Episode 126 – Jack Canfield: How To Maximize Your Potential

Casanova Brooks:

What’s up DreamNation we are back again. And I can tell you for all of the episodes that we’ve done. I don’t know if I’ve been as excited about doing NT, any interview as the, as I am today. And so without further ado, I want to welcome my friend. I feel like my mentor, my good friend, Mr. Jack Canfield to the show.

Jack, you want to go ahead and say what’s up to DreamNation.

Jack Canfield:

Oh, what’s up. I’m really glad to be with you Casanova. This was really fun. I’m glad to share. We share. Before we came on air, a lot of things we have in common growing up, you grew up in Chicago. I used to teach in that area. So I’m looking forward to the conversation because my life purpose is to inspire and empower people to live their highest vision, which is their dream in a context of love and joy.

So basically we’re, we’re aligned here.

Casanova Brooks:

Absolutely. And, and I love it. And I always like to make sure before we get too deep into it, that we give the proper introduction. So I’ll say first off, if anyone does not know who you are, they’re probably living under a rock, but let’s go ahead and make sure that we can give that proper introduction.

And so before you became this world renowned success coach, before you became. A person who’s sold over 50 million books and been featured in everything. Let’s take it back to when you were just a young boy and tell us who is Jack Canfield.

Jack Canfield:

Well, I grew up my dad. I was in the air force and I was born in 1944 during world war two.

And he was transferred to a lot of different places. I born in Fort Worth, Texas. We lived in Omaha, Nebraska. We lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We lived in Florida and then he got out. We settled in Wheeling, West Virginia and across the river in Ohio, which is where I grew up. And my dad was an alcoholic, somewhat violent.

So my mother divorced him when I was six, remarried. My stepfather, who was. Came out of the Navy in world war II. And, basically we lived in a house that cost $8,000. So, you know, we weren’t rich, we were lower middle class. and, but my dad was ambitious and eventually he became a sales person and, and did okay for himself.

And what it made my life unusually successful, given where I came from is that my, I had a rich aunt and she helped build weapons during world war II, I think was a top of the tank or the Turret, they call it with the. Gun part sticks out. Yeah. Get a Foundry in a steel mill. And so she sent me to a private school because her son named Jack was killed when he was in college.

And so she kind of adopted me. I live with my parents, but she kind of took over my education if you will. So I got to go to private school. It was a day student. We graduated 52 kids. It was a small school. It wasn’t like a big prep school in East, but nevertheless, I got a good education for West Virginia, which had the 48th worst.

Public school system when we’re only 48 States at the time. And so basically I got to go to Harvard. I majored in Chinese history, which has nothing to do with what I do today. But what happened for me was that I took a, an elective class in psychology. My senior year for an Easy A. This is an easy A, you’ll get it.

So I took the class, but I fell in love with it. And I said, I want to grow up and do this. I love working with people. And they said, well, you can’t really do that. You don’t have any undergraduate courses in psychology to get into graduate school in psych. So they said, why don’t you go into education? And you can kind of sneak over into psychology.

So I ended up at the university of Chicago on the South side where you grew up. And then I taught at Calumet high school, which has a school, not too far from where you were. And I became more interested in why my students were motivated than I wasn’t teaching history. And that’s what led me to a meeting, a man named W. Clement stone.

Which was one of these guys who wrote a book called Think And Grow Rich. He was a friend of Napoleon Hill, who wrote Think And Grow Rich, . And they together wrote a book called The Success System That Never Fails. So that’s kind of how I got from just being a normal kid to where I am now.

Casanova Brooks:

I love it. And there’s so much that I want to unpack there, but the first thing I want to ask you is you’ve been.

Known for teaching people to maximize their potential. Right. And really been able to live out your dreams. Was there ever a point when you were growing up that you felt like you weren’t maxing, you maximizing your potential? And so that’s where you decided that listen, there’s gotta be more or was it always that you kinda knew the path that you were going to be on, which is an education and history?

Jack Canfield:

No, I grew up basically, really doing whatever you were supposed to do. You go to school, you get good grades, you know, and then I got to be a senior and I’m supposed to apply to college. And I had no idea what I wanted. My parents wanted me to be a lawyer. I didn’t know any better. I thought, well, okay, why not?

And so my Latin teacher who loved me basically said, I said, where do I apply to school? She said, you should apply to Harvard, Yale, and Brown. And I said, get outta here, you know, like, where am I going to get to that other schools? She said, well, I can get you into West Virginia university with a phone call.

So, because she was well loved and known in the, in the educational world. So I applied to those schools. I got into all three, and this is embarrassing, but people often ask, well, why did you choose Harvard over the other three is because there were 52 women’s colleges within 50 miles of Harvard. So it was an all male school and I like girls, you know, I had a girlfriend, all that.

So that was, and that was why. And basically I’m glad I did, because it was a good education and it got me into graduate school and university of Chicago. But, yeah, I, you know, for me it was like, like, I didn’t really know that I wanted, I didn’t know. It never thought about maximizing my life. It was just like, what’s the next thing in front of me graduate from college.

What’s the next thing go to graduate school because I became interested in psychology and education. So when I was in graduate school, this guy comes up to me, I’m in a laundromat mining my own business, just studying for school. And he says, put your book down. Talk to me. I think, God, am I getting picked up? What is this? You know? So he said, no, he was a graduate student. He just wanted to talk.

And then he said he was going to this. Lecture series called living philosophers up at Kendall college, which was an Evanston, a little light. And he said, do you want to come? And I didn’t have a car at the time I was using buses and public transportation. So I said, sure. So we went up there and the first lecture was by a guy named Herbert Otto.

He was a director of the national center for human potential. And he said, you’re only using 10% of your mind. Hmm. And I went up afterwards. I said, well, Can we learn to use more? And he said, absolutely. I said, where do I do that? He said, there’s this place called the Jesse B that’d be climate Jesse Stone foundation.

They have a place called Oasis. It’s a growth center where people do personal development work and you could go there and take classes. And I went, okay, that’s what I did. And I got introduced to all this stuff about the power of the mind and goal setting and visualization and affirmations, a law of attraction.

Emotions, which I had never really owned my emotions much, had always been up in my head. So that was like a breakthrough for me. And then it was like, I want to grow up and teach this stuff. And then it was teaching at Calumet high school. And then it was like, someone said we’re looking for, for really bright people from university of Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, we’re putting together a group of six people.

We’re building a team at a job Corps center in Iowa and Clinton, Iowa. And we’re going to, we were looking for young turks, which I was in my twenties who were smart, who can develop a program, it’s breakthrough to get these kids who’ve dropped out of school, jobs skills and basic training skills. So I spent a year and a half there developing literally the first self-guided education.

In other words, right now, everyone goes online and we, you know, we type in and we got us up. But back then, Reading was taught. The teacher would stand up in front of the class. Everyone had the Solomon reader would have an Apple and say, ah, like an Apple, a like in lay, you know, like, and so in the whole class had to go together and I thought we have these cassette.

Players, why don’t we just put all that instruction on individual cassettes? Let the students literally at their own pace, that was the beginning of individualized learning. I was part of that, you know? And so then what happened where it really shifted for me that job Corps center got shut down .

And that, that’s how it all started.

Casanova Brooks:

I love it. And what’s so significant about that. And I hope that somebody pays attention, as you said, like, I didn’t have it all figured out, but I just took that next step.

