Sharon Pearson first met behavioural mindset expert John Assaraf around ten years ago, when she “cornered’ him at one of his events and invited him to lunch. As she recalls it in 2020, “you were curious and open. That’s one of the things I fell in love with about you, wanting to brainstorm about how do we make it bigger and better.” A decade on and in vastly different circumstances, Sharon and John brainstorm again on Perspectives podcast ‘The question that changed my life’. John talks how he went from a high school dropout to building five multi-million dollar companies and what success looks like today. For him, it’s his strong marriage to wife Maria, their two boys, and mental, emotional, physical and spiritual good health. The conversation ranges from both losing a parent during COVID to business strategies, generosity, neural networks, interest vs commitment and authenticity. John says a mentor told him to give as much as he can to help other people: “I seek to be a go getter but also a go giver. I’ve discovered I can’t outgive the universe.”
Zero: BEGINNINGS
Sharon introduces a “very dear friend of mine” who she met about ten years ago and has stayed in touch with: “He’s a phenomenal human being and thought leader.”
—Classic rags to riches story, that today sees him regarded as one of the world’s leading behavioural mindset experts. John has built five multi-million dollar companies, written two New York Times bestsellers, sat next to Ellen DeGeneres on her talk show and worked on eight movies including 2006 hit The Secret. Founder of Neurogym and his latest book Innercise promises to help people recognise and release emotional blocks. We talked about all things mindset and overcoming fear and procrastination. It’s a very inspirational conversation dedicated to being the best selves we can be and fulfilling our truest potential.
—Sharon notices people in this space are geared up for short term and not to be in the game in 20 years. They are very excited about volume and big numbers on the front end but not about the stick rate and longevity: “I find it hard to mentor them. I am the reverse. All our attention is on the back end, making sure the experience is so good they only want to stay and rave about us.”
—John says the internet space where you can market to everyone in the world and “say I can make 200K in a weekend … the greed factor comes in, and you are thinking about that new car or second house or amazing trip. You are making decisions based on what your lifestyle may be like today and it’s sexy to think of that vs how am I going to build a business which is recurring and repeatable.”
—Both discuss how they met probably ten years ago: Sharon “managed to corner” John for lunch after one of his events. She had read The Answer. “And you were curious and open. That’s one of the things I fell in love with about you, wanting to brainstorm about how do we make it bigger and better. Can you talk to openness and curiosity and how it’s playing out for you?”
—John has been on Larry King’s TV show eight times and asked Larry what makes him so good at what he does: “He said two things that were really interesting. Number one, I ask the questions the audience wants me to ask because that’s what they’re thinking about. Two, I am just insatiably curious and I just want to know stuff and have a full idea of the things that are of interest to me.” References the saying ‘success leaves clues’, saying 90 per cent of what makes successful people successful is the same and 10 per cent is different: “That ten per cent is a big clue so I am fascinated by finding little things and big things. Ways of understanding that things that work for you may not work for me.” Says a mentor told him to give as much as he can to help other people: “I seek to be a go getter but also a go giver. I’ve discovered I can’t outgive the universe.”
—Sharon recounts how when she started out as a coach 17 years ago she told a potential client she didn’t know if she could give him what he wanted until he figured out what he valued. A lot of times that match gets reversed, people thinking, ‘How do I get the sale?’ instead of ‘How can I serve you?’ To me that values conversation is the only one that matters if you want to do well for a long time—how do you provide value and how do you show up ready to give it?” Asks John to speak to the attitude of generosity and giving.
10.16 ATTITUDE OF GENEROSITY
—John recounts how when he first got into selling 40 years ago as a real estate agent his mentor told him not to come into the office if he was thinking how much money he would make but always to think ‘How can I serve somebody on the end of the phone?’ Selling is doing something for somebody, not to somebody. That was my first frame I learned about selling.”
Second lesson was when he wrote The Answer and it became a New York Times bestseller. Copywriter Jay Abraham asked why John was giving away so much amazing content: “Forget about how many copies it sold, the number of people that ended up buying programs, coaching, consulting, because of that book … it was millions of dollars. So whenever you put that much value into the marketplace, people get a charge to see that. Baseball players, cricket players, football players they don’t hold back. They play full out, put it all on the field. Put it on the field and watch what happens.”
—Sharon looks at it from a perspective of ‘If I have your back, you’ll have mine.’
—John says as people get older and wiser, “the more you show up with your authentic self to really help others. Everybody wants their best foot forward. Why not put it forward with an open heart, a giving spirit so you can enhance somebody else’s life somehow without trading? I’m not trading, I am giving, there isn’t an expected return. I am going to give because it’s the right thing to do. Operate from a place of abundance rather than scarcity.”
