Editor:
Today, we are privileged to have John Assaraf join us. John is an internationally recognised entrepreneur, brain researcher, and expert in the psychology of success. Not only has he grown multiple multimillion dollar businesses, but he’s also a bestselling author and the CEO of NeuroGym, a company that uses the most advanced methods and evidence-based brain training methods to help individuals unleash their fullest potential. John, thank you so much for joining us today.
John Assaraf:
Great to be on.
Editor:
Well, could we start by asking you what initially drew you into the field of brain research and neurodevelopment?
John Assaraf:
I was fascinated with what we were discovering about the human brain, and specifically I had a lot of limiting beliefs. I felt like I wasn’t smart enough. I felt like I was inadequate when I was a kid because I failed English and failed math. I left high school with grade 11. And so I just felt like I wasn’t supposed to succeed because I was told if you didn’t have a proper education, you probably weren’t going to do well in life.
And I ended up meeting this one man who really understood the power of the mind, and he was a Napoleon Hill student of the book Think and Grow Rich. And so he started to teach me the power of self-talk, the power of visualisation, the power of developing the beliefs and the identity to achieve goals versus believing in my current beliefs and believing in what I thought I should achieve or not achieve because of my scholastic background and education. years.
And so I got a healthy dose of what the human brain is capable of at a very, very young age. And because it helped transform my life, I’ve studied it now for 44 years.
Editor:
Wow. I’m sure you’ve got many insights which we can maybe dive into as we get into this. What was the inspiration though behind you founding NeuroGym and how does that reflect maybe on your personal mission now?
John Assaraf:
I’ve been somebody who’s exercised most of my life to stay in really good physical shape and to have energy and vitality and to look good and feel good. But I also was doing a lot of inner work, and I was looking to stay calm, reduce stress, have more confidence, have more certainty, have more personal power, tap into my fullest potential. And one of the things that I realised during my journey is there were a lot of people that knew what they should do. A lot of people know they should exercise and eat well and sleep well, but they don’t do it. And a lot of people how they can make more money, and a lot of people know what they could do to have a better relationship, and a lot of people know a lot of stuff, but why weren’t we doing what we knew we should be doing? Why weren’t we doing what we already knew how to do?
And so I got fascinated with the neuroscience side of us, and I realised that the inner game determines the outer game. And I coined these terms, neuro muscles and innercise, for my own ease of understanding. And I realised that our self-image was either strong or weak. Our self-image was either constructive, building us up, or it could be destructive, tearing us down. I also realised that we have empowering beliefs, but we also have disempowering beliefs. And some of them are negative and some of them are downright lies.
And so I started to innercise a lot to train my own brain, and then I started to train my students’ brains, people that were following my work that read my books or saw me in one of my movies that I was in. And they started to achieve the same results. And in essence, we were training their brains. So just like you go to the gym, maybe to train your body and cardiovascular system, I was helping people rewire their brain, strengthen their neuro muscles so that they felt confident, certain, unstoppable, and they started achieving their goals and dreams as fast as I was.
And so I knew there was something to brain training, and that’s why I started NeuroGym. That’s why I wrote my bestselling book, Innercise, is to give people the brain exercises, so to speak, to train the different aspects of the brain, which is $100 billion tool that most people don’t know how to use.
Editor:
Which is amazing in itself. Innercise has become, as you say, a bestseller worldwide. It’s groundbreaking in terms of the content. But in terms of getting that out to an audience and getting people to buy into this, what were the steps that you took, John, to make that happen?
John Assaraf:
I had to break it down for people to be able to really understand it. So I’ll give you an example. When I ask anybody, how important is your self-talk to yourself? Whether you say, “I’m good enough to achieve this,” or, “I’m not good enough to achieve this,” when you say, “I’m too young,” or, “I’m too old,” when you say, “I don’t know how to do this,” you’re giving your brain an instruction and your brain follows through with whatever self-talk you’re using on yourself. So self-talk matters. Self-talk creates thoughts that are consistent with the self-talk.
So if I’m negatively talking to myself on an ongoing basis, is it any wonder that the majority of my thoughts will be negative? And if the majority of thoughts are negative, which by the way, on a statistical basis, 80% of the average person’s thoughts in a day are negative, and we have 6,200 thoughts as of the latest research last year. And so if we have 5,000 negative thoughts a day on average, and we repeat those thoughts, 90% of each day, day after day after day, the majority of our population is negative, is disempowering themselves. Negative self-talk creates negative or disempowering emotions.
Negative or disempowering emotions create behaviours that we don’t want. So when we talk negatively to ourselves, we feel the negative aspects of what we’re saying, and then we behave in those ways and we wonder why we’re not achieving goals. So I started to understand that self-talk has a direct correlation to how I feel. How I feel has a direct correlation to what I do or don’t do, so self-talk is important.
Next is understanding the effect on how I feel based on what I do. And so for example, if I feel afraid of failing, if I feel that I might be embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, judged, rejected, abandoned, if I feel like I might disappoint myself or somebody else, what are the chances that I’m actually going to take action?
John Assaraf:
Well, the answer is very, very slim because what we’ve discovered about the human brain, we will do more to avoid pain or discomfort than we will to gain pleasure. And so there’s some automatic processes in the brain that prevent us from taking action as a protective mechanism, not because we don’t want to take the action. We’re just making sure that we don’t suffer the consequences of maybe making a mistake or of feeling embarrassed or ashamed, judged or failing.
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