Gratitude and goal setting: how neuroscience shapes wealth

0:01Today I want to take you through the scientific basis and the actual practical steps you can take to literally amplify wealth. And it has to do with, you guessed it, your brain. Gratitude has an incredibly important and profound impact on the neurotransmitters in your brain.

0:30You might have been like me. I was a real sceptic. I just thought this whole gratitude thing was a phase that hippies did and it wasn't actually ever going to work. Strangely enough it took science to convince me. So how does it actually work? Well, when you are grateful, and I'll show you how to be grateful in a moment, there are two things that happen in your brain. Dopamine and also serotonin, which are neurotransmitters that transmit information, are released in your brain. Literally in your brain, doesn't particularly matter where, but it's in your frontal cortex, and they get released in the middle and they bounce their way around your frontal cortex.

1:20Dopamine is probably the one you're familiar with. That's going to do with pleasure and just being motivated, and it boosts your happiness and accomplishments. One of the reasons I do this is because I get literally every single morning dozens of beautiful happy messages and emails and comments from people, and I wake up and I read it and I go, oh my God, look at the dopamine running around my brain. So for me that's one of the reasons I love doing what I do.

1:52Serotonin is similar but it's more linked to your overall sense of wellbeing and happiness. Generally speaking, if you're in a good mood your serotonin levels are relatively high. If you're grumpy and miserable then you need to boost those levels. So gratitude isn't some feel-good hippie emotion. There is an actual neurological scientific basis for it, and every single time we express gratitude our brain's prefrontal cortex here becomes more active. You can see that in brain scans. Someone says an affirmation and it keeps going, and that's what we therefore want to practise because if we know it works, why the heck aren't we doing it every single day?

2:52So the activity that we trigger by literally practising gratefulness releases dopamine and also serotonin, and that makes us feel more positive. There's a study on this. I include some notes in the notes here. A chap called Zahn and a bunch of others in 2008 or so, and it's called The Neural Basis of Human Social Values. They basically looked at our response to social values including gratitude, and essentially what they found is that when people experience gratitude the frontal cortex gets switched on. But the brain actually separates stuff that's relevant to us and just general moral values, thou shalt not kill type stuff, that doesn't actually trigger that much. So it gives us some real hard evidence for a scientific basis to be grateful.

3:58So how do you get to be grateful? Well, affirmations are an incredibly powerful tool to literally rewire and reshape your brain to have that permanent positive mindset. Maybe you're not that positive and you find positive people really really irritating, but if you really want to get what you want in life you need to have that positive mindset. No matter what gets thrown at you, you find the good in it.

4:29So how do we actually do this? Well, you want to phrase your affirmations in the present tense. So not like yesterday I was grateful for the thing that happened last week, that doesn't trigger anything. It's got to be now, and I'll give you some examples.

4:54You want to pretend essentially like the outcome you want is already happening, and we'll write out some examples together. Let's do some examples, I think that's probably the smartest thing to do. I'll share my screen with you here. So how do you phrase affirmations? You can go really general. I am grateful for the wealth and abundance in my life. That's pretty general.

5:30You could make it a little bit better. I'm grateful for the wealth and abundance I attract effortlessly into my life. Why is that better? Because it's like it's a process, you're in it, it feels a bit more real. What would be another way of doing it? You could say, every day I am moving closer and closer to my financial goals, guided by gratitude. That's pretty general but it's a great thing to keep saying.

6:17Now what I like to do in addition to doing something a little bit general like this is in our lovely wealth accelerator planner, which I encourage you to get your hands on, at the end of every day we have our evening reflection. In that evening reflection the first question is, what am I most proud of today? I phrased it like that intentionally because it makes us feel like, hey, what did I achieve today, what did I actually feel really good about. Proud is quite a powerful word.

6:50So in that, rather than just writing down 3 bullet points of did this well, did that well, you could instead write, for example, I am grateful for the $2,000 profit I made today whilst trading, and that I am moving effortlessly closer and closer to my financial goal, guided by gratitude. So I'm using a hook in a sense that I feel good about today to get myself into the slightly broader gratitude space.

7:57There is no right and wrong with this. When I first got into this someone said do affirmations. I spent hours analysing other people's affirmations to make sure my wording and phrasing was the same. That's not how this works. If you say it, and say it out loud, do it in the bathroom or wherever if you don't want to scare the children, then does it make you feel good when you say it? If it doesn't, it didn't trigger any dopamine, so you need to change what you're saying. So this is really a personal thing.

8:32But if you're finding it difficult, just stick to something really general like what I've written out here. I'm grateful for the wealth and abundance I attract effortlessly into my life. And maybe you add to it, every day I'm moving closer and closer to my financial goals, guided by gratitude. And you can go on. I am grateful that I am now attracting everything that I want into my life with such ease. I am now ready to live my best life. Something like that, go where your pen takes you.

9:17At the beginning you might just want to stick to the standard stuff because you feel a little bit awkward about it, but it becomes more natural and then you can actually just write pages and pages of this stuff. I do this not every day, but I write down stuff I'm grateful for every single day. What I do do when I have a little bit more time, I just take a piece of paper or literally the back of my planner and I just write out a massive list of things I'm grateful for, and it really gets me going.

9:44I'm grateful for my cat that's purring on my lap, for the love and kindness she's giving me. I'm grateful for Winston who's snoozing in the corner, for the fun we had hiking this morning. I would never have gotten up at 7:00 in the morning and gone up that mountain if it wasn't for Winston. I'm so incredibly grateful for his kindness and love and joy. I'm grateful for the breakfast I just had, for the lovely housekeeper who cooked it and served it. You can literally just go through your day from the morning to the evening and write that out. And you do that, read it, and see if you can possibly be in a bad mood. It actually isn't possible. So it's a really powerful thing to switch yourself out of something.

10:30So your homework is to practise this by journaling. Write down at least 3 things every day that you are grateful for, that you are proud of that day. What that will start to do is to change your whole mindset, because your brain likes the dopamine. This thing loves the dopamine and the serotonin, and you're therefore going to look for these things. As you go through the day you're going to become that person that just goes, I'm so grateful for this meal, I'm so grateful for this coffee, I'm grateful for the car that's taking me to work and warmth and comfort, I'm grateful for the wonderful music on the radio. You can just go nuts with it.

11:12But you will start to see that all of those things do actually make your life good and happy. It's just we've taken them for granted, so we've taken the joy and the gratitude out of it. You put it back in and your whole rewiring changes, and you are physically rewiring your brain to become that happy fulfilled person.

11:35And guess what, the things you're grateful for that you are saying in the present, and these can include your goals, they should include your goals, not just what's just happened in the past but actually in the present, they'll start coming. It sounds cuckoo but it happens. I journal like mad every morning and every evening, and it's amazing what lands in my lap. Honestly, I'm incredibly grateful for what lands in my lap every day. I was writing about it yesterday and the next morning something pops up, someone contacts me, someone calls me, precisely the thing that I wanted. It's just phenomenal, honestly. So practise.

12:17This and any questions, comments you have, put them down below, message me. Let's get cracking. We're setting smart goals, wealth goals, financial goals, and how that really works and why each specific part of that is really important and linked up to here. So let me share my screen with you.

12:41You're probably familiar with SMART goals and thinking, Felix, this isn't the news, but give me a minute. So SMART, you've probably seen this at school or at work or something. What does it actually stand for? It's specific, it's measurable, it's achievable, and that's one part I definitely want to talk about because there is a real risk with this one. And then it's relevant and time defined or time bound.

13:22Okay, so far so good, right? Let's run through each of these individually and see what is it about, what does the science say. So specific, specificity is basically what happens in the frontal cortex here, right? That's where your decision making part sits, and when your goals are clear and specific, that part of your brain can focus better on the tasks that are actually necessary to achieve those goals. And it'll reduce the overload of your GPU, if you will, which is what you will get if you make it really vague.

14:03So if you're saying I want to be wealthy, that's really freaking vague, right? Whereas if you say I want to earn $1 million a year, have $10 million in assets that give me a 5% return a year, that becomes very, very specific. And obviously the numbers can be whatever you want them to be. So the specific part really, really helps the frontal cortex and your brain to calm down, reduces the load.

