you right each of us and it's it's hard for people to grasp that because well they don't want to first of all maybe because they don't want the responsibility but then they don't get any meaning then they suffer then they get bitter that's not good so it's like which of these are you going to pick but it's also salutary to people because it's useful for everyone to know that if you don't live up to your potential that you leave a hole in the fabric of being and it's filled by something approximating hell and unless that's what you want then you shouldn't be doing that and so and it's perfectly possible to have a serious discussion with 3 000 people about this and they're right on board with it all the way and so that's really something amazing to behold and one of the things i've realized is all these new technologies the technologies you're using enable these long-form discussions turns out that people are smarter than we thought right right right tv narrowed it right it's like 30 seconds say your complicated thing in 30 seconds like but can't yeah and so we were viewing the the population through this narrow window and everyone looked kind of stupid it's like now the window's fully open it's like oh look at that you people like 40-hour netflix specials that are incredibly complex right and you like three-hour joe rogan discussions that are complicated you'll follow the whole thing it's like oh good we're smarter than we thought thank god for that because we better be so yeah so that's that's where i mean [Music] when i tell you uh for example don't think of a pink elephant you immediately think about it and all the viewers right now think of a pink elephant so the same thing when you watch the number four you can't think of three you can't think of five and i know it's like a poker tale when you look at it i know it's a four i know it's a three i know it's a two i know i during the years i you practiced it enough practice it's all about it's like it's like playing a piano you know everybody can learn to play a piano but not everybody will read mozart so i mastered the whole concept of understanding how people think now if it's a if it's a one through six it'd be easier than one through a hundred so it's the same principle just same principle just going to be more sensitive wow so somebody has a 100 dice so for example for example in my show i have an act where i have someone hold the coin in one of the hands and i guess which hand is the coin every time and it makes the audience laugh because i talk about body language but somewhere inside their mind they're saying okay it's the 50 50 chance so you know and then i bring 30 people on stage and now you have one to 60. and one of them is holding the coin and now it's much more difficult but i'm looking at them and i point to a person and that person usually holds the coin so it's a real so it's the same concept you know before the before we start shooting we talked about uh magician versus mentalist and i thought about what to tell you about that when you watch a magician show uh you are amazed you're blown away just like here oh my god how did it happen how did you know it what's going on but you know somewhere deep inside your mind that he didn't kill the girl sower in half and then brought her back right and you know that when she levitated you know it's not something from quantum physics a defying gravity thing you know there's a trick you don't know what is a trick but you know it's not real right you know it's an illusion when you watch a mentalist show there's another factor of belief because there is you will ask yourself is it really is it true not true is it a magnetic dice can you do it with my dice right right the answer is yes but eh there's there's lots of lots of more aspects than just wondering so there's an element of belief there's a limit of of it's similar little bit to same thing that happens in our brain when we talk about religious when someone believes in god or not believe in god there's you go out and you ask yourself is it real or it's not real it's not just a trick so that's the main issue between a mentalist and a magician wow and there's not many mentalists there's not many how many are there that are world-class in your mind not a lot i mean i think there's like less than 10 very good ones very good ones who's the one that you're inspired by there's uh we talked about there and darren is amazing amazing from england we've got another israeli heim goldenberg from canada he's a good friend of mine uh there's two in israel which are very good i mean there's there's there's you know yuri getter started the whole concept you know the name no yuri getter in the 70s israeli he took the concept the first one who took and took it to the stage he used to bend spoons with the mind so every time you think of spun ben you have something about that's him he was the one who did it he became huge all over the world he was a personal friend of michael jackson and john lennon and and was consulting them he used to find oil that's what you know according to what he says of course if i oil with his mind have companies advice companies he was the first one who started the whole concept of taking the power of the mind bringing to the stage and entertainment and what i did with it because i was always very funny you know and you know i always like to make fun and entertain people i love the high energy of entertainment and i love to be creative so i took the concept and developed lots of creativity around it and that's what you see in the live shows and the tv shows and all of that wow that's a lot of fun what's something