Innercise: Rewiring the Brain for Health Success

Introduction to John Ashraf and Neuro Gym 0:00

Hi everyone. I'm Doctor Sanjeev Goyal, and today we're interviewing John Ashraf. In the last 35 years, John Ashcroft has built five multi-million dollar companies, including growing Remax of Indiana to 4.5 billion in annual sales and taking Bamboo Icon public on the Nasdaq with the market cap of 2.5 billion. John has appeared on many television programs, including Larry King Live and Anderson Cooper 360, and was featured in the blockbuster movie and book The Secret Seen by over half a billion people worldwide, and the documentary quest for success with Sir Richard Branson.

He's also the bestselling author of four books, including New York Times bestsellers Having It All and The Answer. And in our exercise today is the founder and CEO of Neuro Gym. John specializes in helping entrepreneurs and individuals unlock their fullest potential using the most powerful, evidence based brain training tools and programs in the world. I hope you enjoyed today's talk with them. I'm really excited about this talk. How are you, John? I'm doing great. Doctor, how are you? Good, good.

I'd love to, just. If you could tell us a little bit about, I mean, you know, the, the, the whole, the brain training part that you're really an expert in this and how to kind of get the results you want by, I guess, reprograming your brain. But I'd love to understand. Maybe just the background. How did you even get into this? Like, what's the story behind how what got you interested? Oh, my. Many years ago, about 38 years ago, I was working really hard to try and get ahead in life. I was 22, and, I was working, working, working, stressed out,

Ulcerative Colitis and the Mind-Body Connection 1:49

probably partying to too much as a 22 year old, not eating well, not exercising. And I ended up with, severe ulcerative colitis. So I end up with ulcers in my colon, and some people know what that is. But basically what happens is I had inflammation of, you know, my colon. And so there wasn't a lot of room for food to go through or feces to go through. So I had zero bowel control movement. So I might be, you know, in a meeting and I'd have this pain in my gut and then I would literally shit in my pants.

And whether I was in a car, in an elevator, in a restaurant or in bed, I didn't have enough time to get to the bathroom. And so, I had bleeding ulcers. And, for two years, I was taking these pills. They were called back then. Salads appear in pills. I was taking 20 pills a day, to try and reduce the inflammation. I was doing two, cortisol, our cortisone enemas. Morning and night. And then once a month, I would go to the hospital to do a sigmoidoscopy. All right, so that's I'm giving you some of the the discomfort and pain that I was in.

And I remember my doctor, he was an internist. His name is Doctor Who. And he said to me says, you know, you're going to have to be on these pills probably for the rest of your life. And then it got so severe that at one point in one of the, sigmoidoscopy, when they were looking inside the wrong side that they should be looking in, he said to me, says, listen, this is looking really bad. It's about 30, inches into your colon from your rectum going up. And there's a chance we might have to remove this.

I'm like, oh, well, what? I'm 22 years old. Like, what do you mean? You have to remove this? And so he's scared that, you know, no pun intended, but he scared the shit out of me. And so I started to do some research. And this was two years of suffering in pain and being a victim of ulcerative colitis. And somebody asked me a question, and the question was, what do you know? What's causing it? And I said, well, they said, it's probably stress related. And when I did a lot of research, one of the possibilities was that it was stress related.

But another possibility was that it was an autoimmune disorder. That was a genetic predisposition that I had. And then somebody said to me, I want you to watch this show that's coming up on TV. And there were a bunch of doctors at the time talk about something called psycho neuro immunology, big word, right, for the mind body connection. And so I started doing more research on the mind body connection. And I said, okay, so let's say that it's stress, and the stress is activating a genetic predisposition that I have affecting my autoimmune system.

And it's showing up as colitis as the effect. What if I took care of the cause? So I started to eat better. I started to exercise. I started to visualize every single day. My colon actually becoming normal and healthy. And I created this affirmation from this is going back to 1983. Okay? My body and all its organs were created by the infinite intelligence in my subconscious mind. It created all my muscles, tissues, bones and organs and it has the ability to make me whole and perfect. Now, amazing is the creative intelligence within me.