14:40When we look at the measurable part, that's essentially your dopamine centre. Because if we get an outcome we can measure and the outcome is positive, it's a milestone that we can achieve, the brain is going to release some dopamine and you're going to feel flipping fantastic. It's our reward system, it's the carrot essentially.

15:14Now therefore if your goal is to have $1 million invested in stocks, just say, right, if that's your goal on its own, you're not going to get any sense of achievement between now and the $1 million. So you want to break it down into measurable chunks, like say every single month or every single week, even better, I'm going to put $1,000 into this investment, this ETF or whatever, right? And every week you do that, obviously again the amounts can be whatever you want it to be, you're going to feel great.

15:51Right, I do that by the way. I have a weekly target, a weekly goal, a weekly amount I invest, and I feel flipping fantastic every single month when I do it. And it's just that dopamine thing that gets released in my brain. So that's the important part with measurable.

16:10Now achievable. Okay, so there is something in your brain called the amygdala. It's this bit here inside your brain, and the amygdala is the bit that processes your emotions. Fear and anxiety live there. So if you set goals that are completely unattainable, it can cause you stress because you feel like you can't possibly get there. So setting goals that are somewhat achievable can give you a positive emotional response.

16:52I think there is a danger with that science to make you say, all right, let's say $100 a month, it's achievable, I'm going to feel good every month, but you're not going to achieve anything, right? You're not actually pushing yourself forward. So I'm a huge fan of the big goal and then breaking that down into components that make you feel good on the way, right?

17:16So $30 million in invested assets, or whatever the number you wanted to be, that's a goal you're thinking, okay, that's really big, I don't know how to get there. But I do know what to do and how to pull $1,000 a week into the stock market, say, or buying a property a year that's worth half a million dollars, or whatever it might be for you. That's an achievable number, you know how to do that.

17:41And you want to make the big goal a little beyond the immediately attainable, and you want to make the steps, the stepping stones, achievable, with the aim of making them bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And I feel that that way we can get our dopamine release every week or even every day if you want to. Don't make it every month, you're only going to get 12 a year, you're not going to be that motivated, it's just boring.

18:12But I like to do it every Monday, or maybe it's every Sunday or whenever you want to do it. And that way you get that weekly hit, you get 52 opportunities to pivot, which is really important, way better than 12, right? 52 opportunities to do something better. And you also spot way more, way earlier, if something is off kilter, something isn't going quite right in your finances. So that's I think a really important one, is that we get the achievable balance right.

18:46Now what about relevant? So there is something in your brain called the ACC, the anterior cingulate cortex. Let me make sure I show you the right part. Exactly, that's what I thought. It's basically this bit here, you see that? Yeah, you can see that here, this bit here. And this ACC evaluates your options and evaluates your decision making.

19:10So if your goals don't align fundamentally with your larger objectives or your larger values in life, you're going to have a hard time moving towards those goals. And that's what I found in large companies where the company is like, we're making, I don't know, let's make lots of toxic chemicals to make money out of it, and the employees are going, I want my children to live, right? It doesn't work.

19:37Same with you. So you need to set goals that ultimately align with your values and your purpose that you see for yourself. So make sure that your goals are not cutting corners with your morals to get there, because actually your brain will sabotage you. This ACC bit, literally in the middle of your brain, it's going to totally sabotage you. So that's why the relevant part, it needs to be relevant to you as an individual, needs to be relevant to your larger value system.

20:12Now the time boundness thing here is also rather important. And there is a part of your brain called the hippocampus, bit like the hippopotamus, and that's basically down here, down there by the stem of your brain. And that processes time and also memory. So by setting a deadline for a goal, you create an urgency. And in your memory, in your brain, you make it more important, and therefore your brain is literally going to recall it, it's going to memorise it more frequently, and it's going to allow you to actually focus on it.

21:03So you could say $1 million invested by, and just that. Well, if you say $1 million invested in 2 years, say, or 3 years, say, or by the end of the month, depending on where you are right now, it's going to keep it in the back of your mind. So I set generally goals in the sense of end of year, 2 years, 3 years and 5 years. That's generally my vision.

21:32It's also really good to go out to 10, 20 years, and we'll look at those things a bit more going forward, because it gives you a bigger vision that allows you to dream way bigger, way outside of your present comfort zone, which is really, really important. But we want to be able to take it back to actionable steps right now, and they can still be pretty ambitious. 2 years is a really long period of time in my book. That's, what is it, 104 weeks, that's a lot of weeks, right? So you want to always attach a time period to that goal that you feel is a little challenging but also somewhat realistic.

22:17So yeah, that's where we are with that. So the SMART thing, I think it works. I think the real danger with it is, let me just share my screen with you here again. The danger with it is that people make the achievable too small. They try and cheat and create a shortcut with irrelevant, so they try and say, well, I'm going to cut some corners in my business or my morals, I'm going to sell something I didn't think was that good but I want to get some instant cash in. That's really important not to do those two things.

23:00And people don't like to put a time frame on it because they feel it causes them stress. I wouldn't see it as stress, I would see it as motivation. And we're going to get to the motivation part. If your motivation, you're so excited about getting there, it's just going to fire you up, it's going to put energy behind you to just act more. And you are going to get to that slightly unrealistic goal, and you're going to find the way.

23:28Why is it that some of the most successful people are people who've had some serious trauma around their life, or they have had real poverty in their youth, or a lot of the wealthiest people were immigrants who suffered great struggle and trauma, right? That is because that was the motivation. The motivation was to never experience that again and get the heck away from it. So they have a very, very, very strong motivation centre that repels all the noise and all the distraction, and they're just singularly focused on getting to financial security and financial stability because they've really experienced the pain of not having it. So that's embedded in their brain, and I don't want you to have to have pain.

24:12But we can use the understanding of how the brain functions to make sure that our motivation is really, really fleshed out. And that's why we focus so much of our energy, and I do every single day, writing it out, journaling it. I used to think this is a complete waste of time. Honestly, I used to laugh at people doing this. But I now understand that by writing out visually what the goal that I want will make me feel like, what will it be like to be in it and to experience it now, like a dream, like a movie, it means my brain is already in it.

24:52It means my brain can't distinguish between the real and the imagined. It's the same thing for it, which is why you go into a ride at Disneyland or something that's meant to be scary, right. It scares you, genuinely scares you, even though you know this is a simulation. It still scares you. You go to a 3D cinema, something's coming at you and your seats shaking and it feels very real. So we can do the same thing to our brains. So we're going to focus obviously quite a lot on the actual implementable steps here. Thanks for watching, see you on the next one.

25:30One of the most important ways we can change our wiring is by actually facing where we are, writing down where we want to be, and then revisiting and checking on our thoughts and our processes every single day. So I'm a huge fan of journaling and it just means writing down what you want and writing down what you've done and comparing and contrasting the two. And it keeps you on the straight and narrow.

25:58So we have a journal called the Wealth Accelerator Planner. You can order this in a hard copy version from Amazon, it's like 90 bucks or something like that, and it's a 60-day essentially journal that takes you through it. I found it super helpful. I've been doing this for years and I'm super happy to finally put this into print and share it with you.

26:21So I'll walk you through it. It's obviously table of contents and then there's a little bit about what we do and how we do it. The first step is a life review and it's a really, really important exercise to just get a feel for yourself about where you are at, where you want to be, and what your processes are at the moment. So you're essentially scoring each of these questions from 1 to 5, 1 being low, 5 being high. Be honest with yourself, no marks here from a teacher. We just want to make sure that we are genuinely honest with yourself.

26:54And I do a very similar exercise every single day and I'll show you what that looks like in a moment. But essentially stuff like, do I have a clear financial goal, plans to achieve them, is it 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. For most people that's probably a 2 or 3 if we're really honest with ourselves. We have some vague idea of where we want to be and we're doing some of the right things, but do we have a written out plan, probably not.

27:18And the same is true for every part of our life. And once you start improving one part of your life you will actually notice that everything else improves with it. It's all connected. So that's the first exercise, life review, and this is going to take you a little bit of time. So you might want to find 2 hours of peace and quiet where you can do this, or do it before you go to bed for an hour or two for a couple of days. It's a really, really important exercise.

27:42First part is really self-reflection. So we're setting out life goals here and one of the really important things is to remind ourselves of what are actually our accomplishments. And they might be childhood, it might be you were great at sports or school or something. Write them out, whatever it is, what you were proud of, you felt really good about yourselves. And what activities or tasks make you lose track of time because you enjoy them.

