Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: What you're experiencing now are the outcomes of the responses that you did to earlier events. If you believe that other people are affecting your life, then you're going to be angry at them, you're going to blame them. When you give that up and you realize it's up to you, all that judgment and blaming and complaining and excuse making disappears. Now. It doesn't happen overnight if it's consciously moving that direction, but I think that's critical. And what happens when people do that? They're more loving.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Deborah Rosman and a warm welcome to our listeners.
Each month for the Add Heart podcast, I have the privilege of interviewing individuals who are contributing to the creation of a more heart based world.
This month I'm talking with Jack Canfield, who's been called a legend in personal development and peak performance.
He's a multiple New York Times bestselling author of the Success Principles, the Power of Focus, the Key to Living, the Law of Attraction, Coaching for Breakthrough Success, and many more. And Jack, you and I have known each other accounted at since the mid-70s, about 50 years.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Right.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: We first met, you were talking about self esteem into the classroom and I was talking about meditating with children in the classroom.
Then you became well known for the Chicken Soup for the Soul beer books, helping people achieve business goals with success principles. And somewhere in there you invited me to be part of the Transformation Leadership Council. What inspired me about that is you had a vision of how leaders could really help come together and help the planet and humanity transform.
I know that vision is still close in your heart.
Talk about it. Welcome. Okay, so from all your years of teaching, experience your own inner work, how do you see it now? How can leaders help transform the planet and humanity?
[00:02:08] Speaker A: Well, I think first of all, leaders have to make love a priority, make the heart a priority. All the qualities of the heart, of love, of compassion, of respect, of honesty, you know, all those kind of things, transparency, vulnerability, trusting your heart, trusting your intuition. So I think leaders have a responsibility to be leaders in the sense of like creating the frequency within their organizations and within the sphere of influence they have by being that loving, being themselves. And it's a challenge. You know, we're constantly coming up against, you know, the internal blocks we have from limiting beliefs and trauma and so forth. But if we make it a priority, make it a high priority value for our organizations, then we can basically take it so that people move into that. I share a story with you. I was in Singapore and I was talking to the director of the Ritz Carlton hotel. And they have these things they call standup meetings every morning where the entire staff in little groups, whether it's the housekeepers or the doormen or whatever, they have a meeting where they stand up and they call it a standup meeting. So nobody sits down. They don't take too long. And then they say, what is the way today that you're going to manifest this value? They have a certain Ritz Carlton values, and everyone has to say specifically what they're planning to do. So imagine if every morning the staff got together, you said, okay, what are you going to do today to make sure we express love to each other, to our clients, to our customers, to the world in general. And, you know, so just holding that question, how can we express more love?
I remember all those people. Remember we were wearing those little bracelets. Wwjd. What would Jesus do?
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: I thought, you know, well, what would love do? What would the Dalai Lama do? You know, we can ask those questions because, you know, the Mother Teresa, you know, and so forth, because they were examples of embodied love. And so for me, I remember every day for a while, I would just ask, what would Mother Teresa do? What would Mother Teresa do? And that was like the guiding principle for me. So I think that we have to, as leaders, demonstrate it, reward it, confront it when it's not there, you know, in a loving way, and help people move into that. And then I think we need to reward it in our companies when people are loving. I think one of the things I've noticed is that peer nominations for awards. So it's not me, the manager or boss thinking about it, but we could ask the staff, you know, the last month, who have you noticed that did the most loving thing or the most kind thing or the most, you know, generous thing or whatever. And they'll, They'll. They'll tell you. And then all of a sudden, when there's an award, a reward, people want to win it. So our natural tendencies to want to go for it, you know?
[00:05:01] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, you, your, your website, your books, Living the success principles, breakthrough success, it all sounds like it's productivity and profitability.
How do you weave love and the heart into what you teach and train? And is there receptivity now to that? More than it used to be?
