Welcome back to another episode of Passive Real Estate Investing. I’m your host, Marco Santarelli. I have a very special guest today and my question to you is, how important is mindset? There’s a lot of science out there that shows that how you think and how you talk, not only to yourself but to other people actually affects your level of success and how fast you get there. So with all the science out there that talks about your mindset and how you think and how you talk and your NLP or neurolinguistic programming, all this stuff ties back to the success and performance you have on a day-to-day basis and over the course of months and years in your life. Well, one of my friends, Michael Hyatt, wrote a great book recently called Mind Your Mindset, and that book is about the science and success that comes out of positive thinking.
But don’t let that sway you because we’ve all heard the term positive thinking, but it’s not exactly what you think. And you’re gonna learn about that here today with my interview with Michael Hyatt. So with that, let us jump right into the interview. I hope you enjoy it. I think there’s a lot of good golden nuggets to take outta this interview today.
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Well, it is my pleasure to welcome a special guest. His name is Michael Hyatt, and many of you probably have read his books or know about him, but he is the founder and chairman of Full Focus. He has scaled multiple companies over the years, including a 250 million publishing company with over 700 employees and his own leadership development company that has grown over 60% year over year for the past four years. Under his leadership full focus has been featured in the Inc 5,000 list of the fastest growing companies in America and was named one of Inc’s best workplaces. He’s also the author of several New York Times, wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling books, including Living Forward Free To Focus, which by the way is a fantastic book. I strongly suggest you pick that one up, the Vision Driven Leader and Win at Work and Succeed at life. Michael, my friend, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Marco. Great to be with you again.
Well, it’s great to have you on. You have an impressive bio. What did I miss? Maybe fill in the gaps and let us know a little bit more about you.
Well, probably the most important thing is my family. So I’ve been married for 44 years to the same woman. Wow. I’ve got five grown daughters. My oldest daughter is the c e o of Full Focus. My youngest daughter works in the company too. The other three are entrepreneurs and their own right. I have 10 grandkids and my entire family lives within 20 minutes of me and my 10 grandkids live within five minutes of suddenly. So that’s a lot of my focus these days,
<Laugh>. That’s impressive. So I actually met your wife. We had you attend and speak at Power Room last year and she’s such a sweet lady and you guys are Thank you. Very close. I can tell. So the 44 years is not a surprise whatsoever. That’s great. I’m glad you came on the show because you just released a new book. And I remember when you were at Power Room, you were talking about the title of this book and you were kind of kicking two titles around. I remember one title was, it’s All In Your Head, <laugh>. And then you ultimately settled upon Mind Your Mindset, which I think is a brilliant title by the way.
Which one did you vote for? Do you remember? We had your audience Vote. Yeah, and I think it came out pretty much split. So it didn’t really gimme any new information, <laugh>, cuz we were kind of split on it too. But the publisher felt strongly about this title, but did you have a vote?
Well, I remember when you actually asked everybody in the room the audience, if you will, I think it’s skewed more towards it’s all in your head.
Oh, maybe it did.
Yeah, it did. And I was actually kind of disappointed because I really liked the Mind Your Mindset title. It just had a nice ring, it rolled off the tongue and it was talking about the topic of the book, which has a lot to do with mindset. So for me, that was my vote.
Yeah. Well I, I think at, at the end of the day, the publisher thought that it’s all in your head, sounds a little bit condescending cuz we’ve all had that person say to us when we’re recounting something important to us or that’s meaningful to us, they just say, oh, well that’s just all in your head. Yeah. And so they didn’t wanna do that. I thought it would be good because it was kind of jarring. But anyway, I’m happy with the title.
Well, that’s interesting cuz I have a question that’s very similar to what you just said, but I don’t want to ask you that question yet. I’m gonna ask you that in a few minutes. Okay. I wanna first ask you why did you write this new book? Like, it’s, it’s a great title, but what is the book about?
Yeah, so the reason I wrote this book is because it’s been a gradual realization over the years that everything begins with our thinking. And I had an executive coach back during the Great Recession who said to me, she said, if you want different results than what you’re getting, and you can think about this in any area of your life, including investing, but if you want different results, you’ve got to exhibit different actions. You know, maybe you need to take greater action or different actions or whatever. But behind that is your thinking because your thinking is what motivates your actions. So if you really wanna swim upstream, if you want to kind of address the thing that causes everything else, it’s our thinking. And almost in every book I write, and this was not really known to me until I wasn’t consciously aware of it until I, until I wrote this book, is that almost every book I always start out with a section on mindset because that’s the single most important thing when it comes to delivering different results. We’re getting bigger, better results.