I am now perfectly healthy. I'm reciting something to you from 1983. I wrote it out every day. I would read it. I recorded it, I would see it and visualize it five weeks later diet, exercise, visualization, emotional possession and reading. This affirmation. Every day, all symptoms are gone. All symptoms are gone. I took my pills, threw them into the garbage, and I've only had one relapse when I was stressed out in 1998, okay, doing a business deal, and as soon as my symptoms came, I realized this is an effect of the stress that's activating the colitis.

And within 4 or 5 days, it was gone again. So that was the beginning of me understanding that, you know, I have this hundred billion dollar brain, right? A bio computer that if I can train it better, it can do unbelievable magical things. And so instead of being a victim of my dis ease, I became very efficient at managing the effects by focusing on the cause and with starting with my self-talk, emotional regulation, focus and behavior. So John, you were mentioning these affirmations you did with regards to getting over that ulcerative colitis.

Do you think it's about the affirmations actually changing the programing of your brain? Or that because you're doing the affirmations you're now more aware of, you know, making behavior changes, and that's why you're having these types of benefits? So I think it's a combination, right? The affirmations of themselves, like every word that we use, activates neurochemicals in our brains, activates the electrical activity, the neurochemicals in our brain, the the neurochemicals in our bloodstream, which causes how we feel.

So when I am using affirmations

Affirmations, Visualization, and Brain Reprogramming 7:49

like my body and all its organs were created by the infinite intelligence and my subconscious mind, it knows how to heal me, right? I'm not only stating a fact of truth that I now believe, but I am instructing my brain on how to behave and what to focus on instead of focusing on my disease, my dis ease, and how shitty I feel and how you know, how it hurts and how it's affecting my life in a negative way, which reinforces that pattern. Now I am depending on my own language patterns, my own focus, my own awareness, my own instruction of where to pay, my attention.

And so they say that energy flows to where attention goes. So if I'm using my energy to pay attention to being healthy, vibrant, energetic, totally healthy instead of the disease, now what happens is I'm actually activating the neurochemicals associated with being healthy. And so, whether I'm activating my reward system because I see myself healthy, I feel myself healthy. And in my mind I'm replaying, you know, a visualization of being healthy from a neuroscience and neuropsychology perspective.

Visualization is simulation, right. And so I'm simulating in my mind being healthy now, my body has to follow the thoughts and the emotions and what I am using my brain for. So what happens with a lot of people is they have these preconceived notions, or they have these illnesses and diseases, and they keep focusing on that and they wonder, why is this not going away? Why is this getting worse? And that's because you keep recreating the very thing you don't want. I like to focus on how do I train my brain to focus on what I do want?

How do I focus on the outcomes I do want? But then I also have to back it up with behavior. Right? Because now reinforcing the neural networks around the right thoughts, the right emotions, the right feelings, the right sensations and the right behavior. So I don't suggest you just, you know, sit there and imagine and hope and pray is your only strategy. We know that for that neuroplasticity switch, you know, to activate challenges. Okay. Fun is okay, but actually behaving in ways that are consistent with what it is that we want to achieve.

That's really the little piece that cements that neural pathway and reinforce it, which creates that default mode of being healthy. If that's what you choose to have. Do you think that there's, a type? Do you think like somebody is going to be successful in using this type of training? They have to have a certain amount of pre homework done or they have to be, you know, or some, some that make them more suitable, like, you know, so they have better games. Well, there's a lot of work, for example, around the placebo effect, as you know.

Right. What's really interesting with some of the recent placebo studies is the nobody knows, you know, placebo effect is, you know, they give, you know, half of the people, you know, a pill that might reduce inflammation and the other half will get a pill that's a sugar pill. And just about the same number of people, you know, receive the benefits as if they took the real pill. So the inflammation symptoms and markers go down. Now, here's something new that's recent. Even when somebody knows that they're taking the placebo pill, they still get the benefits of them.

As if they were taking a real pill to reduce, let's say, inflammation. And so there's something that's happening in our brain that even when we know that something that we are taking is not a real substance based on a scientific, FDA approved drug, okay, in the United States, it still works for us. So the question is, does auto suggestion help anybody? And the answer is it appears to be yes, regardless of whether you have a grade school education, high school, university or PhD, it doesn't make a difference when we're talking about, as I mentioned, the human brain, the brain works the same.