[00:05:24] Speaker A: Well, first of all, I teach the first principle in my book. And every seminar we do is take 100% responsibility for your life and your results. And that means no blaming, no complaining, no excuse making. And coming from the position that you are the one who has created your current experiences by how you responded to earlier experiences. So I teach a model called E + R equals O. Event + response equals outcome. What you're experiencing now are the outcomes of the responses that you did to earlier events in a recession happened. What did you do? Did you freak out? Did you get scared? Did you scream, yell, you know, start drinking alcohol or whatever, you know. And some people called up everyone else and said, hey, what are you guys doing? And started figuring out ways to pivot and going online and doing zoom calls and zoom trainings and so forth. So it's not the externals that, that create that problem. If you believe that other people are affecting your life, then you're going to be angry at them, you're going to blame them. When you give that up and you realize it's up to you, all that judgment and blaming and complaining and excuse making disappears. Now it doesn't happen overnight, yet it's consciously moving that direction. But I think that's critical. And what happens when people do that? They're more loving. I also teach people, let's say goal setting. I'll bring someone up on stage and I'll have them put their arm out to the side and we'll muscle test it. Just, you know, how strong is your arm? I'll say, now think of a goal you have and only how you will benefit if you achieve that goal. Their arm goes down. Same goal could be one of Mercedes Benz, win the best salesperson of the year or whatever. But only think about how it will benefit others. If you achieve that, their arm stays strong. So we start to see that when you're coming from service rather than from greed or ego, what happens is that you now are stronger, you're more radiant. People are attracted to you because people are attracted to people that are loving and kind and happy and joyful and so on and so forth. So that's, we've woven in all through what I do. You know, one of the things that you're familiar with, I'm sure, is Byron Katie's work. Loving what is, you know, and most people are judgmental and they feel bad, they have negative thoughts and then they, you know, it sanitizes in their body. And so when you learn that the only thing that's creating pain in yourself is the thoughts, you're thinking about stuff, not the actual stuff that's happening, but your belief that it shouldn't be or should be different. So I build all that into the success. Because when you're coming from that place, you end up More successful because your vibration and frequency is higher and you have less disturbance in the field, if you will.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I love that. How. Okay. In the years you've been teaching businesses leaders, have you seen the receptivity for understanding vibration frequency, what you're talking about, increase? And what have you noticed?
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Yeah, I have, I have. And so first of all, the people I train, and I train hundreds and sometimes thousands of people a month, sometimes in one day workshops, sometimes in, you know, zoom calls and training programs, we do ongoing coaching groups. And the reality is many of those people are business leaders and they will go back to their companies and build in meditation time in their companies. They'll start doing the quick coherence process, which I teach everybody because, you know, when I first learned it from you guys, I started using it to say, okay, think of a problem you have, think of the solution you come up with. Now let's do the quick coherence process. And now ask yourself for solutions. And they're always better. And so basically, you know, they're, they're more effective. So when people start to see that what they're doing is more effective, it works better, they're happier, then they want to share it with their company, their sales team, whatever it might be. And I'm seeing that happening quite a bit, not just from my people as well.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, it's interesting. We've gone in and out of doing a lot of work as heartmath in corporations from Motorola back in the 90s to right now, PwC. But they're usually divisions when the company. Whereas a leader who, who really wants to make a difference. Okay. To really transform culture at the level this planet needs with what's going on, we need to, we need to be able to reach not only just senior leaders, but C level people who can really make an impact on culture. And, but there's so many that we hear about and I know this isn't true, I'm not exposed to probably as many as you are, but it's like they're struggling to even figure out a three year plan, let alone a five year plan because everything's changing so dramatically. It's hard to know where the world's going, where your business is going. And at the same time you have a workforce. A lot of younger people are disengaged, they're there, they're surfing the Internet, they're depressed, they're lonely, they're anxious. I mean, you're dealing with a lot of toxicity in the workplace.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: Well, my belief is they're disengaged because the work they're doing isn't aligned with their highest purpose, their values. They're not feeling acknowledged, loved. There was a wonderful book, you probably know, the Five Love Languages book. And Gary Chapman wrote another book called the Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, because we didn't want to say love. And what happens is, you know, there are five things that you can, ways you can communicate, quality time, nurturing touch, words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, et cetera. And often we're trying to engage people not through their love language. You know, we're rewarding people by saying, you did a great job. And what they need is a hug or they need, like, a gift that says, hey, here's two tickets go to the basketball game tonight. So we have to take more responsibility for how do we engage the. The younger generation rather than blaming them for being disengaged. And so a lot of the work we're doing in the world is not interesting to them, is not fulfilling their sense of growth and values and creativity and so forth. So a lot of times we have to shift what we're doing, and we have to start spending more time engaging them. Give you an example, I went to Johnson and Johnson, the pharmaceutical company. They wanted to do diversity education. And they brought in all these people and tell everyone what they were doing wrong. And all it did was create more and more separation because they all felt judged. And we know when you judge somebody, they push back and resist. I went in and basically divided them up into small groups and had them share their childhood experiences. We worked on their childhood traumas. We worked on the successes they had been over before 18. So they're all, like, neutralized, whether they're a CEO or new hire. Everyone's had successes before 18. We shared strengths with each other, we told each other what we like and admired about each other, et cetera. By the end of the day, they were saying things like, I know these people now better than I've known them. After working here 20 years, I learned that a lot of my prejudgments, prejudices were wrong. And so we have to. And they loved it, and they wanted more of it because it was real. It made a difference in their life. And when you do that and you bring in that kind of experience, whether you're teaching meditation or you're doing bringing in, you know, movement exercises or, you know, Sedona method, you know, whatever it might be, there's all kinds of things you can do. What happens is people respond to that because it's meeting needs, they're not getting met anywhere else in the world.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Yeah. So there's pockets here and there. And I'm like, when I look at the political situation and I look at what's going on and so much backwash against DEI right now just because of the reasons you're talking about their judgment underlying so much of it and throwing the baby out with the bathwater and going to the other extreme there. And I ponder and I saw what are the most effective things? Transformational leaders. You, myself, your company, my company. What can we really do?