Yeah, I think anybody who believes in personal development, personal growth, and you know, they read books like from Tony Robbins to you name it, you know, resonate with this message and believe in it. They believe that mindset is important. But there are so many books out there on mindset. Like, if you go on Amazon and you type in anything related to mindset, you pull up hundreds if not thousands of books. I I have to ask you this question, but why the new book with so many mindset books on Amazon?
Yeah, well, you know, fir first of all, with so many books on Amazon, it’s hard to come up with something truly unique period.
Yeah.
But the uniqueness of who’s giving the message and kind of their take on it is what makes it unique. But I think the thing that makes this one unique is the subtitle is the Science that shows Success Starts with Your Thinking. And so we did a deep dive, I wrote this book with my oldest daughter, Megan Miller Hyatt, or excuse me, Megan Hyatt Miller. And we, we basically did a deep dive into the brain science to see exactly how our brain responds and how our thinking develops kind of organically from our biology. And that was hugely insightful. So that’s, that’s given us, I think, a little bit different take on it because everybody wants to be plugged into the science and make sure that that what they think and all of that is congruent with the science. And it turns out there’s been a lot of advances in science in recent years that are super helpful when it comes to shifting our mindset and shifting our thinking.
Yeah, that’s true. So Michael, I like to begin every interview with breaking things down into like basic building blocks. And, you know, we talk about mindset, and I think most people conceptually or generally understand what mindset means, but I think there’s a lot of people out there, maybe not most, but many people, they don’t actually know what we’re talking about when we’re talking about mindset. What are we even talking about? Is it just a way of thinking how you think about yourself, what you believe is it about your values and beliefs? I mean, what, what is mindset?
Yeah. Your mindset is basically how you think about the world and in particular how you think about a specific problem that you’re trying to address. There are mindsets or thinking that are disempowering and that don’t get you a bigger, better result. And there’s the kind of thinking that does. So for example, I don’t know if you followed this game this last fall. The Vikings and the Colts played this extraordinary game that was maybe the biggest comeback in N F L history this fall. But at halftime, did you see this game, by the way, this
Was a fall. I didn’t see it. No.
Okay. So the Colts were ahead by 33 to zero at halftime. So my kings are behind zero to 33 now. It would be super easy, and this is a mindset illustration, it’d be super easy to have the mindset, hey, the game’s over. I mean, there’s nobody that’s ever come back from a 33 point, you know, behind, behind situation and won the game. And so if I’m the coach, you know, I’m probably gonna go into the locker room and say, Hey guys, let’s give it our best. But it would be kind of half-hearted because my mindset would be, look, the game’s lost. You know, we’re basically twiddling our thumbs here as we’re going through the second half, but there’s no way that we can catch up. But there was a cornerback by the name of Patrick Peterson who walked into the locker room, into the Vikings locker room, and he fired off this crazy challenge to his team. This wasn’t the coach, this was a player. He said, we only need five touchdowns to win this game. So the very fact that he chose the word only kind of revealed his mindset. In other words, this is a problem that is solvable, you know, where most people would give up, walk off the, the field or just kind of, you know, run out the clock. He said no. And as it turned out, the Vikings came back and won the game. And it was amazing.
So that not only made it plausible, but believable and achievable by stating the word only five touchdowns, and it, it caused everybody else to have a similar or the same mindset that they can believe it and achieve it. Right. That’s basically right. What happened.
Yeah, and I, I think Marco, one of the things that, that we talk about in the book Mind your Mindset is that, that there’s this person that we call the narrator that lives inside of our head. And so there are facts and then there’s our interpretation of the facts. So our brains are meaning making machines. We’re constantly trying to take the facts that we experience and we perceive and knit those together in a story. And the narrator is the one that’s providing like an N f l football game, the color commentary about what those facts mean. And so it could be anything, you know, it could be like, like early on I, in my career back in the eighties, I started a book publishing company and after about five years, we got in relationship with a distributor. Long story short wind ended up going bankrupt.