Like, okay, what’s next, I’ve conquered this. And I think the world that we’re living in right now, especially with social media, that’s constantly blasting us in the face to show everything looks so perfect. And we’re trying to figure it all out. We’re trying to figure 10 steps ahead where. If you listen to someone who’s already had a tremendous amount of success, it was like, no, let’s just figure out this next step and let’s keep it going.

And our journey might change along the way, just like it did for you, but eventually you’ll get to where you’re supposed to be. Did I understand that correctly?

Jack Canfield:

Yeah, I do. You do. I don’t know if you saw the movie, The Secret when I was in The Secret, I used this metaphor. And it was really most of my life where if you do the thing in front of you and you do it with excellence, you do it with commitment.

Did do a good job, make a difference, be of service, et cetera. Then what happens is it’s like driving a car through the night. Yeah. When you’re driving a car, your headlights are only going so many, a hundred yards, the head of you, you can’t see the rest of it, but if you can drive that a hundred yards successfully, you don’t drive off the road.

The next a hundred yards appear in your headlights. So life for me has been like that. You know, I went from, Chicago. I went to Iowa to the job Corps center and came back to Chicago, worked for Debbie common stone. Some guy at a conference said, you ought to come to the university of Massachusetts. I can.

Get you a scholarship there, you can work on your doctorate and education. I went there while I was there. I met my first wife. She happened to have a trust fund. Wasn’t a lot. She got $6,000 every four months, I think. So it was 18,000 a year, but when you’re a graduate student, that’s a lot of money. And so we were able to then open up a therapy practive, cause she was a psychotherapist and I never planned to be a therapist.

But she taught me how to do that. At that time, there were no licensing laws in Massachusetts, so I could be one. And so I did that. And then one day I took a training with like 300 people, kind of like S Lifespring, those kinds of things, insight. And I went, Oh, you can work with 300 people in a room instead of 20.

I want to do that. So I did that. Then I moved to California to work with that company. And then I found out the guy running that was a cult leader. So I quit. Started my own company. And then I basically wrote The Chicken Soup For The Soul books that took me on a whole other trajectory. You know? So each thing I did, I just did it as well as I could.

And then something else showed up that, that my heart said do that. Then I would just kept doing that. Now. Now, here I am.

Casanova Brooks:

I love it now for Chicken Soup For The Soul. I remember when I was first cause these books released, I want to say what in the nineties? Early night.

Jack Canfield:

93.

Casanova Brooks:

Yeah. So I was very young on this and talk to me about how did that the mindset for Chicken Soup For The Soul even come about and was that your idea or was that like somebody brought that opportunity to you similar to the opportunity that you had when you were just sitting, you know, and the graduate student came to you.

Jack Canfield:

I would say it started when I was at class swim teacher back in the seventies in Chicago. And I realized that when I was talking historical facts and theory and you know, the seven cause of the civil war and all that, my students were like looking out the window. But if I was telling a story about myself, What about Frederick Douglas, who was an escaped slave or about, you know, anything in history that was a story of a real person.

Or if I was talking about, I used to bring in magazines like jet and Ebony, and mean stories to the kids about African Americans who had succeeded because they didn’t have any models. they were on pins and needles. So I learned the power of story. So even when I became a teacher, a trainer and worked for stone and did all that work, I would always use a lot of stories in my work.

And one day, Somewhere when I was, I would say we’re on 1990. They just started. The people would say that story about the puppy is that in the book anywhere a story about the girl who sold 3000 boxes of girl scout cookies, is that in the book, anywhere that story about the kid who climbed Mount Everest, then the book I’d always say no.

And then one day I’m coming back on a plane from Boston to LA, where I was living at the time, live in Santa Barbara. Now about 90 minutes North, it was like the old V8 commercials where the guy goes. Oh, I should have had a V8. And it was like, Oh, I should put these stories in a book and was like, God was tapping me on the shoulder with all these people asking this question.

So I made a list of like 68 or nine stories that I had that I knew, like the girl scout story, the puppy story, the Kilimanjaro story, whatever. And so I made a commitment that I would write down. I would write two stories a week, one Monday through Wednesday, one through Saturday, take Sunday off and in a year, I’d have a hundred stories.

That was my goal. And I, I started looking for stories. Other speakers had stories. And then about, I think I was about 60 stories into when I have breakfast with Mark Victor Hansen, who is the co author on all those books. And he said, I’d like to finish that book with you. And I said, Mark, that’s like asking a novelists, like James Michener, when he’s written three quarters of the book, Hawaii, you’re going to finish the book with him.

Why would I do that? Right. Well, half the stories you tell you stole from me that wasn’t true, but maybe five. And he said, I got 30 more stories and you need a hundred hundreds of good number. So I said, okay, And, turns out he’s a really good marketer and sales person, very creative. I’m really a good detail person.

And it was a great marriage. And so that’s how the book came about.

Casanova Brooks:

Wow. And so at this time, as you start to become a success coach and you start to teach people these principles, did you ever have the belief that like. because here’s why I asked this for a lot of people that decide they want to get into the personal development space.

And before it became cool, right. To have courses online. And just like you said, you kind of first helped to develop this whole industry of where we are now for a lot of people, it’s a struggle because one, am I an expert enough, right. People go through the imposter syndrome and then, two how exactly do I make money out of this?

So were you someone who you instantly knew or was it more just about the passion that you didn’t care about? Any of that stuff you just only wanted to help the mindset.

Jack Canfield:

I think it started in graduate school where I started running seminars for teachers all around new England. I was going to school of education.

I’d written a book called 100 ways to enhance self-concept in the classroom. I was in graduate school. I started getting invitations to come to teacher in services and state meetings of like, you know, counselors and teachers and stuff. And, I wasn’t making a lot of money. I remember my first. Paid speaking gig where after I wasn’t working for another company was I drove through a blizzard from Massachusetts to Connecticut about an hour.

And it was a blizzard. I mean, the snow is just coming straight at you. And I got $25 for my thought. And I remember coming home, boy, I am a paid professional speaker. It was my goal. And I remember the first time I got a thousand dollars and I remember I went out and bought a hundred dollar bottle of wine from my wife and I, and I never spent that kind of money.

I still don’t usually. But the point being that I, was like, it was like a breakthrough, you know, normally my fee was like $300 a day back in the day, seventies and eighties. And, and then, you know, I’ve asked a friend. Well, what do you charge? He said $800 a day, $800 a day. How do you get $900 a day from schools?

He said, I asked for it. I thought, wow. And so I, was so afraid of being seen as someone who didn’t care about kids. I had this big image issue, you know, that I was afraid that I asked for $800. They’d see me as a, in those days, capitalist rip off pig was my concept. You know, it doesn’t care about you, but I practice $800 a day, $800 a day, a practice in the mirror.

This place called me from Iowa Cedar Rapids. And they wanted me to come to a, a half day mental health thing for their mental health group. They said, what’s your feeling with a $600 a day? I couldn’t even get it out. And they said, Oh no sweat. I said, what sweat? And they said, we had $1,200 in the budget.

And so the next company that called me or was a company, it was a social agency or something. I said, $1,200 in my feet. He said we only have $900. I said, okay, I’ll give you a discount. But you know, it’s like little by little, this thing unfolded. And I really did never, I never really set out to be a wealthy.

Famous person. That was never my goal. My goal was to make a difference. So when I wrote 100 Ways To Enhance Self-Concept, I just knew all these teachers didn’t have these techniques and I wanted to share them with them, but the book took off and sold 400,000 copies. And then all of a sudden I was a celebrity in the education world, but not the rest of the world and everything I ever did.

