Transcription
And we're live! Welcome to the show. It's my second show today, actually. I was just on with James Tusk. And now I'm with Mr. Paul Benjamin of Apex Mindset. Great pleasure to have you on again, mate. It's been a while since we've done a show together, hasn't it?
It has. People really liked the last one we did, so we need to do it more often, I think.
Yeah, definitely. Well, I was looking back, and we did a couple of shows around this time last year. I was sitting, and there were a lot of Christmas decorations behind me. We were talking about some interesting stuff, like the dark triad and all of that—getting into quite deep waters. But, yeah, good to see you, man. How are you doing today?
I'm doing awesome! I just did something I'm experimenting with—neurofeedback. I do meditation, and I get a bunch of wires hooked into my head. It's a whole brainwave thing; they're looking at my brainwaves and mirroring them back in audio through sound while I'm meditating. It's cool. What it does is… it gives me psychic powers? No, I'm just kidding! It takes your brainwaves—supposed to be in a meditative, calm, serene state—and for certain parts of your brain, they should be within different ranges when in a peak state. It mirrors them back, so your brain sees where corrections need to be made, and then it starts to make corrections.
It sounds weird. If you sit and meditate, thinking, "I'm going to focus on this key word, like 'success,' and I'm not going to be distracted," then distracting thoughts happen, or boredom sets in. When this mirroring happens, my mind self-corrects to the state I'm trying to achieve during meditation. One hour-long session is like doing a month of… you could scan my brain to see the results. You can see measurable results based on brain activity and focus.
Alpha waves! Philip got the course where I talk about alpha wave meditation. I have a whole chapter on alpha wave meditation. Dude, that's such a good activity, and it's so easy to do. This neural imaging is more for research and me figuring stuff out with neurologists at U of M. But the alpha brainwaves are easy. You just go to YouTube, or my course (I have the tone for your alpha waves in the appendix). You listen to that and shut your brain off, take a mini-nap for five or ten minutes. Even fifteen minutes—you won't fall into a deep theta sleep; those waves keep you awake and low alert. When you come out, you feel rested because your brain's been shut down, but motivated and ready to go, instead of groggy like after an afternoon nap.
Yeah! So it's cool, man. Glad to see someone in your audience did that. Good timing! Enough, man. Good stuff.
So obviously we're here to catch up, but also because you have this course out now, Alpha Mindset. I wanted to talk about that and the thinking behind it. This is a beast of a course; it's a lot of material. How did this come about?
It came about from solving problems for my clients. I got into this space doing one-on-one consulting, helping guys with everything from pickup to managing relationships, getting over breakups, and sometimes working with them to get an ex back (though I don't recommend that). That turned into people wanting mentorship because I have a background in performance psychology, using performance measures in the military and civilian life. I help guys with productivity, sales, and goals.
In this pursuit, I noticed guys had limitations preventing them from acting on what I told them. I'm sure you run into this as a pickup and dating coach. You give them the info, but they have trouble taking action. We focus on the internet complainers who don't take any action, but there are a lot of people trying. Most people want results and are willing to work, but they have internal barriers—their inner game isn't dialed in. Mental habits are your behaviors, emotions, and thinking developed over time. Some are good or productive. Think about a natural pickup guy; he naturally fell into attractive habits with women. Take another guy who was rejected in middle school and high school; he may be more analytical or an engineer type, not as socially dialed in. He has habits that make him unattractive. You say, "Here are the skill sets," but he has to recondition those habits. Those habits come with beliefs, maybe negative ones: "All women don't find me attractive," "She's too pretty; I shouldn't approach her." He has habitual negative mindsets or emotional reactions. A girl gives him a "tester," looks at him a certain way, and he gets negative, insecure, or anxious emotions because that's been habitually conditioned.
To make changes, I want my clients to make real substantial change, not just feel good after a session. So, I thought, "How can I maximize results?" I've been developing a seduction mastery program, and I wanted to make sure that was dialed in for guys, which is why it's turning into a membership program, not just a course. It's too dialed in for a two-month course. But then I thought, "Guys are going to get this material, but they won't be able to action it." I'd be working with them on mental fitness exercises to get their minds lined up so they can do the seduction things I'm telling them to do. Then I realized I was giving the same assignments over and over: "You need to do this identity assignment. You need to do alpha brainwave meditation. Here's your morning routine." I saw these trends—why not develop a course with all the assignments I give in consults, all the research—so guys just buy the course and have all the material, the activity? It's like learning how to work out; here's the proper way, the theory, the action plan, the assignments to work on parts of your brain and recondition behaviors. When guys work on getting girls, money, or being a better man, they have this material to fall back on. "I'm running into a confidence issue; I need to do these assignments."