And this was after a stellar start. And we fell hard. It was embarrassing, it was publicly humiliating, it was a hard lesson to learn in business. And then shortly thereafter, I had a really important mentor say to me, you’re not very good with money, are you? And I can still remember to this day, Marco, what I was wearing, where I was, we were sitting in an airplane, I can remember where I was sitting. And he said that to me. And that rang in my ears. So I had this, now this narrator inside of my head that every time I wanted to do something financial, whether it was an investment or whether it was just managing my budget or I was considering debt, I’d always have this whisper in the back of my, my head that would say, you know, you’re not very good with money.
And that’s so influenced my behavior. So that would cause me to be very risk adverse. It would cause me to do stupid things because after all, I’m not very good with money. But then over about the course of a decade, I said, wait a second. And, and we talk about this in the book. So identifying the, the bad thinking is the first step, and then interrogating that thinking. And, you know, hopefully it won’t take you 10 years to interrogate your thinking like it did me in that initial pass. But I started asking myself, is it true that I’m not very good with money? Or have I just taken a couple of experiences and knit together this entire narrative? That’s not true. What if I was just not yet educated on money? What if I could learn the secrets of the people that have learned to master their money? Well, that was a shift for me. And incrementally I got to the place where I said, you know what? I’m actually great with money. But that was a process. But that influences my behavior. Cuz now I’m not afraid to take risks. I’ve invested, I’ve done very well for myself, but it always a shift in my thinking. That’s where it began.
So what comes first, the mindset before the education to become good with money or the education to be good with money ultimately leaves you to change your mindset. Does that make sense?
Yeah. I, I think they’re kind of reciprocal and iterative, but I think it begins, and in the book we talk about these three steps and we talk about, first of all, identify the thinking. So this, this requires self-awareness. So whenever we’re frustrated or we’re angry or we’re fearful, then we need to ask ourself the question. Just stop, push the pause button, ask ourself the question, what are the sentences in my head right now? What is the narrator saying about this situation? Then once you’ve identified and, and becoming self-aware is the hardest part because most of us confuse our story with reality. But the facts of the story are more like a police report. You know, the, we saw the person at [spp-timestamp time=”6:39″] AM on the side of the street. You know, that’s a, that’s a fact. What that means is the story. And that may or may not be right.
One of the things we learned in the process of doing this book is that up to 20% of our memories may be false. Up to 50% of our memories are distorted. And so they’re not the facts. And so identifying the story is number one. Number two is to interrogate the story to say, wait a second, is that really true? And so we have a whole sequence of questions in the book that you can ask yourself. And then finally, after you’ve identified interrogated, then you can imagine a different story. And that’s what I began to do in that, that example about money, is that I began to imagine a different story and begin, and back to your original question, began to kind of educate myself. And that would affect my mindset, then my mindset would affect the amount of education I wanted to get. And over time I developed that confidence. But now I can do it obviously much more quickly. And that’s why we wrote the book is so that people don’t have to wait 10 years to get to to a different story.
So you talk about stories a lot in the book, and you mentioned it multiple times right now. So does the brain constantly put our life or the paradigm we’re living in, in the form of a story? I mean, we are, we constantly formulating stories and telling ourselves stories and believing our stories, whether they’re true or not.
Totally. Yeah. Our, our brains, we literally cannot exist without stories. And so we will create stories. What does it mean? You know, if you’ve, if you’ve grown up in an abusive home or you’ve grown up in a great home or whatever it is, you’re gonna tell yourself a story about that that is gonna become the controlling narrative of your life. And oftentimes they, they’re just not true. You know, there’s other ways to piece together those facts and tell a different story. And that’s kinda the whole purpose of the book, is to talk about how we can create that different, more empowering story to ourselves.
So the majority of my audience, if not the entire audience that listens to the show, they’re high achievers. They want to be successful, they’re into personal growth, they’re striving, they’re investing, they want to grow. I’m sure that by now people are understanding that if we start to understand how our brain works, then we can leverage that tool <laugh> that organ, if you will, to maximize our results and our performance. Right. And that’s all built around stories as you’re, you know, talking about, and if I understood you correctly, it sounds like what we need to do is identify what the story is in our brain that we’re telling ourselves or that we believe. And then you call it interrogate, which is an interesting word, but interrogate the story. So you’re questioning the validity of that story and then you’re re-imagining the outcome or the facts of that story. Did I get that right?