The first. Album I made was cassettes. If you can go back that far, then CDs now it’s all MP3 downloads and so forth. But the reality was, I just wanted to get it out there and share it with more people. And eventually I woke up one day and realized I was a celebrity speaker, you know, up there with Tony Robbins and Brian, Tracy, and all the other people, a legend they say.

Which is weird. Cause you know, talk to my wife. She does not think I’m a legend. Like I’m just a normal guy, you know? But I think again, just doing. The thing is in front of you. And I always have the goal to reach X number of people to sell so many curriculum guides. It was always about impact.

And, you know, lately I, I will say last maybe five or six years, I’ve had income goals that I, that are more about what I want to earn in terms of reaching certain plateaus of financial independence. You know, I could probably retire right now. But I would not be able to do all that things. I do. I support a lot of causes and projects, and I’ve got a grandson.

I want to be able to make sure he goes to college and all that, but my wife and I could live happily on what I own, you know?

Casanova Brooks:

My question to you is when you were first. Finding out who you were, how big was your environment? Did you have masterminds at that time with other people who are doing the same thing as you, or were you kind of like an outlier because I’m imagine you were kind of first generation for everything that you were doing and you were a pioneer in an industry.

So there wasn’t a lot of people that you could talk to because it felt like a lot of people was probably asking you the questions. So besides your mentor, did you have anyone else.

Jack Canfield:

Well, I had W Clement Stone as a mentor when I worked for his foundation for a couple of years. And there were a number of people in the foundation who were older than me who had doctorates, who took me under their wing because I was kind of bright.

And so they recognize that and they wanted to support me. So that was valuable. Then I went to the university of Massachusetts. I was in a graduate program with a lot of other people who were working on what was called psychological education. We said, if it’s done on time, it’s called education. It’s done late.

It’s called therapy, but we were teaching emotional awareness, emotional intelligence, you know, things like, how do you control your emotional States? How do you know who you are? What’s your identity? How do you set goals? What are your values? That kind of work was what we were focused on, which was called psychological education aspect of education, things like that.

So there was a graduate group of people that were all. Thinking the same thoughts and supporting each other, not so much professionally, but intellectually at that time, when I started the new England center, which was a retreat center in Massachusetts, when I dropped out of my doctoral program, I never completed it.

I wrote the book, the book took off, there’s a Cheech & Chong movie where at one point he goes, “we don’t need no stinking badges”. I don’t need no stinking PhD. And, so, but I started the center. And it was a place where people would come for weekends and we had a big 30×30 living room. We could put people up in local motels and stuff, and that got me into the doing larger groups.

And then going off to work with that company that had, you know, put doing 300.

But I want to go back to an earlier question. You asked me and I realized I didn’t answer it, which is Someone starting out now who may not have a big platform who doesn’t know, you know, they feel like they’re posture, everything they learned.

They’ve learned from somebody else that they haven’t really developed something themselves, NLP or EFT, or, you know, whatever. And, and that’s the same for me. I don’t think I ever developed anything unique. I mean, a couple of little nuances of exercises where I put. This together with that most creation occurs when you’re take something, you know, and something else you learn from something else, you put them together and something new emerges.

And so for me, I consider myself a good aggregator. And I think the thing I would say to young people or people not necessarily young, but people starting out is that we all have different audiences that we can relate to. I mean, you’re a young African American, so you have that credibility in the African American community.

You’re also really bright and you’re articulate. So you have universal appeal. but some people like I have a friend, I teach trainers. I teach this program called train the trainer where we train trainers to teach what I teach. And one of the women that came and trained with me was a mortgage broker.

And she thought she was going to go to do general public seminars. Turns out her audience is like 90% mortgage brokers, but she, he runs elite mastermind groups where she charges $24,000 a year. She gets 20 people in those groups. That’s a half a million a year right there. She does keynotes for mortgage brokerage conferences, et cetera.

So we each have. groups like I started out with educators cause I was an educator. I knew that world. I knew the language. some people are, there’s a guy named Jason Dorsey who is a millennial expert and he was in college and this millionaire a billion, I think he was a multimillionaire. Might’ve been a billionaire.

He came and spoke to their undergraduate program and and he said, if anyone wants to come out to my house every Wednesday afternoon, I have, I sit on my porch and I mentor people. So he went out Wednesday. And there was no one there, but him and it’s okay. Interesting. How many people don’t take advantage of the opportunities that are offered them.

And the guy said, so what do you want to do? What’s your life plan? He said, well, I’m going to go to school, finish school, get an MBA, go work in a company. Eventually leave that company, start my own company. And then I’m going to sell that company. And then I want to go and I want to teach high school kids that they can do anything.

And he said, why are you going to wait until you’re 50 to do that? First of all, they won’t trust you anymore. You’re going to be too old. And secondly, why do you want to wait 30 years to achieve your dream? So he dropped out of the university of Texas, started doing seminars for teens, and for high school students, it was and became the number one speaker for high schools in America, and then became the number one go to millennial expert.

And so he makes a fortune teaching companies like. Burger King and you know, all these other companies that hire a lot of young people, how to work with millennials and how to work with, I know the generation Z now, but the younger people, but the point being, he had a target market that he can speak to.

So I would say, you know, who is your target market? And if you say everybody, it’s probably not true. there are people, the Dalai Lama who probably has a universal message, mother Teresa, you know, maybe Tony Robbins, whatever, but in general, think about like, if I go to a Tony Robbins workshop, Everyone there are these type, a hard driving people.

You know?. And if you go to another workshop, everyone’s kind of mellow, they meditate more and they’re doing yoga, you know, so find who you are. If you be authentically, you, you’re going to attract the people that are attracted to your vibe, to your energy, to what you have to teach to your wisdom. And so some people.

Work with athletes. Some people work with school teachers. Some people work with entrepreneurs. Some people work with women, some people work with prisoners. So I think that I wouldn’t worry. There’s plenty of people out there who need, need our work. Trust me. If you just look at how the world’s working right now, we’ve got a 40% of the people in America are supposedly clinically depressed.

We have, I forget how many millions, you know, 30 million or more unemployed at the moment. They’re not living their dream. We have people were told even when people are employed, 80% of them don’t like their job. So, there’s lots of to use the term market available. If you have a message and you learn how to share it with people in an engaging way.

Casanova Brooks:

That’s that’s super powerful. Cause I’ll tell you for me, especially, it felt like you were talking to me, especially over the last couple of years. Cause I have been somebody who, and I’m sure there’s many other people like me and I have friends like me that have thought like, who is when you’re trying to.

Become somebody who is a thought leader. Yes. You can definitely niche down or niche down. However you want to say it. But at the same time, if you feel like you resonate with multiple people and then just, like you said, if you’re targeting everyone almost, it’s like, you’re talking to no one. And so for me, I always wonder, like, how can I have the maximum appeal without feeling like that I’m leaving someone out.

And so I think that you put it in the right way way is to just say like, Hey, you have. Something that already resonates with someone. Right. And then eventually, maybe there’s going to be different people that come to your seminars. Maybe you’re going to pull some people over, but you got to kind of know who you’re talking to in the beginning.

Was that always, did you always understand it or were you someone that you looked up because here’s what I’ll say for me, my mindset was. Especially when people would ask me this over the last year, 12 months or 18 months, I would say Gary V Jack Canfield, Tony Robbins, like who is Jack Canfield’s target audience.