28:08And this is a little bit of self-discovery really. Are there things that you do and you just go, oh my god, wow, it's late. In which case you might want to know about that because that's something you obviously really enjoy and you get lost in. What do you think your natural strengths and talents are? And you may or may not know and that's also completely fine. This is not an exercise of judgement. There isn't a right or wrong. This is a kind of self-exploration that we just don't do enough of.

28:34And we want to get from A, where you are right now, to B, where you want to be. Well, we need to know what A is and we need to know what B is. So the first part here is really about what are those goals. And then it's vision and purpose. If you had all the resources in the world and couldn't fail, what would you do? And that's a really, really hard question for most of us because we never really think in those terms. We always think in terms of limitations. We're always thinking we've only got this much time and we've got to do all these tasks and all these responsibilities and we've got the limited budget. Limits, that's what we're trained to think of.

29:10If you just chuck away those limits for a moment, what does it actually look like, what would you be doing with your time? Right, for me it's teaching. I get a tremendous dopamine kick out of that. It's painting, music, and spending time with friends and family and exercising and swimming and hiking and travelling. And that's pretty much what I do now.

29:34There is an element of my life too, because I have like 3 businesses, where I do some things that I don't absolutely truly want to be doing all the time. But I know they help to get the other say 70% of my life into the right order. So it's important to be honest with yourself here again, what you actually enjoy. Don't write down what someone else thinks you enjoy or what someone else wants you to enjoy. This is your time.

30:02How do you envision your life in 5, 10 or 20 years from now? Again, just getting you towards visioning what your life actually should look like, rather than, well, in 20 years I'll retire and then I'll sit in this chair. That's not really the way we get ourselves worked out. What legacy do you want to leave behind? Similarly trying to elicit some of those longer term plans. Values, what's important to you.

30:26What people are most important to you and how do they fit in with your goals? What tradeoffs are you willing or not willing to make? So are you willing to spend more or less time with family? Are you willing to work more or less, harder or not? Are you willing to have less money to achieve, if you want to do something less financially motivated for example? Really important to be honest with yourself again to set out those limits. So you know, actually, okay, I'm happy to do that, I'm not happy to do this, and it'll help to narrow down your goals.

31:03We've got education and career. What are you most interested in? What professional accomplishments would you like to achieve? Maybe something, that may not be anything. Maybe you want to be the best at something, you want to reach a certain seniority in your business, you want to get a certain qualification, you want to do a deal of a certain size or bring in a customer of a certain size, or you want to build something if you're an architect or a builder or whatever it might be. Write it down.

31:29Do you see yourself climbing the corporate ladder, starting your own business, or something else? Personal growth, what new skills or knowledge do you want to acquire? For me a couple of years back I was like, I'd really like to learn the piano, and I'm still a pretty terrible player. But I just sat down, I downloaded an app, I bought a keyboard sitting over here, and I just started. And you'd be amazed what you can do in a couple of days. So write down what you actually want, again without any objections, without any hurdles.

32:02Are there any fears or limiting beliefs you'd like to overcome? I'm sure there are some. How do you want to grow as a person in character and behaviour? Health and wellness, you do not become usually a successful, happy, wealthy person unless your health is good. And there are some exceptions, it's true. You see some people who are in horrible shape and they're wealthy, but they're typically unhappy.

32:30Right, you can typically sense their anger simmering under the level. And there is usually a reason they're really out of shape, is because they really haven't dealt with something in their personal life. So write down your ideal state of wellbeing.

32:53Relationships, how do you want to be perceived by friends and colleagues? Are there places you want to travel to, where you want to go? Do you have a bucket list perhaps? How do you want to spend your leisure time?

33:13Financial, what are your financial goals? And for most people this is actually the easier part. Buying a house, be debt free, all that kind of stuff, have X amount of money. How much money would you like to earn, save, invest? Try to be as specific as you can with dates, amounts. And what steps do you think you need to achieve those goals? And if you don't know, that's also fine. Contribution, do you want to give?

33:38Back to your community or the world or certain causes. Is there some positive impact you want to make? Now that's the right here right now. We'll then go through the visualisation and then we'll go through the planning and then we'll go through the day to day, which is also truly important.

34:00Visualisation, you can't live without it. Why not? Because we are dreaming, imagining beings. Pretty much any other being out there on the planet that we know of gets to a certain level of hierarchy, top of their pack, we've got enough food, got enough sunshine and safety, and they're done, right. We as human beings have the enormous luxury that we can imagine and dream and create our future, and no matter where we are at we usually always want more. That's kind of the way that we've been genetically wired.

34:44And science shows us that active visualisation and dreaming and or living it is actually the same. So if you can create a dream scene as vividly as possible, the impact on your brain is the same as if you were actually that fit and healthy and good looking and wealthy and whatever you wanted to be. And your brain makes that the new normal and it helps to remove limitations that we place on ourselves, that programming has placed in ourselves. So very, very important to do.

35:22So I've got quite a few pages in here of visualising your dream life, and I say at the top here, write out what it looks, smells, feels like to live your dream life. Imagine you're the actor in a movie. What details would you need in the script to play your part? And the more visual and just 360 you get with this, the more powerful that is.

35:46So your home, not your current home, your dream home. So give you an example, you visualise it from the outside, what it looks like, what the sun is doing and the wind blowing through the palm trees. And you walk through the door, how does the handle feel, what does the door look like, the sound it makes as it opens. What does it look like on the inside, what's the scent, what do you see, how large is it, what does it sound like as you say honey I'm home or whatever it is that you say. And the more you get into that, the more fun it becomes. And the first one you do probably will be quite short and then as you keep doing these they get longer and longer.

36:24So we got a section on my career, my money, my health, my love life, my friends, you are the people you surround yourself with, my spirituality, your mind essentially, my accomplishments. And again all the things you want to achieve, write about them like you have achieved them. How does it feel to have achieved them? What kind of a person are you now that you have achieved them? So make, write this out not as a wish list but as I'm living it, I'm in it. You're walking into this metaverse if you want to use that kind of terminology. Your impact on others.

37:02And spend some time on this, and if you need more than the 2 pages I've allotted you, go for it. Type it if you like. I personally feel pen and paper is really, really good, but obviously add extra pages, staple them in or whatever you want to do, shove them in the back of the book.

37:20So now we've done a lot of the planning. We're going to get to the day to day because that's actually where the repetition kicks in that keeps you on the straight and narrow. What the heck is neural goal setting? Why do you care? Well, I'm not a brain scientist nor do you need to be. You don't need to be a psychologist or a cognitive scientist to understand why and how goals work in here. That having a base level of respect for this little thing here, other way around even, is helpful. Actually that way around, yes, the red bits are front.

38:06So let me walk you through a little bit of how the process works in your brain, because you've probably set goals before, whether at work or at school or privately, and then nothing happened and you didn't hit them. You got frustrated and you found the whole goal setting thing would be a bit of a waste of time. At least that's the place I came from when I got into this. I used to literally stand in bookshops with my girlfriend in the self-help section and I said this is the looney bin section, what a waste of time.

38:39And I changed my mind over the years because it is the most powerful, incredible instrument you have in your body, this thing here. Understanding it helps you set better goals. And I'm not saying SMART goals because we're going to get to that in another bit here, but goals that actually mean you're going to get to where you want to get to.

39:01So how does it work? Well, I'll show you a little chart in a second, but just the frontal, so if you look at the brain here, half a brain, this is the front, these are the frontal lobes, prefrontal cortex especially over here. And they basically play a huge, huge role in goal setting and achieving something. This is basically the bit where your decision making sits, your planning, your attention to what's going on in the world. And if you want to prioritise certain things in your life, which is what you need to do if you want to execute the right bits, right, most of us spent all of our life on the wrong parts of the things we should be doing. That's what happens here.

39:47What happens once you've set the goal, you've written it out and you actually want to go forward with, what's the process? Let me share my screen with you here, it's a nice little chart that I thought I'd put up here. So we start off in our prefrontals, we start up here.

40:12The second thing that is actually required to make the thinking, planning and doing into something that we will want to be doing is emotions. And to get emotions you need to have an actual desire. And I don't mean, be nice to a million dollars. Did that sound like I wanted that? No. But how about, the thing I'd love most in my life is waking up in a bedroom, opening the curtain, stepping out onto my balcony and watching the waves come in. That is what would make me feel so incredibly good and relaxed, and it's feeling the sunshine on my face. Now that's a little bit more desire, right. For you that'll be something different, but that's where we want to get to.