So what if I could shift my awareness to a more positive frame right from I don't know how to? I'll learn how I can't because it's hard to I know it's hard, and I'll still do a little bit any time we shift language patterns, we either put the brakes on or the gas on of our potential. So when we're talking about retraining our brains, if you think about how did our brains become conditioned, like when you and I were born, were we born with any beliefs? No. We were. You born with a self image? No. Were you born with any habits?

No. Were you born with any fears? No, for the most part. And so we develop these neural patterns or networks that from the, from the early years of imprinting, modeling and experiential years, we created a map of reality and a map of what we expect. So we expect, you know, back then at 60 or 65, you're on your way down and you're aging. I mean, says who? Well, says whom is people in, you know, the 60s, 70s and 80s. Well, now, you know, your 60s and 70s could be like your 30s or 40s or 50s. Now, if you don't believe that, then it's not true for you, and you are going to behave in alignment with your beliefs, not the truth, but your beliefs that are your truth.

And so is it possible, since a belief is not nothing more than a reinforced neural pattern, that we have a lot of evidence for from our parents, our teachers, our experiences, and more than that, the meaning that we constructed during the experiences. Is it possible? And this is a question I've been asking for 35 years, and I know the answer. Is it possible to release disempowering beliefs or negative ones or destructive ones? Well, of course it is. Is it possible to release disempowering habits?

I've given up refined sugar. I've given up alcohol because I was drinking a bottle of wine a night. I have given up so many things that I was either addicted to, you know, or were destructive by recalibrating my own brain. At one point I was 243.12 pounds years ago, 33% body fat, borderline hypertensive, borderline diabetic. I was going downhill and picking up speed into the ground and I said, hold on, stop. I am creating this reality. I'm achieving success in these areas of my life. But look at the effect called my body.

Let's change that. So I took a couple of years and I said, let's rewire my self-image, let's rewire my habits. Let's read wire my behaviors. And I just said, how do I take the evidence based methods to activate that neuroplasticity switch to change my self-image to take the beliefs that I had that may have served me for whatever reason, in a period of time in my life, and change my beliefs and reinforce a new set of patterns around my beliefs and my behaviors. And I released 45 pounds of fat. And I've been the healthiest I've been in my adult life.

Now, as I mentioned to you before, the, you know, before the show, my focus now is a six pack at 60, which is not supposed to be normal. I didn't have a six pack at 16. I didn't have a six pack at 26, 36, 46 or 56. And I just said, okay, for my 60th birthday, I'm gonna have a six pack at 60 just a few months away. And, and I'll have that way before then, but regardless of that, our own self-concept is really, really important and really taking control of the most powerful bio computer and organism which can change is one of the greatest gifts we can have, and use and become better operators of our brain.

So we're we've taught in medical school and all through my training and our training and all that, the beliefs are very fixed, like they're very difficult to change. And what you're saying is pretty revolutionary that we can actually change these core beliefs like, I am not worthy, I am not lovable. I mean these we say that these are like very deep ingrained.

Changing Beliefs Through Neuroplasticity 16:49

So you're saying that through training, we can change these core beliefs and then remake our whole life? Is that what I'm hearing? It is what you're hearing. And that's what all the science is proven. So let me give you a, a great example. Did you at one point or do many people around the world at one point believe in Santa Claus? Yes. So it's a belief that we have that we swear is true when we're kids, only later to find out that the evidence shows that that belief was a made up story that we got introduced to at a very young age.

If you happen to, you know, have Santa Claus in your in, you know, in your family culture, or societal culture that you lived in. Well, that's a belief structure that had to be replaced with one that that's a really nice fantasy for children, but Santa Claus doesn't really exist. Well, what if we took a look at what is a belief in our brain? A belief in our brain is nothing more than a neural pattern that's been reinforced with evidence to support it. That's why we just have evidence to support it.

Well, is it possible that some of that is just wrong? Is it possible some of the evidence we have because of either our parents, our teachers, our own experiences, the meaning we gave things, or maybe the error that we were raised in, maybe the evidence was wrong, maybe it was religious, maybe it was cultural, I don't know. But if a belief is nothing more than a reinforced pattern with evidence to support it, can we disengage that pattern and create a new pattern based on the science of neuroplasticity and automaticity?