I know that when I do the "Get the Girls" program, more people buy it—it hits their pain point. If I did a "Get Your Ex Back" program, huge pain point; everybody buys that. Not as many people buy a long-term self-improvement plan for their brain. That's not as sexy, right? But that's fine. It's better for my clients who want substantial changes. Now I can reference this course and say, "Grab that course. It has these exercises. Book my time; I can help them, then they can get this course so they don't have to book my expensive time all the time for the assignments that are in a course for a lot cheaper." Eighteen plus hours of material would cost them more one-on-one than the price of the course.
What's the ideal target customer? Is it a guy who's gone through a difficult time, experienced trauma, or someone who's okay but things aren't working out as they'd like?
Great question. It's really any of that, which makes it harder from a marketing standpoint. If I wanted to make a bunch of money, I wouldn't have done 18+ hours for a low price. I would have done a section on trauma and breakups, and peak performance. The Miracle Morning book is just that guy's morning routine—five or six steps—and it's a best-selling book. If I wanted to market better, I would have broken this up. But I wanted to provide more value to the end user. So, guys with trauma from past experiences, bad childhoods—yes, this is a great course for you. But guys doing really well and mentally balanced would also do good with this, taking themselves to the next level in their mental fitness. It's like asking, "Is a fitness program good for someone overweight or someone already fit?" The answer is yes, it's good for everyone. You have to do physical fitness. Someone already fit will improve or maintain; someone lacking will get better. We think about physical training for our bodies, but not training for our minds, which is a mistake. We think we don't need to because we're thinking all day, but we're not thinking as much as we think. Most of our behaviors and responses are habituated. If we want to be the best version of ourselves, we want to target unproductive emotional, behavioral, and thought responses and work to change them. This process is neural behavioral conditioning: stimulus, neural pathways, response (habits). If you have a bad response, unlearn that behavior and relearn a new response. There are different ways to do that depending on challenges or goals. That's what this course is about; it has material for guys to tap into, exercises to change their brains at a fundamental level. We're taking out the magical thinking and woo-woo aspects of meditation, hypnosis, anchoring, NLP techniques, and identity development exercises. The self-help world has good stuff, but attaches magical thinking to it. Even religions. Not to say magical thinking is bad—if someone meditates with religious belief, that's fine. But by "magical," I mean it's based on belief, not necessarily science. Science says the benefits are real. I've taken out that magical aspect so people can tap into these activities and get the benefits from neurology and behavioral psychology. Instead of a week-long retreat or joining a cult group and meditating for hours a day, ten minutes a day will get them a lot of benefits. Meditating with alpha brainwaves, for example, or a walking meditation, is a way to solve problems and make changes just by walking. A ten-minute walk in the morning to dial yourself in for the day, or if you're distressed, to think about what's distressing you—don't try to solve anything, just feel it—while walking stimulates both hemispheres of the brain. The forward activity triggers acceptance points with emotions and suppressing negative emotions. Someone pisses you off; you go for a ten-minute walk, allow yourself to get pissed off, then come back with your frame back. Simple exercise, but there are reasons why it works. Getting sunlight on your eyeballs in the morning to dial in your circadian rhythms—small things that make huge differences. A lot of times, it's the little things that add up; it's not some big magical thing.
You were talking about inner game. Johnny and John McD have been talking about it a lot. I did twelve days of video recently on this channel because Michael's Cat Academy was primarily an inner game course—sorting out the underlying stuff before external tweaks or improvements. John said nearly all the guys he helps have problems with inner game. Would you say most guys you come into contact with have issues with inner game?
Oh, 100%. To get to the next level with anything, you have to sort out the inner stuff first. I use the example of making a million dollars. You have to think and be the millionaire first to gain a million dollars. You have to do millionaire thoughts and behaviors; then the money comes. It's not like you get a million dollars and suddenly you're a millionaire. We see that with lottery winners who are broke in five years; they didn't have the millionaire mindset or behaviors. Money is easy to measure, but it applies to anything—a good relationship. You have to be the person who could have that relationship; it's more about you than the girl. You can't get what you want without the behaviors and mindset to have it, other than by chance or luck, and then you'll lose it. This happens to guys; they get a hot girl because they learned pickup techniques, but their inner game isn't squared away, and they lose it. Even James Tusk talks about that. He was good at being social and meeting girls, but then dates would fall flat because he had low self-esteem. His life wasn't there enough, and the girls were like, "Wait a minute, I thought this was this really cool guy, and he isn't."