—Sharon: “The more I give and that’s received with love and respect the more I want to turn up, vs someone who is very reserved with me or still wanting to suss me out.”
—John says the people you give things to might not be the ones to give anything back, which is fine: “Can you believe that we just got invited to a week-long trip to Sardinia on this 150 foot yacht of this person we just met? That is a giving we didn’t expect.”
—Sharon notes John is talking this year about helping people overcome procrastination. She says procrastination 27 years ago cost her ten years of her life: “It cost me a feeling of joy about my life, it cost me a lot about my health. It cost me feeling I could live a full life.”
—John discussion his passion “being the neuroscience and neuropsychology of stuff “ and says procrastination is an effect of one of three causes: an arousal mechanism in the brain of about one per cent of the population, self image, self worth and self esteem, and fear. “So we have all these unconscious patterns that are activating the brakes of our lives and that’s what causes procrastination. So if you work on understanding which one or two or possibly three you are, then you focus on the cause then eliminate it.”
21.29: PROCRASTINATION CONTINUED
—After Sharon notes procrastination is the outcome, almost a symptom of the internal neurology, John talks about self image: “Who would you have to believe you are in order not to procrastinate? As soon as we start to shift the questions we ask ourselves … and stop minimising ourselves and create a healthy self image that matches the vision and the goal we want, the resistance starts to go away.”
—He says you can use affirmations and declarations, and mental contrasting techniques to retrain your brain. He says if you tell yourself that was the old me, this is the new me, 100 times over the next 100 days it is possible to “activate neural networks” in the brain: “I’m building a brand new neural network that overrides the old network, possibly, that is actually how we do it.” Compares it to an actor who learns a script by practicing over and over: “What are the tools, techniques and processes you are using right now to become the person that’s capable of achieving his or her goals? Most people have the goal but they don’t have the process by which they become that goal and create that unification between their head, their heart, their gut and their behaviours.”
—Sharon asks John how much mental rehearsals have played in what he has created.
—John pulls out his Exceptional Life blueprint and says he refers to its 43 pages of pictures, prayers, goals, visions every day. He also has it on his phone: “People ask, ‘Why do you do it? You’ve already achieved so much success.’ It’s because I’ve achieved so much success that I want to maintain it. If you get into really great shape physically as soon as you stop you get out of shape. Why would I want to take neural muscles that are strong and weaken them? Why would I want to stop doing the things that work?”
—Sharon shares the analogy that works for her that she’s looking to build a mental muscle around. “I see a country road that’s all grown over with grass, it’s rutted. Do I want that or do I want a smooth ride? The only way I’m going to get the smooth ride is if we keep driving there eventually it’s going to become smoother. That’s really worked for me for nearly two decades, this mental rehearsal idea. Sometimes the dreams are really big and they seem a stretch but I don’t have to be all of that today. I just need to mentally rehearse heading in that direction. I never could have dreamed that 17 years ago but I could mentally rehearse the next step and the more I rehearsed that the more comfortable I got with it and the more real and possible it became for me. This landscape is rich enough to carry me forward.”
—John notes Sharon’s visual is all based on the science of neuroplasticity, where our brains are wired to create new networks. “Think of mental rehearsing as developing a … neuropath and the more you create it the more you can add more ‘neu-roads’ to them and reinforce them. So that’s the science of neuroplasticity, we’re making new connections every day.” Discusses the default mode network which “becomes the new way of being … if we want to achieve a greater level of success we have to change the patterns that are in our brain, and that’s when you can ask questions to change the perspective. You can behave differently, you can use mental contrasting, mindfulness, visualisations, meditations, affirmations, declarations. The key is to understand we will never outperform out own hidden self-image and if we do the lottery effect comes in and we sabotage the success.”
29.57: SOMETHING PROFOUND
—Sharon says one way she does it is to have people around her who she aspired to be like or who inspire her. At the beginning of her coaching career she was curious about how others created their success and often travelled to the US where people “were having these conversations every day. It was nothing for them to think about doing well. It was an expectation and not a hopeful wish. They weren’t self- sabotaging so it became normal for me to ask that question for myself. So I kind of took a two-step path to get there until it was okay for me to feel that way about me.
—John talks mirror neurons activating: “Anything you can read, watch, listen, be in the environment of successful people you aspire to have lives like, do it. That is one of the tickets to success. I eliminated all people in my life who are physical or emotional or financial vampires. I don’t want that in my environment anymore. I know what it was doing to my brain, including somebody I loved very deeply as a family member.”