Yeah. You’re actually putting together a different story. You know, I, I, okay. You know, another example, I used to have a buddy that I play golf with, he’s now deceased. But whenever he would, you know, shank a ball off the tee box or otherwise hit a bad shot, he would mutter under his breath, he would say, you idiot it <laugh>, why do you always hit it into the rough? Or something like that. Right? And so his language, by the way, and this is, this is a key thing that we talk about in the book. Our language reveals our thinking.
Yes. Very much.
And so if you wanna get access to your thinking, listen to the words that you use. And so for example, I remember one time when I was and I’m gonna have a story within a story, but one time I was flying to a speaking engagement in San Diego and a friend of mine called me just as I got seated on the airplane. And he said, Hey, where are you going? I said, well, I have to speak in San Diego, I have to go speak in San Diego. And he stopped for a minute and he said, wait a second, you have to speak or you get to speak. He said, for as long as I’ve known you, you’ve wanted a career in public speaking and you’re getting to go to San Diego to speak. Yeah. So he said, and so that just that little shift, but my language was revealing my thinking cuz I was seeing it as duty and obligation instead of privilege and opportunity. So back to my buddy who was the golfing guy. So those are not the kind of thoughts that Tiger Woods or any other professional golfer, that’s really good. That’s not what they’re thinking. Right. You know, they’re reinforcing, and I learned this from Tony Robbins, they’re reinforcing when they hit a good shot, they’re saying, awesome, why do you always make such a great shot off the tee box? Or I’m always, you know, I always one putt or two putt or whatever it is. But it begins with our thinking.
Yeah. I don’t know where I picked this up, but I think I’ve known this for a very, very long time, probably decades. But words are very, very powerful. And you need to choose the words that you think and say very, very carefully. And it’s probably because your subconscious mind is always listening to what your conscious mind is saying, and there becomes a point where it believes what you are saying, even though you may not wanna be saying what you’re saying. So speaking in negative terms and talking in woe is me terms and just, you know, I mean, how much truth is there in that, in that the words you say affect or can affect your life and your outcome and your actions?
Well, it’s absolutely true, and this is one of the things that we discovered from neuroscience is that, you know, our, our brains and computers are not the same, but they’re similar in many respects. And one of the places where they’re similar is that they can be programmed. And so there’s a variety of ways to program and, you know, very vivid or traumatic experiences can program our brain. It creates a neural pathway that every time we have a similar trigger, then our brain goes down that neuro pathway. And we think those thoughts that have been triggered by the trigger. But one of the ways that we can reprogram our brain is through language. We can also do it through actions, but we can reprogram it through language. We have access to the most powerful programming language in the world, which is our own speech. And this is where, you know, affirmations come in or beginning to literally state out loud what we want the story to be. And after a while we’ll begin to believe it and we’ll begin to create new neuro pathways in our brain so that the trigger doesn’t run down the same old path, but it goes down the new path that we’ve had. You know, the privilege to create and change.
Well, affirmations is an example of what I was talking about where, you know, words can shape your future and be powerful. I have a cousin who thinks this is all bs. Like he just doesn’t believe that, you know, there’s any truth to positive thinking or that words can change. I mean, he doesn’t care. I mean, he’s not even politically correct. I mean, he doesn’t sugarcoat anything. I mean, he gets himself into trouble all the time, but that’s the way he’s left his life and he is very successful. So, you know, I can’t knock him, but <laugh>. But, but you know, when you get back to the whole concept of stories, it seems like these stories drive your strategies and then those strategies that you formulate for yourself in your head drive your results. So my question would be this is how does our thinking drive our actions? I mean, I know that when I want to do something, I know why I want to do it. I have a goal or an intention and I I’m expecting a certain outcome, but I don’t put a lot of thought into my mindset if that makes any sense. Right. I just know that it’s something I have to do because I want to go from A to Z and, and I just take the action. But how does the thinking that we have drive our actions?
