032: Hal Elrod on Beating Cancer, Building a Community, & How Financial Advisors Can Create a Miracle Morning Routine

Welcome to this episode of the Elite Advisor Blueprint Podcast with your host, Brad Johnson. Brad’s the VP of Advisor Development and Advisors Excel, the largest independent insurance brokerage company in the US. He’s also a regular contributor to Investment News, the Wall Street Journal and other industry publications.

 

[INTRODUCTION]

 

[00:00:23] Brad: Welcome to the Elite Advisor Blueprint, the podcast for world-class financial advisors. My name is Brad Johnson and I’m the VP of Advisor Development and Advisors Excel, and it’s my goal to distil the best ideas and advice from top thought leaders and apply it to the world of independent financial advising.

 

In this conversation, I finally get a chance to sit down with a special guest and a buddy of mine, Hal Elrod. He’s one of the most inspiring keynote speakers in the world. He’s a creator of one of the fastest growing online Facebook communities on the web and author of the best-selling book series, The Miracle Morning. For those of you who don’t already know Hal’s story, The Miracle Morning was his answer to overcoming a life-changing event that happened when he was just 20 years old. His car was hit head-on by a drunk driver and he was literally pronounced dead for six minutes. He also broke 11 bones and was told by doctors he’d never walk again. Seriously, you can’t make this story up.

 

As if that wasn’t enough for one guy to overcome in a lifetime, just about a year ago, actually a week before we were scheduled to originally have this conversation, Hal took a trip to the doctor after waking up in the middle of the night and just struggling to catch his breath. He was again rocked to a life-changing news. He had a rare and aggressive form of cancer. Hal and I go deep into what he’s faced over the last year, in his words, the most difficult year of his life. But fortunately, the story does have a happy ending as Hal recently found out from his doctors he’s now cancer free. What I love about this conversation though is the way Hal dealt with his diagnosis. This is the same mindset Hal’s used to help people all around the world achieve their full potential one morning at a time and today’s no different. Hal shares some incredible advice that I know all of you advisors out there can learn from. So, get ready for a level of energy Hal brings to this conversation as it’s a fast-paced content-packed episode.

 

[00:02:13] Brad: Here are just a few of the highlights. Right at the beginning, we get into the single most important philosophy Hal’s used to overcome adversity. We go deep into Hal’s thoughts when his doctor first told him he had cancer and how he dealt with it. The same mindset trick applies just as much to the daily ups and downs of being a financial advisor and you can literally implement it in under five minutes. Next, we cover Hal’s Miracle Morning framework. It outlines the six most powerful personal development practices to start your day. These were distilled from the highest performers in history and I’ve got to say on a personal note, I followed this ever since being recommended Hal’s book a few years back and it’s been an absolute game changer for me so I hope for you all it’s just as impactful. From there, obviously the number one problem to overcome with starting a morning routine is actually getting out of bed. Hal gets into his five steps snooze-proof wake-up strategy that will allow you to actually put this routine into action. Lastly, Hal gets into the secret ingredient to writing a book that will maximize your impact and what he believes is the single tactic that turned the Miracle Morning into a global movement that’s being practiced daily by over half a million people in 70 plus countries. Not only that. It’s led to a Facebook group that’s 120,000 strong and he shares the secret for you authors out there to converting passive readers into an active and loyal community, a community, by the way, that’s excited to attend your events and implement your strategies.

 

Okay. Before we get to the show, Hal’s generously gifted his very own sample Miracle Morning Journal with step-by-step instructions to implement your very own morning routine and also a list of his all-time favorite reads when it comes to business, success, money and more. It’s available for download right at the top of the show notes, BradleyJohnson.com/32. You can also find links to everything else we mentioned there too, books, people discussed, full transcript of our conversation, everything else from the show. So, that’s it. As always, thanks for listening and without further delay, my conversation with Hal Elrod.

 

[INTERVIEW]

 

[00:04:21] Brad: Welcome to this week’s episode of the Elite Advisor Blueprint Podcast. I have my buddy and special guest, Hal Elrod, here with us today. Welcome to the show, Hal.

 

[00:04:31] Hal: Brad, it is a pleasure. I told you this is my first interview I’ve done in like a year and a half or a year, a long time.

 

[00:04:37] Brad: Well, I’m honored, man. In fact, this Saturday was actually supposed to happen. I checked my calendar before I hopped in here today, November 15, 2016.

 

[00:04:47] Hal: Wow.

 

[00:04:47] Brad: Knowing a little bit of your personal story, I wouldn’t normally open a conversation like this but following from afar, watching your Miracle Morning Community but when you were kind of rocked with a diagnosis of cancer just over a year ago and seeing most importantly the mindset that you approached it with, I want to open there and I just want to ask you what have you taken from that experience? And maybe, I guess, give us a little bit of color commentary because not everybody’s going to be familiar with the story.

 

[00:05:14] Hal: Sure. Yeah. So, about a year ago, just a little less than a year ago right before Halloween, I woke up in the middle of the night and just gasping for air and kind of like when you wake up and you’re having a nightmare that maybe you’re drowning or something and you wake up and you’re like, “Ah,” and you can’t breathe but I wasn’t having a nightmare. I just couldn’t breathe and this went on for a couple of days and it wasn’t getting better. It got worse and my wife said go to the urgent care and get checked out. With the urgent care they did some an X-ray in my chest and he said, “I think it’s pneumonia. I’m going to put you on some antibiotics,” but he said, “I’m not sure. So, in a few days if you’re not better, go see your regular doctor.” So, a few days later I wasn’t any better. I’m literally sleeping propped on pillows and I can’t even, I can’t sleep. I can’t breathe. It was terrible. And so, then I ended up going to my doctor and he calls the next day and says, “I want you to come in,” and I’m going, “Oh God. That’s like a bad news thing if you have to come in. They can’t tell you over the phone. What could this possible…”

 

And for me, I’ve lived an anticancer lifestyle for like ten years. I mean, I watched a documentary 10 years ago, Healing Cancer from the Inside Out about how to cure cancer holistically, naturally and so I just said, “I’m going to start just living that way now so that I don’t ever get cancer.” So, I came in and he said, “There’s definitely something going on,” and he said, “You might have – it could be some sort of virus or some sort of infection,” but he said, “It might be cancer and you show the signs of like a lymphoma with your – you’ve got these enlarged lymph nodes in your chest that are causing your lung to collapse and overfill with fluid.” And I mean, I’m going, “There’s no way. It can’t be cancer. It’s got to be some freaky virus.” And I went out in the car. I called my wife. She was actually on a trip I was supposed to be on but I couldn’t go on because I couldn’t breathe. I canceled it. Sent my family to go visit my grandma because my grandma was looking forward to seeing my kids and everything.

 

[00:07:14] Hal: I called my wife in the car and told her and I personally accept all things I can’t change. When I was 20 years old I was, we’ll get into more into this as we need to later, but I was hit head-on by a drunk driver. I died for six minutes. I broke 11 bones. Doctor said I would never walk again. So, at age 20 having that adversity, the lessons I’ve learned from it was, well, if you can’t change the circumstance, there’s no value in feeling bad about it and feeling sorry for yourself and being a victim and wishing that reality were any different than it is. If you can’t change it, you can’t change it and most people suffer because they wish they could change it. So, I learned that early on. So, when I received the diagnosis from the doctor, I thought, “If it’s cancer, okay,” like I won’t have emotional pain over that. I’ll just figure out how to work through it as proactively as I can. So, I was at peace with it as soon as I heard it. But calling my wife and telling her that I might have cancer was not as easy, wasn’t as easy for me to tell her as it was for me to completely accept it. And so, I called her. I started crying and she’s crying and I said, “Sweetheart, it’s probably not cancer but if it is, don’t worry. If it is, I meant to go through it, I meant to beat it. I meant to write another book about it to help people that are suffering from it as well, right?

 

And so, long story short, I was diagnosed with a very rare, very aggressive form of cancer. I went in for a second opinion into a major hospital and they found out not only are my lungs failing, my kidneys were failing and my heart was surrounded by a sack of fluid that was compressing my heart and it was about a fourth of an inch thick or an eighth of an inch thick. If it got to be a fourth of an inch thick or any more, they said my heart would stop beating and I would die or I would go into cardiac arrest. And so, I said, “Okay. I’m a natural guy. I want to cure this cancer holistically. What can you do to support me on that?” And my doctor, the oncologist said, “You’ll be dead in a week if you try to cure this holistically.”

 

[00:09:15] Hal: And I didn’t like that answer because I thought it was kind of a fear tactic and I said, “Well, all right. Well, we’re going to go home and sleep on this.” And when I went on home, I did some research on the kind of cancer that I had and the doctor wasn’t exaggerating. It literally this is a cancer where it’s extraordinarily fast-acting. I mean, from healthy to lung collapsing, kidney failing, heart, you know. And so, basically me and my wife, we looked at and we went, chemo literally it’s a necessary evil in this particular case. This isn’t a cancer where you can make gradual lifestyle changes and I didn’t even know what I would change at that point. You know what I mean? So, anyway, I ended up, I went through chemo. Thankfully, it saved my life. I mean, within a matter of days, my lung, I could breathe again. My kidneys, where like it fixed all the things that were causing the problems and it started to minimize the cancer. And the last year of my life has been the hardest year of my life by far but I am very, very grateful to say that a few weeks ago went and got a test and they don’t find any cancer.

 

And so, the chemotherapies combined with all sorts of natural holistic outside-the-box, weird things that most people would never even think to do, the combination of the best kind of east and west if you will, yeah, it worked and I’m cancer-free and I don’t look at this as the end of the road. It’s a lifelong journey of remaining cancer-free. A lot of people with their cancer, once you got it once, it can come back much, much easier. And so, I’m very aware of that and utilizing not only like physical practices in medicines and supplements and stuff but there’s so much mental. Like the Miracle Morning which we’ll talk about today, the affirmations and that mind-body connection ever since my car accident, I really believed in the power and I’ve seen the power of the power of mind influences our biology in a really powerful way. So, utilizing every tool I’ve got to keep healthy and around for my kids.

 

[00:11:15] Brad: If there was one piece of advice you are going to share with someone that either just got diagnosed with cancer or had a family member diagnosed with cancer, what would it be?