And the answer is yes. Our brain is plastic. It's not hardwired. We used to believe that it was hard wired. We used to believe that we were born with a genetic predisposition, and that we were going to be just like our mother and just like our father. Well, the truth is, we become exactly like them or exactly opposite of them based on our choices, not our genetic predisposition. So epigenetics, right, is actually more powerful than our actual DNA and our genetic predispositions. So even though, for example, you know, I had a genetic predisposition, which I have found out for ulcerative colitis, it was activated.

Okay, my autoimmune predisposition for ulcerative colitis was activated by stress and my lifestyle. And as soon as I changed the inner game and the outer game, oh my God, the autoimmune disorder basically quieted down, right? So we have more control than we think we have. We are not hard wired. Our brain is moldable, pliable. We can deactivate neural patterns that don't service and disempower us, and we can deliberately and consciously evolve ourselves. That's the work that I do. And that's, you know, that's the power that we all have.

And we're just really starting to understand how powerful we really are. Not from an egotistical perspective, from just a humble, holy shit perspective. I got this $100 billion brain. I just need to become a better operator. Like somebody might say, you know, what John is, is a very special human being. He's he's he's got above average, you know, determination and perseverance and all that. But that's not me. I don't have that type of capability. How would you respond to that? Like how would you respond to somebody who feels that way and they still have the same type of belief structure.

So that's somebody that you believe. So I would ask somebody, you know, who believed that. I said, is it easy to learn how to walk? Have you ever seen any of the robotic companies that are trying to teach robots how to walk, and how difficult it is to walk just across a room? It's very hard to learn how to walk, but you learned how to do it, so you're pretty resilient. Do you know how easy or hard it is to just pick up a pen and start writing? What you learned how to do that? You know how hard it is to be balanced on a bike and not fall off, or a robot that we can spend $100 billion for?

Well, you know how to do that. You know how hard it is to learn a language or 2 or 3, or to eat with your right hand or left hand, or to do math easily? You're a lot more resilient and a lot more capable than you may be giving yourself credit for. So my question for those people who would think that, you know, I'm different than you, I would say show me some evidence of when you were able to do something that you thought maybe harder than you initially thought. Show me some evidence of learning.

Language, math, biology, knitting, checkers, chess, riding a bike. Show me some evidence where you displayed that you can achieve more than maybe you thought you could at the time. And here's the other question. When people want to compare, you know themselves to somebody else. They're usually comparing themselves to somebody else who's achieved something that's taken them years to achieve versus in the last 24 hours. Right. And then I always suggest is, and imagine if we decided to, jog a marathon a year from now and imagine that you don't know how to jog a marathon.

You don't have the cardiovascular capacity, you don't have the training, you don't have the right diet, you don't have the right mindset. You don't have the right emotional control. You don't know what to do. But imagine if you said, I'm committed to running a marathon slowly a year from now, and then you said, okay, what would my diet need to be like? What would I need to do today as far as exercise? Could I maybe walk for two minutes, three minutes, five minutes? How many days a week should I run?

How much rest should I get? What kind of food should I eat? How much sleep should I get? What kind of coaching and training can I get? If I was committed to jogging a marathon a year from now? Now almost everybody I've asked all over the world who answers honestly says if I committed to jogging a marathon a year from now, I could do it. If I started slowly today with just a little bit. So let's not compare whether you can run a marathon from now, because I might be able to. Let's ask, could you do something for one minute today that would make you healthier?

Maybe one minute of positive, whether it's affirmations, declarations, promises, whatever you want, maybe it's one minute of feeling good so I could release the feel good neurochemicals. Maybe it's one minute of taking action towards what I want and not using stories, reasons or excuses of why I can't. Maybe just one minute could I build a muscle by doing a little bit of exercise every day? Of course. Well, could I not also build my neuro muscles by doing the same thing? No. That's where you know my newest book, Inner Size The New Science Unlock Your Brain's Hidden Power is Jack LaLanne.