Well, lemme give you an example. We tell this story in the book, and again, I wrote it with my oldest daughter Megan. And so she tells this story in mind, your mindset about this deathly fear that she had a public speaking, I didn’t even know this as her father <laugh>, but she had this tremendous fear of public speaking. And it came from an experience that one of her friends had in high school where she was up in front of the class speaking, forgot where she was, and fled the room in tears. And this was Megan’s best friend, she went in the restroom and there she wasn’t a puddle of tears. And Megan said to herself, I never wanna be publicly humiliated like my friend Katie was. So I will never speak publicly. And it just, it just terrified her. And so then you know, as, as luck would have it she got asked by our team to do a keynote speech at a big conference that we were doing.
It’s gonna be about a thousand people. And she got asked to do the keynote speech. Now she had basically, and this is how her thinking influenced her actions. She would avoid studiously, carefully, meticulously avoid any situation where she’d have to speak publicly. She didn’t even like to read in public. So she had avoided this, this had influenced her actions. And all of a sudden she’s cornered and so she’s asked to speak to give this keynote. Well, she said, okay, I’ll do that. And then she promptly later broke down and said, I can’t do this. So she ended up now. And so this is her mindset beginning to shift. She’s thinking, well maybe this is something I can learn. So she hired a speech coach, coach, she went to a therapist for her anxiety over it and she began to literally, she wrote on paper two pages of how the event was gonna go and how her speech was gonna go.
And she rehearsed that every day. Now the key thing to, to say is when I’m talking about thinking produces different results, I’m not talking about that in some kind of, and maybe this is what your brother, your brother-in-law reacts to. Not in some kind of woowoo kind of way. Yeah. You know, that like, well if I just have different thoughts, I’ll attract the different outcome. No, it influences your actions and that’s what changes the results. You know, I wish I could just think it and it would happen, but that’s not been my experience. I have to think different thoughts, take different actions to get different results. So in Megan’s case, because she went to the effort to write down or to imagine this new story and how it would end, and then she worked like crazy on the speech, but that’s what gave her the confidence to rehearse and actually step onto the stage with butterflies like we all have when we speak. But she killed it. I was there, I couldn’t believe it. And when she told people at the end of the speech, this is the first time I’ve ever spoken publicly, <laugh>, I mean people fell out of their chair. They couldn’t believe it really. And now she, you know, she reports records our podcast with me every week. She speak, does keynote speaking all the time. And you would think, oh my God, she was born for this. She loves it. But it started by changing her thinking.
Yeah, no, that’s interesting. That story you just told reminded me of something you have in the book and you talk about that people have two related capacities. They have this, the ability to aspire to something greater or more and then ways to envision or ways to, I guess, achieve that aspiration. Why is it so difficult for people to, I guess, achieve success? I mean, we all have the capacity to do it. Maybe not the belief, which is mindset, but why is it so difficult for some people to achieve success or maybe they’re already successful and, and get to that next level, you know, that two x 10 x level in their life?
Well, a again, I think it goes back to the way they think. And for a lot of us, we kind of have a lid on our thinking. You know, I think to myself, you know, I’ve achieved a certain level of wealth, you know, multiple eight figure net worth. But then I look at somebody like Mark Cuban or Ilan Musk. Yeah. Are they really that much smarter than I am? Yeah. Do they just have more contacts than I have? Maybe they had a better, better education or they have more experience. Or maybe, and this is what I think is the driving force, they think differently. You know, mark Cuban, when he looks at a deal, thinks differently than I think. It doesn’t occur to him that, wow, I can’t do this. Whereas I might at a certain level go, okay, I’ve done deals up to this level, but I’ve never done a deal at that level and I may be having the inner thought that I can’t do deals at that level. Hmm. And so, you know, gay Hendrix called us this in his book The Big Leap. You know, he talks about this ceiling that we have where we get beyond it and then we sort of self sabotage. But again, it’s a thinking issue.
Yeah, true. So let’s shift gears for a second here. I’ve heard this phrase a million times, you know, the scarcity mindset. And that’s something that I try not to fall into a trap of scarcity. I’m a believer that you shouldn’t look at how big or small your slice of the quote unquote pie is, but rather look at how big can that pie be? Because then everybody’s slice becomes much larger. So it’s the scarcity mindset versus the abundance mindset. How much truth is there in that? There must be a lot of truth I would imagine. And are there differences between limitations over possibilities? Because to me, scarcity versus abundance is all about limitations versus possibility.