Yep. That happens to a lot of people. I call it the Alpha Mindset course because it's a funny, unoriginal name, but I did it intentionally. Guys always think about wanting to be the archetypical alpha, but really, being that type of alpha that people admire—that's something you have to change up here; your mindset has to change. It's not just the thought process; when coaching guys on inner game, we give them the right mental framework, but how do we change the behavioral and emotional responses? That's where this course comes in—using exercises to make those changes. Sometimes it happens through action; for example, guys with approach anxiety—approach 100 women this week. They get rejected a bunch, but realize it's not a big deal, and the anxiety goes down with repetition. But I've seen guys where the rejections leave a deeper mark in their unconscious; it makes them more awkward. They don't have good healthy self-esteem, and they use rejections as evidence to support their negative thoughts. Instead, someone with healthy self-esteem realizes the rejection has more to do with the girl than anything they're doing.
It's funny because we were just talking about rejection on the stream before with James and Mr. Ram, and a viewer wrote, "How do you deal with the crushing impact of being rejected so many times?" We're all saying rejection is good; everyone gets rejected. If you go out and hit on a lot of women, you're going to get rejected. It's part of the game. He said, "Yeah, but you must have been rejected thousands of times. How do you deal with that? Surely your self-esteem must be crushed." I said, "No, I think it's the opposite. The more I've done it, the more self-confident I've become because you become more resilient and realize you can handle whatever life throws at you." That's the response for most people. That's good advice: get out there and do it. Take the action. But if you're taking action while doing mindset work, you get there quicker. Someone with bad approach anxiety might have to do 350 approaches before it goes away. If they're doing mental fitness stuff, they can get to 100 like a normal person. Someone with good healthy self-esteem might be dialed in right away. It's going to expedite the results. Raw action is "I'm just going to do it and go through the pain until it doesn't hurt anymore." I talk about that, actually. Someone asked about procrastination. I have things on procrastination throughout the course, but the best answer is to try to develop your intrinsic reward system for things you're procrastinating on. That's kind of a "just do it" thing, but I talk about intrinsic reward versus extrinsic rewards. When people face something they don't want to do, they build themselves up to get started and think about a reward down the line. That may work in the beginning, but you get to a point where the pain of doing the work doesn't register as worth the reward. The key is to reward the process or the effort versus the reward outside of the process or effort.
I'll give you an example: sales training. I helped a lot of guys with that; I used to be a sales trainer. People were thinking about the money they were going to make, the sales, and all that stuff. They were thinking of the reward, and making those cold calls was painful. They were worried about rejection, losing it, because getting rejected unconsciously registered as not getting them to the money they wanted. The reward was sales and money, and being a good salesperson. These losses were seen as a big problem, and it weighed on them, so they struggled and procrastinated. What we want to do is make those calls rewarding. Instead of focusing on the rewards you'll get from the calls, let's work on making the calls rewarding. Let's turn it into a game. Once you start doing that, it's addicting to pick up the phone and make that next call. It's about learning about the process, turning it into a game where you're trying to win, like chess or a video game. You do that in your mind, and now you're in the process, and now the process is rewarding. You do a couple of hours of calls, and you don't want to stop; you have to physically stop yourself.
Do you think guys hold themselves back from the really important thing that's going to make a difference—like picking up the phone and making that sales call?
All the time. There's the 80/20 rule; there are things that will get you the most results, but often those things aren't seen as rewarding. How you mentally put a connotation on something and how you think about that thing directly influences your neurochemical response during the activity. If I find working out intrinsically rewarding, I love going to the gym; I'm hammering out the next exercise, feeling some pain, but I want to do more until I exhaust myself. I like that process. If I miss too many days of exercise, I start to feel like I'm missing something; the pain-pleasure balance gets switched around, and now the pain is from not doing it. Most of the time, guys won't associate the hard thing with something they don't want to do, but they know they need to do it for their goals. They get super pumped up about the goals—a vision board, a boat, beautiful women—as long as they make these sales calls or 100 approaches. But once they start, the rejection and grind happen, and they take a break. Versus the other guy who's intrinsically rewarding himself—"Damn, you got blown out again; there's another one"—and he goes and approaches her because he has to beat this; it turns into a competitive nature with yourself.