41:11Now the next part of our brain that's a huge issue is the filter. So why do we have a filter in our brain? Because the brain perceives millions to billions of things a day or even at the same time. And it's literally, if you think about where you're sitting right now, all the things in your room that you could potentially be seeing, move your hands around and you can actually start to see them. Before you did that you weren't aware there was even that space. What about the stuff behind you? What about the slight humming of a computer, a laptop or an air conditioner, or the noise outside, or the birds, or the colours around you, or the air moving through the room, or the slight differences in temperature, the softness of the chair you might be sitting on, the different alignments of the chair.

42:02There's so many things that are going on in the world, right. Imagine when you're in a car and you're driving, you're moving. Your brain would literally drive you stark raving mad if it told you in a sense and it processed all of that information with its full attention span. It does notice it but it filters out like 99.9% of it, and that's a good thing because otherwise we'd all be in the looney bin, and I don't mean the bookshop, but we'd be in straight jackets.

42:31So the next step would be to actually make some progress on our goals and get some results, and that's important. And we're going to talk about how we set our goals to actually get to that, because what you really want is some level of dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter. And it's basically the brain's reward system. And there is an area called VTA, nucleus accumbens, for the nerdy people out there, and is again in the frontal cortex, and that releases dopamine.

43:05Dopamine either when you've achieved something exciting or in anticipation, and that's useful to understand. Your brain does it also in anticipation. Now that dopamine hit, that good feeling, it reinforces the behaviour. If you're a runner for example, a certain period of running the dopamine kicks in and you really suddenly enjoying it. Like I hike a lot, about 2 hours into the hike I suddenly start jogging and the guys I run with, it's like there goes Felix again, nutter. And at that point I'm just pumped because I'm physically kind of exhausted, but that's the success, that's the endorphins hitting me, the dopamine's hitting me. And that reinforces my desire to want to hike. So very, very important that we get those hits.

43:57Now then the next stage to this is essentially habit formation. Again there are bits in your brain called the basal ganglia and the striatum, and they play a huge role in habit formation. And if we want to become successful, we want to change what we do, we need to change our habits, right. We are creatures of habits. Most of us spend 90% of the day doing the same things we always do, right. Might have noticed the way you eat, the way you make your breakfast, the way you get dressed, it's always the same leg first, isn't it. All these things, brush your teeth always with the same hand, you open the doors with the same. All these things are habits, very, very creatures of habit, and it means we don't even think about stuff, so it's a good thing.

44:46Thing is, if you never actively programme those habits, what happens? Well, your life just is filled with the habits that you were given by parents, in school, and just society around you. So if you think you can actually change your life without changing your habits, well it's never going to happen, because the habits are always just going to get you back in line. So that's really, really important that we get through that.

45:20Motivation is a huge part, and that kicks in and is linked very significantly to desire, which is why we're going to do quite a lot of work on that. And that's what's going to help you to persevere when things get a little bit tougher. The desire, the motivation, the actual passion, the purpose, why are we doing this?

45:40Now, to actually change our brain, what does it mean and what does it take? So the brain creates these neural connections, brain connections, all the time. It can reorganise itself and this is called neuroplasticity. It allows us to learn something. If you're going to learn the piano today or a language or something, you're creating new neuro connections. If you get dressed this morning or today or undressed today and you start with the wrong leg, that'll also change your brain's linkages, and that's a good thing to do.

46:20The beautiful thing is that once we understand this, once we realise we can actually physically change the connections in our brain, it makes it easier over time to do these things again that we want to be doing and for them to become new habits. So that's really the power that we have here, and that's why we're going to talk a bit about neuroplasticity in this programme. Because understanding that what you're doing, and by repetitively doing something, we can actually change the pattern in here, therefore change our behaviour, our subconscious behaviour, like the way you get dressed in the morning, is magic.

47:11So it's a critical component really of goal-directed behaviour, and we want to accelerate here our wealth creation in all aspects. So there's a great study on this by Baum, Locke and Latham, I think it's 2005 or 6 or something, and that's a lot about organisational psychology. So they were looking at employees and how can they set smarter goals, how can it actually work, what's the problem with goal setting. And there are a few problems with goal setting, and again I'd love to run through that with you.

47:47So the first thing is the positive of goal setting, and this is scientific study from their paper, is it gives us a clear direction. And the visual I always have in my mind is flying. I'm often in fairly small planes and I look at the cockpit with a door open and I can see they always have a flight plan, a little basic, it's a tablet with a line on it, and that's what they're following. Without that they wouldn't know which direction to go in. So that's the first thing, we actually want to know where we're going to.

48:39And the second part that they highlight is motivation, which is what we just started talking about a little bit in terms of emotions. Motivation energises people. And you got to understand, precisely what I do every day, but I wake up every morning and my first thought is I want this and I'm going to get, today is going to get me closer, and it's amazing, let's get out of bed and do stuff. That wasn't always me. I used to get out of bed and just be like, oh man, I'm tired, this is exhausting, why are we here. That used to be me.

49:23So the challenge with goal setting, and for me that's the biggest takeaway from this particular scientific paper, is what's the pitfall of it all. And that's where I came from. It's we tend to focus on a very narrow goal. And I've read all these books, how Habits of Highly Influential People and the 7 Habits and the 8 Habits and all that kind of stuff, and it teaches you how to reply to 69 emails in a morning. Now that doesn't actually going to get you anywhere, just might make your boss happy, but it isn't going to get you anywhere. It's this very, very narrow set of goals that just completely ignore the bigger picture.

50:11So people often with their goals ignore the important parts of their life and just focus on something really, really, really tiny and irrelevant. Like I know people who are focusing on lifting an extra 5 pounds in the gym or something, or 50 pounds, whatever it might be. That isn't really what they want, is it? What they really want is a certain physique, they want to feel a certain way, they want to have a body like an Egyptian god or something or a Greek god. And overall, what's the actual overall health thing? Is it just having that one muscle a little bit bigger? Surely there is something larger to that, or why do they want to feel that way.

50:51Secondly, most people are too conservative with their goals. So if I ask people, what's your income goal, it's $1,000 more a month or something like that. So it's kind of like, where is this going to get you? This isn't going to motivate you. So most people are risk averse and they don't want to fail, and therefore they set goals that they couldn't possibly fail with, and therefore it's really not a goal, it's just a tick box exercise. This is the corporate approach to it.

51:23And what can we do to do this better? Well, I think there's two things to this. One, balance your goal setting, and we're going to get into the detail of this in a bit. Balance your goal setting between big outcomes and learning. And people often ignore and forget that learning is a huge, huge goal. It's actually going to get you there. So mastering new skills and knowledge, and so I'm very proud of you that you are watching, this is important.

52:08Second thing that I find most people do, and I was very, very guilty of that for most of my life, is set your goals and dreams, not someone else's. And what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that most of us are living the life that somebody else wants us to have. And that could be your parents, your community, your church, your spouse, your golden retriever, whatever, because we've been programmed, we've been conditioned to live a certain life.

52:42I went to school, my parents didn't have any university education, they were very, very focused on me having a university education, so I went to university. And the thing, my dad had a business, they thought I should be a business person, so I went to university and studied economics because that's the most businesslike thing there was. Wasn't really my choice in a sense. I thought it was, but it wasn't really my goal, it was really someone else's goal I was trying to please.

53:14And then when I graduated, 2001 or 2, world economy was blown up and I couldn't get the banking job that I was meant to get, as in my parents would have thought that to be the great big achievement. So what did I do? Well, I went and studied law because that was the second profession that I thought was respectable in the eyes of my parents. So I was setting goals that weren't really mine, which is why I was happier once I left the whole thing, started to do my own thing.

53:48So it's very, very important that you're honest with yourself and you're setting goals. Don't set the goals that your neighbours have, that your friends have, that your wife wants you to have, your parents want you to have. They got to be really, really yours. This is about you. Also, when you write the goals, don't make it about we, make it about me. And it feels a little selfish at the beginning. Like I write out about I'm going to buy my next home and I'm writing about my house. I would normally not do that, I would include my family, I'd say our house, but no, no, no, it's my house, because it's my dream. So you have to be a little bit self-centred in this, not generally, but just with that.