I mean, obviously the love and heart, compassion has to go viral in the field. There has to be a pandemic of love put us because the planetary energies. But what do you see?
I mean, it's one person at a time is pretty slow. What do you see can be done to accelerate this process?
[00:13:56] Speaker A: Well, it's all about communication, obviously. I mean, I think there need to be some Netflix films on the, you know, documentaries on the power of love. There are all kind of organizations and companies that are out there, whether it's Zappos shoes or, you know, the. I can't think of the name of the company right now. I actually went online and looked for some of them. Patagonia, Ben and Jerry's, Tom's, the Body Shop. So if someone like, you know, Morgan Freeman would come on and do like a secret type movie about all these things and show the importance of love and how love wins and so forth and so on, then what happens is people will start to go, oh, wait a second, maybe I need to change my mind. But it's communication and we now live in a world of mass communication. You know, the. I think was the Queen's Gambit, which was on Netflix, was seen by 62 million people in America. You know, so we have to. And I think also we could have like, you know, we give out awards, like for the Peace Prize and with values, companies that are best places to work and so forth. What if we had awards for companies where the greatest love was expressed or the greatest and not always using the word love, you know, using like ethics and corporate values and integrity and spiritual growth and truth and honesty and gratitude, so forth. So it's like, you know, like, like the guy who created the X Prize, I forget his name right now. And, you know, all of a sudden he said, okay, I'm going to give all this money to whoever can figure out how to get a rocket up the ground. And then all of a sudden, you know, everyone competed with that. And, you know, the people up at.
Well, I'm trying to think of his name, Elon Musk, went for it. A number of different people, because people like prizes and, you know, people go for that. So I think we have to build in almost a gamification, if you will. Yeah. That allows people to experience it. Because I think what. What I learned from Moshe Feldenkrais, who was a bodyworker, is if you better. Your body wants it again. In other words, if I go and I have a better meal than I've ever had, I want it again. If I get a massage and I feel better than I ever had, I want it again. So we have to give people an experience of being loved. You talk about the political divide in America. You know, if you look over the MAGA group, who feels unappreciated, not listened to, they're in fear. If you look at Maslow's hierarchy of safety, most people don't feel safe about their jobs. Now, they'll blame it on the immigrants, they'll blame it on, you know, whatever. But the point is, nobody's listening to them. Hillary made the big mistake of calling them the deplorables. And they said, well, screw you. So if we had said, hey, I get it that you're not. It's not working for you. Let's talk about how we can make that happen. And I'm on your side as well as over here. I want this compassion for this group as well. I think what happens then is they start to be willing to listen because they're being listened to.
[00:16:55] Speaker B: I think that's so important. I mean, we've had an entry into companies, into a lot of sectors from law enforcement and military to help through our science, through the research, saying love is healthy, gets your heart, brain, nervous system in sync, and all the qualities of love, like respect, integrity, compassion, gratitude, they're frequencies. And we've been able to map it out and show people how this is going to help you be more effective. You know, zone, state, peak performance, all that. So then people go, okay, let me practice love and care. You're coming in through a similar message, but a different door. And I think that to really accelerate the shift on the planet, which is happening so fast and discombobulating so many people while people are waking up, that there's got to be another answer. And that answer is in the heart, because that's the only thing that hasn't been tried.