that uh someone's done that you think has blown you away personally i feel like you've seen it all you you know how a lot of people have learned their psychology and things like that so i you know well if to if you think about it again i go back to magic a magician can do four things any magician you can make something appear from nowhere or disappear or transpose you know or levitate that's it that's like in lots of different ways exactly so like that's like four pillars now with what i do same four pillars i can read something i can influence something or guess something you know it's more like a reading i can predict something or i can make things move like the spoon bending or telekinesis stuff brain power on that you build a story different different story it's like you know you talk about motivational speaking okay motiva thinking positive it's it's a fact people need to think more positive but every person takes it to how they see it and how they look at it at the end it's all about mindfulness and you know getting yourself into the right position but same thing here there's four elements and i build the story the crazy story wrong and i give you in the middle of the story i give you traps and i give you ideas and i give you oh i think i know how we did that and then something came coming to that blog so it's it's a show it's a live show it's to entertain people and when i see and this is the truth when i see people wondering and here's an interesting thing that i don't think nobody talked about it what is the sense of wonder what is it what do you think is a wonder what is it when someone is wondering they're curious but if you wish you left you went like oh my god oh my god some people will cry some people will go like this and some people will just there's i mean we know yeah exactly you know laughter you know it's universal this is laughter right sadness you know it's the opposite angry you know it's like this wonder it's very individual if you think of wonder not everybody will go like this not everyone some people will go like this some people would be like shocked once i had a show and nobody clapped their hands at the end and i was fell so he said no you understand they were too shocked oh wow so i had to reprogram the show to get to uh applause so so it's very interesting when you think about it and when i see the audience wondering becoming children again that's amazing wow that's why i do what i do do you feel like you had a good childhood uh define a good childhood well you say you want people to be like children again that means i believe you know i have two children of my own and you know the children did you see that there's a there's an amazing scene from the movie the prestige you see a magician you're taking a little bird and you go like this when the bird disappears and the audience goes oh my god and the bird appears like in another place so everybody's like clapping their hand and the little boy is asking what happened to the first bird and really the musician had like a mechanic something that makes her he kills the first board oh no or something like that but peop children has a sense of wonder you know they touch the iron because they're curious and then they get the burn and they they you know i see my my kid is doing something from from lego and he's like oh look what i've done what i've done it's amazing when we grow up we start to lose this you go into the box you know you you have your work and you know everything in the news and we start to lose this this amazing feeling so wonder of wonder and i'm here to get back and you see and you know i don't want to no name dropping but you know some of the people that i perform for it doesn't matter who you are you can be known i don't know rich poor everybody's like leveled and they have a sense of wonder which is amazing so it's a wonderful feeling how old are your kids or four and two and do you perform mentalism on them it's hard because mentalism is very uh sometimes it's not visual it's not like magic visual sometimes it's very intellectual you know what you think about later you think about so it's hard to express it but you know working on that you're working out with them a little bit because you're not like voila like there's something like exactly exactly an art exactly that's why when i do a big show even if if i do a show for 3000 people it the stage and the screen the production will be modest because it's not going to be explosions and stuff like that a little of course lighting and we have screens we have cameras because it's all about the interaction but it's not going to be like you know fireworks and stuff like that because it's all about what's happening there it's not about about it's not about how big it is it's how emotional it is how important is storytelling in mentalism that's everything that's everything that's everything how did you learn how to tell better stories i didn't i didn't you know i just uh you know it it's i'll tell you a little story a i think it was like 10 years ago i did a show and the guy came to me and told me i have a show for a company for a swatch group in switzerland the swatch brand and i have all the retailers do you think it's it's amazing you think you could do something connected to the watch and then i was like hmm it's like thing i have an idea and then started infotainment infotainment which is creating this stuff i said okay so i know how to guess things for dice what if it wasn't a dice what if it was different messages of a company and you look at something and say oh you're looking at how important is the connection with the workers and