 

[00:11:24] Hal: You know, the simplest is to give you a resource because here’s the thing, if you go to your doctor like I went to my doctor, I mean, I’ve asked my doctor. My doctor, by the way, is one of the best oncologist in the world. I mean he literally flies around. Every month he’s somewhere in the world speaking to hundreds of oncologists telling the latest. So, I mean, because the hospital that I’m at or that I went to in Houston, MD Anderson, they’re like the cutting edge. They invented a lot of the cancer protocols that are being used now and he’s at the cutting edge of the leukemia department so he heads it up. But when I asked him about like I said, “What part does nutrition play in healing my body of cancer?” And he says, “That doesn’t really matter. Just do the chemo.” I’m like I even know – I’m like no, it matters. It definitely matters. But like doctors they, no offense, and I wouldn’t be alive without my doctor so make sure that’s in context but typically most of them it seems, my experience has been they only know what they read in their textbook to get their degree and practice medicine. Now some continue their education I’m sure and I think a lot of them do what they need to do to get a paycheck and help people know with their current frame of knowledge, right?

 

And so, if you ask your doctor about what you can do to detoxify your body because chemotoxicity kills arguably as many people as cancer. Now again I’m not going on record quoting that but, I mean, it’s up there. And so, I asked my doctor, “What can I do to detox from the chemo?” And he said, “We’ll give you a flush every time.” And I’m like so here’s a point. Go to a website: ChrisBeatCancer.com. Opt-in for all of his free resources and either use just those if you want to go all natural or if you do what I did which is combine the best of both.

 

[00:13:22] Hal: Do the treatment that they’re going to give you at the hospital but you’ve got to support your immune system with natural holistic things and Chris gives you all of that. He beat cancer naturally, I don’t know, like seven years ago or longer. He’s been in remission. Never came back. And he had like stage 3 colon cancer where it was bad and the doctor said, “If you don’t do chemo, you’re going to die.” He decided not to do chemo. He lived through it so I believe that combining the best of both is a great approach for people and that can give you – listen to both. Do everything your doctor says and do everything that like the ChrisBeatCancer who it’s not just his own opinion. He’s interviewed like the top natural holistic doctors in the world for the last how many years and bringing the best of that knowledge and making it concise for anybody that’s going through cancer.

 

[00:14:11] Brad: Okay. Cool. Thanks.

 

[00:14:13] Hal: Yeah.

 

[00:14:13] Brad: And reading your book, we’re going to get into Miracle Morning. Like it was inspiring, man. And we have mutual friends and I can’t say this strongly enough. What you see on screen, Hal Elrod, is not an act. It’s you, right? And some people are like, “How come he always have that much energy? How can he stay that positive, right?” Guys like John Ruhlin that like he used to room with you in the Cutco days. So, going back to mindset because obviously this is a podcast for financial advisors and you’ve been in sales, kind of grew up in sales really, there are a lot of negative emotions when that sales says no and you have the ultimate negative emotion which was you have cancer. What are the steps you went through? Because I know you’ve done a lot of work on yourself but there are some people that haven’t gone through those steps mentally like you did with the car wreck. Like if somebody was working through, “Here is, I just had really bad news,” how can I step back and look at this with a positive mindset and get the best out of it? Are there any tips or tricks that you have along those lines?

 

[00:15:14] Hal: Yeah. The greatest lesson that I learned from that car accident when I was 20 which to this day it’s one of the single – this is what I’m going to share with you. This is one of the single most important lessons, principles, philosophies, mindsets to I believe to be happy and everything else that we want in life. And it’s accepting all things that we can’t change. And I didn’t, well, actually I guess I can attribute it to when I was in sales, I learned something called the five-minute rule from my sales manager in my initial training. So, like day two of training he said, “Hey look, in sales, just like in life, there’s going to be disappointment. There’s going to be failure. You’re going to try something. It’s not going to work. You’re going to have customers cancel their orders that in your mind you’ve already spent the money and then all of a sudden you go, ‘No.’ We’ve all been there.”

 

And he said, “I’m going to teach you a tool. It’s called the five-minute rule and it states it’s okay to be negative when things go wrong but not for more than five minutes. And he taught us to literally set our timer on our phone for five minutes and you get five minutes to bitch, moan, complain, cry, bent, punch the walls like whatever you got to do. Just feel it but he said after five minutes when that timer goes off, you say three very powerful words to yourself, “Can’t change it.” Can’t change it. Which and what that is it’s a reminder, “Okay, I can’t go back. Unless I’m Marty McFly with a DeLorean, I can’t go back in time whether it was five minutes or five years or five decades, we can’t go back in time and change the past.” And what I later learned to really strengthen this lesson is that when I read the book the Power of Now is that every negative emotion that we have ever felt in our lives or could ever feel is not a result of the thing we’re focused on that we think is causing our negative emotion such as the cancelled order or the cancer or the car accident or the breakup or losing a loved one, whatever.

 

[00:17:17] Hal: That’s not what caused the emotional pain. It’s our level of resistance to the reality. So, to the degree that we resist our reality is the degree that we create emotional pain for ourselves. So, in a very practical way, an example, something bad happens and you go, “No, no, come on. I wanted that so bad.” So, I’m resisting reality. I didn’t get it but I want it. It’s not fair or we lose a loved one. Now I would never make light of that but our emotional pain is only laid at rest when we accept whatever happened as it is and we make peace with it. And for some people they never do that. Think about this. Many of us are suffering over things from our childhood like, “Oh, well my father did this or my mother did this,” and it’s like by all means no one deserve to have bad things happen to them but it’s reality and to suffer today over something happen five minutes ago or when you were a child, that is self-created emotional pain because we’re still resisting our reality from way back when we’re still wishing it were different.

 

So, for me, when the car accident happened, at first, I woke up from a coma six days later. I was 20 years old driving home from a sales meeting, hit head-on by a drunk driver at 70 miles an hour, spun off the drunk driver. The car behind me broadsided my door at 70 miles an hour. I broke 11 bones. I died for six minutes, woke up six days later from a coma and the doctor said, “You’ll probably never walk again and you have permanent brain damage.” I had like no short-term memory and hearing you’re never going to walk again at any age is tough, right? But at 20, your emotional intelligence is pretty limited. Your life experience is limited but I had the five-minute rule and I had this philosophy I’m sharing.

 

[00:19:11] Hal: And so, it only took, literally, a few days and I went, “Okay. I can’t change that I was in a car accident. I can’t change that my bones are broken. I may never walk again. The doctors may be right.” And so, I thought, “But since I can’t change that, I’m going to be the happiest I could possibly be as I go through the rest of my life. I’m going to be the most grateful I could ever be. And so, the doctors called my parents in after I was out of my coma for a week and they said, “We’re concerned with Hal. We believe he is in denial.” He said, “Every time we interact with Hal he’s always smiling and laughing and joking,” and they said, “That’s not normal for anyone let alone a 20-year-old that’s being told they’re probably never going to walk again. His body is scarred. It’s broken. But we’ve seen this where his reality is so painful he can’t accept it so he’s checked out. And he’s just pretending everything is okay. And one day,” they said, “he has to face it and it’s going to come crashing down and it could result to him turning to alcohol or drugs or suicide or something to cope.” So, they said, “We want you to talk to him and find out what he’s really feeling.”

 

So, my dad comes in and he sits down and I’m sitting there. You got to imagine me on my hospital bed like my eye was shattered. I mean this is all made of metal. I’ve got a bandage over my eye. My ear was almost completely severed. It was bandaged on. My head is shaved because it had been cut open. They had to stitch it up. My arm’s broken, my elbow’s broken, my leg’s broken, my pelvis is broken. I’m two weeks out the accident, removed from the accident and I’m watching Oprah literally and my dad comes and he said, “Can I talk to you?” And I was like, “Dad, I’m watching Oprah,” and I looked over and I could tell his eyes were like he had been crying or he’s about to cry and I turned it off and I think he has really bad news for me. I’m going, “Uh-oh. Oh gosh, dad, you just met with the doctor. What’s going on?” And he told me their concerns. He said, “Hal, it’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to be depressed.”

 

[00:21:07] Hal: He goes, “It’s okay to be angry. God knows your mom and I want to strangle that drunk driver. We’re sad, angry and depressed. I can only imagine what you’re going through. Talk about it. How are you feeling, son? It’s okay. Let’s talk about it.” And again, I could tell you he was so concerned so really, I paused and I thought, “Am I sad? Am I angry? Am I depressed? Am I covering something up that I’m not realizing?” And I just shook it off and I look, I said, “Dad, I thought you knew me better than that.” And he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Remember, I live by the five-minute rule. It’s okay to be negative for five minutes but after five minutes…” I go, “It’s been two weeks since the accident. My five minutes are up.” And he goes, “Hal, I know your five-minute rule but that was for no sales and canceled appointments. This is a bigger deal.” I said, “But, dad, the reality of the philosophy, the mindset it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter the level of adversity. Emotional pain is self-created whether you die in a car accident or you’re in traffic. It doesn’t matter. It’s resisting reality.”

 

I said, “I’ve decided, dad, if I’m in a wheelchair the rest of my life, I’ll be the happiest, most grateful person you’d ever seen in a wheelchair. Because I’m in a wheelchair either way so I could either be miserable in a wheelchair and blame the drunk driver and be angry that it happened or I can just roll around being genuinely happy. That’s the decision that I’ve made. I’m not putting on a front. I’m not in denial. I’m choosing that no matter what happens to me in life, I’m going to make the best of it, period, and I’m going to be happy even in the midst of the most difficult circumstances of my life.” And because of that, when the cancer happened, I instantly like it took no effort to as soon as the doctors, the words were, “You could have cancer,” I’m like, “Oh, okay, can’t change it. If I have cancer. I’ll accept it. I’ll deal with it. I’ll move through it. I’ll learn from it and I’ll help other people as much as I can as a result.”

 

[00:23:03] Hal: And so, that’s been the greatest lesson, that five-minute rule that can’t change the philosophy and it doesn’t even take five minutes after you practice it for a while because eventually like you set your timer and you cuss for 30 seconds and then you look at your timer and you go, “All right. I got four-and-a-half more minutes. I don’t really need to sit here and wallow in this anymore. I’m just going to work on a solution.” You know what I mean?

 

[00:23:23] Brad: You’ve become very efficient with the five-minute rule.

 

[00:23:25] Hal: Exactly. It’s like the five-second rule now. It’s like, “Son of a – okay. What now? What can I do?”

 

[00:23:30] Brad: Dude, thanks for sharing that. That’s an amazing framework. It’s stoic really. It’s what it reminds me of it. Ryan Holiday is The Daily Stoic. I think you’re familiar with…

 

[00:23:39] Hal: Sure. I know Ryan.