54:30So I just wanted you to go through here a little bit the process that we are going to kick off here, which is the planning and the thinking, setting really clear desires, understanding the filtrational patterns in there, understanding where the rewards kick in, and that's why it's important to reward ourselves and to celebrate the small achievements. Whereas a lot of people get frustrated, they say I'm only 1%, but like it's amazing, 1% progress, celebrated, let's get some of that dopamine going.

55:02And then we're going to have to repurpose and re-emphasise the motivation, the passion, the purpose behind it. Make sure we take continued action, make sure we stay inspired, so we get back to the plan. And I'm going to give you all the tools here that I use every single day, and we're going to break down step by step actually actionable tasks for you to do, to get you to identify your goals, to get you to your goals, and make this a fun experience, which is what this is of course all about. Any questions you have on this opening, comments down below, feel free to use and abuse them, and see you on the next lesson.

55:46The month ahead overview. So the beginning of the month we've got this double page, and I'd like you to write in the dates.

55:57So let me find a, I'm doing this on the screen here, much easier to do this on paper I find. Where are we, type some text. So you could just type in here, if it happens to be the 1st of the month and the Tuesday is the 2nd, that sort of thing, you get the idea. Do that because obviously every month is different and we want these books to be valuable not just for the particular month but just going forward. And I put in some key dates. Are there any really important projects that are going to bring you closer to what I call your big goal, which is that big overarching thing that motivates you the most? We'll talk about that some more, but for me there is in my life typically always one thing that really gets me going, and then I've got loads of other things on my wish list that all tie into it, but there's usually the one thing that I'm gunning for and I call that my big goal.

56:48So what are the projects that are going to get you to that? Are there any major events to celebrate this month, birthdays, anniversaries, just general parties and whatever it is? And write out here on a couple of lines, I will feel I'm designing my best life this month if I do such and such, if I behave in such and such a way, if I feel like this, if I write in this book every day, whatever it is for you that will give you a sense of satisfaction that you're moving closer to your goal.

57:21We then have a double page for every single day, and the way I'd like you to use this and the way I use this is in the morning I start on the left hand side here with my morning intentions. So I write down, why am I getting out of bed today? Seriously, why? Is it because the alarm clock rang and it's 7:30 and you're late? That's not very inspiring, is it? Or is it because you're living life intentionally and you're moving closer to your big goal which has got you incredibly excited and you want to make that impact, you want to get that house, and you're doing it for your children and your hamster, whatever it is that motivates you.

58:06Write that down. There might be something specific today that you're excited about, and that's actually the best thing, and we'll get to this in a second, how we do that. What goal am I most excited about? That could be something small, it could be something really big, it could be something today or it could be something that you're making a little incremental impact on today. Who can I help with an uplifting compliment or gesture today?

58:27And that's such a powerful thing. As you engage with people in life, it could be your spouse, your children, people you work with, bus driver, Uber driver, whatever it is. And if you tell them something heartfelt, a nice compliment, a gesture, you do something for somebody, makes you feel so good. And the impact it has on that person is incredible. And just generating that positive energy that keeps you up in that high vibration where you want to be, and your day is just going to be 10 times more powerful than if you hadn't done that. So I love doing that.

59:03And where in my life will I excel today? And there might be a particular focus. You might say I'm going to the gym this morning, I'm going to do that bloody stretch session that I hate, that's me. Or I've got this thing at work today, I'm going to really focus on that. And it doesn't mean I need to really get that contract and bring that money, it could just be going to give this all my energy. I'm going to send out the best presentation, the best pitch anyone's ever written or that I've ever written. And just find something to get a little bit excited about.

59:38And then what will make today a great success? Would it be coming home and having a lovely dinner with your spouse or your family? What is it for you? Define it, because then at the end of the day you can look back at this and go, I did that, today was a great success. It makes you feel really really good when you go to sleep, you sleep better, and the next morning you wake up with way more energy, which is exactly what we want for you.

1:00:06Now the part in the middle, we got a little calendar in here and I made this intentionally not a huge section because I think most people run some sort of Gmail, Apple, Outlook calendar that runs their life. So I'm not expecting you to write every single thing you got in terms of meetings in there today and every day. But I still like to use paper, I still come up with ideas usually in the morning where I go, I should do this, I should do that, I want to do this, that'd be amazing, I just had that thought this morning. So just a little bit of space to write some things in here.

1:00:40And then at the end of the day we go to this middle section, the bottom half of the page. How did I do today? And the point here is not to go, Felix, you sucked today, you were really rubbish, you failed on all fronts, go and beat yourself up. That's not the goal. The goal is to observe and to perceive what I've actually done and give me some encouragement and thought about what can I do better tomorrow.

1:01:07So am I moving towards my goal, any steps big, small or large to bring my big goal, which is what I'm most excited about, closer? And then you give me, I give myself a score of 1 to 5. I do this every day. And I do that with my goal setting, I do my fitness, my focus time for the mind or spirituality or religion or whatever it might be for you. Managing people, and that could be at work if you have people you manage, it could just be anybody in your life. Did you have good interactions with people today?

1:01:38Love and kindness I think is a huge huge thing. Were you kind and loving to people around you today? Did you make people feel good? Was it a success in terms of my family, my friends, my co-workers? We generated and created a good environment to be in. And that's a really important thing that we often forget. We went through 29 tasks and we went to the gym and we did a thousand things, and then I look at that and I go, I sucked today though, didn't I? I was pretty short with the people, I didn't really say hi to anyone, and someone said something nice and I just went huh and kept walking. And just to get the balance right, we can't just be that executing machine, we've got to balance this out if we actually want to come out of this as a whole happy individual.

1:02:27And then if I have low scores on this, and I always have some low scores on this every single day, don't beat yourself up on it. There's usually one thing I forgot or something where I go, and I very very rarely actually give myself 5 points. Maybe that's just me being hard on myself. But what I do is I then go okay, I wasn't that great on the love and kindness and the physical fitness today, tomorrow that's my first focus. And I'll write that out for the next morning.

1:02:55And then we move on to the evening reflection, and this is in a sense already part of the evening reflection. How did I do today? What am I most proud of today? Is there something that I did today that was really really good? And it just needs to be one thing. And it again gets you in the mind of, okay, maybe today I really did one little thing and it wasn't the greatest thing in the world, but tomorrow I'm going to make sure that I do something I'm actually really proud of. You see how this focuses your mind and it brings you back again and again to what you actually want your life to be, rather than fighting off the noise and the stuff that life throws at you.

1:03:30Something that I learned today. There's always something we learn every day, and taking those lessons on board and actually processing them actively means, a, we form new connections up here, and b, we really absorb that knowledge and we therefore grow as individuals in our knowledge and our skills. Something I'll do better tomorrow, and that's usually where I look back at how did I do today and I go, yeah, I will go to that gym tomorrow morning. And what steps did I take today towards my big goal?

1:04:04And that can be little things, it could be literally a thousand little things. For me at the moment I'm looking for a dream house and I'm still looking and I haven't found it yet. So it could be, well, I called a realtor, I did some research, I worked on my visualisation board for what that house looks like. And my business, I hired 3 new sales people or something which is going to somewhat help in making the house a possibility. So it's those things that I would look at, and it can be something small, can be something big, doesn't really matter, but just something that gets you there.

1:04:43Or you might just say, well, I exercised today, my mind was really clear, I was really focused today. That's enough too, it doesn't need to be a huge huge thing every single day. Now we have a lot of these pages because there are 7 days in every week, so we're going to skip them here for the week, and then we have a

1:05:04The end of each week, a weekly wealth review. It's a really good exercise to do, to actually review the week, because life is so busy and noisy and full of unexpected things that get thrown at us. Especially if you have a job, especially if you have children, stuff happens that is out of your control and you're permanently responding to it. So it's so important to find that time at the end of the week. I like to do this before I go to bed. Could be Sunday evening, just go to bed an hour earlier with your journal. It's such a nice peaceful time.