How do we bring real influencers together to help accelerate this process?
What's your Vision for that.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: Well, you know, when I started the Transformational Leadership Council, that was one of the qualities of people that we wanted to join. There are certain people out there in the human potential movement we didn't invite because while they were powerful and motivational, they weren't compassionate, they weren't demonstrating love, they weren't aligned spiritually and so forth. So that was one effort on my part. Granted, it's only 40 people, but when you think about all the people that are out there, I mean, we could have a big love gathering conference of all these people, bring them to Las Vegas or some other places. Maybe not so Las Vegas, but the point being there's lots of conference centers there and have people inspire each other and invite them to participate in some bigger game. The problem right now is that everyone's doing their own thing, right? And I think to get to this level, think about when the secret came out. When the secret came out, there were 28 people, something like that, from the Transformational Leadership Council in that movie. And what happened was they all sent out an email on the same day to their mailing list that said, you need to watch the trailer for this movie. Get the movie. 12 million people got an email from John Gray, from maybe you, from me, from other people they respected, if they got five or six and said, holy Mac, we better take a look at this. So that grew the Law of Attraction into a huge international movement. And I think the same thing could happen with the Power of Love.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And it has to. And I think it is. I feel it being drawn just like the project that you and I are talking about, which is too premier to talk about yet, and the public, but a Netflix movie, celebrities, musicians, that's who people look up to. And if they say this is going to make a difference, more and more people will try it. And I. I feel that is definitely on the horizon and it's going to be essential for help love go viral on the planet. Everybody that I have talked to, leaders, influencers, mentioning that there's a momentum, a movement which heartmath is part of helping to ground with practical tools you can do in the day as well as science, to help love go viral. And to a person, they go. They sit up and they go, I want to be part of that. How do I contribute?
[00:20:21] Speaker A: Absolutely. So someone like you or some other group of people, you know, a planetary council or something, needs to get together and say, okay, this, this, we're taking this on and we're going to do it. And then it's just A matter of putting together the, you know, the logistics to make it happen. And they're hard. They're not easy to put together big events like that or even, you know, like. But here's the deal with the Secret. We. We pulled it off. The Secret was the number one DVD in China for almost a decade.
I. Yeah, I went to Iran, who's supposed to be one of our, you know, enemies. And I spoke in Tehran. I had to go through the Pakistani Embassy even to get a visa, because we don't have a, you know, embassy there. Neither do they here. And I went there, and 800 people showed up for my talk. And I said, why? And they said, oh, we saw the Secret on television. I thought the Ayatollah allowed that on tv, but the fact was, it played many, many times on national television. They only have a couple television stations, and they control them very tightly. And the reality is, it was just a message that rang so true to people that it got them excited, got them to feel like hope and possibility. And I think the same thing is true with love, right?
[00:21:40] Speaker B: I mean, what else is there? It's. People say that and give lip service to it, but there's enough people ringing that bell now and enough people coming to us, possibly to you, to others, saying, it's time. And people who have organized these kinds of things in the past, so it's not their first rodeo.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: I would just say one other thing, too, that I think we could look at AA as a model where. Why is it that AI is so successful? Because in every town, in every city, in every country, there's a group, small group of people that get together regularly to work and to work on their sobriety. And we could do the same thing. Like in some of my ongoing coaching programs, like we do online, we will have a whole month devoted to love, a whole month devoted to integrity, a whole month devoted to success. And what happens is there's. There's. There's challenges. They do. They get together in small groups. They have to look at where did you know? One of the things I teach is called the Evening Review. And I learned this from Roberto Assagioli, who created something called psychosynthesis, very spiritual kind of psychology. And he taught every night. When you're working on a quality, he was working on qualities like joy, gratitude. But you pick one a month before you go to bed or right before dinner or whatever, you ask yourself the question, where could have I been more loving today, for example? And you wait for. And you start to see things where you were Impatient in line at the supermarket where you gave someone a finger on the freeway. And then what you do is you replay it in your mind the way you would have liked to have done it had you remembered to be. And so what happens, you're pre programming yourself to do it differently the next time you're in that same triggered experience, if you will. So those kind of activities supported by a support group of people that are working together to become more loving, who are working together because they know this is what's required. And it requires people working at that level, on the lower end of the totem pole, if you will, and the CEOs up at the top level as well.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: I love it. Great, wonderful exercise that you just mentioned. So what's next for you? What is. What is. What are you being called?