Do you think having the end goal in mind, having that strong "why," is key?
It is. You have to know that strong why. I have an identity module on an identity exercise where you're envisioning and embodying the best version of you in a lifestyle; that helps formulate your goals and gives you that strong why when you decide to put effort into something. But once you have that, you kind of want to forget about it and make it about the activity. Using fitness again, I might have a particular look or fitness goal that's strong, and it's good that I have that because that's what's going to cause me to want to design this program and show up in the beginning. But once I get started, it's not so much about that goal; it's about the effort I'm putting in that moment. A lot of people with military backgrounds talk about this—David Goggins, for example; his whole brand is intrinsic rewards, embracing the suck. But how do you do that in a productive and rewarding way? That's where we can trick our minds—using our mental systems to our advantage. Having that goal in mind makes us think this is important, and now we start. But if we see it as hard or difficult, we transform that into getting into this activity, and solving this problem is now somehow rewarding. We continue along with that, even if it's something simple. You're doing 20, let's see if I can do 50, 100. Setting mini-goals inside the activity—one more rep, one more approach, one more call. You're in the call, and she said that objection—that's the one I went over in my training class two weeks ago. You're testing yourself out, and it becomes about the game and how you play the game, and that becomes rewarding. If you can take anything you're procrastinating on and turn it into a game somehow…
Make it about how you play the game; you won't procrastinate anymore. You'll dive head-on into it. The course talks about that, and how to do it more specifically, how to step it out and stage it out for different things. That's good stuff.
Wow, yeah, it's pretty in-depth stuff, man. It really is. Guys, if you have any questions for Paul, stick them in the chat, and we'll get them covered while we're on the stream.
Yeah, I mean, it's really fascinating stuff. I find the performance stuff really fascinating, particularly this elite performance stuff. I've read quite a few books—obviously Goggins, but also things like *Relentless* by Grover, and that great book.
Yeah, yeah. It's just really fascinating. Is that something that's been a big part of your background? Is that something you bring into the mix in this course?
I've read a lot of stuff like *Relentless*. *The Compounding Effect* by Darren Hardy is an older one I thought was really good and impactful. Compounding effects are really cool. A lot of these entrepreneurial success books are great reading; I enjoy them. But a lot of this material came from research on the neurology side—reading papers and experiments. I also looked at behavioral psychology, because they're tied in together pretty well. Even evolutionary psychology, dealing with pickup and gaming sexual dynamics, pointed me towards the evolutionary stuff. We're dealing with primitive drives here, talking about mating; those drives and behaviors are instilled within us. Those reactions play a role in seduction, and that's good to look at. From a performance perspective too, that stuff can answer a lot of questions. I'll have a question or a thought, and I'll be looking up papers and different research, studies, and papers that have been done on some of the different things, looking for results. Questions about meditation: what are the brain changes that can happen, how much time is required? I try to figure it out. My role is more or less—I know our friend Ryan Stone hates the word—as a coach.
Okay.
But as a coach, that means I'm not the researcher. I'm not the one in the university setting up a clinical trial. I do have anecdotal or data evidence from working with tons of people and personal experience, but I'm not the researcher. I take that stuff into account, people's field experiences, what's happening, but also the results of the individual. I'm looking at the research, but I'm not the researcher. I'm taking the research and saying, "Okay, how can we apply this most effectively to get the results in the best way?"
Did you have a background in this stuff, or is it just something you became interested in?
It's kind of both. I started my career in high-level consultative sales, then went into the military. That's something I'd wanted to do all along, but it wasn't until the War on Terror that I could get in, due to a waiver I needed for psoriasis. In the military, we were looking at becoming better performers, almost like professional athletes. I got into the special operations side of things, where they pay military psychologists. I got into conversations with the head of neurology at Harvard about transcendental meditation and how we could implement that as operators to become better operators, reduce anxiety, and reduce the after-effects of combat. These were things I got into because of a passion. I could have been a regular dude with a rifle, but I chose to dive into it as a non-commissioned officer. In those areas, I trained other people, so I'm looking at how I can better train these guys to perform. A special operations guy thinks like that. I'm not just repeating what a drill sergeant did; I think, "Shoot, we want to take somebody and make them a much higher-level performer, so how can I do that?" I look at these ways of hacking through that, and that got me into performance psychology. I was also in grad school for psychology. I left grad school to pursue where I am now because academia is very… I wanted to get into relationship counseling and dynamics, and what's being taught or promoted is… there's some valuable stuff on the research side, but as a red-pill person, academia is very gynocentric. The model that most therapists and counselors have when they see their clients is going to be a broken one, and they're going to steer the guy or the girl, or the couple, in the wrong way. I left because I was on a series of deployments. I thought maybe I'll go back, but I said, "No, why would I do that when I can just be a coach? I can pull the research as researchers do it, because I'm not going to be a researcher." That's not really what my interest is. My interest is the field and getting results.