Right? Because when you say that it’s like anybody who wants to maximize their life, which could almost be anyone. And the same thing for me being a, now 32 year old man black man, the fact that I’m referencing Jack Canfield, where’s our connection there. Right. We don’t really have it. It was just the mindset and it was the vision that, listen, I want to create a life by my design.

So you would say, Hey, my target audience is not the young black man, but yet I am your target audience. So was that always you in the beginning or did you still focus and you just let it happen?

Jack Canfield:

I would say that my target audience has always been people like you, people who wanted to have more, do more, be more and impact more.

I. I would say that my target audience has not been private top corporate executives. I’ve worked with a number of corporations, FedEx and Microsoft and so forth. but I don’t feel like I’m the guy to take a CEO or a C suite executive and teach them how to run a business better. I can talk to them about how to run their life better, how to run their, maybe be a better parent.

And a lot of them want that. And they come to my seminars for that. What started for me? Cause one of it was, I. Because of my work in school and because of teaching in the school in Chicago and realizing most of my kids had low self esteem, I became a self esteem expert. And then I realized, yeah, statistics are two out of three people in America have low self esteem.

So I used to kiddingly say, when I was talking to audience, look to your right, look to your left. One of you is okay, two of you are in trouble. And so the idea is that meant two thirds of the American population were my audience because they had low self esteem, but here’s the challenge. And this is the challenge with personal development, general: Harvard. Business school did an article in one of their business magazines, Harvard business journal or whatever it’s called.

What they said was the work you and I do is called missionary work. You do not have to convince someone. They want a car. You only have to convince them your car is the one they want.

Everybody wants a car, right. But not everybody wakes up every morning and says, I need some personal growth. I need some self development. I need to become more of who I want to be. Most people don’t do that. So first of all, we have to convince people that they have more potential than they really think they have, because a lot of people are living in resignation.

It’s a habit of thought. It’s a mindset that there’s not more, I can’t have more for a number of reasons. I’m not worth it. You know, I was told as a kid, I wasn’t worth it. My parents treated me like I wasn’t worth it. You know, the school system treated me, like I wasn’t worth it through segregation, bad schools, poor neighborhoods, whatever it is.

A lot of people have a lot of beliefs about their inability. To achieve more. So they go into resignation and they go through this Groundhog day existence, getting up, going to work, coming home, drinking a beer, watching TV, going to bed, you know, and it’s like, and that’s their life. And they carve out little pieces of it, whether it’s the barbecue on Saturday.

Yeah. The football games on Sunday or whatever to kind of enjoy themselves, or maybe numb out from that. you see a lot of alcoholism, a lot of drug abuse in America. I just saw. Today a news item that said, because of the pandemic, we haven’t been focusing on the amount of deaths from drug overdoses, 70,000 deaths this year, just from drug overdoses.

That would have been news except for the pandemic where we’re getting, you know, 70,000 people a day, new testing, positive. So I think that we first have to convince people. That you want more. Now there’s a lot of people out there, especially young people coming out of college, people that are in certain industries like real estate and network marketing companies, they’re kind of in that mindset.

And that’s a lot of market for what you and I do. in terms of, you know, people that sales, they always want to sell more people that are in network marketing companies are independent solo entrepreneurs in a sense within there. So there’s that reality. And now that people are out of work, that. They weren’t wanting more necessarily, but now that they have less, they want more than what they currently have.

Right. And we can convince them that we have the ability to teach them that. And so all the people that you’re talking about that are coming in as thought leaders and to become a thought leader, you need to be thinking. You know, if you see behind me, that’s only one of four walls in my office that looked like that I’ve read over 3000 books, I’ve taken over 600 seminars.

I’ve watched over a thousand Ted talks and YouTube videos. And, you know, and I’m constantly learning something new, you know, whether it’s tapping and EFT. And then we can get rid of limiting beliefs. I just recently got into essential oils, which I had no idea what they were. It turns out these are plant based essential oils that are created through steam distillation, that when you inhale them, From a diffuser or you rub them on your hands and inhale them, or you put them on your body.

They create instant changes in attitude, in a courage in opening up limiting beliefs and yeah. Helping release them, unbelievable stuff. So I’m now deeply that that’s my new kind of thing I’m into, I’m always into something new because my whole. Commitment is how do you help people go further than they ever thought was possible faster than they ever thought was possible.

So I used to have people pounding, pillow, screaming, I hate you and stuff to get rid of their anger. And then I learned about EFT and we can get rid of it, like in, you know, 10 minutes. And then I learned about essential oils where you can get rid of it even faster. So my point of view is let’s not take a long time to get to where we want to go and let’s keep learning new stuff as you do as well.

I’m sure every guest you have, you’re probably learning something from them, reading their books, watching your videos, et cetera.

Casanova Brooks:

Absolutely. And that’s what I say. Some of it is when people ask me about the podcast, I say some of it is definitely selfish because of the fact yeah. That I know that I’m going to learn something new from everyone that comes on.

Right. And they all have that one or two nuggets. And so with you again, it was super cool because it felt like somebody who helped me even get into this space of bringing them on. And I’ve learned so much from you. The one thing I remember I saw this video probably about. Three months ago. And I think this is relevant for a lot of people that are listening or watching right now.

And it was about three months ago and you basically broke down about how to tackle 2020. And this was before the pandemic even came about. But you had said, and what was really powerful is, I don’t know. I know you described a Mark Victor. There as the, the sales guy, but I don’t know, maybe you’ve developed it over time, but you had that hook in the beginning of the video.

Cause you said, you know, I’ve delivered hundreds of thousands of messages, but this might be the most important message that I’ve ever delivered in my life where then it was like, I’ve heard a lot of Jack, but Whoa, what is he going to say right now? And then, so you started to go into basically the message of.

Was that you cannot possibly attain your greatest, vision in your life without healing first. And you said that, you know, in 75 years, basically you have done so many different exercises, but you found that even age of three to eight or three to nine years old, you still had two or three wounds that were still alive and that had not healed.

And the reason being is because you didn’t allow them to heal, you didn’t acknowledge them.

Jack Canfield:

Right.

Casanova Brooks:

I wanted to say, like, why, why do you think that most people will not acknowledge it because this took you a long time. If you can say, Hey, it wasn’t until I was 70, 71, 72, that I even found a place to acknowledge him for somebody right now that’s 25 years old, 28 years old.

And they’re about to go into their prime right over who they can be. How can they open up to where they can do it even faster and start to acknowledge those wounds?

Well, first of all, you have to know that nobody is exempt. I don’t care how good your childhood was. whether it came from your peers, your teachers, your coaches, your older brother, your parents, your grandparents, your uncle, your neighbors, whatever.

All of us have had experiences that were negative, that we then made a decision that affects us for the rest of our life. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Yeah. one of the people I work with is a swimmer and she is a really good athlete. And in, in her, in her, practices, amazing times Olympic times.

In competition, never the same. And so in the work that we do and I’ll describe that work in a minute, we were able to take her back to when she was in her case, 11 years old. And what happened was she said to her mother, how come when I win all these trophies and ribbons and metals, you hide them, all my friends, they put them on their shelves, their bulletin boards or refrigerators, you know, et cetera.

And she said, the mother said. Your younger brother, when you bring those homes, it makes them really feel bad. Cause he never wins anything like that. And so she, at the age of 11, that her winning hurt her brother. Hmm. Now, now she’s 21 years old and she doesn’t remember she made that decision, but every time she goes into competition, her subconscious mind doesn’t want to hurt her brother.