then i would i find myself talking about the messages conveying the messages but in a way that people remembers it right so for swatch i took 10 people on stage i told them to one of the acts hold your hand above your watch count to three and i actually stopped all their watches stopped completely from they all you didn't touch their watches i told them i was going like this to them the watches stopped you didn't touch the watches the audience goes well never touch the watch the audience goes wild wow one lady from those ten people said my watch is still working and i started to act like no way what's going on no no it didn't stop and i was let me see him you see and i was going like oh you have this watch and that was like a moment because and then i said what do you have what do you have and i talked about all the other brands wow that i could stop but i could not stop the swatch that was powerful and the message was i can't do it that's brilliant and it was a metaphor of course by the way i could stop any of the watches i just made it look like i could i i acted that's right and i saw the owner of uh mr hayek is the owner of uh he passed away but back then he was like because he had 700 people who sell his watches and now we wanted to say how good is the watch wow so then i found myself flying for a lot of corporations fortune 500 companies cyber security uh for ibm i did a competition who is smarter me or watson you know the artificial intelligence for google we did something who is faster in searching the master mentalist or google you know so i create this and i think this works on a principle that if i ask you what were you wearing three weeks ago on monday you know nobody nobody knows no no but if i ask you what did you do on the on the day of september 11 when the plane hits the twin you remember exactly what you did yeah can you remember what i was doing no but i remember what i was doing and they think that why do you remember it because it was an emotional impact yeah bad negative one you remember also the good things so when i'm doing when i'm standing in front of a company and i create this sense of wonder mind tricks call it whatever you want and people are like blown away but this is connected to the messages of the new product you're holding the new cyber security program that prevents hackers and while you're holding it i'm i can't read your mind right and people get the metaphor and everybody remembers the messages and it's better than any lecture it's better than any powerpoint show because people go home and say oh this guy was talking about the new blah blah blah of cyber security of the company when when i hold this he couldn't read my mind and when i didn't hold it he could read my mind so it talks about right this what's the riskiest thing you've ever done that you actually because usually you know like it's going to work i'm just susan i'm assuming like you know you've got to influence or they use do you still have a time where i used to one of the acts in the show i used to have like a like a russian roulette i used to have like like uh four knives a story four like bases and one night or something something like that with the bags i used to play with their staple guns that you know one of them is loaded all the rest is not loaded you mix it up and then i i find it and then i took it to the next step i don't find it you find it so you take it and i take it and i go like this like and i click it i did it in a television show in israel it was crazy and then with time i felt i don't think it's for me it's not about the if i'm right or wrong if i'm wrong it's very not for me but but because this is not it's um it's very authentic it's very it might go wrong and when i do a live show and i just came back from miami i did it was a two hours live show things got wrong yes but the audience are not aware it's part of the story it's it's kind of okay i'll get something else i'll get back to it later and there's there was a guy who in the middle of the show he was like a heckler he said what's the name of my my kingdom teacher or what's the name of my friend it happens and i was like i stopped the show and i was like i started to tell jokes about him interrupting me and actually i'm sorry the show was going to be extended then i went to him but at the end of the in the end of the show i wrote the name of his kingdom on the teacher this is robinson it was remember it was crazy and everybody's like blown away because i have anchors i know i'm first act second act third act but in between stuff can go i go crazy but people don't remember the failures necessarily because they're so you've always tied around at the end and by the way this is i mean this is this is this is it's like a philosophical psychology okay let's say that you're holding i'm just inventing something you're holding a bill and you ask me to guess the serial number okay and i go okay three five six nine nine nine or whatever and it's completely correct and the orders of course let's say they do it and adam is taking one digit what's better one digit out of the out of the ten ten or eight digits i don't know i'm pretty impressed if someone pulls it out and you get all the ten digits but in a show i think that if i have a mistake it tells like you're it's it's incredible i'm human i'm like you guys it's you get got it uh there's an actor not perfect exactly because then there's something's got to be off exactly there's some magic behind here i don't believe i don't believe you don't know this person exactly sometimes i get there's an act that i tell someone to draw something where you're standing