So yeah, there is a background there, but I do have certifications. I'm a certified EMDR therapist, a certified hypnotherapist, a master hypnotherapist, in fact, and an NLP therapist as well. I've gotten these certs outside of conventional PhD doctorate that I was going for in psychology, but I'm just not willing to go through the hoops and play the game and pretend that I agree with the gynocentric narrative to get a degree and initials behind my name and then do the same damn thing I'm doing now. It's not worth it to me.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, fair enough. How do you deal with psoriasis?
Get with a good doctor on this, because there's a lot that we know about psoriasis, and a lot we don't know. Mine wasn't that bad; it was just a little bit on the elbow, maybe on the knee. Some people have it really bad, so I'm not about to advise you how to handle that better than a doctor might. Topical creams worked for me, and tanning or getting sunlight or red light therapy. I found that red light therapy was really beneficial. I have a sauna, and I do infrared. This time of year, it can get particularly bad up here in Michigan because it's cold and snowy, and the air can get really dry. I think it's dryness; I'm not sure, because I'm not a psoriasis expert, but I noticed that when I get an infrared sauna, I have red light installed in the sauna that gives me the benefits of red light therapy, which is a whole bunch of different things. I cover this in the course as well—the benefits of infrared and some of these little biohacks. I found that helps my psoriasis a bit. A mixture of topical creams, prescribed and keeping moisture in those areas works pretty well. Getting red light, or if you like to tan, go to the beach.
There you go. Thanks for that. That's slightly separate to the main topic, but it's good to cover that. Username is saying, "Could you elaborate more on how to turn the stuff we procrastinate about into games? For example, how can one turn getting good grades in school into a game?"
Let's say getting good grades in school. You have to learn a certain amount about a topic and get to a certain level of proficiency, and right now you don't like it. Let's say it's math. It's funny because when I was in college, I went to college first, then military, got my undergrad first, then military, then was working on my doctorate, and I said I'm not going to do a doctorate. While I was in college, I was teaching kids in high school, and I was teaching math. Math generally sucks unless it's associated as not sucking. At first, you're going to start it, and you're going to hate it. You're going to be like, "This is just stupid and boring, and I don't like doing this." Yes, well, make it about the process. I really want to figure out how to piece this apart. How can I… okay, so I do steps one, two, three to get the result. Why does step one, two, or three work? Start diving into the whys, start diving into the topic more deeply. When you dive into it more deeply… if I'm just sitting here going, "Okay, I'm going to do this thing of that rule," okay, cool, I'm following different mathematical rules, and there's the answer. Oh, that's wrong. Oh, okay. Oh, if I didn't follow that rule… you're just memorizing rules without any idea of the actual operation behind it. If you get deep into it and start figuring out why it's a rule, and start asking yourself those questions and getting deep into it and start understanding it, you'll start to get rewarded as you figure it out. As you get more correct answers, you'll figure it out, and then you just keep on building. The next thing you know, you're… it's not like you would go do math instead of go hang out at a bar and pick up women, but when it's time to do the math, you're not procrastinating and going, "God, I just don't want to do it," finding everything else to do. You can dive into the activity much easier, get in that zone, and now you're in this focused zone, and it's intrinsically rewarding itself until you've gotten the proficiency you wanted. Your grades are going well. Being able to get lost in your studies versus, "Oh, I don't want to do this, and then it's just really dull and boring," you find your mind drifting to other more interesting things. You make what you're doing in that moment as interesting as you can by diving into it. When it's something that's not interesting to you intrinsically, it's going to suck for probably about a couple of weeks. After a while, this is the "embrace the suck" part. You're just going to have to know in your head that this sucks, but you're going to do it anyway. A lot of times, I tell people the motivation needs to be so that it doesn't suck later. I'll give a great example of that: running. I'm not a big runner; I'm not great at it. It's not something I really like doing. However, I didn't want to be in a group environment, especially in a military environment, being the guy that's last, sucking wind and dying, and not having their energy reserves to go to the next activity during a training environment. That's the biggest way you look like a weak person. So even though I like lifting things better, and even though I didn't really particularly like running, I embraced the suck of running so that it wouldn't suck as bad later. Eventually, it started to reward itself, and eventually, I started to enjoy it. At my peak, I was doing—not Olympic numbers—but a military two-mile, I was clearing in about 11 minutes and 20 to 30 seconds. That's pretty quick for most people.