And so she doesn’t perform as well. So when we were able to take her back, I can see that and then basically released that belief and replace it with a more positive belief consciously from a conscious mind, and then install that belief. She starts winning. So that’s the kind of thing that happens. I had another woman on the other side aside, who was, she was very successful and she won a free coaching call with me.

It was part of a contest. We did, she lived in England and she was over when she got on the call, I said, so what do you want to do in this hour? And she thought like, To learn how to be more successful. You’re the success guy. And I said, well, tell me how successful you are now. So she was the vice president of a bank.

She was on the board of like three or four companies and organizations that are banks, et cetera. She was planning her own wedding. She was about to get married. Anyway, she was so overwhelmed. It was ridiculous, so much stress. And I said, I’d really like to rather work with you, un-hooking, this need to perform at such a high level.

Cause she was stressed out and she admitted that. and so it turns out when we took her back using the same exercise, what happened was she was five years old and there was a recession in, in England. And one night at dinner, her father said, you know, just blowing off steam. “I don’t know how are we going to feed all the children?

There’s just not going to be enough money. I don’t want somebody whose kids are not going to be able to eat”. And so she’s five years old and she’s thinking, well, I want to be one of the ones who eats. So all of a sudden she figures the strategy for that is to be perfect. You know, keep your room clean, never get dirty, do everything perfectly, get good grades.

You know what I mean, preschool, whatever it was. And so now here she is in her late thirties and she’s doing the same thing, living her life, having to overproduce and be perfect in order to survive, but she didn’t need to do that to survive anymore. And she didn’t need to do it then either, but she didn’t know that, she was a little kid, but we make those kinds of decisions as a child that then inform us.

For the rest of our life, subconsciously, we don’t remember we made it right. And then we don’t know why, why are we afraid to make that call and ask for what we need? Why are we afraid to ask that woman out? Why are we afraid to confront somebody when they’re abusing us? Why are we afraid to leave a crappy job?

You know, whatever it is, there’s something in there that’s stopping us. And so what you’re referring to was when I remember I was standing in my driveway, when I did this, we did, it was outside, that I was. Promoting a call. I do a couple of times a year where I’ll have a thousand people on this call from all over the world and I take them through this process.

So if you’re listening to this yes. And you would like to get an email when we, when I do that and just go to JackCanfield.com, Jack Canfield, C A N F I E LD .com and just get on our mailing list. And when we’re doing that, you’ll, you’ll be informed and, I’ll take you through it. But basically what we do is we look at what’s something in your life where you feel frustrated.

You’re not able to create what you want. So it could be a relationship that lasts. It could be a certain amount of income. Why can’t I ever do that? Why can’t I, you know, have courage to talk to my boss, whatever it might be. And, and it could be health. A lot of people have health challenges, which are, mostly, mental, that create the physiological health challenges.

And then what I do is I say, close your eyes. Scan your body notice how you feel when you feel you can’t do that. You know, if when you’re blocked, you’re frustrated. So frustrated, resignation, hopelessness, fear, whatever. Then we scan the body from head to toe and look for a place in the body where there’s tension, where where’s the greatest tension, the greatest pain or the greatest numbness.

Cause numbness is numbing out the pain he’s been holding tight so long. Then we basically say there’s a feeling inside of that. Let’s. Identify that, and people can get in touch with it. And then now ride that feeling back to the earliest time you can ever remember feeling that same sensation in your body and that same feeling.

Everybody goes back to somewhere between three and 10, 11 years old, mostly three and eight 99% of the people all go back. And then it’s like, what was, what w where are you? Who are you with? What’s happening? What did you want that you didn’t get? What did you didn’t want? That was happening? You were being shamed.

These locked in a room, whatever, what decision did you make at that point? It’s not safe to be sexy. It’s not safe to ask for what I want. It’s not safe to confront authority, you know, whatever. Now what would be a better decision based on your intelligent adult self, your adult self goes back, counsels you, then you go into the future.

You become your 81 year old enlightened self counsel, your current self. And then basically it’s gone. It goes on you and you’re better, you know, now the challenge is I do that call, but most people have 10 of those, you know, so basically the little repetition is needed, but once you learn how to do that, you can do it anytime you want.

Yeah. And I think that that’s so powerful. I think the next level of that is people have to be okay with being vulnerable. Right. Because that’s the part it’s almost like therapy, like you said. And for a lot of people, especially in the black community therapy is always looked at as a sign of weakness.

Yes, Right. And so it’s like if I admit that I have a problem and I go see a therapist, whether it’s a marriage counselor or whatever, it means that I have a problem with that, that I’m weak. And so I think that that’s the same thing where like, people, they can listen at you, they could watch those videos, but yet when they write down the answers, how do you gain the conviction to say this is okay, which is, I think is another thing, because we have that subconscious mind in our voice that says like, okay, we’ve wrote this down.

But this means that you’re you have demons, but how do you, how do you prepare it? The people were to say, it’s okay to have these demons. We all have these demons. Here’s how you can counter that. Is there a process for that?

Jack Canfield:

Well, it goes back to the missionary sales thing. You first got to convince them that they need it.

And my experience is that you have to go first. You have to be the one that says I have demons. These are my demons. This is how I’ve dealt with them. And I know for me, it was really the hard, you know, I’ll go back to teaching in a black school. There was a time when being smart and a black school was being white.

You know, you didn’t want to succeed because it meant you were copping out and becoming white, you were becoming what they call the house. N-word, you know, so basically in

Casanova Brooks:

some ways that’s still, that’s still relevant. Yeah.

Jack Canfield:

So, and so that kind of what it’s a, it’s a level of fear. That basically says, I don’t want to play that game because I’m not sure I can win.

So I’m going to make you wrong for playing that game for success. Now, obviously people do cop out and they become the token black person in the company and all that kind of stuff. And we’ve seen movies and books, and we know about that. So that has to be addressed as well. But the point being that someone has to go first.

I had a friend who used to run nude workshops and basically get everyone nude. And I said, how do you do that? And he said, well, you have to take your clothes off first. And so that’s a metaphor for if I’m and I teach trainers is if you’re going to ask people to do an exercise and go deep, they’re never going to go deeper than you go.

When you demonstrate setting up the exercise. So you have to tell people, Hey, I’ve been where you were. I thought it was a sign of weakness. I was afraid people would judge me. I didn’t want to acknowledge it. I didn’t, I didn’t want to lose control. I thought I might get it so angry. I’d kill somebody because I’m so angry about, you know, anything, racism, whatever, or I’d cry forever.

Cause there’s so much pain in there. no one’s ever cried forever. No, one’s, I’ve never scraped anyone off a wall because they exploded. You know, it’s like, and you just have to explain that and then tell them what you learn.

You know, I’ll share a story with you, which I had not shared for a long time.

And I mentioned, I’m into these essential oils right now. So we do This thing right now called the emotional reset, the guy that developed this discovered a set of that we’re using Egypt to train. To, to purify the people that were in the high government position. So that way they would not come from ego, they would come from service and they would take him into this temple.

And for three days and nights, they would put these oils on them and these oils bring up feelings. They bring up memories. They bring up times when you were hurt and traumatic. So I’ve been part of a group taking this group and being part of it as well. This last month, going through this process. And the first week I did it, you put this oil on.

and you just lie there. And all of a sudden these memories come up, which you haven’t thought of in ages. And I had a very painful memory occurred. So I was teaching at Calumet high school. My best friend was an African American. He was the basketball, he was a phys ed teacher. They had a basketball coach already, and he wanted them to get some extra money, which meant if you.