 

[00:23:39] Brad: He’s in Austin with you.

 

[00:23:41] Hal: Yeah.

 

[00:23:42] Brad: But he had a passage in there that talked about prisoners of war and these are guys that have been tortured for years and he’s like there was one guy that made it through. I can’t think of his name right now. It was like the one thing they couldn’t control is my mind.

 

[00:23:52] Hal: Viktor Frankl?

 

[00:23:54] Brad: It wasn’t Viktor Frankl because he had been – but yeah. The same concept. The one thing you’ve got control of is your mind. You can’t control that drunk driver rolling down the highway at 70 miles an hour.

 

[00:24:03] Hal: And also, I think that for me, I look at the way that we look – here to me this is one of the most important things for us all considered is that the way that we live our lives gives, and I didn’t invent this part of it, but it gives other people permission to do the same. And so, I think that’s a responsibility and a power that we cannot take lightly. Like for me, it’s my kids. It’s like I have to live my life in a way I want them to live their lives and I want to teach them through my example how to respond adversity. So, if I’m stressed out and freaked out and pissed off and yelling or whatever, well, then that’s what I’m teaching them to how to respond to the challenges in their life. I’d rather them go, “Wow. No matter what my dad goes through, he’s genuinely accepting of the things he can’t change and grateful for everything else and then proactive in creating everything that he wants.” And by the way, that’s the framework if we’ll wrap up the can’t change it, it’s ABC. Accept everything you can’t change, B, grateful for everything else and C, create consistent progress towards everything that you want. And that’s it. That’s the holy trifecta of how to live life to the fullest.

 

[00:25:10] Brad: That’s awesome. All right. Let’s transition. All right. Because I have you to blame for waking up at 4:45 AM.

 

[00:25:17] Hal: Nice.

 

[00:25:17] Brad: So, I just want to give a little bit of background because your book, The Miracle Morning, it has changed my life and I don’t say that lightly. I was even trying to as I was preparing for today’s conversation, I was trying to remember where I found out about. It was like this underground entrepreneur circle that this book was rolling through, right? So, I want to get to the story of how the book came to be. There are all kinds of lessons wrapped in there but I just want to say thank you because fairly consistently the last two years, there have definitely been days that I have missed but…

 

[00:25:49] Hal: Me too. That’s okay.

 

[00:25:51] Brad: Okay. Good. We got rid of…

 

[00:25:52] Hal: Yeah.

 

[00:25:53] Brad: All right. So, but I can say there is a dramatic difference between days where I do my version of the Miracle Morning versus days that I don’t and the ones that I do it’s just led to a massive increase in productivity, my mood, how I carry out throughout the days so thank you. I just want to throw that in there before we dig into what the Miracle Morning is.

 

[00:26:13] Hal: No. You’re welcome and it means a lot because it’s become my life’s work in a way that I never imagine it would. Yes. So, I just thought it was…

 

[00:26:22] Brad: How did it come to be? Let’s start there.

 

[00:26:25] Hal: Yeah. So, the first part of it, everyone listening to this or relate to is a financial advisor. So, back in 2008, you might remember the economy hit a little bit of a rough patch. Well, in 2006 I hit Hall of Fame with Cutco. That’s where I was in sales and I hit Hall of Fame. I bought my first brand-new house and I wanted to move on to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to be a coach and I want to be a speaker. I want to be an author. That was like the three things I wanted to do. So, I wrote my first book called Taking Life Head On which was about the head-on collision with the drunk driver and the lessons from that. I launched my coaching business and coaching salespeople primarily and then I launched my speaking career. Actually, here’s the funny part too. My first paid speak ever was for Countrywide Home Loans which no longer exists.

 

[00:27:12] Brad: Wow. What year was that?

 

[00:27:14] Hal: $500, 2006 or 2007 I think. Maybe 2005 even, yeah.

 

[00:27:18] Brad: Might have been one of their last speakers.

 

[00:27:20] Hal: Actually, I was responsible for the housing crash which I apologize to all the realtors and everybody else. But, no, so when right before the economy crashed like life was great. I was in the best shape of my life. I was happy. I was building my business. I’ve gotten almost to a six-figure business in the first year-and-a-half I think and when the economy crashed I lost over half my coaching clients just because they were the same thing. They were all it’s like, “Hey, Hal. We don’t have any money,” and so I lost my coaching clients. Wasn’t getting booked to speak. The book wasn’t really making me new money anyway and so I couldn’t pay the mortgage. I lost my house, canceled my gym membership, tripled my body fat percentage like got in the worse shape of – went from the best shape of my life to worst shape of my life in six months. And as a result, the happy-go-lucky me got really depressed.

 

For the first time ever, I got deeply, deeply depressed. Now part of that and I’ve only shared this a few times in interviews because I didn’t realize it until much later but I quit taking Adderall around that time. I’ve been taking Adderall for a few years and I didn’t know it was bad and then my dad sent me some articles. He’s like, “Hal, you might want to rethink this.” I was like, “Oh, I didn’t know.” So, I stopped taking it and I quit cold turkey and that wasn’t the best way to do it but I think that was part of why I got depressed simultaneously when I was losing everything. It was the perfect storm but when you’re in that, if you’ve ever been depressed, you can’t think straight. You can’t analyze, you can’t evaluate. It’s just really difficult. And so, the six-month downward spiral where everything went kind off the rails, I lost my house and finally after six months, my wife – well, a series of events led me to go search what do the world’s most successful people do every day that I don’t do? That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

 

[00:29:17] Hal: Okay. Because if I do what they do every day and I adopt their routines, their rituals, their habits, it’s only a matter of time before I should start to see the results that they would see. And I kept coming across morning routines, morning rituals but I wasn’t a morning person. At least I didn’t consider myself like I think the majority of society, I’m not a morning person because and, by the way, I think my theory on that is when we leave the house at 18, we lose the people that we’re waking us up in the morning and then we love it. We’re like, “Ah, I don’t have to wake up early anymore. I could sleep in as late as I want.” And then for most people it’s kind of like a downward spiral and the mediocrity in some way either in financially or maybe their business is good but like their health, their physical fitness.

 

So, for me, I wasn’t a morning person but I kept coming across article after article after article and now it’s much more prevalent. Back then you didn’t see as many articles but, you know what, I got to wake up an hour early. I got to give this a try. And then I wanted it to be the ultimate morning ritual. I thought, “Okay. If I’m going to wake up early, I want like what’s the most effective thing that I could do during the first hour of my day?” So, I continue searching online and just googling and I come across meditation. I come across visualization. I come across exercise. I come across reading, I come across journaling. I come across affirmations. And I’m seeing all of these from world-class athletes to celebrities to CEOs and they swear by any one of those six practices that I just rattled off but none of them are better than the other. It just depends on who you ask. Will Smith said to Ellen, “The reason I’m one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood is because I’ve done affirmations since I was 15 and now my affirmations became my reality after I programmed my subconscious mind enough.” I’m like, “Well, I got to do affirmations.” And then Jim Carrey of course he’s famous for his visualizing the $10 million payday and writing a check to himself and then it became a reality. Well, that’s pretty compelling.

 

[00:31:19] Hal: And on and on and on and then the epiphany as I’m sitting there going which one should I do? The epiphany was what if I did all of these? What if I woke up tomorrow morning and did the six most powerful proven, personal development practices in history? All six of them. Woke up the next morning, did all six, felt amazing even though I was terrible at all of them. I don’t know how to meditate. I was learning it all on the fly but you fast forward two months. That first day I went, “If I do this every day, it’s only a matter of time before my life turns around.” And I was thinking in 6 to 12 months. I was thinking like The Compound Effect, Brad, slowly but surely but it happened faster than I ever thought possible. Less than two months later, I had more than doubled my income. I went from being the worst shape of my life physically, having never been a runner to deciding to run a 52-mile ultra marathon which I committed like six months later where I completed and my depression was gone on like day two.

 

And because my life changed so fast, I started calling it my Miracle Morning. It felt like a miracle but it wasn’t a book idea. It wasn’t anything I was going to tell anyone about. My coaching client, one of the few that I have left, well at that point I guess I had built them back up but she said, “Hal, you do a morning ritual?” and I go, “Oh my gosh, I just started doing this thing. I’m calling it my Miracle Morning.” I tell her about it. Two weeks later we get on the phone and I said, “Katie, did you wake up an hour earlier like you committed to?” She goes, “Not exactly. I did one hour earlier for the first week.” I go, “Okay.” She says, “You’re right. It was so good that I woke up two hours earlier for the last week and that’s what I’m going to stick with. I wanted more of it.” And she said, “I’ve had the best two weeks in my entire sales career. I read two self-help books. I took yearly. I started running again,” and that was when the light bulb went off. I’m going, “Wait. This changed my life faster than I ever thought possible and I wasn’t a morning person. It changed Katie’s life and she wasn’t a morning person. This could change the world. This could change anybody’s life.”

 

[00:33:20] Hal: And I started working on the book and it took three years to write the book. Now you fast forward. That was like nine years ago or something like that. Now the Miracle Morning is now practiced by over 500,000 people in over 70 countries. The books been translated into 27 languages. Number one book in Korea. This is like I’m baffled by the whole…

 

[00:33:43] Brad: It occupied Asia. I love it.

 

[00:33:45] Hal: Yeah. It’s crazy. My buddy, a friend of mine that I used to sell Cutco with, sent me all of these pictures. He was in a bookstore in Korea. He’s Korean and he was visiting his family and like there are the aisle caps or the Korean version of the Miracle Morning and it is number one. I mean, it was crazy. And now people like Robert Kiyosaki practice it every day. People that I looked up to that then got a hold of my book somehow like Robert Kiyosaki swears by the life. He says he does it every single day and people will text me or email me all the time, “Hey, I’m in South Africa. Robert Kiyosaki is the keynote speaker and he just talked for five minutes of how the Miracle Morning has changed his life,” and I’m like, “That’s crazy.” So, yeah, that’s the Miracle Morning intervention.  

 

[00:34:27] Brad: For the listeners, just to tie it all together, LIFE SAVERS, that’s your acronym to lay all those out, correct?