Well, a absolutely, there’s enormous truth to that. And it does influence our behavior. You know, if we have a scarcity mindset, for example, we may really feel threatened by our competition. Right. we don’t wanna help ’em, we wanna keep ’em in the dark. Certain things we don’t say publicly, cuz we don’t want them to get the inside edge. I’ve never had that attitude. I’ve felt like, look, I’m willing to share everything. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, my competitors are not gonna be able to execute at the level that I can execute. Yeah. And they’re not gonna execute in the same way. Even if I were to hand ’em the playbook, you know, they’re not gonna do it exactly the same. And so I, I think the abundance mindset is really helpful cuz it leads to generosity, it leads to collaboration, it leads to a lot of positive things that produce even bigger, better outcomes.
So I think this is one of those things where, and we have a whole chapter on this in the book, but we’re highly influenced by the people that we surround ourselves with. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Like if we’re around scarcity thinkers, we will become a scarcity thinker. If we’re around abundance thinkers, you know, we’ll, we’ll think abundantly. Like, one of the things my wife always says to me, like when something goes south, like a deal goes south or you know, some of their setback, she’ll say, honey, don’t worry about it. There’s more where that came from. <Laugh>, that’s an abundance mindset. Great. There’s more where that came from. I used to work for a guy than whenever we lost a deal. He would say the same thing. You know, he would say, there’s always another deal. You know, deal would fall through. There’s always another deal. And it’s true, there are opportunities are everywhere. Yeah. But that’s a mindset. Yeah.
Yeah. That’s totally true. I mean, I see that all the time and I’ve seen that for many, many years. Whether it be real estate or business opportunities or foreclosures or bankruptcies or you name it. I mean, if you just open your eyes and you’re aware, you’ll, you’ll find what you’re looking for. It’s almost like a sixth sense. Actually on that note, <laugh>, you know, you mentioned that intuition is not a sixth sense. It’s actually something better. So what’s the role of intuition in our lives? I mean, is it a real thing?
It is definitely a real thing. So here’s the cool thing. Intuition is the ability of our subconscious mind to more quickly process, experiences, perceptions and data, and come to a conclusion. It’ll do that faster than our conscious mind will do. It’s not infallible. And this is not either or. It’s not intuition or reason. It’s intuition plus reason. We tell the story in the book about a race car driver who is about to crest this hill and he’s going like, I don’t know, 150 miles an hour. And all of a sudden he just decides his intuition tells him, hit the brakes now, and he hits the brakes. And people said to him, how did you know to hit the brakes? And he said, I don’t know. I just said something was off. Well, there was a 20 car pile up on the other side of the hill, and if he had gone into that pile up at 150 miles an hour, he probably would’ve killed himself and probably would’ve killed, you know, several other people.
There were already enough injuries. But they said, well, how did, where did that’s intuition come from? You know, where it came from. It came from his peripheral vision. He saw that the crowd was not looking at him. They were looking over the hill at this pile up that was happening in real time. And his subconscious sense, something’s off and he hit the brakes. So that’s how our, that’s how our intuition works. It’s, it’s faster than our conscious mind can process, but again, it’s not infallible. Sometimes it comes to the wrong conclusion. You know, I’d say maybe 70 to 80% of the time it’s right. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. But it’s also difficult to communicate about your intuition. Like if you say to your, your wife, well, honey, you’re just gonna have to trust me. I think we need to, to invest half our net worth in this deal because I just had this intuition. You know? Right. So reason is helpful in explaining to other people why we’re doing what we’re doing, but it’s also a, a, a great way to, to validate what we’re doing. So it’s kind of trust plus verify.
Yeah. Sounds like what you just said is deep rooted in your subconscious mind. It’s a real thing. It’s not woowoo or That’s right. Pocus. Pocus. It’s actually there, but it’s not something that you can easily tap into. Which kind of begs the question, does everybody have intuition? Are you born with it and lose it as you get older? And can anybody tap into it?
No, I think what the, what the science would tell us is that everybody has it. It’s a, if, if you take the perspective of evolution, this was a survival thing. Wow. You know, because you, if you were being pursued by a big, gnarly animal Yeah. You had to be able to make a, a decision very quickly. And all of us have seen this in situations where we just unconsciously, in other words, subconsciously, we’ll steer out of a lane or do something to avoid a crash or do anything that happens very quickly to protect us. You know, our brain’s very, very good at that. Everybody has intuition, but sometimes, you know, we may have made a decision that we thought was intuition and it didn’t lead to a good result. So we question the intuition. We don’t trust it. And I think that that’s one of the things that we have to, to learn to do, is to work with it, not exclusively, but to be able to work with that and let its, let it do its work.