1:05:41I write in the 3 things I'm most proud of this week, the 3 things I've learned about myself this week, some self-reflection here, and the 3 things I will focus on and do better next week. And by do better I don't mean man I sucked this week. It's a permanent evolution of just getting better and better and better. In our Trading Academy one of our coaches, he's almost 80 years old, he's been a trader for 50 years, he's managed billions of dollars for hedge funds, is one of the most experienced traders I've ever come across. And he says to me he learns stuff every week in financial markets. You've been doing this for 50 years at the highest level possible and you're still learning every week.

1:06:27That's what life's about, it's about growing. Stop growing and you are dying slowly, you're withering away. So that's the whole point here, it's not to give ourselves grades and scores and then go undone. It's not a school exam, it's about the evolution of your abilities to get better and better and better. And then how did I do moving towards my goals, my physical fitness, my time for the mind, my focus. How was I with people, was I kind, was there fun this week, how were we with our family this week or loved ones this week, friends. And growth, did I learn any valuable skills and lessons this week.

1:07:11And then there are 10 of these, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, just checking. So in theory you can get a score out of 50. I never get 50, never, never yet happened. And then a couple of words, how do I feel about the score. And again it's about positive encouragement. You just say well there were parts of the week that were amazing, there were parts of the week that sucked, and I'm okay with that. And I want to make next week and every week thereafter better and better and better and better, so my life grows and becomes exactly what I visualised.

1:07:46That's the thing that I think about in those moments. So for me it's not oh my God I only got 30 points or 20 points or 10 points or whatever it is. It's about well what am I omitting in my life as a whole. So that's the week score and then you go back to the days and then there are more weeks and then you come back to the next month and so on. So it's a process of repetition.

1:08:13The purpose of the book is actually the journal, to make sure that you do repeat, because it's a daily thing. And science is very very clear on it, that the more we repeat the more we rewire up here. We get rid of the things that hold us back and we allow ourselves to actually achieve what is possible for us. Because you might think that the billionaires out there are smarter than you. They're probably not, they're just thinking bigger and they're not obsessed with the but what if it fails. And there are those things and I can't do that, I haven't got the time. They are in a mindset, in a place that allows them just to achieve way more, and that's where we want to get to.

1:09:01Doesn't have to be the billion, whatever it is for you. But you see people around you who are just doing things without being held back by those programmed objections. And that's the whole point here, is just plough through this every single day. I think you'll enjoy it, I see it as a really lovely happy exercise, and I hope you enjoy it.

1:09:27In this lesson I'm going to show you how to transform your limiting beliefs through a step by step process into the new beliefs. And if you've done the exercise from the previous lesson, which I trust you have, the first step is very easy for you. We're going to identify and write down the beliefs that feel limiting or negative. And you've probably already done that because you've written out the repetitive ones, and typically the repetitive ones are our limiting beliefs. But you might want to add some more to that, and honestly be generous with yourself, anything, write it down. This is our Santa wish list that we're going to crack.

1:10:09So step 1 is just to gain awareness of the beliefs that might literally be hindering your progress. Step 2, and we'll go through an example here in a moment, I'm just going to go through the steps. Let me go through an example that refers to me and obviously then you can go through your own. We want to challenge that belief. So you want to ask yourself, limiting belief number 1, is this belief based on factual evidence? Is there some fact that says this is correct? Have there ever been times when this belief wasn't true?

1:10:48That's usually the case, it's always the exception isn't it. And that means this isn't actually factual, it's just something that got stuck up in there because of past programming. So we want to question the accuracy of the belief that you've got so that we can move towards rewiring it and restructuring it.

1:11:19So what's step number 3? Look at this limiting belief and is this an overgeneralisation? Is this simplified black and white thinking? And a lot of our beliefs are like that. It's not really like we really thought this through, it's just in there. And we now want to replace this distorted general belief into something more factual. We want to reframe it into something more objective, that's a little less negative.

1:11:55Step 4, and yes there are 12 steps to this, that's why I made a workbook for you. Fifthly, this week write down every day any evidence that you can come up with that contradicts this limiting belief. And our aim here is perhaps by the end of the week to have some actual facts that will challenge what's been ingrained up there by people who probably meant well but ended up doing that. That might have been you, it might have been somebody else.

1:12:31Okay we've done that, we've challenged it, we've reframed it. Now we need to reward this, we want to create a positive narrative. You might call it an affirmation that we can repeat, and we'll do one together in just a second. What you do after this affirmation or whatever you want to call it, you want to visualise a scenario where you are living beyond this limiting belief. And that's really really important because science supports that our brain, what we imagine, what we dream of, actually has the exact same reactions physically as experiencing the real thing. The brain can't really distinguish one or the other.

1:13:20You might be thinking no no Felix you're a bit off there, that can't be true. Well I remember going to Disneyland and they had some, I don't really like roller coasters, not for me, but this one was apparently, well it wasn't going to move, it wasn't going to go up and down, it's a stationary thing and they had a 3D cinema around. And I thought all right I'll do that. Bloody hell that was scary, really really really scary. And my brain could not distinguish between the fact that I was actually sitting in a seat that wasn't moving and everything around me, because it felt like it was surreal.

1:13:54Your dreams can be the same thing. And if you've ever had very vivid dreams, often there are nightmares, you're being chased down the road or something, it feels very very real, which is why you wake up screaming. Hopefully that's not you, but maybe you've experienced it at some point in your life. So that's step number 6, visualisation.

1:14:14Now we want to start doing small tasks that align with this new positive belief. So if your old belief was I am terrible at meeting people, I'm not very good in crowds, well go to a little social event and just say hi to somebody at the bar. Not saying you have to chat people up, but just be friendly and do these little things. Or next time you go to a restaurant or a cafe just make yourself say a line or two to whoever is serving you, just have a little bit of a chat, say good morning to the person next to you. Or compliment someone sitting there, it can be somebody of the same sex, you don't want to chat people up, just say nice jacket or love your phone cover or whatever.

1:15:01A simple thing, and that'll start to challenge your old belief system through a real world experience and make you think hey maybe I'm not so bad at it. Because maybe one of those people that you talk to, don't just do it once, do it a couple of times, will come back and chat with you and it was actually quite a pleasant conversation.

1:15:18After you've done this, the chatting in the cafe, whatever is appropriate for your scenario, you got to write it down. And why do you have to write it down? Because you're gathering evidence that proves your new belief is accurate and the old one's false. And that's really really important, it'll help to rewire those grey brain cells out there.

1:15:47Number 9, talk to friends, talk to family about it. Say to them look I've

1:15:52Got this limiting belief, I think I can only do X. A lot of them, at least if they're nice friends, they'll say to you, nonsense, you're better than that, you can do that, you can do way more than that. Remember the time when you did this, XYZ. And that's also really, really useful. So again, you get the external validation.

1:16:17Here I'm going to skip over number 10 because that's more about the journaling again. Here there will be moments when you get discouraged and you get pulled back to the old belief system. Because say it's the socialisation thing for you, maybe it's something else, you say hi to someone and then they go, what are you looking at? Something like that and you go, I'm really not very good at this. You want to prevent the relapse, so that's why we are asking ourselves, what's triggering me sliding back? Is this based on real evidence? Is this based on one outlier experience?

1:16:59So for example, you want to make more money, maybe next month, maybe you want to have a business, you get less deals. That doesn't necessarily mean much. You need to look at why did you get less deals. It probably wasn't the fact that you were undeserving of it, it was something that happened that was either random or not random. Most of the time it isn't random if you find the reason for it.

1:17:20And very, very important, celebrate, celebrate the small wins that are gradually getting you towards your goal. I've worked with lots of people who say, look, I want to get to a million dollars a month or a year or whatever it might be, and they're bloody miserable bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars a month because they are not hitting their target. That doesn't get you there. You want to celebrate the process, the gradual climb up, and you want to stop as you go up the mountain and look around and go, isn't it glorious, look at the view, how fantastic is this. That's very, very important.

1:18:00So let's look at an example together. Now this is a spreadsheet, I get not everybody is a spreadsheet kind of a guy, I am, but you could obviously write this out on paper or in your journal which I highly recommend you go and buy. And don't buy a super expensive journal, just buy something that costs a couple of dollars. So I've put in here the steps, your identification of the negative belief, the challenging it, the restructuring, the evidence, the affirmations, the visualisation, the behavioural experiments, and then recording the outcomes, asking for feedback, challenging any backslides, and celebrating small wins. And I've written down a task that I'd like you to do and the reason why I'm asking you to do those tasks.