 

[00:34:31] Hal: Yeah. So, real quick, so the SAVERS is the acronym and it was meditation became journaling and this is my wife’s idea. I was writing a book and I was frustrated one day and she goes, “What’s wrong?” I said, “Well, I got these six practices but there’s like no rhyme or reason.” Robert Kiyosaki he’s got the cash flow quadrant. It fits together. Stephen Covey’s got the Seven Habits. I need some sort of framework.” And she goes, “Why don’t you get a thesaurus and see if any of the words of those practices are interchangeable for other words and put it into an acronym?” So, I owe this to my brilliant wife. But S is for silence, that’s for meditation or your prayer or both. A is for affirmations, V for visualization, E for exercise, R for reading and the final S which was journaling is now scribing. And Robert Kiyosaki he interviewed me on the show and he said it best. He goes, “Hal, before the Miracle Morning, every successful person on the planet swore by at least one of the SAVERS but I’ve never heard of anyone that did three of them, let alone all six of them but all six are life-changing. So, I now do all six every day and I have the Miracle Morning to thank for that.”

 

[00:35:47] Brad: And I’m going to drill this home because I swear like I’m on my soapbox every episode. Brilliance of it is the fact that you made it easy, right? Easy to remember. This nice little acronym where nobody’s going to forget. We’re on that with our clients a lot that you’ve got to take financial services and they get a simple framework that people understand that gives some comfort. And so, I love that you went back and you’re like, “How can I fit this into an easy-to-remember framework so that people can actually take it and run with it?” and they don’t need your book with them to be able to remember what to do.

 

[00:36:21] Hal: Yeah. You’re right and people tell me that all the time that because once you’ve been on the SAVERS for a few days, you memorize them pretty quickly and then people always tell me that in their head they go S, you know, literally that’s how they do it. They go, “Okay. Now it’s time for affirmations. Now it’s time for visualization. Now it’s time that…” you know. And you can totally customize the order. People will do their exercise first or last or whatever. Because that’s the thing is I was really insecure writing the book going, “Well, I didn’t invent any of these,” like I didn’t invent waking up early. I didn’t invent any of the practices but I’ve had…

 

[00:36:54] Brad: You just made it sexy, Hal.

 

[00:36:55] Hal: I just made it, yeah, sexy, simple, etcetera, and when I think that to your point about like the power of that simplicity and the acronym is if you take any one of the SAVERS, any one of them people will try to implement as a habit like, “Oh yeah, I’ve tried to implement meditation before. I’ve tried to implement reading consistently or journaling or whatever.” So, it’s like if you take all six of them that you’re like and you separate them, you’re like, “Well, there’s no way I could find time. How am I going to find the time to meditate and to exercise and to read and to do journaling? There’s no way.” But because it’s all done at the same time and as little as six minutes, I mean, there’s a whole chapter in the book to do is six-minute version or a 30-minute version. Most people do I think 60 minutes but you can do – it’s totally customizable. So, doing them all at once makes it like, “Oh, I can wrap my head around these six things being all done in a quick little cute easy routine versus having to fit all six of them at different parts of the day.

 

[00:37:53] Brad: And the fact done daily, right? So, say you only have five to ten minutes to read, well, you’re knocking out eight to ten pages, if not more, every single morning, you’re cranking through some books pretty quick if you’re doing that.

 

[00:38:05] Hal: Yeah. Ten pages a day is like a book and a half a month. You’re a different person.

 

[00:38:08] Brad: All right. So, I’m just reading the listeners’ and the viewers’ minds right now. Let’s start with…

 

[00:38:14] Hal: I didn’t know you had that psychic ability, Brad.

 

[00:38:16] Brad: It is amazing. At this point, I’ve really been able to do it.

 

[00:38:19] Hal: Awesome.

 

[00:38:20] Brad: What time do you wake up each morning?

 

[00:38:23] Hal: So, it used to be 3:30 AM for like the last seven, eight, nine years and then once I got cancer, I decided I would throw an extra hour of sleep in. So, now my alarm goes off at 4;30 and I will sometimes do the first part of Miracle Morning like I’ll sometimes roll over and I’ll get my phone and do my reaffirmations while I’m laying there which is a new thing. I used to like jump out of bed right away and some kind of experimenting with things but, yeah, it’s definitely I used to sleep five-and-a-half to six hours. Now I get seven hours every night. It’s one of my post-cancer protocols is a little more rest but so I get up between 4:30 and 5:00 at the latest.

 

[00:39:04] Brad: Okay. So, a lot of people would be like, “That sounds crazy,” but what’s interesting is going back to the framework, the mindset that you have with it. 4:30 is not early. It’s only early if you don’t get your required sleep.

 

[00:39:18] Hal: Sure.

 

[00:39:19] Brad: Right?

 

[00:39:19] Hal: If you’re binging on Netflix until midnight, it’s early.

 

[00:39:22] Brad: Exactly. So, I think that’s one of the things, one of my friends calls it it’s like domino effect to goals. If you’ve got the solid morning routine, it actually – you’re not going to be out with your buddies until 2 AM drinking beers if part of your routine is I’m working out, part of my morning routine is 4:30 or 5 AM workout routine and hopefully you’ve got some accountability partners tied in there too. But that’s what I found is a lot of people say, “I’m not a morning person,” it’s because they don’t actually rewind the clock to the previous night and make sure they’re getting in the hours needed.

 

[00:39:55] Hal: Yeah.

 

[00:39:56] Brad: I would love your mindset there because you helped hundreds of thousands of people implement this so do you have some tips or tricks on how do you make sure you’re getting the required rest the night before so you can be a morning person?

 

[00:40:08] Hal: So, the first thing that I’ll say on that is that, “I’m not a morning person,” is a limiting belief and I call that out in the book. And it’s a belief and that was another one of my insecurities as the author is I go, “How am I going to like…” That’s a powerful voice in someone’s head that they’ve reinforced their entire life. They’re like, “Dude, I’m not a morning person. How do I know that? Because I hated waking up for 30, 40, 50, whatever. It’s like how am I going to overcome that?” So, what’s interesting is I surveyed our community once because I was on an interview and somebody asked me a couple of years ago. They said, “What percentage of your community of Miracle Morning practitioners were already morning people before they read the book?” So, this was easy. They just had a new routine to do in their morning time and he said, “What percentage of them had that limiting belief to saying, ‘I’m not a morning person,’ and they had to actually overcome that to do this Miracle Morning?”

 

And I didn’t know the answer so I posted it on the Miracle Morning community’s Facebook group with 100,000 people in it so I can get a pretty good sampling pretty quickly with the question. And 72% of our members said, “I was never a morning person in my entire life until I read the book.” And so, I’d be listening that’s kind of going, “Yeah. This sounds good but I’m not a morning person like you can join the club. That’s most people that are doing the Miracle Morning now. So, there’s an entire chapter in the book dedicated to it’s called the five-step snooze-proof wake-up strategy. Now, it’s arguably the shortest chapter in the book. It’s like four pages. It’s arguably the most – it’s the linchpin and I didn’t know this. It’s all hindsight but if I had not put that chapter in there, it teaches you how to beat the snooze button and become a morning person even if you’ve never been one your entire life. Without that, I think that there’d be hundreds of thousands around the world that went, “Oh yeah, I read the book and I tried it for two days but then I fell back in my old routine.” And so, I give you, some of the most important parts of that five-step strategy. Number one is the night before. So, prepping with a bedtime alarm.

 

[00:42:07] Hal: So, I encourage people to set a bedtime alarm that goes off so I have like – I don’t anymore because it’s automatic but for probably two years I had a couple of alarms that went off one hour before that said, “Hey, it was one hour until bedtime.” That’s what the alarm said. I’m like, “Oh yeah, okay.” I’d start winding down. Then 30 minutes it would go, “30 minutes until bedtime. Make sure you get ready.” And then 15 minutes it would go off again and say, “Go brush your freaking teeth. It’s time to get ready for bed.” So, that was a big part of it. You’ve got to commit to that, to commit to going to bed. And at first you might be laying there. It might be tough to go to sleep but force yourself to wake up and like you said that domino effect, if you get up in the morning you force it, even if you’re a little tired, it’s going to make you more tired at night, right? So, you kind of have to reset your clock, if you will. One of the biggest tips I’ll give you though is to set the alarm clock across the room as far as possible. Most does have our alarm clock on our bedside table within arm’s reach and I don’t care who you are, myself included. I have no discipline. Those first few moments the alarm goes off you’re still in dreamland. You’re half-asleep and you just reach over like mindless, your eyes closed and you tap off your alarm.

 

So, when your alarm clock is across the room like for me, it’s in my bathroom on the sink right next to the toothbrush, when the alarm goes off, once you have to get up out of bed, you are 10 times more awake when you’re upright than when you’re horizontal laying there. So, you get up out of bed and turn the alarm off and then the next step is as soon as the alarm is off, if it’s in the bathroom, it’s easy. If not, put it in your doorway on the way to the bathroom. So, you pick up your phone or your alarm or whatever. You turn it off and you go straight to the bathroom sink and you brush your teeth, you wash your face. And what I call your wake-up motivation level which is how motivated you are to stay awake in the morning, it goes up let’s say by a point every minute that you stay awake. So, just getting out of bed takes you from a level two on a scale of 1 to 10. Let’s say you’re a one or two when the alarm goes off and those first few seconds or first few moments.

 

[00:44:08] Hal: If you are at a one or two, by waking up and having to walk into the bathroom, you go from a one or two to like a four or five. You’ll still probably rather go back to bed but you’re now way more awake and it takes much less discipline or willpower to stay awake. Well, if you brush your teeth, wash your face, you’re now like a five, six or seven. It’s getting easier and easier to stay awake. And then the last tip I’ll give you is have a glass of water sitting there that says, “Living the Dream,” on it. It doesn’t have to say that but have a glass of water sitting there by the sink, that’s what I do. And then as soon as my teeth are brushed, I down it like a college kid at a keg party like I just pound the water and now I’m hydrating because think about this. They never taught us this in high school. I don’t know why. When you wake up in the morning, you’ve gone six, seven, eight, nine hours without any water. You’re dehydrated by default. Think about that. You’re dehydrated by default. No one teaches this but dehydration and fatigue go hand-in-hand. So, the first thing that I do is I down a full glass of water or as much as I possibly can and then last tip I’ll give you, I said that was the last one. The last one is…

 

[00:45:22] Brad: Bonus tip.