Back in the 60s and 70s, popularized, exercise to strengthen your muscles and your internal organs. Well, I've been doing meditation and mindfulness and visualization and affirmations, and and a host of other inner sizes for 40 years. And I know what they've done in my life. And so not only is it done, you know, miracles in my life, but I have taught millions of students around the world, on how to retrain their own brain so they are empowered. They have focus, they have energy. They are aware of how powerful they really are versus how disempowered they may feel.

And helping them understand that beliefs are nothing more than the lens by which you see the world. And then, you know, you distort and delete everything else that doesn't match your belief structure. Now we start the same. Maybe I can change. Maybe I can be healthier. Maybe I can have more energy. Maybe I can reverse the aging process and be healthier, more vibrant, more energetic as I get older, instead of this old belief and paradigm system that I have to wither away and die, you know, you know, in, in, in a chair or I don't buy into that.

Building Habits, Resilience, and Long-Term Change 25:49

My, my whole structure of what I believe is possible into your 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, hundreds is not predicated on what the masses think and do. It's based on what the few have already shown us we can do and are capable of. Do you think that I mean, you have spent basically, you know, you said 30 years or so developing this and learning these techniques and now looks at so it's I mean, one could one if one tries to do this on their own, they're going to have to go through all the trial and error and all this.

I mean, the real beauty here is that you basically created it so they don't have to go and relearn and figure all these little these this training out. I think that's the real it's like working with a special athlete, a coach who's like, yeah, you know, it's an expert in this field because I know for so long, yeah, I happen to love the research. I happen to love being my own guinea pig to see what works and what doesn't. But then I've had hundreds of thousands of clients that have released their fears of failure, fears of being embarrassed to shame, ridicule, judge rejected, fears of not being good enough, smart enough or worthy enough.

Eliminate procrastinating. Eliminate self-sabotage behavior. Relinquish destructive habits. You know, that was going to kill them too early and and move into it. Move them into a state of of despair. So not only has it worked for me and my and my wife and children and and friends and family, but I started teaching it to my own students like I'm an entrepreneur. I didn't set out to do this. I just wanted to be a high performing human being myself, to fulfill as much of my potential as I could. You know, I went to grade 11 and high school didn't do well in school.

I thought I wasn't smart enough or good enough, and some people stepped up and said, oh, no, no, you don't know how powerful you really are. And again, I don't say powerful in a sense of ego, powerful in the sense of you have this amazing brain that if you just use it better, you can actually achieve more than you ever thought possible. And so that's when I started to write books that became New York Times bestselling books and creating brain training programs, to help people, you know, lose weight and keep it off.

We know how to lose weight and keep it off. But we also know why people gain weight, lose weight, gain weight, lose weight, gain weight, lose weight. We know that it's a combination of triggers and self-esteem and habits and behaviors and hormones. And we know what is the cause of this yo yo diet syndrome. But our television ads are all about this quick fix that you can lose weight this week, and then you can go back next weekend. So nobody's talking about the truth of what is really happening inside the conscious or subconscious mind and the network and the circuits in our brain.

Our brain is a there's a network, or three major network salience, executive, and default mode network and a variety of circuits to turn on or off. And if we don't know how our brain works and what turns on these networks are circuits, that means we're ignorant, not incapable. We're ignorant. Which just means I don't know. Well, I want to let people know. Now, you can say, I know what? I'm choosing not to do it. But most people don't know that they can deliberately and consciously involve themselves and change from the inside out, from the outside in.

So all the work that I do is work with world leading neuroscientists and neuropsychologists and and experts, apply what I, what I learned in my own life, teach it to my students and my family. So that I can help them achieve their goals and dreams faster and easier than ever before. This sounds like it's something that one is one to you. Take this up. It's it's becomes a lifelong, endeavor. It's not something with ongoing and, I guess, gains and changes in your life. It's not something you're saying, like a quick fix.

This is you commit to something you're committing to, like, a whole wave of developing a brain reprograming. And I'm like, I don't believe in, you know, people who want to lose weight. You're either going to want to lose weight, for example, for a reason, a season or a lifetime. If you want to lose weight for a reason, just fast and don't eat a lot. You'll lose weight. If you want to lose weight for a season like bikini season, or because, you know, you know, you want to have, pictures taken at a family reunion, which is a reason, maybe even a season.