There’s a, there’s a reason you feel that way about that person, why you don’t trust that person, because your subconscious is picking up on some clues that your conscious mind hasn’t yet processed and may not even see, kinda like the crowd, you know, the the guy seeing the crowd look over the horizon mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and, and taking the intuition to, to break the car. Well, the same thing can happen when we meet people. We have this intuition, you know, something’s off. I don’t trust that person. And then we learn that there’s not trustworthy, there’s a reason not to. But again, we kind of have to, to, to stay open to the fact that, that our intuition’s not infallible. We may be wrong, we may just need more experience.
Right. I guess something related to that is the whole concept of mind reading. In the book you talk about the theory of mind and how it plays into our success. I don’t know if there’s truth in mind reading, maybe it’s intuition, maybe it’s neurolinguistic programming, maybe it’s reading body language, which is something that’s always been fascinating to me. But I mean, what is this theory of mine? Can you explain that a little bit?
Yeah, I, I would say that the best access to what somebody’s thinking is listen to their language. Body language did, I’m
Sorry, verbal language or body language.
Yeah, no, I would say verbal language. You know, that, that the, that the language that they choose to express their thoughts, it may be happening subconsciously, but it reveals a tremendous amount about what they’re thinking. And so, you know, when I said to my friend, I have to go to San Diego, that revealed something about my thinking. So was he reading my mind? No, he was just listening to my language. And one of the things, we have a large business coaching program called Business Accelerator. And one of the things that our coaches do, and one of the things I do with my coaching clients is I’m intently listening to the language because their language will reveal their thoughts to me. And that’s where I wanna adjust their behavior and their results is I wanna get inside their thinking and try to change their thinking with them.
Interesting. How important is creativity? I mean, I think as kids we’re born with tons of it, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think as we grow into adulthood, I don’t know if it’s if it’s society or our friends or the school system or a combination thereof, but I think creativity is kind of choked or stifled and it becomes less natural to be creative. You know, we become so specialized or, or vertical in, in our thinking in what we do. But I believe creativity is extremely important, and especially when it comes to problem solving. That’s why in business you have, you know, you have your visionaries and then you have your implementers. And the visionaries are the ones that, you know, definitely want to keep their head in the clouds and, and think outside the box, quote unquote. But is that a skill that we actually lose? And if it’s something we lose, is there a way to bring it back or spark it?
Well, I would agree that it’s very important and it’s oftentimes something that we lose over time because of the stories, because of the stories that people are telling us. Like when we’re kids, you know, we say to our five year old grandson or granddaughter, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And they say, I wanna be an astronaut. And you say, awesome, that’s great. And then fast forward to their 18 years old and say, okay, so why do you wanna go to college? Well, I wanna become an astronaut. That’s not practical. You gotta pick something more practical. And so we dial down the creativity, we dial down their imagination. And again, there’s a story there oftentimes influenced by other people that we tell ourselves. Like I hear all the time, people say, I’m just not that creative, or, I’m, I’m not, I’m not really a writer.
And I, I tell the story in the book, Mind Your Mindset where I went to an industry event and I heard this public speaker stand up and he said, you know, I’m not that gifted at public speaking. Those, like, like, those were the words out of his mouth, <laugh>. And then he spent the next hour proving it to us because his thinking was influencing his behavior. So so again, this whole thing about creativity. What is the story you’re telling yourself about your creativity? You know, are you saying to yourself, you know, I’m just not that creative, or I’m not as creative as a lot of people. What if you said, I’m learning to be creative, or I’m becoming more creative over time or in certain situations, I’m highly creative. So whatever it is, again, be intentional about it. And I think that that one of the best things you can do when you’re frustrated, angry, fearful, write down the sentences in your head, and then re-engineer those and reprogram your brain with more empowering thinking. What could you be saying to yourself when that trigger presents itself so that you don’t just run down the same neural pathway, but that you actually choose a different pathway that’s more empowering?