 

[00:45:23] Hal: Bonus tip. Get the hell out of your bedroom. Okay? Get the hell out of your bedroom. If you sit there and your bed is within your vision, that’s like someone trying to quit smoking and they keep a pack of cigarettes in front of them at all times. That’s bad news. It’s very tempting to crawl under those covers. So, for me, like this morning was a good example. I actually wanted to go back into bed like I didn’t feel, you know, some mornings you’re more awake, less awake. I want to go back to bed but I knew that moment of decision, I went, “All right. I got to go sit on my couch and wake up.” So, I went into the living room where I had my Miracle Morning. I had my book, my journal, everything’s out there sitting out there and then drink another glass of water. I made some bulletproof coffee, yada, yada, yada but now I’m awake and then it’s much easier to stay awake. If you need to, go for a walk or whatever but that alarm clock across the room directly into the bathroom to brush your teeth into drinking a full glass of water and then if you want to put on your workout clothes so you’re signaling your brain, “Hey, I’m going to work out at some point,” and then in the near future that’s a good thing and then get the heck out of your bedroom.

 

[00:46:27] Brad: Yeah. I remember you mentioned in the book too, the workout clothes that was kind of option A and option B was if you’re still struggling, some of your people would just take a shower right there just to snap into it.

 

[00:46:38] Hal: Yeah. Again, because every minute, yeah, there are two great things about that, yeah, if you’re really tired, jump in the shower. If you need it to be cold, great. Listerine is another bonus that I gave in the book. I’m like when you brush your teeth, use some Listerine and alright that lights up your whole face. Your senses are alive. But yeah, if you need to, jump in the shower or take your shower right there and then, again, not only is it waking you up, it’s refreshing you but, again, every minute that you’re awake, your wake-up motivation level is just notching up higher and higher and higher.

 

[00:47:06] Brad: Yeah. That chapter you brought it up before I could. That was the chapter for me because once you kind of have a couple of tips or tricks, it gets you over that hump and then once you’ve kind of programmed your body to be in that sleep pattern, it’s really pretty simple from there once you’ve been doing it a couple of weeks.

 

[00:47:22] Hal: Absolutely, you’re right. And one other thing I’ll share. In fact, this is a resource anybody can get right now. It’s in the book but you can get it before you get the book. If you go to TMMbook.com, so TMM as in The Miracle Morning, TMMBook.com, all the bonuses that are in the book, sample affirmations, journal, all sorts of stuff, you get all of it but one of the things you get specifically is the bedtime affirmations and this is about a couple of paragraphs that I wrote. They’re my own affirmation but I wrote for me because I know the power of programming your subconscious before you go to bed because the last thought you had before bed, think about this, it’s usually the first thought you have in the morning. It’s that same thought before you went to bed. So, as a kid, if I went to bed thinking about Christmas morning and I was excited to wake up, well then when I open my eyes in the morning, my first thought was, “It’s Christmas morning!” So, the same way, a lot of us go to bed going, “Oh God. I got to wake up in six hours. I’m going to be exhausted.” And then after our first thought is, “Oh, it’s the morning. I’m exhausted.” That’s terrible. That’s not how you want to wake up every day.

 

So, I wrote an affirmation and you can start using this today before you read the book but some affirmations you read them and essentially, I tell myself, you’ve been telling yourself, “I’m getting X amount of hours of sleep tonight. No matter how many hours it is, it’s the perfect amount and I’m going to wake up with energy and motivation,” yada, yada, yada. And I’ve got so many people tell me that they read their bedtime affirmations for the first, I don’t know, 30, 60, how many days and the first day that they didn’t read the bedtime affirmation, I’ve had at least a dozen people tell me this personally. First day they didn’t read the bedtime affirmations because they either forgot or they thought they didn’t need to or whatever, it was the first day since they started The Miracle Morning that they missed it, they hit the snooze button and stopped the alarm clock. It’s really fascinating how that works.

 

[00:49:16] Brad: Yeah. It is interesting how that works. Okay. So, one of the things that I appreciate about your book is it’s become a movement. It’s not just a book. It’s a movement and it’s become a community from there or maybe a community and then a movement.

 

[00:49:29] Hal: A then movement. Yeah.

 

[00:49:30] Brad: Right? One of the things you did really well throughout the book was these free tools and the download. So, a lot of our clients, a lot of financial advisors they’ve written books and ideally, they would like their book to grow their financial services practice, right? So, it’s a value proposition to the readers but ideally, hopefully it attracts future clients to them. So, I thought it would be fun to just dig in a little bit there. Were there certain things that you put throughout the book so that people could greater connect with you? I actually checked your Facebook group today. I think you’re up to 118,000 members in the Miracle Morning community. So, I think there’s a lot we can take from that. So, wherever you want to go with that question or that thought process, I’d love to hear it.

 

[00:50:12] Hal: Yeah. And I’ll give a free resource that there’s no, you don’t have to opt in or anything but I did an interview on this. So, if you wanted like one hour of me on my best like a full interview on book writing and how to write a book that becomes a movement and earns you a fortune, if you google, “Hal Elrod beyond the bestseller.” So, I did an interview with Jordan Harbinger on The Art of Charm Podcast and this was the first time ever he was like, “Hey, you always talk about,” I’ve already done Miracle Morning on a show and he goes, “Dude, what else do we talk about?” And I was like, “Well, I can give you the best book stuff,” and so you can hear an in-depth or I’ll give you a few like the most important parts of some of the strategies.

 

So, in terms of answering your question, were there things I put in the book to help influence readers to better connect with me to take actions that I wanted people to take, etcetera? Yes, and I would say that probably 50% of them, give or take, were on purpose and 50% of them were totally on accident. I would back then go, “Oh my gosh, that was genius. Thankfully I did that or somebody,” a lot of like great example. The Miracle Morning Community, that was 11th hour and that’s been the biggest part of the movement probably is this group of 115,000 people. By the way, just to be very clear with everyone, totally organic, I’ve never paid for any – I’ve never advertised the group at all. Every person that comes in that group is because they’ve read the book and then they’re invited – it invites them in the beginning and it invites them again at the end in case they missed it in the beginning. But here’s the biggest thing. The number one, I believe the number one thing to put into a book if you want your book to make an impact and increase your income. And to me those are really the two things that my two objectives with a book and income wasn’t an objective when I wrote the book because I didn’t think it was going to sell that many copies later on. But so, I was really looking for impact.

 

[00:52:10] Hal: This changed my life and I felt the sense of responsibility to pay it forward and share the Miracle Morning with people. That’s why I wrote the book literally. I didn’t think it would be a big bestseller. I didn’t know. So, I wanted impact. But now because it’s created, it’s one of my biggest sources of income is the Miracle Morning book. And so, because of that, now I go, “Okay. In hindsight, everyone should write a book to create impact and income.” And of course, income is a form of impact.

 

So, the number one thing that most books do not do that I believe that you must do if you want your book to really maximize impact and income for you is it needs to change people’s behavior and ideally, it needs to change their daily behavior. Think about this, Brad, and anybody listening, most books they don’t change your behavior. They just shift your thinking and they do it very – most books do it very short-term because there’s only so much capacity in our brain to think about information, right? So, how many times have we done this, Brad, where you’re reading a book and you go, “Oh my God, this is like it’s changing me.” You’re like, “Wow. I never thought about that. That’s brilliant. Wow. It’s huge.” And you’re reading it. You’re going, “This is great,” and maybe you’re talking about it to other people. You’re going, “Yo, have you read this? Well, you should read this book. It’s great.” But here’s the problem. Because it’s not changing your behavior and especially not your daily behavior, as soon as you’re done reading that book, you start reading another book and now that’s the book you’re talking about because that’s the book that’s making you think differently. Right?

 

[00:53:46] Brad: Right.

 

[00:53:47] Hal: But if that first book had changed your daily behavior in a way that was meaningful, that was lasting, that was making an impact for you and adding value for every day, well, you’re going to keep talking about it forever just like Miracle Morning, right? Because you’re like, “I do this every single day.” And so, that’s it. Most books only change your thinking and it’s short-lived but if you change someone’s daily behavior and in a way, that adds value for them, well, they’re going to talk about it forever. And I’ll give you some examples that you can apply to – so if you’re a financial advisor, right, I would have people doing some sort of daily or it could be weekly by the way. It doesn’t have to be a daily behavior change. It could be weekly. So, let’s say a weekly change where they are changing their – actually, I just thought about I might give you a really very concrete example that I’ve done financially with all of my coaching clients. Remind me if I forget and remind me of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. That was where I got the idea for this. So, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, weekly habit change so that’s it. But if you’re a financial advisor, having them do a ritual every day, every week so I’ll go right into it. I was going to have you remind me but let’s go ahead and do it now.

 

[00:55:03] Brad: Just cover it now, Hal.

 

[00:55:05] Hal: Yeah. That’s the next logical step anyway. So, in the book –  you ever read Secrets of the Millionaire Mind?

 

[00:55:10] Brad: I have not read that one yet but it’s Eker, right, who’s the author on that one?

 

[00:55:14] Hal: T. Harv Eker or no. Yeah. T. Harv Eker. Yeah. So, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind I read how many years. I actually read it in 2008. That’s funny. This was part of my financial turnaround actually. I read it in 2008 and he basically said that you should set up five bank accounts to start managing your money. It’s like reverse budgeting kind of. Instead of setting a budget, you just take a percentage of every dollar. When you get paid, you take and the goal was 50% of your income to be moved out of your normal checking account and you kind of manage. Now at that time, 100% of my income wasn’t covering my bills and he addressed that. He goes, “Now if you’re thinking, ‘I can’t even live off of 100% of my income, let alone 50%,’” he said, “That’s fine. Start with taking whatever you can afford. Take $5 out of every paycheck and put a dollar into each of those five accounts. Now those five accounts one is your long-term savings account. So, it’s your financial freedom account, right? So, that would be what you would invest in retirement.

 

The next one is long-term spending which is buying things that you need to save for. And most of us, what do we do? We put it on a credit card. “I can’t afford that but I really want it, I’ll put it on a credit card.” He said, “The discipline, you want a computer but you don’t have $1,000 or whatever. You put it in that account until you have $1,000 and then you buy the computer. You want a down payment on your house? You put it in that long-term spending account.” Third account was your play account. It’s my favorite account. He goes, “Even if you’re broke, you should spend a percentage of your income on things you can afford. Then the fourth was your giving account, giving back to charity. And then the last one was your – I can’t remember but it doesn’t matter. Go read the book after you read The Miracle Morning. In fact, I recommend that book at the end of my book I think. So, here’s the point. So, I started right away with a dollar in each account. I set up the accounts, dollar each account.