I heard this very simple piece of advice—I actually put it into Cad Academy—it's basically in *The Charisma Myth* by Olivia Fox Cabane. If you're in a situation that's uncomfortable, say you're sitting on a train and you're late for a meeting, and the subway car stops, normally I'm going crazy. The advice is to pause, and instead of resisting whatever's happening, really dive into it. Okay, so these feelings of frustration and anger that I'm feeling… let me examine them. She talks about savoring it like a fine wine.
So rather than going out running and saying, "Oh, geez, tiring, it's boring," actually leaning into that stuff…
It's interesting. In some ways, that could be helpful, I would say, because you're diving into deeper analysis. So if I'm just running and it sucks, and I don't want to do it, but I'm not just saying, "Okay, I gotta run because I'm about to go to special forces selections, and I don't want to be a [ __ ] when I get there, so I guess I gotta run," and I just run, that's my mindset; I'm going to resist running every single time. But if while I'm running I'm thinking about doing better and being in that top five percent of a selection process, and having all those numbers add up, and asking myself, "God, this hurts," and kind of diving into why I'm having this pain, or why I'm resisting it, it's really the analysis of it. Embracing the pain… I'm not necessarily focusing on my lungs burning, although after a minute you kind of do. You're sucking wind, but you're like, "That's getting me where I want to go." You intrinsically reward that feeling, so you want to speed up and suck wind even more. How can I make this suck more? It's a weird thing. When I do Tabata, which is 26 Tabata sprints, it's four minutes of death. It's 20 seconds as fast as you can go, and then 10 seconds rest. By the time you get to set six and eight, you're dying, you're sucking wind. You're like, "Oh," and he did research on this in Japan. It's named Tabata after the researcher, as having the highest benefit for your VO2 max per time. The reason why is because you have an unbalanced rest-work cycle, and the way that that works, it challenges your cardiovascular system the most if you're putting max effort each time. It gets to a point where instead of trying to slow down, you're like, "Feel that burn! Go faster!" You embrace that burn and that bad feeling, and you want to make it go because you know that's getting you to where you want to go.
Yeah, that's what I think it is. It's like you're not resisting whatever is hard; you actually push further into it because you know it's just getting you the results you want, and faster.
And then what's strange is that that thing can actually start to become compulsive.
Oh, 100%. We used to joke around; we'd be like, "Come on, guys, this is awesome! We're getting smoked; we're covered with dirt. We're getting abused practically by instructors. Come on, guys, this is sweet!" "All right, go run around the thing again!" You're like, "You know what I mean?" We're not enthused, but what's interesting is that fake-it-till-you-make-it scenario. Embracing it and being like, "Come on, give me more," actually ends up motivating you, and then it becomes rewarding. Leaning into it and feeling rewarded while you're doing that activity and you put more effort into it… it's interesting.
I don't know if this is a correct comparison, but that book about dopamine…
*Dopamine Nation*. You've read this as well, haven't you? The premise is that we are all addicted to dopamine in various ways. We might get it through drugs, alcohol, sex, shopping, or social media. We get that hit, and we crave it. But what she ends up saying towards the end is that what is more effective for us is to lean into things that are painful. She talks about the Wim Hof thing—diving into freezing cold pools of water, endurance running, things that initially are painful, but you do it, and afterward you feel amazing, and you kind of want to do it more. These things tend to be more healthy for us as well, because we're pushing ourselves.
Yeah, I mean, I think that that's valid. As far as dopamine, it's… it's weird to say that we're addicts of dopamine, but in a sense it's true. It's our natural reward systems. We want to be able to play with those systems to our advantage versus allowing those systems to move us to our disadvantage. In terms of addiction and overstimulation with pornography or screens, our bodies aren't evolved to handle those things in a productive way. We want to manage those things and do some of these other techniques to reward productive behavior, to get us what we want.
We're actually on an hour now. I don't want to keep you; you're a busy guy, and I have to meet someone. To finish off with perhaps visualization… Username asked about… I wonder if you visualized your current status a couple of years ago, and do you wonder about whether you're visualizing where you'll be in a couple of years? What's your view on visualization?