Get a sport after school, you got paid for coaching at sports. So swimming. Well, I’d been a swimmer and I taught swimming. I had a water safety instructor card and all that kind of stuff. So I said, I’ll help you. And after swimming practice, we have a glide. We go to a bar, we’d have a shot of scotch or a boilermaker or whatever.

That was his way of not wanting to go home to his wife and their great relationship. And then eventually we had to stop that. I said, I can’t do this. You don’t have any preparations. I got up. Playing lesson plans for the next day. Anyway, we became best friends. He took me to was up. Club in Chicago called the pumpkin room.

It was a jazz club and we used to go there every Saturday night and just really great friends. And then one day it was in the spring of that first year of my teaching, he comes up to me and he says, I’m not going to be able to be your friend anymore. And I said, why not? And he said, I just joined the black Muslims.

And now I have to see you as the white devil and I can’t interact with you anymore. And I, it was like devastated, you know? I mean, it was like, Your wife breaking up with you when you weren’t expecting, I mean, was that devastating for me? It was, that was the only male friend I really had as I was in that school program at the time.

And so I forgot I had that experience and it came up and I, I cried in my, I was in my bedroom, my own bed when I was there and it reminded me, I. Many years ago, I had a subluxation in my neck. I was thinking chiropractor. He would adjust it and I’d come back the next week. It was still there. He did some muscle testing on me.

He said this subluxation have to do with biochemistry. No, this relationship? Yes. male or female male. between ages of zero and 10 now 10 and 20, no, 20 and 21. Yes. 21, no. 22. Yes. Okay. what happened to you in 22 with a man then? That was that. Event and I hadn’t healed it. And when I did some work on that in therapy, basically my neck started staying in place, but there was still an emotional residue in there that had not totally cleared out.

And so you never know what’s going to come up. And the point is by my sharing that. You know, you know, more about me and what happened was I shared that on a call. It was an African American woman living in Barbados on the call. And she wrote me a two page letter talking about her being black and having been rejected by white people and how she’d never heard a black white person talk about that.

And we. You really bonded us. People love authenticity, and vulnerability is what creates connection and also what’s creates trust. And one of the things I teach my trainers is you want to be a guide by the side, not a Sage on the stage. And so you want to be working with people because people know you look at someone like Tony Robbins, who is much more vulnerable than it used to be, but there was a point where he was so perfect.

You said I can never be that. Right trainer. You don’t want to be that person because then people feel it’s impossible to achieve what you achieve. So the more they know, like when you asked me, what are some of the challenges you had in the beginning and so forth people go, Oh, if he could do it, I could do it.

Casanova Brooks:

The question I guess, that I have from, from here is looking at all the success that you’ve had, and if you can sum it up and you’ve talked to so many world renowned thought leaders, if you could sum it up now, looking over these last, let’s just say 50 years.

Do you have one, maybe two lessons that if you, I had to do it all over again, you would have put these at the forefront to make sure that you could speed up your success. Not only mentally, but spiritually as well.

Jack Canfield:

Well, I would say work on yourself first. you know, success is an inside out job. It’s, it’s a combination of mindset, skill sets, and action.

And I think a lot of people, especially younger people today are looking at the skillsets. Tell me about internet marketing. Tell me about online trainings, how to develop an online course. And there’s all that information out there. And, you know, some of it’s free online, somewhat. You got to pay for their webinars or summits.

There are courses that people sell at the end of that, and it’s good information. And, but if you don’t have the mindset of positivity of, the, the whole understanding of a lot of attraction, if you don’t have your vibration high, if you’re not being authentic and vulnerable, you know, you hear people all the time now saying people want authenticity.

They don’t want, you know, Canned performances and so forth. So that willingness to be vulnerable, to not have it all figured out is really important. But I do think that personal growth and development working on yourself, people often say, what’s the best thing I can do for my kids. I say, work on yourself.

The better person you become, the better parent you’ll become because the more uncooked stuff in you, where are you going to be reactive instead of responsive. And so what most of us are, is we’re reactive. We get pissed off at stuff. We get, you know, we defend ourselves, we push things away with judgmental and that doesn’t work very well.

And so we need to be open to feedback. That’s a real big issue for a lot of people. They don’t want to hear the feedback. They’re afraid of what they’re going to hear. You can’t get better if you don’t know where you’re off course. If you don’t know where people aren’t getting, what they want from your need, from you, the reason Chicken Soup For The Soul was so successful Casanova is that we had a panel of readers.

Anywhere from 20 to 40 readers for every book we did and they were black, white, yellow, Brown, they were urban, suburban, and rural. They were Democrats and Republicans and non-party, they were rich. Middle-class poor, you know, across the board, male and female, whatever. So that when we had, we’d give them a story and say, great.

On a scale of one to 10, 10 gave you goosebumps made you cry, made you think inspired you, whatever. And if anything, less than a nine. Never got in a book and stories. I wrote that I love never gotten a book, but it wasn’t about me for me. It was about impacting the reader. And so basically you have to be open to feedback and a lot of people aren’t.

Like, you know, your husband starts to give you feedback and you scream at him or you throw a bottle at him or whatever. And so, you know, men hit women for giving them feedback. So that’s a big piece. And I think a lot of leaders don’t listen, you know, I would say I would, me, I would have listened more when I was younger.

Listen to the people I was teaching, listened to my. Wife listened to my kids and so forth. I think that’s a big thing. As far as professionally, I would say I would have written sooner. I think having a book and a lot of people don’t write cause they think they don’t have anything new to say you have your version of it to say you have your experience of it to say, you know, you apply a lot of my principals and principals from other people from the books you read, but the way you apply them, And what obstacles you are facing and how you overcame them and how the rule of five, or, you know, affirmations or visualizations work for you.

That’s a unique story. And it goes back to that niche are the people who can relate to you. You know, Tony Robins become Tony Robins. People are curious it’s about that. How did Brian Tracy become Brian? Tracy? How did Lisa Nichols become Lisa Nichols? You know, interesting stories. And so basically I would say.

When you write a book, include a lot of story. You know, stories are what Velcro, the principles to the brain. That’s why The Success Principles book is so good is because it’s not just a principle and a strategy to apply. There’s a story that makes you believe it’s possible for an average person to achieve that.

So I think those are a couple of things I say today, you got to build your, your network, obviously online. You know, the more people you can get in your Facebook community, your Instagram account, your Twitter followers, you know, whatever it might be, that’s worth building up and there’s. That’s skill set again.

Right? You have to have the courage. I mean, how many people do you know, who, you know, have good information who are afraid to do their first Facebook post or afraid to do their first Instagram live? You know? And so that’s called the personal development part, overcoming the fear and realizing that your why is bigger than your fear because you care and you want to make a difference.

Casanova Brooks:

Wow. And there’s, that gave me goose bumps. And I’ll tell you the reason why is because when you first talked about opening up to feedback and in some ways criticism, I remember when my son who is now, now on Monday, he just turned nine. CJ did. And I remember when he was three years old and I don’t tell this story too often, but he was three years old.

And for me, I came my mom and my grandma. They would physically whoop me. And I think I remember hearing, in your video, you were talking about one day, you basically. You got a whopping by your dad with a hairbrush and things like that. And that led to some of the beliefs that you had. Well, for me, I grew up and I was thinking, you know, we would get whooped when they’re not listening.