back-to-back and we draw the exact same thing and it's really spectacular it's really cool sometimes i get the picture so good that i'm doing a little off on purpose really yeah so he did a house in a tree and a sun so i do a house in three but i reverse it i i do pretty close yeah very very close and it's it's i think it's wow stronger i think it's true it's a little bit not a perfect match yes i'm like a magician that you can't go a little bit it has to be exactly because if not she's not levitating if it's not it's has to be so on purpose you'll mess it up yeah i won't mess it up i go close because i think it shows uh credibility of the audience but you really have the exact image sometimes and sometimes not you know and sometimes i will not know it and i will play on it in a different way and i'll go from a different direction or you'll come back to something else with them and tie it in somehow before we continue this video make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day [Music] i think my toolkit is people's is people's stories that they tell themselves i think that's that's that's what interests me it's like can you give an example so like like even just like a magic trick right you are um when you watch a you might watch a card trick and you go you know he he had me pick a card and then he put the card back in the deck and it disappeared and then it was in my it was in my pocket that's impossible now that that is a story you're telling yourself and you've you're going from point a to point b to point c but of course there's like also 8.1 8.2 you know but you what the magician's doing is just encouraging you to edit the story in such a way that probably normally all the sleight of hand happens right in front of you but you don't pay attention because it doesn't seem important and then the bits that do seem important are the bits that later are going to join up to form the story right and they're a little like there's a when i used to do a lot of this kind of magic and like a thing i'd always say is so let's say you've got like a deck of cards at the beginning that is in a special order so you can't shuffle them but there's a point halfway through the trick where they can shuffle them i would normally say at that point okay let's shuffle the cards again but this time do it under the table right so they follow that instruction but it sounds like they've shuffled the cards before to them does that make sense again because i say shovel the cards again but this time do it under the table now they haven't shuffled the guards before because they were in a special order but then later when they're reconstructing the trick in their head let alone when they're then telling someone else about the truth shove the card a bunch of times yeah i shoved it at the beginning you know and it's like a false memory that you start to implant so so uh so it's just yeah you're just working with stories and so what i do because i'm like the sort of magic i do isn't very like uh you know proppy it's kind of like more based around suggestion so it really is there's also conjuring in it as well i mean i'm using magic techniques too but largely like the bit that interests me and the story is just yeah it's people's ongoing perception when you meet people what goes through your mind first i'm not trying to ask you like about me but just in general like what goes through your mind when you see someone you're always thinking of like i wonder if there's a way i could tell them a different story to like create an aha moment or i'm just curious about this individual or are you just kind of not thinking anything no do you know what i so there's the work that i do is like is very sort of controlling like i seem to be able to control people's minds or control people's actions or whatever um i actually think that's a terrible way of living i'm i'm a big believer in the stoic idea that you're there's like all the things you can control and then the things you can't control if you try to start controlling things that you can't you're gonna you're just gonna get frustrated and angry and anxious right but the only things you can control are your thoughts and your actions and that is it that is it so you have this choice you try and control all this other stuff or you could just decide that it's fine that everything else is fine and the thing is it always is it always is and if you let that thought of so like you know your partner is driving you mad because essentially they handle stress badly and they're putting putting it all on your head or whatever whatever that is and it's it's sort of like you can you're in charge of how much you maybe do try and help them or or how much uh how much how much how kindly you can meet them but you but essentially if they handle stress badly and they're having a bad time like you you can emotionally separate a little and go that's okay it's okay and in that sort of clarity that comes to that then you can actually be like a better partner and be a better help as opposed to making it all about you and turning into a huge big thing that you don't need to do um so there's like there are gray areas but essentially uh so it's like i'm sure sport is the same like um so you if you're going to like a tennis you're going to a game of tennis if you if you try and control the thing you can't control which is the outcome so if you go in thinking i must win i must win this game then what happens you start to lose you become anxious you don't play as well whereas you can go in thinking i will play as best as i possibly can the best of my abilities and i'm not going to react and