(upbeat music)
- Hi and welcome to SmartFem and Friends.
I'm Lea Woodford, your host and with me today
is best-selling author Jack Canfield,
author of "Chicken Soup for the Soul."
Thanks, Jack, for being here.
- My pleasure, thanks for asking me.
- This is really big for me, so thank you.
But I wanna jump right in.
Can we talk about "Chicken Soup"?
- Sure.
- 'Cause it really wasn't an overnight success.
- No, it wasn't.
In fact, the book itself was rejected by 144 publishers
before we got a yes and then after we finally sold it,
it took us 14 months to hit a best-seller list,
so we were doing what we call the rule of five,
five things every single day for the better part
of a year and a half to get the book to sell.
One of the principles of success I teach
is you've gotta do five things a day.
We would call five PXs on the military bases and go,
do you have our book?
Would you be willing to carry it?
We call five TV shows or radio shows and say,
would you like to have us on?
We call five book stores, are you carrying our book?
We'd call five newspapers, would you like to interview us?
On and on and on and on.
And then one day we sent out boxes of books to all
these different places, like the O.J. Simpson jury,
we sent a box of books to them and they all came into court
a few days later carrying this book.
It became a national news story.
So we're just always constantly doing everything
to build up to that, but it was not an overnight success.
People said this, the title was stupid,
short stories don't sell, which was true
because literary short story books don't sell,
but these were true stories and they inspire people.
They made them cry, they made them laugh,
they touched their heart.
So eventually it took off and now we're
at 500 million books sold and I think about 50 languages
around the world.
- That is really amazing.
So how did that change your life?
- Hugely.
- Well, you were a teacher, you were a teacher.
- Well, it changed my self-esteem.
I felt like, wow, I'm making a much bigger difference.
It changed myself financially because all of a sudden
I was making millions of dollars.
That was a big shift because I grew up in a house
where my dad made $8,000 a year.
Eight with three zeros.
West Virginia, and all of a sudden now I'm living
in an estate in Santa Barbara, it's very different.
Changed my life too because I got invited to places
I never would have got invited before.
I got to address all the women Congressmen,
the Senators and state governors that were women.
I got invited to all the major TV shows
and invited to A-list parties and so forth and so on.
But I say the main thing it changed was wherever I go
people will come up to me and say,
your book changed my life.
I was doing chemo and I was miserable and I was throwing up
and I was sick and I read your stories
and they changed my life.
Or my daughter, she was sick and ill and we read
the stories to her.
I had someone like the Fonz come up to me at a party
and say, we read those stories to the kids every night.
That makes you feel pretty good.
We know, for example, over 200 teenagers
that didn't commit suicide
'cause they literally sent us letters
saying that story and the "Chicken Soup of Teenage Soul"
book changed by life.
I was gonna commit suicide and I read that story
and I said, wait, if she can survive, I can deal with this.
And I'm sure there's millions of other stories
we never even heard.
- I had to get another copy because my daughter
took mine to college with her
and she loved that book so much.
You message is even more relevant now, don't you think,
with all the negativity and the stuff
going on in the world and I love,
can we talk about how you talk about staying positive?
- Sure.
Well, here's the deal.
Our emotions are our own responsibility.
We like to blame other people.
She made me feel mad.
He ruined my day.
The news is so terrible I can't even think straight.
But the reality is we teach a little formula called
E plus R equals O.
There's an event, you then have a response to that,
usually a thought about it, and then you get an outcome.
So if you think that shouldn't be the way it is,
then you're gonna feel bad.
If you realize things are just the way they are,
then you don't have to feel bad.
You can still work to change 'em,
but you don't have to feel bad.
I often tell people, if your husband forgot your birthday,
I'll say, would that upset you,
and most people go, well, yeah.
I say, well, what would you have to tell yourself
to be upset?
And they say, well, my husband doesn't love me,
he forgot my birthday.
The truth is you could easily say someone who loves me
forgot my birthday.
You'd have a different outcome totally.
So we have to take responsibility for our feel-good
and realize even in the midst of all the trauma,
the tragedy, the mass shootings, the political upheaval,
the stuckness in Congress, all that stuff,
the truth is most of us have control over our lives
if we choose to exercise it
and mostly those things are out there,
they don't touch us.
Occasionally they do, they're local,
but generally we have the ability to focus on what is good.
I have a great wife, I have great children,
I have a great staff.
You were sitting here doing this, you know.
The weather is not the most wonderful weather.
It's 105 or something.
- 112.
- But who's counting.
- Yeah, exactly.
But the fact is, we're in an air-conditioned room.
- Right.
- I have a job, you have a job.
We've got money, we've got refrigeration.
A third of the world doesn't have refrigeration
and if you don't have refrigeration
you can't have antibiotics.
You have to put 'em in a refrigerator to keep 'em going,
so there's a lot of things we can be so grateful for
what little we have, and yet we tend to focus on what
we don't have and it's just shifting that focus
and being grateful for what we do have.