Right. And so, for CJ, I never like took a belt or, or anything like that to him. Well, one time and his mom freaked out. I know they were, and I gotta get back into that one. But anyway, so even before this, he was younger and I would just always take my hand and yeah. Once or twice on his butt, right. To say, Hey, you know, we got to listen.

And so one day, this was right when we’re going through this time of losing my mom and everything else. And he, he wasn’t listening. I took my hand to his butt and a couple of times, and then afterwards it was probably about 30, 45 minutes. Okay. Laughter and I catch him, he’s got little headphones on and he’s sitting underneath the table and I say, Hey buddy, why are you sitting on his table?

And he says, because I’m scared. And I say, well, why? And he says, because you always hit me when you get mad. And so this was the first time for me and keep in mind, I never had, my dad was never around. And I was just thought like, that was the story that I was telling myself. And so I really, it made me listen to that feedback.

And then I vowed the like, from there on, I wasn’t going to put my hands on him. Right. Because I didn’t want him to grow up. Thinking that listen, when you get mad and when you get irritated, that’s gotta be the thing you gotta, you gotta lash out and be physical with people. And so that was something that I was open to that feedback.

And now, I mean, we have such high level conversations for him to just be 9. But I think it’s again, because of the story that I told myself of like, Hey, we can ask him, did you know better? Right. Well, how come you didn’t do better in this situation? If this was you, you know, and someone said this to you, how would it make you feel all of the things that I was never grown up asked, right?

No one was ever asking me this. So I think that that’s very powerful when you say like, you gotta be open to the feedback and that’s the other part, part two of leaders gotta listen. Right? And so for me, that’s a big thing because. I there’s one of the quotes that came out probably about six months ago or eight months ago.

And it kind of went viral and it said, you know, if I didn’t come from, and the thing was, wealthy family, if I didn’t come from a wealthy family, that meant that a wealthy family had to come from me where I was speaking about a couple of weeks later in front of an audience of about 200 or something.

And it was young black kids. And I had told them, you know, that I grew up without a dad. And one of the quotes that was resonating with my heart was if I didn’t grow up from a or. If I didn’t come from a loving father, then what did that mean? That a loving father has to come from me. So I think it all plays back into that point, but I a hundred percent agree.

And I think in this world nowadays, Just like you said, you can learn the skillset, but that mindset is the thing that even when you feel like you have the skillset, that’ll take you to the next level, because it could just be, if you feel like you’re at the top of your game and skillset, but you don’t go seek out the mentors and the knowledge, things like that.

You’re always kind of stay at that ceiling. So I appreciate you sharing that. So powerful

Jack Canfield:

talk. Yeah. Go ahead. No, I just, I’m going to take a moment and then do a commercial. So this is the latest book I wrote. It’s called The Success Principles Workbook. And the reason I wrote it is I found out that the people that took my live seminars and went through my coaching programs were much more successful at applying the programs and the people who just read my first book, The Success Principles.

Now, people like you who read that book, this is the original book and you. You know, you can still get it. It’s great. It’s got 67 principles of success. but a lot of people would read it and then just put it on the shelf. And they ended up with what I call shelf esteem their life. But what I did was I said, if I could put a, a live coaching program into the covers of a book, so someone would just go through the book, do the exercises in the book and then come out like you did applying them and having a better life.

Is that possible? So we, we, we wrote the book. We beta tested it with about 35 people. Who’d never heard of me, never heard of it and didn’t know anything before it, at the end of 16 weeks had transformed their lives. And so we know it works. So then we put it out. So there are 17 principles of success.

There are the core principles, just like in football, you need to know how to block and tackle them, pass the ball and catch the ball and so forth. So these are the core principles. So if you’re watching this. I D I just want you to know there’s a resource available called The Success Principles workbook.

You can get on amazon.com and come to my website. JackCanfield.Com. There’s all kinds of courses and online things that we have available for you. I just, I didn’t want to get to the end of the call and forget to do that.

Casanova Brooks:

Yeah, and it’s okay. I’m glad that you brought that up. We do put all of the links, like anything that you mentioned, we put links in our show notes on it.

So definitely we’ll make sure that everybody has the links to those. And I know that someone here in this will be reaching out to you and they will absolutely say how. The 17 core principles have changed their life. Because for me, I know that when I was first getting exposed to it, and just like you said, it was the stories.

And I want to say I’m almost positive that it was The Success Principles that first said that you can do anything. And the story behind that was, they had said it, let’s say that you just say that, Hey, I just want to listen to stories all day and drink coffee. Right. And it was like, if you don’t think that that’s possible, let me ask you, what does Oprah do all day?

Right, or what does Ellen do all day? And it was like, and at that moment that I heard that I was like, that’s right. Like what do they do all day? And, you know, and it just felt that was the story. That was the resonation with me, that I was like, this is possible. And of course, nowadays it’s the same thing because you have a podcast and you can bring the greatest people on and you could have water, you could have coffee, you can have whatever, and you can listen to these stories and you can learn and you can be empowered and you can be inspired and you can give.

That to your tribe. And so that was huge. That was so huge. I know we’re coming to the end of our time. I want to ask you what does having a dream mean to you?

Jack Canfield:

Well, to me, it means having something you’re looking forward to something you want to have happen, something, you know, desire from your heart. I mean, I think when you’re a little kid, everyone has a dream.

They want to grow up and be an astronaut. They want to go and be a professional basketball player. They want to grow up and be a doctor, you know, whatever it is that they dream of, you ask, most kids, they can tell you that our kids will say, I don’t know. And that’s okay. Cause you you’ll eventually. Find something you love to do.

But I think for me, you know, I always wanted to grow up. I want to be smart and I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to contribute. I remember, when I was. I think I was 16 or 17. I visited my uncle. He said, why do you want to be when you grow up? I said, I want to be an egg head. I just heard somebody talk that they said an egghead was someone who was really smart.

And there was this, there was a Senator, a US Senator who was very impactful and he was very, very smart. I thought that would be fun to be someone like that. Yeah. Making a difference in the world and who’s really know something, you know, I mean, we have a lot of smart politicians, some of them not so smart right now in an office, but I wanted to be that kind of person.

And then along the way I discovered, you know, Les Brown I’m sure you’d know Les Brown and less basically he was. He was an assembly person, a state legislator in Chicago, you know, in Ohio. I don’t know if you know that.

Casanova Brooks:

And,

Jack Canfield:

and he was there for two years and he said, I couldn’t make a difference. He said it was, everything moves so slow and it’s so hard.

There’s so much back and forth and so much politicking so I left the legislature and thought if I really want to make a difference, I need to change people’s mindsets. And that’s when he became a motivational speaker because he realized he could make more of a difference than he could in politics, which I found fascinating. Les and I are good buddies.

We actually were giving a talk once and Les said he was up in front of the group. And there was four of us speakers that day. And he said, you’re watching myself, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen go from local obscurity to national obscurity right in front of your eyes, which at that time was pretty true.

So for me, A dream is something that is, it’s a little more than just like, a hope or, you know, you have something you really want to achieve something you really want to experience.

Maybe you want to climb Mount Everest. Maybe you want to be a doctor that comes up with a solution to cancer. Maybe you want to be an NFL football player, whatever it is, but it’s something in your heart that you feel passionate about. And I think for a lot of people, they don’t have a dream. They’ve been talked out of their dream and I’ll share an interesting piece of data with you.

About three or four days ago, I was talking to a woman who worked. With cancer patients. And she said, what she noticed was the people she would ask them after you heal. If you, if you get cured from cancer, what do you want to do? And she said, the people that had a very specific answer, I want to go to Hawaii.