be negative and i'm going to yeah but it's just it's just a different story you're in your thought you're on this side of the line and of course you play better you do actually play better so the results tend to be better but you're just you're just trying to keep it on the right side of the line so there are these there are kind of you know like matters of social injustice that you think well that's not fine that needs changing well fine but then just emotionally commit yourself to doing your absolute utmost to change that thing not to an outcome that may this may not be the time that maybe like it's going to be years after you've done your efforts that's going to change but you'll do a better job because you'll be less bitter you'll be less frustrated you know so so what i'm saying is in life i'm like you know the least controlling person actually what i think is more important is to have a an easy relationship with um fate fortune you know the greeks used to they really believed in this thing called fortune that you know so imagine a graph right and i i love this image and it comes up i wrote a book on on happiness and this i just found this a recurring image um from from the ancient greeks onward so imagine you've got like um an x like a x your x axis and your y axis right is it that or is it that way remember but so along one axis you've got say the y axis is your aims the things you want to do the things you want to achieve right so that's like that axis this axis down here is just stuff it's fortunate stuff that life throws back at you stuff you can't control what we are told again and again and again is if you believe in yourself enough and if you set your goals clearly enough you can sort of the life you lead this line will be kind of up here somewhere really in line with what your goals are um and i mean that can work sometimes and that's great when it does but what you're not then respecting is this the stuff that just happens that you don't have under your control so what happens is like when people if people like we call people losers now right like they've lost we used to call them unfortunately there was a slightly more sympathetic approach to um when things don't go right in people's lives so what i think is important is that actually what we live is an x equals y line right we we um we try and do certain things and we try and pull the line a bit up here and then life pulls back a little bit and you can either let that drive you mad or you can just let that settle in as a kind of that's what life is right that's what life is which is whether you make your peace with that or not are you like a like a dog that's pulling at the lead and like this all the time or are you kind of trotting along a bit more harmoniously with it so this i think this is i think a really uh a really big thing and that same idea comes up do you know michael she said me hi he wrote flow there yes yes yes so he's he started like amazing yeah athletes musicians chess players anyone that had like a zen state like a state of flow where they felt this is the best version of me and i'm achieving the most and and what he saw was that they're in this x equals y line of uh you can imagine like you've got your your skills on this side you've got the challenges you're facing on this side when your skills roughly match your challenges you settle into this flow state right you lose any sense of like time and those things uh regardless of what the skill is like a lot of people don't see anything you're like all that just go yeah you're just in the zone you're in the zone right if your skills are greater than the challenges you kind of get bored if the challenges are greater than your skills you get anxious but there is this x equals y line uh schopenhauer like great uh 18th 19th century um german philosopher uh said you know if you i guess it's so relevant today when we're just told believe in yourself and set your goals like you've said if you're playing game of chess you if you start out you start out with a plan but if you just stick to that plan all your life if you sit that plan for the game it's nonsense because like someone else is playing so you have to adjust right so again you've kind of got this idea of moving home freud freud who started you know psychoanalysis he wasn't trying to make people happy he figured life is pretty much unhappy a lot of the time suffering yeah yeah so he said well i want to restore what he called natural unhappiness as opposed to unnatural unhappiness that people have naturally just natural and happiness you call it and none of this sounds like in the uk yeah like yes like living with our weather in the uk and our teeth um but you know and it doesn't sound kind of like you you don't sell a lot of books with those kind of it's a sort of pessimism it's like a strategic pessimism it's been called you know but i think actually it's a little bit of that is valuable because otherwise it's like the faith healer that says if you don't continue to feel better it's your fault you've let yourself down because you didn't have enough faith and if you swap out faith for self-belief like i don't know if you're a fan of like you know the secret but it's the same model yeah yeah and it says quite explicitly if if these things don't come to you it's your fault it's your fault it is your fault because you you let go of that self belief and it's a recipe i think for anxiety and disaster do you face a lot of anxiety in your life i don't no i i don't particularly i i i have the opposite problem that i'm i'm you're too relaxed i'm so good at avoiding anxiety how do you avoid it because i