 

[00:57:13] Hal: And then as my income increased, I put $5 in each account and then I got to percentages. I’m like I’m going to do 10% and I kept increasing the percentages. Here’s the point. I still talk about that book. I can’t tell you how many books I’ve read on money that I never talk about because they got me to think differently about money but they didn’t really do much differently. That is a ritual. Every time to this day, this is like 2005 I read that book I think or 2006 or I don’t know, way back when. Roughly ten years ago, ten years later I still, when I get paid, I put a percentage of every dollar that comes in into those accounts. So, that’s an example of behavior change that gets me to continue talking about that book and valuing T. Harv Eker as I’ve gone to his seminars. I’ve done all sorts of stuff.

 

[00:58:01] Brad: That’s solid. It’s funny because a lot of people write about it but it’s more educational as opposed to actually from an implementation standpoint how they actually act on this. So, I think that’s solid.

 

[00:58:12] Hal: And here’s the thing. To the point of like you said with Miracle Morning and I was able to make things simple, I think if there’s anything that I have a gift at or a talent at, I think it’s been really taking the complicated and making it simple. So, taking what could be complex and not only simplifying it but putting it into action something that a five-year-old could do. So, like that five steps snooze-proof wake-up strategy is so simple and in the book, you have to like you said it earlier, Brad, when you’re like, “I’m going to get into the heads of our listeners and like, okay, what are they thinking? What are their concerns?”

 

When you write a book or when you’re communicating or selling anything, you’ve got to anticipate like in every sentence that I write, I’m going, “What’s the reader going to think, feel or worry about when they’re reading this sentence and this paragraph?” And it takes me a long time to write because I really hyper analyze and think about that. But I go, “Okay. Well, at this part when I’m telling them, ‘Hey, you should give this a try,’ what are their objections going to be? What are their fears? What are their concerns going to be?” And then I go, “Hey, you might be thinking one of the following,” and I list the five top concerns and then I’ll address, “Here’s how you overcome each one. Give them a small win. Pat Flynn always teaches that. Give them a small win right up front. Give them something they can do right up front that they’ll feel good about, congratulate them, commend them for it and they feel now they have more confidence to keep moving forward. But that’s such an important part is you’ve got to hold their hand, make it so easy for them to implement it and then handle their concerns in advance.

 

[01:00:00] Hal: When I was selling Cutco, I created something with this philosophy that I just explain all the emotional roller coaster quotes and I think I just said it one day like in a presentation and then I was like, “Oh, that was – it worked?” but it was the emotional roller coaster close and I’m trying to remember it now. I haven’t sold Cutco in a long time. But it was something along the lines of right when I presented the price which is that moment when we’re at the moment of they know I’m about to ask them to buy something and they’re like the tension between everybody in the situation. I said, “So, here’s how much it costs,” then I’d be quiet for a second. I’d go, “Now, Mary, I don’t know what you’re thinking right now but if you’re like most people though you’re probably thinking, ‘Gosh, that’s a lot of money for knives.’ Most people that I see, Mary, that’s more money than they’ve ever spent on knives and there’s always like a fear which I think is totally normal.”

 

So, what am I to do? So, let me pause everybody. I now am going to explain. So, I’m saying that and they’re going, “Wow. They’re feeling totally understood. They went from resisting what I was – they knew I’m about to sell them and that natural resistance was starting to come up and they’re going, “Okay. He’s about to ask for the order,” but when I go, “Now, Betty, most people feel that this is a big purchase. They’re actually really nervous to spend money. I don’t know if you’re thinking that.” And they’re going, “That’s exactly what I’m thinking.” And now think about the emotional shift. They went from resisting to being curious as to where is he going with this. Now, they’re leaning in and they’re listening. I go, “They’re concerned because it’s a lot of money for knives but then what they realize is most people decide to get the set because of that 30-day trial. There’s no risk.” So, I’m reminding them, “Oh yeah. There’s no risk,” but I told them that 30 minutes ago in the presentation. That’s not top of mind for them.

 

[01:01:58] Hal: So, I’m reminding them but I’m not doing it in a way where I’m doing in a salesy way where I’m saying it straight to them like, “Betty, you can get this because it’s 30-day.” I’m saying most people are fine with that 30-day no risk guarantee because there’s no risk and she goes, “Oh yeah. That’s right. I remember that.” I go, “So, they decide to at least try it. There’s no risk in trying it.” I go, “What they find, Betty, is as soon as they start using it, it’s so much better as you saw today than what they’re used to using that they wondered how they ever lived without it and they realize, ‘You know what, I’m going to have this knife for a few years but for the rest of my life.’” And I go, “Because of that, they realize this is not, it’s not a purchase. It really is an investment.” I go, “So, anyway, what are your thoughts?” That’s how I close. I don’t say, “Do you want to get it?” where I pen them a yes, no.

 

So, I just give them, I lay out, I enter their world and then I asked what their thoughts are. And the beauty of that, and anyone can close anything in this way, is that they don’t feel the pressure to say yes or no. They feel the space to share their thoughts and it’s in this way where it’s non confrontational. They go, “Well, I mean, I’m not sure.” It’s interesting like the dynamic is so different the way that they share what would be an objection but now it’s their thoughts because I didn’t ask them if they want to buy. I just said, “What are your thoughts?” And then they shared their thoughts and then, “Well, it’s a lot of money.” I go, “Well, if you want, you can do the five payments. Is that easier?” and they go, “Well, yeah, that feel a bit easier.” And I go, “So, how does that sound?” So, until I’ve got them to where I can tell they’re like ready, I broke in through all the major objections, their concerns, I go, “So, you want to go into that?” “Yeah.” So, yes, so there you go. But doing that in a book, that emotional roller coaster, you’re always entering the world of the customer or the reader or the prospect, etcetera, and then you’re emotionally guiding them to feel comfortable to move forward with you.

 

[01:03:58] Brad: It’s something missing in the vast majority of any sales industry is empathy. Actually, getting in the mind of your prospects and here’s what they’re actually probably concerned about or thinking. One of the things we coach on a lot is a lot of our financial advisors now have public educational event, seminars, whatever you want to call them. What you’re really selling is comfort, right? You’re not selling a product. They came into that presentation with concerns and as you said, you’re simplifying the complex. Financial services are a really complex world that a lot of people have anxiety about. If you can truly simplify it and bring comfort to them, those are the guys that are the very best of what they do at least in our world.

 

[01:04:36] Hal: Sure. Yeah. That makes sense.

 

[01:04:37] Brad: Okay. So, let’s go here. I know we’ve only got a few minutes left but, man, I’ve still got tons of questions.

 

[01:04:43] Hal: It’s my fault for being super long-winded.

 

[01:04:45] Brad: No. You’re good. I just let your roll there because that was good stuff. Okay. So, let’s come back full circle and in your book and I know you basically you’ve had different versions of your book and you’ve updated it because you self-published it which is a whole other tangent we could go down but you have like little anchors throughout, little tools that like the five snooze-proof tips to waking up or whatever. I’m butchering there but you have little tips for, “Hey, if you like this, here’s a free resource. Just go here,” and now you’re capturing names and emails that becomes your community, your list as everybody, your email list is incredibly valuable which then you’ve gotten them on to the Facebook community as well. So, was there a methodology to here’s how I’m going to sprinkle little tools throughout my book to create a higher level of engagement?

 

[01:05:32] Hal: Yeah. So, in order to get people to subscribe to your email list and that sort of thing, the approach that I took is there are roughly five different bonuses in the book that people can download and you guys will get them all at the TMMBook.com site and they’re mentioned. So, for example, when I’m explaining the power of affirmations and of course if you’re doing a good job in your book or in your whatever, you’re selling them on the value, right? It’s like, “Oh my gosh, I need to change my life. I got to do them.” And then the bonus is hey if you want to, and by the way this is actually kind of a bonus, bonus tip to the bonus, which is instead of just giving sample affirmations which I do, I take it a step further and I go, “If you want to download my affirmations, my own personal affirmations from this year that I wrote this book and achieve these other goals, by the way this book,” and this is again entering into their world. I go, “This book has been on my list for three years to write but fear held me back. If you have any goals on your list that fear has held you back from, check out the affirmation that I used that actually are responsible for me writing this book.”

 

So, it’s like, ‘That’s really cool. I get to actually read the author’s personal affirmation. That’s cool, right?” So, it’s a cool other thing. And they get to the part on journaling, right? They can download a sample journal or the affirmation. There’s a bedtime affirmation. There are always bonuses in the book and I always kind of joke when I talk on this like to be on the bestseller topic or whatever. I go, “If by the fifth bonus they haven’t opted in, either your book sucks or your bonuses suck because your five bonuses haven’t been compelling enough,” and I mean I could tell folks that we have over 10,000 people opt in every month from the book.

 

[01:07:32] Hal: Now granted, we’re selling a lot. We’re selling more copies of that a month of the book so that correlates but well I can share this. Roughly, it’s been years since I checked the stats but when I did check the stats a couple of years ago, roughly 80% of everyone that read the Miracle Morning opted in for the bonuses. And I looked that up because I was at a publishing conference and a publisher, a traditional publisher was asked the question, how many people opt in for bonuses in your reader’s books for your authors? And she said, “I think the average across the board was like 17%.” So, when I found out I’m like we’re getting 80% and the average is 17% and so the only thing I could attribute that to was that there were multiple bonuses, all in one spot sprinkled throughout the book, each were relevant to what they were learning about. So, yeah, so that was the strategy.

 

[01:08:29] Brad: Yeah. And it was going back to the ritual, “Hey, I want to start them. I’m going to try this tomorrow morning. Hey, here’s an easy way to do it. I’ll just basically plagiarize Hal’s affirmations and I’ll just use those as my own.” That’s what I personally did so hopefully you’re cool with that.

 

[01:08:43] Hal: Yeah. I plagiarize or they call it modeling. I model people all the time.

 

[01:08:48] Brad: Yeah. Perfect. Okay. So, I want to hit on something because not only has your book now been published all over the world but now there’s this documentary that’s happening now because of the book as well. So, can you give us some teasers on that? I think you’re nearing the end of production, aren’t you?