I’m going to live on Maui for a month. We’re going to snorkel. We’re going to scuba dive. We’re going to then go to Singapore. We’re going to do East Asia tour. She said those people got better. She said the people that she asked and I said, I don’t know, maybe visit my grandkids, maybe retire. You know, she said, most of us didn’t get better.

And what you realize was having a dream, having a vision of something you want to experience something you want to create manifest, whatever. It’s something that gives you purpose. It gives you momentum. It gives you something to look forward to. When I was teaching self esteem and I was working with some of the self esteem experts back in the seventies and eighties, one of the things we found out that built self esteem was having a positive expectation of something in the future.

So one of the things we would do when kids would come into the classroom in my class, I’d say, what are you looking forward to today? And if they didn’t have anything, I knew that that kid had a problem. If they say I’m looking forward to recess. So I’m looking forward to playing basketball after school, I’m looking forward to being with my girlfriend tonight, whatever those people would have higher self esteem.

So then we had to figure out what can we build into their life to help them set some goals, to have somebody to look forward to or build in support systems, to have somebody look forward to. So a dream usually comes from inside. It’s something that’s like a seed in you. I believe Casanova that every person.

Every person is born with a purpose. Every person has a seed within them as something they’re supposed to be. Something, they’re supposed to express something they’re supposed to do or something they’re supposed to learn. And if we get in touch with that and there are techniques for that: life purpose exercises, et cetera, then we can fulfill that purpose and we get to have a fulfilling, meaningful life.

A lot of people to use Stephen Covey’s quote, “you don’t want to get to the top of the ladder and realize the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall”, right. People are pursuing what they think is success. You know, money. We got to build a business, turn around and become a billionaire really quickly, or I’m gonna become famous, or I’m gonna have the most followers on YouTube, whatever it’s not necessarily aligned with their purpose.

Now, if it’s aligned with your purpose, great do it. But most people I talk to, if you say, what’s your purpose in life, they don’t know. And so I think it’s really important. I’m editing a book called Living The Success Principles, all stories of people who either read the book and took a seminar online course and how it changed their life.

Yeah. And this one person, it’s a quote, someone else said, you know, the, “the two best days of your life is when you’re born. And then the day you figure out why”. And, you know, he talks about the day. He figured out why. And I think that when you get in touch with that and then build your life around it and say, okay, this is my dream.

This is my purpose. And I’m going to now set goals and learn the skills and develop the relationships that I need to fulfill that dream. You know, I often say I have a quote. I sometimes do when I’m talking, I say, y’all remember Martin Luther King’s famous quote, his famous speech. “I have a complaint”. It wasn’t this talk right.

But most people are going around complaining about how bad it is, the pandemic, the election coming up, the Russians, the, you know, environmental destruction, you know, and so forth. but really we have to say, what does it look like when we get on the other side of a society that works, where people are judged by the quality of their character, not the color of their skin, where we have an environment that’s sustainable, where we have people not living in poverty and dying at an unfair rate because they’re in the poverty zone, et cetera. That’s what we have to focus on. And when you get in touch with that, you can’t wait to get up in the morning. You need to go to bed cause you’ve got so much more you want to do. And that’s what I think about the power of a dream.

Casanova Brooks:

Love it. That’s a great way to end it.

I would ask you, I don’t all of these quotes that you’ve heard, that you’ve ever heard, that you’ve said that it resonated with you. Just for my curiosity and I’m sure somebody else would love to know as well. What’s the one quote. If you had to leave one quote line in a book to sum up everything that has been built on your legacy for your great, great grandchildren, what’s that one,

Jack Canfield:

“You have everything you need to do anything you want”. In other words, you have the capacity, you have the intelligence, you have the internal talents to do whatever you want to do. Now you may have to develop skills, relationships, take some, get some credentials. You don’t have whatever, but there’s nothing you can’t do. I mean, literally I’ve, there’s actually the research now that shows people who can’t sing can learn to sing on key.

People that can’t dance can learn to dance. you know, we see Dancing With The Stars and we see how people improve amazingly, you know? So, it’s just a matter of trusting that a lot of people think I’m not wealthy enough. I don’t know enough people. Well, I wasn’t born with the right skills. I don’t have the DNA, you know, Jack Canfield’s different and he was born with a different set of, you know, brain cells or whatever.

but you have what you need to do, what you need. You know, my wife does not have the brain of a physicist. But she has the personality of someone who gives people permission to be spontaneous and real because that’s all she does all day long. And her life purpose is to basically inspire and empower people to be authentic.

And that doesn’t mean she doesn’t need to have a physics mind that can do physics. and I’ve met a lot of physicists who can’t make relationships work. So, and they don’t necessarily need that to do what they’re here to do. So I think that you, I would just say you have everything you need. To do anything you want, don’t let anybody convince you.

You can’t do what you want to do. And I will just finally say this, my personal quote, but I don’t think it’s necessary for everybody. It was for mother Teresa. She said I’m only a pencil in the hand of God. And so I think that’s me. Maybe it’s a word processor or a computer now instead of a pencil, but everything I do is I’m just an extension of that spiritual energy coming into the manifestation to spread love and joy and power and abundance and prosperity and happiness in the world.

Casanova Brooks:

There, you have it for anybody who wants to stay connected with you. Again, we’ll have all of these links in the show notes, but if somebody’s super inspired, they’re going to go out and get your book and they want to stay connected with you.

Where can they find you?

Jack Canfield:

Just Jack canfield.com, C A N F I E L D. Dot the com. Also, if they go to that, if they want to go to jackcanfield.com/transformation, they can actually download it’ll come to your phone or your computer a 10-day free course. You’ll get about a three to five-minute video every day with an assignment for that day, that will Velcro that, Principle into your life, like appreciation of others, acknowledgment, visualization, affirmation, goal, setting, whatever it might be.

but again, I would recommend the way to deep-dive would be one of the books, either success principles, or The Success Principles workbook, as you’ve known it, it impacted you. There’s a, there’s a guy. I just have to end with this. There’s a guy. In Thailand by the name of Andres Pira, he wrote a book called Homeless to Billionaire.

At 19, he was homeless on the beach in Thailand. He was from Sweden, went there to be warm and 19 couldn’t get a job is on a beach. Called a friend and said, could you send me a hundred dollars? And the friend said, no, but I’ll send you a book you can read. So he texted them or, you know, the texts of The Secret.

And he watched The Secret, the law of attraction. And with that, he, the manifested a cup of coffee through visualizing it. This guy that had a stand came by and said, I don’t know why, but I feel like I should give you a cup of coffee. So he said, Oh, this works. So then he kept applying that. And anyway, read ,because I’m in the the movie, The Secret in the book. So he read my book, he read Brian Tracy’s book, and I think he read one or two other books and he started applying the principles. And 15 years later at the age of 35, he’s worth $3 billion. So in 15 years from homeless to billionaire because of The Success Principles.

And that’s what I would suggest is possible for anybody. And I claim if you apply the principles. Within two years, you can double your income and you can double your time off if you apply them. The key word is “the principles always work. If you always work the principles” and that’s the key, you’ve got to do the work.

Casanova Brooks:

I love it well for anybody who is questioning, if they have a dream and if they can be successful there, you just heard it and remember DreamNation in the dream we trust, but you have to take action. Otherwise it’ll only merely be a fantasy. That’s all for this one. We’ll catch you on the next one.