just have this natural constitution i just avoid stress but then i don't the difficulty is getting stuff done then isn't it like anxiety is really important because you need a little pressure to complete things yeah that's our signal that something needs changing in life right now i have a deadline and so i've got to do this thing or yeah something's not working how do you change you don't change your job you don't know it's wrong unless you start to you know hate your job you don't cross the road on your own without letting go of your mother's hand first right something has to die in order for something new to to live right and like i'm 47 um so did you get kind of into the middle bit of life you start to notice you're kind of like your ego has to now just settle down and you actually putting yourself in service of something that's bigger than you like whether it's you know your kids or a or a passion or whatever it is that those things start to become important let you know things have to sort of you have to let go of some things to you know to um to move on to to move into you know growth but you don't grow unless you embrace some level of anxiety it's tough so i find that difficult because like i'm i'm too the opposite and i i need to embrace a bit more anxiety probably in life do you feel like uh did you used to have a bigger ego at one point have you like started to kill the ego off you know i was a magician it's just awful it's embarrassing you know trying to please people or trying to like oh trying to impress it's just terrible the bottom line of magic is look at me aren't i impressive that's it that's all it has to say it is the quickest most fraudulent route to impressing people and there's a wonderful magicians and i you know i love great magic of course but there's a lot of grown-up lonely children in that world because you you're you you learn to have you know show somebody something that is a cheat you know it might be actually really easy and they go you're amazing you're amazing and that's quite an addictive uh cycle so um i think i've i've hopefully let go of some of that but i know i was i was i was unbearable like i couldn't why did you have a conversation without doing tricks really yeah because i just wanted to because you wanted that it was like a drug it just felt like it always felt good it was that hit yeah and like we don't like people that are trying to be impressive and that was like such an obvious truth that i just hadn't quite realized we like people that are kind and we like people that are nice to be around good listeners and yeah yeah not always trying to get all the attention or whatever right exactly yeah yeah and interestingly we don't like people that necessarily like us because we always try and be like people that we try and be like people we admire to get them to like us so we we instinctively try and you know be like them and actually it's not really what we necessarily have drawn to people i don't think why were you uh so into magic or learning about all this stuff in the first place i remember hearing a little bit about as a really insecure like kid who needed to impress and feel solid um i was uh i i saw a hypnotist in my first year at university and i it kind of so i was studying law i was supposed to be a lawyer and this i saw this guy and it just ticked all these boxes it was performance i'd never really thought of myself as performing but i think that i needed that and the control side of it was like it was it was a great show it wasn't making people look stupid but it was it was nonetheless i kind of a bit of me was like all those the kids that i found like intimidating at school those kind of sporty sporty guys yeah they're now like the they're the ones that tend to respond really well to this kind of stuff so now i'm in control you know it was all that kind of stuff it was um and hopefully you know hopefully i've grown out of some of that at least that's why you got into in the first place from insecurities and it was like absolutely yeah wow when did you realize that you had like a gift for this because did you were you just all of a sudden funny and interesting and a great storyteller in the first like few months or did you bomb a lot and get embarrassed even more and uh it isn't a gift i don't think i think it's it's like if you have that insecure thing or whatever that makes you start playing the piano right like probably not everyone's going to play the piano but anybody can could in theory you just got to put in thousands of hours now whatever whatever the figure is today um but not everyone's going to do that so uh it yeah it clicked for me and it um but that it was a slow process i remember one weird seminal moment i was the guy at university that would hypnotize you right that was my thing so i would people would come over and i i was learning hypnosis so i'd sort of you know practice it all right repricing every day just all the time yeah yeah all the time all the time so and i would leave like if they were good if they responded well i'd leave them with this suggestion if you come back and i click my fingers and tell you to go to sleep you'll go straight back into the sleep state right if people are highly suggestible that will that will work with them so and it just would you know speed up the process at a certain time and this guy came one week and i thought i'd seen him before so i sat down i said click i click my fingers go to sleep and he went he went out and he went to sleep when he went to sleep well he's not sleeping he went into this guy yeah one last thing his relaxed state didn't we but essentially went