That's great. But if you want to get healthy and stay healthy, there's a way of thinking, there's an emotional regulation side of it. And this is a way of behaving that gets you healthy. And so if you're going to do the work, why not do the work to, for example, get in shape and then stay in shape, like, right. So so just like, you know, once you start exercising, you feel good, you have energy and you're sleeping better, your sex life is better. And and you're looking and feeling better than you have in years.

Like, why stop that? Like why stop all the stuff that feels great. And that means you have to understand the science of habits, right? So there's the science of behavior, but there's also the science of habits. And I can stop in a minute. I can say, I'm not going to have that pizza. You know, at lunch I'm going to have a salad with maybe two tablespoons of olive oil. But then if you're eating, you know, three slices of pizza tonight, you know, with cheese and bacon and all that stuff, then, okay, you're not going to be able to have that healthy lifestyle.

You might have a healthy lunch, but not a lifestyle. So everything starts off not just, you know, what feels good for the moment, but you know what behaviors, what thoughts, what emotions can I, evoke now so that not only I feel good now, but that I build these constructive, empowering habits and a way of being that I can maintain so that as I get older, I actually am reinforcing constructive, empowering, positive patterns versus destructive, disempowering negative patterns. Right. So the difference between, you know, you and me and a horse and a pig, we have choice.

We can choose now, right? Is it possible we just keep choosing the same things that aren't going to be to our benefit over and over and over again, because our brain conserves energy and is predicting the present and the future based on its past patterns? Yes, that means I need to learn how to interrupt those negative patterns and replace them with positive patterns. And it takes between 66 days and 365 days to create a new pattern that overrides the old pattern. So for everybody who's serious about this, don't think you're going to go on a diet for three weeks, lose the weight and keep it off.

You won't. You're going to revert back to all your old behavior. So don't even start the diet unless you have a reason to do it, like a wedding or a bar mitzvah or something. If you want permanent change, get used to recreating a neural pattern around your self-image, your beliefs, and your habits, and be prepared to invest 66 days to 365 days to create a new, positive, constructive pattern. And then that pattern. If you develop the right habit, the habit will then develop you anything less than that, people are smoking crack and thinking they're delusional.

They're they're using the drug of choice, which I call is hoping. Right. So then so and what about, I mean, someone's let's say they begin down this road, say, look, I'm willing to invest, you know, 90 days, let's say. And they have some setbacks. Like, do you see the people, what type of, you know, is it always a smooth ride or you're seeing the people are having, like, some setbacks and fall down and get back up and. Yeah. So let me let me share with you what I teach every one of my, my students.

I'm just going to use a, you know, a running example. Okay. I don't do any running anymore. But let's say you want to start running, and I said to you, hey, doctor Sanjeev, chances are you're going to be sore, and you might need to take a day or two off, and some days you're not going to feel like it on the days that you're sore. Here's what I want you to do on the days you don't feel like it. Here's what I want you to do on the days that you just don't do it at all.

Support Systems, Recovery, and Where to Learn More 34:49

Here's how you bounce back. What if I could pre frame what you are going to feel and experience and then teach you a behavior of what to do. So then when let's say you you're on a diet and then let's say you just gorged yourself okay. With cake and cookies and pizza and all that stuff, you can go into a negative spiral saying, oh shit, I just messed up my diet. I can't do this. This is hard. Or what if I said to you, that's what you going to want to do? But here's what I want you to do if and when that happens, and it's likely that it will sometime along the way, because your brain does not like change, okay.

The more you feel the resistance and the more that that happens. Here are some techniques to counter the negative self-talk. So here's some techniques to counter the negative emotions that are going to want to keep you stuck in your old patterns. I'll give you the techniques in advance so you can use them. And so once you have the techniques now, you are better equipped to deal with the setbacks. Every single person. I don't care if you're an athlete, an astronaut, a Navy Seal, a firefighter, a homemaker, an engineer, a lawyer, a doctor.

You're a human first. Yes. And that's important to have. Go ahead through. Yeah. And that means that we have to practice awareness. Mindfulness. We have to practice self-compassion in addition to our commitment. And we have to learn how to surrender, allow and accept. Those are skills. Surrender to what is accepted. No blame, no shame, no guilt, no justification. Just awareness. And now a choice in my, my book Inner Signs, I was telling you about one of the things that we teach people how to do.