The law of attraction says what you focus on
or are grateful for you get more of.
- Well, and I'm just gonna say I was focused
on getting you into studio and that worked.
- Yes, it did.
- One of things that you
talk about that I really love is fear.
Can we talk about fear and how people can overcome that
because I think there's a lot of fear going on
in the world right now.
- Well, here's the thing about fear.
Most fear, we know that biologically
only two fears are built in:
loud noises and falling backwards.
Little babies that fall backwards, they jerk, a loud noise.
Everything else you learned.
Reach out toward that snake,
don't touch the snake it'll bit you!
Now I have fear because I'm imagining
something bad happening.
Fear is always based on thinking about something bad
in the future.
In other words, even if someone walked into this room
and had a gun, we'd have to imagine them shooting us
to be afraid.
We have to go into the future because right now we're
still here safe even though there might be a gun
in the room.
So basically, fear, fantasized experiences appearing real,
that's what we do.
We imagine we're gonna lose our house,
this person's gonna leave me,
I'm gonna get old and die alone.
All that stuff is fear based on thinking into the future,
thinking bad thoughts.
You can think into the future and think positive thoughts.
I'm in a plane in LAX going down the runway
and I'm sitting next to this woman,
her hands are going this and her knuckles are turning white
and I turned to her, I said, you look like you're scared.
She said, yes, I am, how'd you know.
I said, well, I used to be a psychologist
so I know these things.
I said, what are you imaging.
To be afraid you have to be imagining
something bad happening.
She said, I'm imaging the plane blowing up
at the end of the runway.
I said, well, let's change the imagination.
Where are you going to go.
She said, we're going to Orlando.
I said, why?
She said, I'm going to Disneyland, or Disney World,
with my grandchildren.
I said, have you ever been to Disney World?
She said yeah.
I said, what's your favorite ride?
And she says, It's a Small World.
So I said, close your eyes.
Imagine you're in the gondola, you're in It's a Small World,
you're going past the little Dutch kids, to the German kids,
whatever, and I started singing
♪ It's a small world after all ♪
♪ It's a small world ♪
And all of sudden she relaxed.
Now, she was using the same function called imagination
to imagine a positive outcome of her flight
rather than a negative outcome of her flight.
So basically we can learn to do that.
Now, there's a better technique.
It's even faster.
It's called tapping.
You've heard of EFT tapping?
- I have.
- And it's simply tapping on nine acupressure points
while you imagine the thing you're afraid of
and what happens is it disappears it
sometimes as fast as like...
Well, a guy read a book
called the "Five Minute Phobia Cure."
It's where it all started way back when.
But we've been working with people,
I've been in seminars and I had someone tapping,
they didn't even get through all nine acupuncture points
and they started to laugh.
And literally I've seen people overcome trauma
from childhood sexual abuse
to someone embezzling their money, a divorce,
all these things that they're negative feelings,
but also fear, any fear you might have.
We're here in Scottsdale, I'm running a seminar,
and a couple years ago we all decided to meet
at the pool one night.
There's a woman, she's shaking on the side of pool,
on of my producers.
And we did the tapping with her
because she was afraid of the water.
Within two or three minutes I had her in the pool swimming.
Turned out when she was six, someone jumped on her
while she was in a pool and knocked the wind out of her
and scared her and was still in there as a trauma
and that was the fear it'll happen again,
even though it was subconscious.
A little bit of tapping, boom, she was swimming.
- Wow, wow.
Can we talk about entrepreneurs a little bit
because you've gone from teaching
to entrepreneur psychologist.
What do you think are some of the biggest challenges,
'cause I know you teach a lot of entrepreneurs,
what are some of their challenges?
- Well, the standard challenges are under-capitalization.
Trying to get a business up and running,
they don't have a balanced lifestyle
because they're so busy.
But I think the biggest challenges that they have
is that they have, this is true for all of us by the way,
subconscious limiting beliefs that are stopping them
from taking risks, stopping them from asking
for what they need, stopping them from perhaps
being a more loving manager, perhaps reaching out
and co-venturing with other people.
And so that happens for a lot of people.
I'll give you just one example.
Friend of mine took a seminar with me
and he was not making as much money as I thought he should.
And it turned out, when we did a process I do
when we go back to discovering the limiting belief,
he went back to when he was about 20
and he just got his first paycheck from the same company
his dad worked for and it was an insurance sales company
and he's a natural salesperson and he brings the check home
and he's real proud and he was showing it to his dad,
and he shows it to his dad and his dad looks at it and goes,
and just slumps out of the room.
And he asked his mother later, what happened to Dad?
Your check was bigger than his check
and he's been working there 15 years.
He felt terrible.
And inside at 20 years old he decided I
don't wanna make my dad feel bad
so I'll never make more money than my dad.
Now when I was working with him he's 40 years old
and he'd forgot he ever decided that
'cause it was unconscious.