I have a whole module on that. Visualization is very powerful when done correctly. What I have people do in this module… it's systemized because here's the thing about affirmations and visualization: if you have deep-seated beliefs that these things are not true, they can work to your disadvantage. For example, if I'm imagining that I'm a millionaire or a billionaire, and that's not really in my reach in my unconscious mind, I don't understand… I can't perceive what it would be like to make a million dollars a month. They're not there yet, so that ends up being almost counterproductive because it reminds them of where they're not at, reinforcing behaviors to keep you in the place that you're in. Your brain is not designed to help you be successful; your brain is designed to help you survive. Those are two very different things. From an evolutionary perspective, we're interested in survival, not having a supercar. Our brain is designed to correct problems and look for stability and comfort and homeostasis. Our brain is not designed to do things outside of our comfort zone to achieve a goal by itself. We have to use our existing way that our brain works in order to step outside of our comfort zone and achieve those goals. Using visualization is one powerful way to do that. Just like we trick our brain from seeing something as not rewarding to seeing something as rewarding, we trick our brain into seeing our current state, even though it may be very comfortable, as very uncomfortable. We believe and see and understand that where we're at right now is not a comfortable place to be, even if you make $100,000 a year and have a relatively stable life, but you want to achieve something big. You got to see that $100,000 a year and that stability as painful, uncomfortable, in order to then start to do things because that will cause you to step outside of this existence you have in order to achieve something. Here's a good example: I live near the Detroit area, and I grew up around a lot of thugs. I know people who are not financially stable. I know people who get down to their last $100 in their pocket, negative in their checking account, and then they start hustling. They get three or four grand up, and then what do they do? They stop hustling; they stop working hard; they start spending money and making stupid decisions until they're back to about a hundred dollars again. That's their comfort zone, their comfort survival zone. Their brain is associated between a hundred and, let's say, three or four grand. If they get higher than that, their brain goes, "Oh, this is actually not comfortable. Let's do a bunch of things to sabotage it." That's how we self-sabotage, because the brain sees it as a risk to be outside of our comfort zone, even though our comfort zone may be terrible. Your comfort zone of having no women in your life is terrible and lonely, and you want to change that, but then as soon as you start to try to change it, your brain goes, "Whoa, that's a survival risk because we've been surviving here. I don't know what's over that hill, so let's try to sabotage you and come back over here, in this comfortable area where you're miserable, but you're living." Visualization… I have people construct an identity for themselves that's above where they're at, and then they do some NLP techniques that I go over in the course to step into that, visualize it, and then visualize doing these things and being this person that's elevated. When they visualize that, embrace that, and embrace the emotions and the state of being this elevated person, now they go back to their regular life, and their regular life sucks compared to that guy I was just meditating about this morning. "Holy crap, I gotta change this!" You start looking for opportunities to change; you start challenging your goals and the status quo, and you start maneuvering in a different direction. That's what visualization can do. It could be very powerful.
I'm going to turn this camera around. I want to show you something. Back in 2014-ish, I got off of one of my deployments, and I was starting a real estate business. I did this identity and visualization thing. What I visualized myself having was this girlfriend—beautiful girl, dark hair—waking up next to her, and then I do my routine, and I have my cup of coffee, and I'm in my office, or I'm on a balcony overlooking water, a lake. That's my visualization. I did it intermittently; I wasn't real disciplined with it back in 2014-2015, and then I fell off of it because I started doing other mental fitness stuff. There are 18+ hours and 52 modules, so I was doing other things. I wasn't doing the identity thing as much, but this thing was so powerful that that year I did it, I'm actually living every single thing that I had visualized back in 2014-2015. I probably would have had it a lot sooner hadn't it been for deployments and other things.
This is my view when I'm talking to you guys every day. I jump in that thing every day, by the way. Talking about cold water plungers… I got all kinds of fun stuff in this place. This is what I visualized.