 

[01:09:03] Hal: Yeah. So, we’re going – yeah. So, I’m excited. It’s been a very nerve-racking, it’s been over two years that we’ve been filming the documentary and it features, I’ll just rattle-off folks and their morning rituals in the movie. So, Lewis Howes, host of School of Greatness Podcast; Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad Poor Dad; Robin Sharma, author of Leader with No Title; Dr. John Gray, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus; Laila Ali, 18-time world champion boxer and daughter of Muhammad Ali; Brendon Burchard, I mean, I could go on and on and on. The cast blows me away that people just it’s kind of like I got Robert Kiyosaki was the first person I got into the movie because I knew he was a fan and I thought if I could get Robert and I can name drop Robert and so I was able to get another big name and then name drop that, it’s like it just kind of spreads. It’s really exciting.

 

But the movie it also follows three or four – it’s funny. I haven’t even seen it yet like I was supposed to get the first cut this week but we followed some non celebrity, just ordinary folks if you will that had amazing transformations with the Miracle Morning. One, Mike Keaton, he lost 90 pounds after started the Miracle Morning. Another gentleman, Keith Minick, he had lost his daughter. His baby daughter had died and he went into a deep depression. He was the Director of Business Development at CNN so he’s a very successful guy. When in his depression, everyone recommended all these books on grief and losing a loved one and nothing worked. Someone recommended Miracle Morning and it turned his life around. He left his position to start his own business. I mean, these really fascinating, really inspiring stories and then it tells my story of the whole journey and we were halfway through filming the moving and I got cancer. So, the final scenes of the movie or the whole were totally unplanned but we’re going to debut the Miracle Morning movie at my live event. Once a year we do an event. This is our fourth annual Best Year Ever Blueprint coming up in November, November 17 through 19. Will this air before that?

 

[01:11:16] Brad: It will. Yeah.

 

[01:11:17] Hal: Okay. Cool. So, yeah, if you want, everybody listening, go to BestYearEverLive.com. It’s a very unique event. It’s unlike 99% of events that I’ve been to which is you don’t just sit there and take notes the whole time. It’s extraordinarily experiential where anything that we teach you how to do, you actually do. You experience, you share, you engage, you interact with the people in the room and you actually, you do it right then and there. It’s really, really cool.

 

[01:11:46] Brad: I want to give you a plug. And our buddy, Jon Berghoff, also helps you host that, correct?

 

[01:11:51] Hal: Jon Berghoff, he actually runs 80% of it. He’s the facilitator, yeah. He’s the genius that does this and John Ruhlin, our other buddy, is going to be speaking at this year’s event as is Joe Polish who runs The Genius Network. He’ll be speaking. We have Entrepreneur Day. The main event is November 18 to 19, Saturday, Sunday and then you can upgrade to Entrepreneur Day which is the Friday before and we’re going to have Joe Polish, you know David Osborn?

 

[01:12:18] Brad: Yeah. Yeah.

 

[01:12:19] Hal: So, 80 million net worth and New York Times bestseller. So, he’ll be there. Who else? Joe Polish, Mike Koenigs, Christopher Lochhead. I’ve interviewed Christopher Lochhead but he is retired now. He’s retired very young, very successful. So, yeah, it’s a really special event and I missed it last year. I had to cancel my flight. I was in the hospital getting chemotherapy, planning on flying from chemotherapy to the event and I got this crazy infection where my whole face, my eye and my face swell up like the elephant man. I had to cancel the flight and I ended up streaming in via computer but, yeah, it’s like it’s really meaningful. I missed last year at my own event, if you will, and I’ll be there this year. So, knock on wood.

 

[01:13:07] Brad: Well, Jon, who has been on an episode before so we’ll put his episode in the show notes here.

 

[01:13:12] Hal: Cool.

 

[01:13:13] Brad: Actually, well, the first time we met was the dad’s retreat run by our other buddy, Jon Vroman. It’s like all of your buddy’s name is Jon.

 

[01:13:19] Hal: Jon will be there. I know. Exactly. I’m the only. Jon Vroman, he’ll be speaking author of the Front Row Factor. John Ruhlin will be speaking. Jon Berghoff runs the event. Yeah. Yeah. The other Jon.

 

[01:13:30] Brad: But that was my first experience with the way Jon Berghoff facilitates a meeting and it was so powerful. Advisors Excel, our company actually brought him in to facilitate our event. So, it speaks to just the power of – it’s not the typical somebody speaks from stage at you. It’s a lot of interaction.

 

[01:13:48] Hal: It’s not going home with more pages of notes than you can handle and then it’s like I always tell people like, for example, we teach you at a former mastermind at the event in case you have a mastermind but instead of waiting until you get home and again having to search for your notes and be like, “Wait, what do I need to do?” you form it in a room with your like-minded fellow attendees. So, when you leave the event, you have a mastermind form and you’ve got your first day set. You know what I mean? Like, why go home having to do everything you learned there? Why not do as much bit as you can while you’re there?

 

[01:14:18] Brad: That’s brilliant.

 

[01:14:20] Hal: And it’s San Diego in November which the average weather is like 74 degrees or something and it’s at the nicest hotel in San Diego in my opinion, the Manchester Grand Hyatt which is along the water. It’s gorgeous.

 

[01:14:33] Brad: Yeah. You have me at San Diego because I live in Kansas.

 

[01:14:37] Hal: There you go. Yeah. The weather will be great.

 

[01:14:41] Brad: All right. We’re down to like the last minutes here but I want to hit one thing because it’s been really cool to see you do this. So, the Miracle Morning, when was it originally published again? 2000…

 

[01:14:51] Hal: 12-12-12 easy to remember.

 

[01:14:54] Brad: Okay. So, 12-12-12 and then once again just going back to we just covered how you pulled readers into your community but then what you did which was brilliant was you took your Miracle Morning framework and then like Cameron Herold, we just had him speak up in Minneapolis at our event. You co-authored with him Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs. Well, there we go. Those are the examples. Those tuning in on video you can see. So, basically, what you did was you took and applied the Miracle Morning principle which by the way if you want to do Miracle Morning for financial advisors, I know a guy.

 

[01:15:28] Hal: Yeah. What was funny is already in the beginning I was meant to say that and so yeah let’s chat about that.

 

[01:15:35] Brad: Okay. We’ll take that offline. So, the brilliance of it is you applied the framework but then you niched it, right? You niched it out to each of these little communities. My wife loves your one for families.

 

[01:15:45] Hal: Oh, very cool.

 

[01:15:46] Brad: Lindsay McCarthy, Mike McCarthy’s wife. So, we don’t have time unfortunately to get all the way up there but give me your thought process. Obviously, you’re expanding your value to different groups but you also are taking key thought leaders in each of those communities and now you’re bringing their communities into our community. So, just give me like kind of the brainchild how that all came about and what has done for you.

 

[01:16:06] Hal: Yeah. Like most things so I’m not a master plan kind of guy. People go, “Did you, is this your plan, your vision?” I’m like, “Dude, I had no idea like, A, it wasn’t going to be a book. It was my little morning ritual.” Then when I started making a book, I launched it with a lot of insecurity going, “Is anyone going to read this?” And if they do, are they going to change their behavior because I told them to? But so, a lot of it happened organically. Like Jon Vroman was the one that said, “Hey, you should open a Facebook group.” It was like that was 11th hour thing where the book was like a week from or like it was like I sent it to my friends for one final look over and he goes, “Do you have any kind of online community plan? Because all these people are going to be up early and nobody – another family is up and they need a place to plug into.” And so, he suggests the Miracle Morning Community. I had no idea it would become one of the largest, most engaged online community. So, with the book series Ryan Snow who – did you meet Ryan at the dad’s retreat?

 

[01:17:00] Brad: I did. Yeah.

 

[01:17:01] Hal: So, Ryan Snow called me. He goes, “Hal, ever since I started Miracle Morning, my sales have dramatically increased and I attribute it to Miracle Morning. Have you ever thought doing like a Miracle Morning for salespeople? Because they really need it but it could be customized with affirmations for them.” And I was like, “No, you want to write it with me?” and he was like, “Sure.” And that was the birth of the Miracle Morning book series. And then I was talking to some of the top real estate trainers in the country, Michael Maher, who wrote the book, Seven Levels of Communication, and then Jay Kinder and Michael Reese. I was talking to one of them and he goes, “Hal, I read the book to my son every night. He’s only two years old. He can’t understand it but I believe that the intentions behind your words are so powerful. I want it going into his soul.” I was like holy cow and he goes, “Have you thought of doing a book for real estate agents?” I was like, “No, but we’re going to do one for salespeople.” And then that was it and then it just kind of expanded.

 

And then one of my coaches were like, “Are you charging people to co-author a book in your series?” And I was like, “No. Who am I to charge people to co-author?” Everything was kind of small and then he goes, “You should charge at least $10,000.00,” and now it’s $20,000.00 and we’re planning on raising it again because of the value proposition is really great now with people’s how much money they’re making and all of that, or co-authors I mean. So, yeah, so that’s it. We’ve kind of slowed down. We were up to like three books a year for the last couple of years and then we want to pull back a little, quality over quantity. So, the next two books I can tell you we did sign the next two books. One I’m co-authoring with Joe Polish, founder of Genius Network and a couple of different nonprofits. He’s big on helping addicts and changing the way addicts are viewed, instead of being viewed as like degenerates, being viewed as kind of people with a disease and they need help and support and love. So, we’re writing the Miracle Morning for Addiction and Recovery and then David Osborn and I are writing Miracle Morning Millionaires.

 

[01:19:02] Hal: That one I’m really excited about. That was actually the first idea that I ever had or one of the first ideas I have for a book. It’s not Miracle Morning for Millionaires because that’s a limited group. It’s Miracle Morning Millionaires and the subtitle is what they do before 8 AM that will make you rich. So, we’re interviewing probably, we’ll probably do roughly two dozen millionaires and find out, A, what are their morning rituals but, B, what are the biggest keys to their financial success. And then that’s what the book becomes. And every book is very different. That was the biggest challenge too is we’ll go, “How do you make them.” It took a lot of time to work through. How do we make it enough of the original so that if someone hasn’t read the original, they can start doing the Miracle Morning but how do make it enough new where if they have read the original, they don’t feel like it’s a repeat?

 

And so, just real quickly, the format is basically the first three to four chapters of every book sums up the entire original book but it’s customized for financial advisors, realtors, whatever. And then the next six to seven chapters are completely fresh content about the niche. So, meaning, the real estate book or the salesperson book, it’s seven chapters, six chapters on how to sell. So, like what I explained earlier, the emotional roller coaster stuff, that’s the content of the book. So, anyone that reads it, the first four chapters are a refresher that’s customized for them but then the next six chapters I have zero to do with the original book. So, it’s been a perfect blend. The average reviews across all of the books in the Miracle Morning book series are 4.9 out of 5 stars on Amazon. The Miracle Morning book itself is 4.6 out of 5 stars. So, the book series books actually on average have a higher rating. So, it’s good because again getting over my fear of like I don’t want this to be all of a sudden, the books come out and they’re just cheap rip-offs of the original. Luckily, the formula we figured out has worked out really well.