There's an inner size called take six calm the circuits, and then the next one is called I, which stands for awareness, intention, action. So in these moments when we are disempowered and we want to blame ourselves, we feel ashamed. When we feel self-doubt, we feel uncertain. We feel down. What if, after you did the inner size one take six, calm the circuits, which is a way to recalibrate the stress and anxiety center in your brain so that you're actually using your thinking brain, not your reactive brain.

You did an exercise with a small sheet of paper that you can just say, okay, what am I thinking right now? What am I feeling right now? What am I sensing right now, and what are the behaviors that I want to take out right now as a result of maybe getting off my diet? Write it out now. In this state of awareness, what if you could do that without judging yourself, blaming, shaming, feeling guilty, or justifying? What if in a state of awareness you can just go wow, that's interesting what my brain is doing, how I'm feeling, and what if I could say, choose one intention for the next 15 minutes?

So the A is awareness, the eyes intention. And so if the intention is to let it go, be compassionate. Be kind to yourself. Surrender. This is part of the process. And then in the intention I said to you, what's one action step you can take in the next 15 minutes to move towards that vision or goal that you have? What if the action was, I'm going to walk for five minutes. I'm actually going to go and have a healthy piece of fruit or I'm going to have a glass of water with lemon juice. What if I now was aware of what I didn't want or like?

What if I set the intention? Now I deliberately took one, one small little action towards what I want now. What have I done now? Instead of reinforcing a pattern, I don't want, I became aware of it. I surrendered to it. I set an intention. Then I took a pattern action step towards what I do want now. Who's in control now? Who's respond instead of reacting now? Who's deliberately, unconsciously evolving themselves? You wow. That empowers you versus disempower. But in the absence of skill, this is really important.

The absence of skill, the skill of awareness. Okay. The skill. What should I do? The skills. How do I flip the emotional switch from this to that? In the absence of skill, we all default to our highest level of training under stress, we all can move on. Yes. Yeah. So just in that okay, so what about, I mean, many people will say, look, I'm, I will do, you know, I'm, I need, you know, my close people around me are perhaps not supportive or they're not buying into this. How important are the support structures and how do you bring them on on how do you help your clients and bring them on board and onto onto helping them through this type of journey?

Sure. So there are some people that their spouse is not supportive of them. There's some people that they're brothers or sisters or mothers or fathers or friends are not supportive of them. I get that. And so the first thing you do is you don't ask them for support if you know they're not supportive of you, because they will push you down instead of lift you up. Now, there's something called the internet. And the internet has got millions of groups that support each other, some not paid, some paid.

For example, in my company, every person who buys any of our programs, we put them into a community of people that are going through those programs. So when there's resistance, they lift each other up and they pull each other up or they nudge each other, when there's opportunities they shared with each other, when there's successes, they share, when there's failures, which just means something they tried didn't work. It doesn't mean they're a failure. Everybody's they're doing it together. So now we have a support group, and like I said, there's paid groups or non paid groups online that you can get the support that you need.

So in the absence of your own resources, you must become resourceful. That's that's that's powerful. Yes. Right. Yeah I would so where could our listeners go and viewers go for more like, I know you mentioned the program. Can you just tell them a little bit of what? Should they go? Sure. I mean, the easiest place to go is my neuro gym.com, so it's m y any erg y m.com. And then people can follow me on Instagram, on my Facebook fan page, on Twitter, on YouTube. I got lots of free content that people can consume.

They can type in, you know, my name, John Ashraf, which I'm sure you'll have on the show. They can pick up my newest, bestselling book called Inner Size The New Science to unlock your brain's hidden Power. I've got another New York Times bestseller called Having It All, another New York Times bestseller for business owner called The Answer. So I've got a variety of different places that, people can find me and follow my work and make their lives better and see their goals faster and easier. Thank you so much.

I actually going to become I'm going to sign myself up for you. Such a mind blowing, talk today. I really appreciate your time today. Thanks, doctor. Sanjiv, I appreciate you, and thanks for giving me the opportunity to to share and to, give people a little expanded awareness of what's possible for them.