1:18:45And yeah, I told you there was going to be some work in this, didn't I. It doesn't happen by magic. I work on myself every single day still because I always want to get better, and I know if I keep doing this I get more and more and more and my life is just more and more and more glorious.

1:19:01Okay, let me get you through an example. This is literally me. I couldn't earn more than $300,000 a year, and it wasn't any rational number to this. And you might think, well, you weren't suffering too much. True, I wasn't, but I just wanted more. I wanted a lot more. I wanted the nice house, I wanted to live where I want to live, I wanted to travel in comfort and style. And it's not that I actually spend that much, but money makes me feel safe.

1:19:33So I noticed that because, okay, I have a business, it might be a little bit different for you, but I have several businesses actually, we get to that. But I noticed that I wasn't willing to charge higher rates than my customers. And at least physical products I was selling. So I then looked at, well, first thing, challenge the belief, see how we can do this best. Right, and we want to challenge the accuracy of that belief.

1:20:04So I looked at factual evidence and I looked at, look, there were quite a few competitors really, that I called them entrepreneurs in my network, but they're really competitors who were selling similar products to me. And for example I have a wine business, and they were charging a lot more than me. And I know their costs were pretty similar. So my initial belief is essentially based on past salary and past earnings and past profits, not on my actual potential.

1:20:37So I then went out and I collected evidence. How did I do that? Well, I literally made myself, and my skin was crawling, made my skin crawl, and I charged a customer 20% more than I normally did for the same product. And they bought it, they signed, it wasn't any more difficult. I also collected other peers out there in my industry who were earning more, who were making more money.

1:21:07So I wrote down a positive affirmation for myself. Once again I taped this to my bathroom mirror, it's a bit of a mess my bathroom mirror. This one isn't there anymore thankfully, but it said, I possess the potential to earn well beyond $300,000 annually. I actually added to it, I deserve to earn in excess of $300,000 annually because I deliver tremendous value to my customers.

1:21:32So for me the deserving part was quite important because I had a bit of a strange relationship with money. What was my visualisation then? I just visualised sealing larger deals at higher prices and looking at my bank balance and seeing a $400,000 deposit or just an amount larger than that. And I did that repeatedly every day.

1:21:57And then I pitched my rates not 20% higher but 25% higher, which was even more uncomfortable. Three people, two of them agreed. So I suddenly was doing the same work, same delivery, same product, and I was making significantly higher margins. And I was like, wow, maybe maybe I am better.

1:22:17So I got 50k more extra revenue in there, and then I talked to one of my mentors and he said, look, you got to diversify your income streams. And he was right, because I was at that time essentially stuck in one business plus trading. So that's what I did.

1:22:32And January of that year my earnings were up 18% from the same month previous year. So I was making 18% more money than the year before, and that was a good step in the right direction. It wasn't exactly the 10x, 15x, 30x that I was going for, but it really helped to shake up my stuckness. And I was just stuck at the same number year after year no matter what I did.

1:22:58Now occasionally you're going to get a setback. So I lost a client, and I was like, okay, don't beat yourself up too much about this, doesn't mean you no longer deserve to earn the extra money. And I have built up and I am building up new income streams. And that's how I got over it really. So just that resilience, you need the resilience, and actually take a setback just to double down. And I just worked a little bit harder that week and it worked.

1:23:27And celebrating deals or little wins, whatever it might be, I mean this is obviously a money example, very, very, very important because that really, really reinforces it. It gives you that dopamine release, which is what we talked about a little bit in the previous sessions, which is so, so very important. So you want to celebrate the little wins.

1:23:47And that's also why I would really, really recommend and urge you to get somebody on board with this. Your life partner or a good friend or a child or somebody, and just share this with them. Because if you can celebrate the wins with somebody it's actually even stronger than if you do it on your own. I mean it's still cool, I celebrate wins on my own sometimes, but I usually have a few people in my life who are very, very important to me and I share with them. And I run out and like, look what we just did, it's amazing. And that just gives it 10x the joy and the dopamine release, because then someone comes and gives you a hug and says, amazing, well done, and you go out for dinner and celebrate or something.

1:24:29And I think those little things are very, very important. Don't even have to go out for dinner, you can open a, I sometimes open a can of peach juice. There's a little Japanese peach juice I love, it's fizzy, it's amazing, you should try it. So for me that's a celebration ritual, and I only actually have that peach juice when something amazing and special happens, which is thankfully most days. Very, very important to do that.

1:24:52So the link to this is down below, summary down below as well, get working. And you might think, Felix, hey, I've got 5 or 10 limiting beliefs. All right, start with the biggest one. Start with the biggest one, start with the ones that you really go, wow, those are the ones you want to tackle first, and then plough through this list. Ping me any questions you have and you're well on your way.

1:25:17I don't think you can really make a mindset shift that lasts and that you are able to sustain unless you make some changes to what you eat. So I want to walk you through the I think 4 key supplements that I take. And I'm not a massive pill popping supplement sort, but there are a couple of things I take every day. And explain to you why those matter and why I take those, and then we also talk a little bit.

1:25:43About food here. So the first one is magnesium, and I take, you see that not so well here in the light, maybe marine magnesium. Anyway, doesn't matter what the brand is. It's basically all the same. I like marine magnesium because it's more natural, it's actually from the sea, not some waste product from whatever synthetic manufacturing.

1:26:08What is it all about? Well, it basically has a huge role in your brain's function, in your mood regulation, and that's a really important thing. So essentially, if you have low levels of magnesium, people get actually depressed. There are lots of neurological diseases that are linked to that, migraines, epilepsy and so on, that can certainly be prevented with magnesium.

1:26:34And how does that work? Well, magnesium somehow helps to regulate the neurotransmitters in your brain that basically send messages. So it also has a huge impact, studies show, in the synaptic plasticity, essentially like what we've been talking about here. How can we make new connections, how can we learn, how can we improve our memory, and all of that needs magnesium.

1:26:58So I'm a big fan of taking this. I take 400 milligrams a day of this. I take it right before sleep because it can make you a little bit sleepy, and my sleep's never been better than when I take this. It also does wonders for your digestion, so it's just all around a really really great little bit of supplement. You can obviously get these on, I get these on iHerb usually or on Amazon, very very inexpensive. So marine magnesium is one I really recommend.

1:27:29Now the next thing I take religiously, and very few things I take religiously, is iron. I take this stuff here, it's called Floradix, and again this is not a product advert, I didn't get anything from these guys. It's liquid, and I think iron and also vitamin B6 and B12, which is in this, are really only absorbed well by the body in a liquid form.

1:27:55What is it? It's basically a protein that carries oxygen around your blood, and your brain takes up something like 20% of all of the body's oxygen. So if your oxygen transport isn't ideal, your brain's going to suffer. And again it's involved in neurotransmitters which essentially help to speed up transmission, that's the easiest way of putting it.

1:28:27So if you are iron deficient, if you're a child or a baby that's iron deficient, your actual cognitive development and functions are really really really poor. Now you also don't want to have too much iron, that can also be bad. Some people say Parkinson's is linked to that, I don't know if that's true, but some people say that. So don't go nuts with it, obviously follow the instructions, and with all of this, talk to your physician if you've got a decent one about supplementation.

1:28:58But I like this because it's plant-based. I generally would take everything plant-based. Don't buy synthetic vitamins. Synthetic vitamins are usually waste products from some other chemical production and are not really, they make your body believe it's getting the vitamins but it's not actually getting it, so it's not particularly useful.

1:29:18And then B6 and B12 are again involved in producing neurotransmitters and it helps to send essentially signals between nerve cells. So it's really really crucial for your DNA, your RNA, and if you are deficient in those, well you get anaemia, you're fatigued, you're weak, your brain isn't working properly, and in the long term can actually damage your brain and your nervous system. So it's something you might want to take or you might want to do a test on.

1:29:54Obviously always the ideal thing to do is just see, are you getting it from your diet? If you can get it from your diet, brilliant, we talk about that in a second. But I don't because I eat a plant-based diet and that makes it a little harder to get tons of iron in and also vitamin B6, so that's why I take those ones.

1:30:12Now the next one is something that looks a little bit less natural. It's called creatine, and it's what you find in the Arnold Schwarzenegger cupboard of bodybuilding. And obviously it isn't working for me, is it? But I don't take it for that reason. It's again produced naturally by the body. You can find it in certain food, some meats allegedly have more of it than not.