You know, Michael, it’s just awning on me now as I’m listening to personally, I think one of my biggest takeaways from this interview is that you can change your mindset with very small, subtle shifts in your thinking and in your vocabulary, what you say, how you say it. Am I correct in thinking that, because this, you are, this is my, no, you, this is my takeaway. It’s like, this is not a leap. This is, these are small steps.
We, we have a, you know, dozens of examples like this in the book, but one of my favorite questions when I’m facing some kind of adversity that will instantly shift my mindset is I’ll say, what does this make possible? Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. So for example, you know, you, you’re, you’re in an airport, and this is happened recently in our airports when Southwest had their crisis. But you know, you see, you see business travelers extremely frustrated or angry because their flight’s been canceled or whatever. But if they say, if they ask themselves in the face of that, Hmm, what does the, this flight cancellation make possible? You know, maybe, maybe you’re able to go to the airlines club, camp out and work on that project you haven’t been able to get to. Maybe you’re able to make some phone calls that you just haven’t had time to get to.
You know, maybe it’s an exercise in learning patients, or maybe you’ll meet somebody that you need to meet. But asking that question, what does this make possible, you know, I went through, we were talking about this before we got on, I went through a major medical situation this last fall with a heart attack and a subsequent heart surgery. And I, I didn’t do it initially, you know, like I wasn’t in I C U saying, what does this make possible? But it didn’t take very long because I’ve trained myself to do this. That as I was going through the healing process, I thought, what does this make possible? I’ll tell you what it made possible. It made three months of reading, reflecting, and writing. It was like this giant pause and reboot. That’s what made that possible. So it’s, it was a different mindset.
Yeah. That’s incredible. And once again, I’m glad you’re in good health and thank you. And you’re here with us today, so that’s, that’s good. So let’s just wrap this up. Kind of a similar question to the whole implementation thing, but I always think about implementation. What would you recommend our listeners do to implement or apply everything you talk about in the book to, to better shape their lives, better shape the outcome that they have in their real estate investing, their investing in general, whatever it may be?
Well obviously by the book, but after you bought the book, <laugh> become just purpose that you’re gonna become more intentional and more self-aware about your thinking. You’re gonna think about your thinking. So again, anytime you get frustrated, angry, fearful, have a negative emotion, say to yourself, what is the thinking that’s driving this? And for me at least, I have to get those sentences that are the, the, the narrator is giving me inside my head. And I have to get those on paper where I can objectify ’em and then re-engineer them. So they’re, so, they’re more powerful. But it starts with self-awareness.
Think about your thinking. That’s a great phrase that’s worth tattooing somewhere. <Laugh>,
Michael, tell, tell our listeners how can they follow you and get more information, find your books and all that stuff, please.
Yeah, the best place to find the book is at mindyourmindsetbook.com, and we’ve got a whole bunch, hundreds of dollars worth of free bonuses if you buy the book and come back with your receipt. So that’s kind of a cool thing. And in terms of where you can find everything else that’s going on about me, go to Full Focus. That’s the name of our company, fullfocus.co , that’s got links to our podcast, all my previous books, my blog, everything else.
Beautiful. And we’ll transcribe all this and put it all in the show notes for you. Michael, I appreciate you and I appreciate you taking the time to come on the show. You’re a brilliant guy. I love all your books, they’re fantastic. And hope to see you again soon.
Great. Thanks for having me, Marco.
Thanks, Michael. Well, that wraps it up for today. I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Michael Hyatt. Super nice guy, super smart guy. Really enjoyed my conversations with him in the day’s past, but I will probably bring him on again maybe in nine months or 12 months to, he’s got so much good content out there and, and some really good books. In fact, I really wanted to pick his brain about one of his books on time management. It’s one of the best ones I’ve actually seen out there. But that is it for today.
If you are interested in anything real estate related, contact my team for a free strategy session or just visit our website. It’s chock full of information and articles we post multiple times per week. But that’s at noradarealestate.com. If you have a question about real estate investing or investing in general, just shoot that over to me at passiverealestateinvesting.com. Just click the Ask Marco button. If you haven’t already subscribed to the show, please do so. Spread the word with your friends and family. We love for more people to listen to the show. It is one of the top 50 investing shows on iTune and certainly in the top 200 of all business podcasts. In fact, it’s usually in the top 100, and that’s thanks to you. So I really appreciate that. Again, thanks for listening, and we will see you all on our next episode.
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