What happened was, being where I was at was uncomfortable. Not having this lifestyle I envisioned for myself was uncomfortable, and then it helped me tailor my goals. I have a real estate license still, but I left that team. It's a great business if you know how to work it, but I wanted to be geographically independent. I'm going to San Diego for the Hot Dude Con with John and a bunch of dudes. I can do that. If I had a real estate business, that would screw my whole business up. Someday I'll come out and see you when you're out in Eastern Europe. I have this geographic independence now, which was part of my visualization. The business I had wasn't conducive of that, so even though I was making six figures a year, I would never have left it. I would have been grinding it out, moderately happy, but not really that happy because of that sunk cost. I was looking at Amazon drop shipping; I was looking at different ways of becoming geographically independent. The Apex Mindset thing happened almost on accident, and that became the thing, but I didn't have a clear vision of where I wanted to go in 2014. I just knew what I wanted it to look like. My goals could tailor themselves as opportunities arose, as I did more work, got more clarity, and the next thing you know, I'm living out this vision. Now I have to do something different; I've been doing this different identity exercise that's better than where I'm at, because where I'm at, I'm already at where I visualized. Our good friend Rich Cooper… he has enough money to not do anything, but he's binge-watching YouTube videos about yachts. He's imagining himself having a yacht and what it would be like to have a six-million-dollar yacht and a crew and to travel around. That became his goal, and then I think last year, he got a boating membership. He's learning about it; the action starts to follow the thing he's visualizing. Rich is a very dialed-in entrepreneur who learned that probably a long time ago. He's doing it without realizing it. You see these habits of highly effective and successful people; they often do these things and haven't analyzed that that's a thing that really helps them be successful. They don't necessarily know. It's unconscious competence. Other than binge-watching videos, the identity exercise is a bit more intentional, so it'll get you more consistent and quicker results. Visualizing is good. Visualizing your pickup, rehearsing your pickup in your mind before you go out and talk to girls… there's a way to do it, and a way to screw it up, and I talk about that stuff in the course.
Good stuff. We should draw to a close now. Tusk has this concept which I sort of agree with: he decided he wanted to travel around the world, but he also wanted to travel in a fairly comfortable way—four-star hotels, the occasional five-star. When he started off, he didn't really have the money to do that, but he did it anyway. You've got to acclimatize yourself to the life you want, and then you will find a way to make it work. Would you agree with that, or could that be a bit of a rash thing to do?
To a degree I do; you have to be careful that you don't extend yourself so far beyond your means. I have a chapter on this, in fact, it's on your environment. It was interesting in the entrepreneur group—talking about a high-level salesperson who drives up in a six-figure car. When he's going to meet with clients to close that deal, and he pulls up in that six-figure car, it's not for them; it's for him. He likes cars. His thing is cars. He pulls up in that car, and he knows it does that imprint on him. He's the guy who can close this deal because he's successful enough to be in this car. It's a mindset shift. If it has an effect for you—if James is going to stay in this five-star hotel, spend some money because he's the guy who can be here, and he's the guy who has enough business sense to go for this and that, and that motivates him to work harder, to produce more, to dial in his entrepreneurial life better—great. You can't bankrupt yourself. If you're doing it to impress other people, to get external validation, that's where it's a slippery slope, and how you bankrupt yourself. I could buy a $20,000 watch, and somebody else has a $50,000 watch, and then I get… I'm going to bankrupt myself to get a $50,000 watch, while some guy comes in with a $100,000 watch. You can have all the money in the world, and some guy comes in with a hotter chick or a better body. When you start competing with the external world in a place of insecurity, that's when behaviors like staying in the four- or five-star hotel are harmful for you because of why you're doing it. But if you're…
I do it because it makes me feel capable. It demonstrates my abilities, and I enjoy it. It's internally motivating. When James stays at a five-star hotel, he's not doing it to impress me; he enjoys it and wants the experience. That's the motivator. It's not a competition. That's an important distinction.
Yeah, for sure. Definitely.
Well, listen, I just looked at your message. We've been on for a while, so let's wrap it up. Someone in the chat said the code isn't working. If you want to sign up for the call, I'll put the link in the chat. We have a discount code—it should be all caps: INTLLPLAYBOY. Let me see…oops. Okay, it's in the chat. Someone said it doesn't work, but that's the link. Alpha Mindset is 600, but with the link you get a 10% discount. Cameron said the code isn't working. I'm not sure why. We can look into it later. Send me an email: apexmindset@gmail.com. Tell me you're using the coupon code, and I'll fix it. My Kajabi software shows it should work, but it's not. I'll investigate later.
Yeah, to claim the 10% discount, email Paul at apexmindset@gmail.com. We'll look into the code and update the description or community tab. You should definitely sign up for the course. Today's stream has been incredibly valuable. It's a no-brainer, especially at that price. Now's the time to act.
Yeah, for sure. Good stuff.
Thanks for coming on, Paul. Great chat. We'll be around for Rule Zero at the weekend, on John's channel. If you want to join the course, email Paul at apexmindset@gmail.com, or email me at realtroyfrancis.com. We'll sort it out. See you soon.