1:30:36But it essentially helps to produce energy in your cells, especially in your brain cells, and your brain is massively massively energy demanding. So you do need some creatine for your brain to actually work at its peak performance level. And lots of studies out there, I'll put some links below, how supplementing with creatine can help you with just more energy. That's why bodybuilders take it, because it gives them more energy, but it actually helps you with energy for your brain.

1:31:11Now there are also studies out, and that's actually how I came across this, I think it was Korea where they first studied this. They gave people who are on antidepressants creatine instead, maybe in addition, I don't remember. And the level of depression went down tremendously, so it seems to have a real positive impact on that. I'm thankfully not a depressed individual, but it just goes to show that it has a very very powerful impact.

1:31:41There are now a bunch of American studies as well on this that are showing that creatine might be a great antidepressant. So anything that makes me happier and gives me more energy is a great thing. So how do I take this? I take one scoop a day, it's 5 milligrams, pretty much every package in the world you buy gives you 5 milligrams. I wouldn't take more than that, I think it might not be great for your kidneys if you do.

1:32:04But essentially there's a little scoop in this and it's just one of those. It doesn't really taste of anything so you can just take it in water or juice or something. I just pop it into a protein shake once in the morning and I'm done with it. Just pop it in the blender with whatever else you consume. I feel it gives me a huge amount more energy, and if I don't take it I kind of miss it, so I really like that one.

1:32:27Now the last thing is something I don't take every day. It's cell salts. So again I get these off Amazon or iHerb, all of it. This one's made by, hard to see isn't it, by Hyland's. It's called Bioplasma, this one. If you type cell salts into Amazon or something, they're typically 12 different cell salts in these and the little tablets. It's like a little sugar tablet, that's the only thing I don't like about it, that it's sugary. But you take one of those, pop them under your tongue, let it dissolve, and boom you've got energy. It's amazing.

1:33:08How does that work? Well, this is a really old product, it's like 100 years old. And essentially whoever came up with this studied the minerals the cells left in dead people. And what they found, or what he found, were that there were 12, or I think it might have been about 12 salts that were part of each body essentially. So each cell was required to have these 12 minerals.

1:33:38So it's a homeopathic thing, it's not going to kill you. And I take this particularly when I'm feeling tired or when I feel like I might get a cold, and I pop one in and it's gone. It's amazing. So the science behind that essentially says that it plays a big role in just neural brain functions and again neurotransmitters and sending signals around and the electrical balance over all of your brain cells.

1:34:07So very very inexpensive product. Again, I pretty much always have it on me. I tend to travel with it as well because that's usually where I get a bit tired or might get a cold sitting next to an air con or something like that. I'll put all the links down below to these studies. But yeah, that's essentially what I take. Not saying you should, obviously talk to your physician about it, or you can test for these things. But if you feel tired or you feel like you're not always in optimal form, these things might help.

1:34:37Now next thing I want to talk to you about is food, and this is obviously a bigger subject. And this isn't a diet programme in any way, shape or form. But if you look at, let me just share my screen with you, here's actually one of the studies on the dietary creatine intake and depression risk. So yeah, really interesting subject. I think for anybody, if you know anybody who suffers from depression, seriously just buy them a box of this and just say just take it for 90 days, just see how you feel. It's not going to really do you any harm, and if you feel better, brilliant.

1:35:08I've done the same with some people in my life and I think it made an impact. The magnesium as well, I think it really makes an impact. But yeah, so in terms of food, there is probably one book I would start with, and there's 1,000 different theories on good eating out there. Joel Fuhrman is an American MD that I respect, and the whole theory here is essentially with this book which I've got somewhere.

1:35:33Eat to Live, it's a $12 paperback or get it on Kindle or whatever. It's got recipes in it as well, but he explains it and I think he explains it very well, probably better than I could. It's essentially that first of all if you don't respect your body because you're eating junk food or stuff out of packets or you grab a crappy sandwich from a shop somewhere at lunchtime and you're going to work, you don't feel good. I used to do that, I used to go to the office, I used to then go out and buy a sandwich from one of those sandwich chains and then for the next 2 hours I'd feel a bit crappy, I just didn't feel good.

1:36:09It's because your body has to deal with it. Your energy as well as your immune system come from your stomach, so if you put something in there that the body has to send all the energy to deal with, the rest of your body including your brain isn't going to function very well. So you want to really respect what you put into your body so you make it easier for your body to perform to the standard that you'd like it to, so you have the energy to actually make changes in your life and get better.

1:36:39Food, super important. Essentially what he's saying is that if you're craving sugar for example, you are actually getting a signal from your body to eat fruit for the vitamins and nutrients it contains. But because we go for the Mars bar instead, the body's like okay, now I've eaten the sugar but I'm still hungry because I still haven't got the nutrients I wanted. So many people are actually very nutrient poor. They might be very well off but they eat a very nutrient poor diet because everything is cooked and fried and baked and whatever and there's very little fresh stuff in there.

1:37:14So eating a large intake of high nutrient dense food is what will make your hunger cravings go away. It's going to be easier on your body and digestion and therefore you'll have more energy consistently rather than these ups and downs and the yo-yos and the fasting and all that stuff. I'd really look into that. Some people say you should eat it raw, some say you should steam and cook. I don't think any of this matters, I think just do everything in moderation.

1:37:48Don't go nuts on one whatever, keto or the raw diet or any of that. They're all there to sell you a programme in some way, form or another, and there's often an industry behind it that is pushing it so they can sell more of whatever it is that they're pushing within the diet. So I would eat a moderate diet, I wouldn't follow one crazy thing.

1:38:07I remember when I bought that Joel Fuhrman book I had just travelled to Tokyo the next day and I was staying in a Park Hyatt and they had a lovely lounge and they had these massive bowls of blueberries. I just read this book and it said blueberries are the most nutrient rich thing you could eat, so there was me eating half a kilogram, a pound of blueberries for breakfast. People thought I was insane and then going back and eating some more and eating a huge bowl of salad. I went a bit overboard so don't do that, just take bits of it on board but aim to replace the easy fast foods in your life with something better.

1:38:48What I did when I still had a job, I would take food with me. Yeah, your co-workers look at you like you're a bit weird but I just felt so much better. So I would take a bit of dinner or previous lunch or whatever it was with me, or you could make it in advance, and then I wouldn't have to buy the junk that I was inevitably going to get. It's going to be full of E numbers and processed whatever, and that would make me feel better.

1:39:15Then I started to also take snacks because I would work very long hours so I'd know I'd get hungry, so I'd take fruit for example rather than buying the Mars bar. You can take little steps in that direction, or take a bowl of blueberries with you, a great thing to snack on actually, keep your energy up quite nicely. Yeah, there's still sugar in that, it's not perfect, okay, but at least you're eating something with some nutrients inside, right?

1:39:39So that's the idea, just replace the stuff that's nutrient poor. It comes out of a packet, if it's somehow been microwaved or otherwise just cooked to death, it has zero nutrients. So you're just putting calories in yourself and your body will digest, which will be hard on the system, and then your body will go okay, I just eaten and processed all of this but I still haven't got any of the nutrients and vitamins that I need, therefore I'm going to tell you I'm hungry. You're going to have to go through the process again and each time you digest it takes up a lot of energy.

1:40:12So that's I think the direction I'd go in, and as I say obviously this isn't the diet programme, but if you have any questions ping me a message down below in the comments. Be super happy to talk to you about it or point you in the direction of the gazillion things I've read on the subject.

1:40:26Have a think about your food plan as well within this. Just think about what you consume and observe it and observe the moments when you consume the worst stuff. I'm not saying you should never have a burger or whatever, of course everybody can eat anything to a degree. It's just if you do it every day at 3 p.m. because you're really hungry, then that isn't good.

1:40:51So just look out for the moments when you make those impulse decisions. For some people that might be after the long day, they drive home and they always drive past that Burger King or whatever and they pull in and they get that. You could maybe prevent that, maybe in the car you could have a slightly healthier snack and you could eat that and that way you can drive past it. So it's little things like that. If we plan when we're in a good state rather than in the tired exhausted state where we're just reacting from instinct, we can make some real improvements here, and it's going to make a huge impact on your ability to sustain a happy healthy mind and therefore get to the success and wealth that you also want to get to.