 

[01:21:07] Brad: When was your first one with Ryan? You remember off the top of your head?

 

[01:21:11] Hal: No. 2013 probably. Probably roughly a year or so after the original but I’m not sure.

 

[01:21:17] Brad: I was just curious if like if you could go back and see how much bigger your Facebook community has grown since you kind of syndicated the book to all these different community. Did you see a massive spike in your Facebook membership?

 

[01:21:29] Hal: Not, I mean, it definitely helps because every one of the books it still has the bonuses and the Facebook group invite but the Miracle Morning, the original book still sells more copies than all the other books combined.

 

[01:21:44] Brad: Wow.

 

[01:21:45] Hal: So, yeah. So, no matter what, that’s still the number one source of opt-ins, of Facebook community groups, all of that.

 

[01:21:52] Brad: Awesome. Well, we are right at the end. Do you have time for like two or three questions and run?

 

[01:21:58] Hal: Yeah. Hit me up.

 

[01:21:59] Brad: Okay.

 

[01:22:00] Hal: If my stomach’s growling, no, that’s a no.

 

[01:22:04] Brad: I don’t want to keep you from lunch or dinner, wherever we’re at now. So, obviously being an author of a book, I have to ask you this. What is your favorite book that made the biggest impact on your life? Is there one that you could pick out of all that you’ve read?

 

[01:22:17] Hal: Yeah. It’s a loaded question, right? Well, I’ll tell you the first one that comes to mind and sometimes I’ll kind of be reserved to share like this isn’t the one I would share if I was thinking about it so I’ll just give you the intuitive answer which is a book called Conversations with God. I read that probably 15 years ago and one of the reasons I had to share it because, A, God is a very loaded topic, right? But, B, I read it 15 years ago and so I don’t know if I would still say it was the best book ever. I think I read it again like two years after that or something but it’s one of my favorite books of all time. And then I’ll just give you one of the best business book I’ve ever read is by M. J. DeMarco. It’s called the Millionaire Fastlane and what’s interesting about that book is that didn’t change behavior necessarily but, well, I take that back. It did in a big picture got me to really think about how I orchestrated everything in my business to revolve around my life and that was the big game changer for me. So, yeah, Millionaire Fastlane is a fantastic book.

 

[01:23:23] Brad: Awesome. When you hear the word successful, who’s the first person you think of and why?

 

[01:23:28] Hal: Oh, that’s a good question. This sounds really totally arrogant and egotistical but I would say me and I don’t mean that in an arrogant or egotistical way but I think that for me, I strive to live my life completely in line with my values and I feel like I do a really good job of that. So, I feel like integrity and love and authenticity like those are really what I revolve everything around. I mean, you like you said in the beginning that you’ve asked my friends or whatever like, “Is Hal really this positive?” I’m like, yeah, I never put on a front. You know what I mean? And because and also at this point from a monetary perspective or what, how most will measure success, I’ve gotten my life at a place where I have freedom to – I’m doing work that I love and earning an income to support my family and I’m able to give back, more money back to charity than I’ve ever given in my life.

 

And so, yeah, I mean it’s like I’m – so I don’t mean, I hate even saying that. I feel like an ass but I’m doing everything – like this cup that says living the dream that I drink from every day like I look at that and I feel so humbled and grateful in that I’m living the life that I dreamt up for so long and it took a long ass time to get here. You know what I mean? Like I really believe that it takes 10 years to be an overnight success that people look, “Wow. You came out of nowhere.” And it’s like, “No, no, no I worked my butt off for so long and struggled for so long.” Not just me. I’m saying for anyone that’s successful. Most people had to go through it before they got to it. You know what I mean?

 

[01:25:09] Brad: Well, now I’m going to brag on you a little bit.

 

[01:25:11] Hal: Don’t quote – don’t put that in writing. Without hearing my tone that sounds terrible.

 

[01:25:16] Brad: No. You’re good. We’ll give it context, man. And I want to brag on you a little bit because Jon Vroman who’s a mutual friend and his charity, the Front Row Foundation, we’ll put details on the show notes but he’s created a very cool organization and I know from him saying you’re the largest donor in the history of the Front Row Foundation. So, it’s really cool to see someone like you that’s gone through some struggles, I mean, recently a battle with cancer but still giving back and helping other people that, well, have been in your situation I guess, as of now, other cancer survivors or people that are battling really tough situations.

 

[01:25:51] Hal: Yeah. Thank you for that. And I just started a nonprofit that I just filed a 501(c)(3). So, it’ll probably be like six months before its official but it’s called Support the Unsupported because I realized during my journey that I have, I’m blessed with family and friends and a community that was really supporting me mentally, emotionally, whatever resources I needed. Our other friend, John Ruhlin, at an event raised $100,000 to help pay my medical bills.

 

[01:26:17] Brad: I was there.

 

[01:26:18] Hal: Oh yeah. Yeah. Mastermind talks. And Jayson Gaignard obviously was a big part of that too. But what it made me realize I was very humbled and grateful by the support and then I realized talking to other people in the hospital that like, “Wow. Most people don’t have this kind of support.” And so, I started a charity and I don’t even fully haven’t decided exactly what it’s going to do. I just know that I want to offer support whether it’s resources, finances, whatever to people that are suffering that don’t have the access to the support that they need. And so, yeah, so I’m excited for that.

 

[01:26:52] Brad: That’s cool. Let me know when it’s live, man. Love to support it.

 

[01:26:55] Hal: Absolutely.

 

[01:26:56] Brad: All right. Last question here. And before I get to it, I just want to say thank you. You’ve already inspired me through your writing. Getting to know you in person has been cool. It’s not like we’re best friends and text each other on the weekends or anything but I just want to say thank you because…

 

[01:27:11] Hal: Okay. Not yet. Not yet. That’s alright, Brad. Yeah. You can go on.

 

[01:27:15] Brad: But, yeah, I just love genuine people. That’s just the bottom line and you are as advertised and it’s cool to see your writings impact people that impacted me but even more recently, what truly hit home with me was how you carried yourself this last year of your life. That’s modeling what you’re all about and going back to your kids like congratulations because that’s being a hell of a father. That’s teaching them some life lessons. So, I just want to say thank you for carving out the time and this has been an incredible conversation.

 

[01:27:44] Hal: You are welcome and then the feelings are mutual, my friend. Yeah, and maybe we’ll be doing this again to announce the Miracle Morning for Financial Advisors in the next year.

 

[01:27:54] Brad: I’m hoping for that. Okay. So, I’ll hit you with the last question here.

 

[01:27:58] Hal: Okay.

 

[01:27:58] Brad: You’ve been very successful. If there was just one piece of advice that you could share with obviously knowing our audience as financial advisors but just the audience in general that’s led to that success, what would it be?

 

[01:28:11] Hal: Do the right thing, not the easy thing. Do the right thing, not the easy thing is a mantra, a philosophy that, I mean, it’s extraordinarily simple but I learned that when I was 19 from one of my mentors when I started in sales. And to this day, like that is the voice in my head that gets me to do the thing and it both applies to like doing the thing that will move me toward my goals but also doing the thing that is in integrity. So, there’s about the moral that both helps to navigate my moral compass and to navigate my productivity compass. But, I mean, literally, it’s when the alarm goes off in the morning, if I go, “I don’t want to get up,” I go, “Like do the right thing, not the easy thing.” It’s so ingrained in me. I’ve said it thousands and thousands of times to myself. I used to say it in sales when I would think about getting on the phone because that’s it. It’s the moment of decision. Every moment, should I go to the gym or should I stay home? Should I stay up late or watch one more Netflix show or should I go to bed so I can get up early? Should I write? Should I fudge these numbers a little bit? Nobody really know or care. Or should I do the right thing and live with integrity?

 

And integrity to me by the way and this is where integrity and productivity marry each other. Integrity is doing what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it no matter what, without excuses, without exceptions. And so, that’s the key to productivity and that we’ll do the right thing, not the easy thing. It’s like I wrote in my schedule that I was going to make 20 calls today. I don’t feel like it right now but who gives a shit what I feel like? I said I was going to do it. I have to do the right thing which is what I committed to, not the easy thing which is what I feel like very often. And so, that’s it. If you do the right thing, not the easy thing and you use common sense and you stay patient and hungry and you keep moving forward, your success is inevitable. My take to 10 years to be an overnight success but if you do the right thing, not the easy thing and keep moving the direction of worthwhile predetermined goals, I don’t think you can fail.

 

[01:30:17] Brad: Thanks for sharing that. That’s awesome. I have a new morning mantra that is going to keep me from hitting the snooze button so appreciate that.

 

[01:30:23] Hal: There you go.

 

[01:30:24] Brad: Well Hal, thanks man. This has been an awesome conversation so until the next time our paths cross, man. It’s been fun.

 

[01:30:30] Hal: My pleasure, Brad. Thank you, brother. Appreciate you, man.

 

[01:30:32] Brad: Take care.

 

[CLOSING]

 

[01:30:36] Brad: Thanks for checking out the latest show. Here’s this week’s featured review. This one comes to us from kmcgrath27 who says, “Love it. Great podcast for a young aspiring financial advisor like myself. Feel like I’ve already gained an advantage in the industry.” kmcgrath27, appreciate the kind words and I’m glad you found the show early on in your career. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out the episodes with Ron Carson and Barry Glassman. Lots of wisdom shared from those guys from a couple of the industry’s leaders. And, hey, for you others out there as a reminder, if any of you Blueprint listeners have ideas on future guests you’d like to see on the show, hit me up on Twitter. My username is @Brad_Johnson and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

 

So, that’s it for this week’s show and for those out there listening in, do me and your fellow financial advisor friends a favor and share your favorite episode with them whether it’s by email, text, however, and let them know we’re sharing ideas and, more important, actionable items specifically for financial services. I’d appreciate it as it helps me impact more advisors out there just like you guys. With that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you on the next show.

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The information and opinions contained herein are provided by third parties that have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable but accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed by Advisors Excel. The guest speaker is not affiliated with or sponsored by Advisors Excel. For financial professional use only. Not to be used with the general public or in a sale situation.