[00:23:53] Speaker A: Well, I'm actually being called to slow down. I turned 80 a couple of weeks ago and I said, you know, I always thought I was going to work, work till I dropped and to be 95, I'd still be giving workshops and writing books. And something happened when I turned 80 where I said, you know, I think I'm going to slow down. I'm going to not have all my staff, which is a huge overhead. I'm going to do fewer seminars, but I'm going to let other people sponsor. I'll show up if you put one together for me or if someone else does. But to run all the logistics that is required to do this, I got tired of it. And so I'm going to. My next season, if you will, is about spiritual growth for me. And whatever I learned that I can teach to people. And I'm very deep into all that right now. But this thing about success, when I wrote the Success Principles book, I wrote it so I'd never have to talk about it again.
What I didn't realize is when you write a book, everyone wants you to come and talk.
So literally, I said, here's everything I know. That's all you need to know. If you do this, it'll work. So now I'm going to stop that and move to spirituality. Maybe I'll write about that. Who knows? But that's where I want to be. That's what I want to teach. That's what I want to live.
[00:25:05] Speaker B: Beautiful, wonderful. Well, let's send some heart energy to all that intention, and let's do a heart meditation together on helping love go viral in whatever way our heart's calling us to do that. So let's focus our attention in the heart and on the in breath, breathe in love and compassion and get still in the heart.
And as you breathe out, radiate love and compassion into your mental, emotional and physical systems.
As you do this, see your heart, brain, nervous system, spirit aligning in harmony and coherence.
Now, in that alignment, envision yourself practicing heart qualities during the day. More of love replacing judgment with compassion, reaction with kindness, gratitude.
As we activate heart qualities from our genuine heart feeling, it nurtures our system and it releases stress, incoherence, despair, loneliness bringing lift and spirit that helps us move through challenges and world changes with compassion and care. Instead of fear, envision yourself having more heart connection with yourself that heals and creates a new baseline for mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health.
Now let's radiate our collective love and compassion to all people and nations on the planet suffering from wars, trauma, political divisiveness, natural disasters and other major stressors. Just see the collective love energetic helping to lift the planetary energetic field, making it a little easier for people.
Now let's close by radiating and co creating together a reservoir of heart energy, of the compassion and kindness filling that heart reservoir that each of us can tap into over the next month when we need a lift in spirit and clarity or support from our own heart's intuitive guidance, see yourself and us collectively co creating that reservoir of heart energy.
Thank you so much for sharing that with me.
Jack, is there anything else you'd like to share with our listeners?
[00:30:12] Speaker A: No, just. Well, one thing you talked about in that little meditation we just did, he talked about fear. And I think the opposite of love is fear. And all greed comes from fear of not being enough and not having enough. And I thought that has to be addressed. We didn't talk much about that. We talked about the positive side to move toward, but we also have to let go. We've all got childhood traumas that are unhealed. We have fear that we're not enough, that we'll never have enough. You've got a lot of people now in the world who are really facing that potential with AI, happiness happening, food shortages, the climate change. So I think that that's. We have to address that as well. And so thank you for reminding me of that.
[00:30:58] Speaker B: Yeah, well, the only thing I know that reduces fear is raising our vibration to see from another perspective and even clearing traumas. That's been our research shown you. And that requires love. That requires coherent heart energy.
[00:31:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:15] Speaker B: To lift us above all that. Not to suppress it or repress it or vent it, but to lift us to a level of perception where we really can have that self security.
[00:31:26] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: Yeah. Well thank you so much for this short. We could go on and on short podcast.
[00:31:34] Speaker A: We could, we could.
[00:31:35] Speaker B: And I just want to tell our listeners as a free gift I want to remind you you can watch the HeartMath experience in interactive film or online video course and just check out the amazing new HeartMath app too at your app store. And I want to remind you that the third Tuesday of every month we publish a new At Heart Podcast episode. So be sure you subscribe so you don't miss our next guests and topic. Thank you and take care.
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the At Heart podcast. Be sure to subscribe so you can catch the latest episodes. If you're wanting even more heart inspired content, find us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. Look for HeartMath and also the HeartMath Institute. Both organizations are committed to helping activate the heart of humanity.