—Sharon: “If there’s anything I put my trajectory and life down to it’s trying to become self-aware. People I want to be around are striving for self-awareness, striving to know themselves, to be in touch with who they are and who they want to become. That is almost the most important conversation we can have as human beings: are we nurturing an environment in here to allow ourselves to know ourselves and know who we want to become, the best version of ourselves we can become?”
33.28: AWARENESS GIVES US CHOICE
—John talks how awareness gives us choice and choice is what gives us freedom. He discusses deliberate conscious evolution: “We’re in a place right now where we have learned more about the human brain in the last ten or twenty years than we’ve known in five million years of humans evolving on planet Earth. We can deliberately manipulate our brain to evolve faster than normal and we’re just entering that era now.” Talks augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, hologram technology. “For the time being here’s still stuff we can do to become more aware, to be mindful, vs being a victim, and that’s really what gives you a freedom, to know I can choose my thoughts, I can shift my emotions on demand if I learn to and I can act or not act based on my deliberate choices.”
—Sharon notices people joining TCI now are proud of not just breaking away from negative thoughts but from seeking approval of others.
—John: “It comes back to insecurity … I’m going to stretch here. The majority of people in the world don’t have a healthy environment to grow in. It’s an environment of scarcity.”
if we are wired unconsciously or on subconscious levels to have a scarcity mindset or a fear-based mindset at the core of how we operate, that’s going to win out over logic and information. Information doesn’t make people change.”
—Sharon: “How do we help someone who is recognising this pattern in themselves?”
—John tells the story of being 19 and being in trouble with the law and leaving high school in Year 11: “I didn’t do well in school, I was doing breaking and entering and doing drugs and selling drugs.” His brother set up a lunch with a real estate developer called Allan Brown in Canada’s Toronto. Over lunch Allan asked John his vision and goals for life: “I want to get a job, get my own apartment, I’d love to buy my own car.” Then he was asked at what age he wants to retire and how much net worth he wanted. “I said I want o retire at age 45, I want a net worth of three million dollars. I want to travel the world, I want a Mercedes Benz, I want to retire my parents.” (He was inspired by Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous.) Mr Brown asked one question: “’Are you interested in achieving these goals or are you committed?’ And I said, ‘What’s the difference?’ And he said, ‘If you are interested you will do what’s easy and convenient and if you are committed you have to upgrade your knowledge and skills, you have to have beliefs that match the goals you have, you have to create habits to achieve those goals.’ And that was the beginning of my career as a real estate agent and someone who built an 85 office, 1200-person real estae company over the next ten years doing four and a half billion a year in sales. One question, one answer, one lunch, one decision.”
44.40: TAKING ACTION AND COLONISING MARS
—John talks the other commitments Allan Brown had him make: moving cities, paying for a real estate course and the excuses he tried to make to get out of those: “The power of commitment and the power of a decision, having the right mentor who really cares and having a path to follow.”
—He says other than colonising Mars we now pretty much how to achieve anything we want to: “We know how to start a business and make it successful, how to become a coach and make it successful, how to have a great relationship and sustain it, how to write a book and make it a bestseller. Do we know the how to of just about any goal we can think of? If the answer is yes, that means the blueprint exists and if the blueprint exists, the how to is not your problem. The commitment is. If you are committed to a solution, a different life, a better life, the answer of how to already exists. The fact you may not know it is irrelevant.”
—Sharon notes that is “very very powerful. What do you say to someone going through the ‘but’ and the ‘and’ … there comes a point where you hear the message enough and it just comes upon you to just seize your life for you.”
—John says many years ago Sharon shared a story at his Brainathon event about having a little voice on her shoulder: “It’s amazing how many people allow that little voice, the little them, to hold them hostage, not realising it’s time to tell that little person, ‘Thank you for serving me in the past but now you can leave. I am going to step into the bigger vision of myself and find a way to make it happen and fulfil my potential.”
—Sharon says one of the best things that really changed he life was realising that little voice, “that little gremlin”, wasn’t her. “I trained my gremlin to say what it said to me. I encouraged it, I nurtured it, I welcomed it, I paid attention to it for hours. I grew my gremlin into the monster it became. The moment I realised I had been feeding it, I realised I could stop and start nurturing something else.”
—John asks anyone stuck in a self-destructive dialogue to know “the best time to kill a monster is when it’s a baby. Tell it to be quiet, develop this healthy new voice that will empower me and construct a new vision of me.”