into a trance that's what it look you did the you know he slumped out and we did whatever we were doing i can't remember what it was maybe you know he wanted to give up smoking or something like that and then it was only afterwards we were talking about it and i realized i hadn't met this guy before so how did he because it like i don't know magic fingers or something nothing and i just realized it was just my my kind of commitment to that i just my confidence my belief that he was going to respond just and the fact he was very suggestible was just like a fortuitous coincidence and that was that was a moment of going right the key to this is not these like long scripts that i've been learning and it's not really the technique as such it's just something about that person's ongoing experience in the moment which i'm i am kind of it's up to me to manage that and if i'm so now on stage i get people up and i shake hands with them and they collapse out on the floor hypnotized whatever that means you know there's a whole other discussion as to what it is but i know that that moment is stepping up on stage it's bewildering and then suddenly all right there's lights and they're like yeah and they just yeah all that and desperate for direction desperate for clear instruction which is like a gift if you're a hypnotist because then you know that whatever you say or just unconsciously you know yeah wow someone tried to hypnotize me once and i was like i want to be hypno i was like you were too enthusiastic well i was like first off i was like i never want to be hypnotized and i'm watching that well this was back in the day yeah then i met a guy who was like hypnotist and he was like you know well i'd love to like show you and guide you if you want i was like all right i'll try it i'm open to it like i just don't know if it's gonna work and he's like well you need to come to the space that it is going to work that's what he said to me he was like i want you to yeah you know you want to be this this is something you want like we're going to work on whatever and he did the whole like arm pull thing or whatever and it just wasn't working like i was trying to pulling your arms what was this like a quick like oh that's not like a stitch it's just like a little you know i don't know like a little pull where you can't follow those readings don't break the hand yeah and um but at the same point i was like okay i'll just like try to like go along with it and and really just try to more relax in like the process and just try to like be relaxing breathe and relax and um he took me through like a pro like a visualization of like becoming your your greatest self he actually put me through an actually nice process because i love the power of visualization i've been doing it as an athlete since as long as i can remember and i believe in the suggestion the story we tell ourselves the projection i would say this is how i'm going to show up tomorrow with the game and i'd walk myself through every move every play every whatever it may be and see myself performing well i'd also be putting years of hard work to back it so it wasn't just like i'm gonna do great with no work but recrea we reaffirming that belief and so he put me through a nice little kind of guided visualization meditation whatever i'll call it and he was like i want you to imagine the greatest version of yourself standing right in front of you and in that moment i'd actually never heard the way he told it before then i was like wow i could see myself like with a hundred percent confidence calm poised like the best looking version of myself whatever just like standing perfectly not slouched just every part of me the best version and i was like wow i can push myself to be a greater person by seeing it first and then taking the action steps to becoming that yeah so i was like that was a nice little as long as you build in this kind of sub clause that cause like people can set these kind of goals that last forever joseph campbell i'm sure you know big rider myth said you know you can spend your life climbing a ladder and then realize you had the ladder against the wrong wall you know there's like so there's it's i mean it's wild i was climbing the ladder right yeah why are we climbing this or yeah well we yeah we spend a lot of time focusing on stuff like this we have this image of this version of ourselves that we're moving towards and it's always out there somewhere it's kind of like all those things that like well that look it's helpful like if you can have a self-image of course why not have a great self-image because we tend to make terrible ones but it's just an image it's just a picture in the head it might as well be a good one yeah but uh in the meantime there's also like the here and now and there's like making yeah your relationship to the to the parts of you that aren't right is or don't feel right and making peace with that and understanding that in a different way if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here and also check out our free pdf the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life download it right here deny a negative that's not there you plant that baby that's why you have to know the difference between a denial in a straight

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 261,783

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, How to gain confidence, how to gain repsect, gain instant repsect evan carmichael, Chris Voss, chris voss masterclass, be confident in any situation, persuasion

Id: eumLSr9Srwk

Length: 94min 3sec (5643 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021