—Sharon learned how to become a coach to manage that voice: “I didn’t have huge aspirations. It was, ‘If I could learn to master my mind that would be the gamechanger.’ I had problems around how fearful I was, how unwell I was, how I didn’t create any health or values, I was too afraid to leave my house. There were all these remarkable voices around me but I managed to tune them all out. I spent the next twelve months managing this until it worked for me.”
—John discusses Einstein vs Frankenstein and explains Innercise: “It’s about understanding these are the parts of our brain that make us human and parts of our brain we can learn to manage and master better.”
56.08 FAMILY MATTERS
—John says his mother died in May of the coronavirus, aged 87: “It was a very sad time and I was in a lot of grief.” He said goodbye on a mobile phone and watched the funeral via Zoom. “I spoke to my mother every day for the last 40 years. That was challenging, at the same time she didn’t suffer, it wasn’t prolonged.” He and wife Maria have been doing road trips and working from home. “My business has been great, my own health has been superb, my wife is superb, my kids are great. There are interesting polarities this year, I still feel grateful and blessed every day I wake up and get another day above ground.”
—Sharon shares that her own father died in September and she wasn’t able to go over to Perth to be with her “without spending two weeks in a hotel room without a guard. No fresh air, dealing with losing my father and being alone for two weeks. It didn’t add up so I stayed here and we had a lovely service on Facetime and we spent an hour together when we knew he weas being cremated so we created as much connection and togetherness as we possibly could. Father’s Day was three days before he passed away and I got to have a great chat. I felt I had done what I could and loved him as much as I could. I felt complete around that. There was no regret I was holding onto. It was a really beautiful release.”
—John talks about US mental health expert Dr Ken Druck who wrote The Real Rules of Life: “He says we have this idea of what life is going to be like—get married, have kids, our kids will do x, y and z, and our kids will take care of us in old age. Then all of a sudden something like this happens and that’s the way it’s supposed to happen and that’s the real rule of life. We have these concepts about how it’s supposed to be and this happens. You and I are experiencing something similar about losing parents and we had to accept and surrender and not have anger and resentment around it.
1.03.06 ADAPTING
—Sharon agrees with John that the human race seems to be geared for things in a certain way and to be able to count on certainty.
—He says it “goes back to we prefer to master disappointment rather than master change. And mastering change and adapting right now is one of the greatest skills you have to learn. My belief is we are on this precipice of some major shifts … it’s hotter than it’s ever been. Our political landscape and unrest around the world is really really serious stuff. In the United States this is the first time I could ever understand civil war. I can see how a brother would kill another brother.”
—Sharon notes there’s also less trust in institutions to “latch onto” to give us stability. “I just find blind trust isn’t working anymore. When I was younger I was okay with blind trust and trusted the institutions would take care of me.”
—John: “There’s blind trust and then there’s out brain wants to conserve energy and we are cognitively lazy.” Says now COVID has made people exhausted, including with rules which change constantly.
—Sharon: “I’m exhausted going to get my groceries let alone all the things I have to think about right now. I developed a really clear purpose for this time. I have planned for two year that this will be like this, so I am mentally more prepared for the longer thing. Talks about the purpose she and JP have and asks what John and his wife Maria are doing.
—The Assarafs are all about health and are exercising every day, getting proper sleep and making sure their immune systems are topped up: “First and foremost is spiritual, emotional, mental and physical health.” He is meditating daily and limiting the amount of news he watches. The couple has been on roadtrips and “fortunately we fell deeper into love. We happen to like each other a lot and love each other a lot. We’ve been watching a lot of movies together, and reading next to each other and sharing our thoughts and opinions. This may not sound great, we have deliberately chosen to stay away from certain friends. Some of our friends that may not be as happily married, shall we say, have become psychic vampires.” Wants to make sure his environment is as healthy as possible.
—John reveals what he’s told his sons who are 25 and 23 during COVID: “Times are challenging and tough and this too shall pass. We are a resilient species and this is our time to surrender, to forgive, accept and take the time to become more aware, more at peace with ourselves, healthier, more focussed and this too shall pass. Jim Rohn the philosopher said one of the things you learn about squirrels is they plan for winter. They’re collecting as many nuts as they can in the summer, they are planning a season or two ahead. Work out what you can do in this time that you didn’t have time to do when you were so busy, busy, busy. Now you have a few hours extra a day, what are you doing to become better, more loving, more caring, kind, peaceful, mindful? Don’t keep feeding that little voice that is going to become a monster.”
—Sharon: “This time will pass. I’ve become quite good at yoga, which I never do. I’ve been flopping around on the floor and having lots a fun, it’s been a great opportunity to move through it rather that fighting it.”