When we surfaced that and were able to release it,
he said to me, he sent me a letter it said,
in the two days after the seminar I made one-fifth
of my year's salary and he went onto like five times
his income for that year.
And so that's one of the things that a lot of people have.
Often they don't have clear goals.
People say, well, I wanna do well
or I wanna be a New York Times best-seller.
But the fact is, what does that mean?
It has to be measurable in time and space,
how much by when.
So people fail to do that.
The other thing entrepreneurs usually don't do,
some do, is they don't visualize their success every day.
I just came back from Thailand not too long ago
where I was on a conference.
It was a workshop this guy did for the public
and it was called Success 2.0.
He had me, Joe Vitale who's in the movie "The Secret"
and Mike Tyson the boxer.
He always wanted to be around boxers
so he could afford.
Now the book he wrote was called "Almost a Billionaire"
and at the age of 20 he was homeless
on the beach in Thailand.
He came from Sweden to get out of the cold,
had no money and basically lost his job in a hotel
'cause he was drinking too much.
He calls his friend and says, would you send me $100?
And his friend says, you haven't been that good of a friend,
why would I send you $100, but I'll send you a book.
And he texted him through the email on his phone
the book "The Secret."
He started reading and he said, this is BS,
this will never work.
He said, but I got nothing better to do.
I'm living on the beach, sleeping on a beach towel
with his head with his suitcase.
And so he said, I'm gonna visualize a cup of coffee.
So he closed his eye and visualized a cup of coffee
and how's it feel, what's it smell like.
Oh, it tastes so good.
Feels it going down into his stomach,
feels that energy that goes through your body
when you have a cup of coffee.
And he did it for about five minutes, he really got into it,
but is was all to disprove that it doesn't work.
The next day this guys comes over and wakes him up
and says, I have the jet ski concession over here.
I notice you sleeping on the beach under this palm tree.
Are you homeless?
He says, yeah.
He said, I brought you a cup of coffee.
He went, wait a second.
So now he says, I'm starting to believe it.
So now he says, I'm gonna visualize a meal,
because he's been eating like 25 cents a day,
like Ramen noodles but they were Thai noodles.
So he visualized a meal.
Steak and potatoes and beans and all that stuff.
And two days later he's walking down the beach,
this guy sees him and he says, are you Andres Pier?
Did you go to such and such high school in Sweden?
He says, yeah, I think I was a year behind you.
Could I buy you dinner?
Off they go.
They have a meal together.
Now he say, hum.
So now he starts visualizing having a job.
Within three days he had a job.
He goes all the way through this job
of like handing our fliers to get people
to come into a condo thing.
Then he becomes a salesperson,
then he wants to be the sales manager,
then he said the real people making the money
are the real estate agents,
so then he becomes a real estate agent.
Then he goes, the real people making the money
are the builders.
He became a builder.
Now that was 15 years ago.
He was 20, he's 35, he's a multi-billionaire,
he has 19 companies and 256 employees
all because of using the law of attraction, visualizing.
He's visualized every day, did affirmations.
- But going back to "The Secret", you talked about
a personal check you wrote to yourself.
Can we talk about that?
- Yes, I did.
We can.
So basically, well, really two checks.
One was I wanted to make a million dollars
in terms of book sales.
And it was, he'll never do it.
And so literally wrote a check
to myself for a million dollars.
Made a mock-up million dollar bill
before all these motivational speakers
were handing those things out.
Put it on the ceiling.
Every morning I get up I'd see it, I'd look at it,
I'd close my eyes and visualize a million dollars
and then I also had an affirmation which was
happily depositing my million dollar wealthy check
from Health Communications.
Couple years later I got a check for $1,135,000.
I have a framed copy of that, of course.
That was for three months.
- Wow.
- That year, Mark and I together made over $12 million
in book royalties.
Mine was six, his was six.
My wife said, this stuff works, doesn't it.
(laughing)
- Well, apparently it does.
So, Jack, can we talk about success principles?
I know you're out here talking about them.
- Yes, yes, yes, I running a week-long workshop
for people who wanna make that part of their life.
What happened for me is I was lying in bed one day
and I was talking to my son who was about 11
and he said, Dad, he said, we're different from most people.
We have a bigger house, we have more money, you know.
He said, why?
How come you're different?
I said, well, I practice these principles.
He said, what are they?
And I started rattling them off to him
and I realized, god, there's a bunch of them,
so I literally sat the next day in bed,
he was on his little computer, I'm in mine.
112 principles that I live my life by.
I said it's way too many for a book.
I wanna share this, wanna put this out in the world.
So we eliminated some, we combined some.
We ended up with 64 principles a the time,
it is now 67.
Added how to have an online presence,
some of the new things.
What I found is there is a formula for success.
There is a system and anyone can,
a system is something that produces a consistent result
every time you do it.
If you have a pie recipe from your grandmother, your aunt,
and you do the exact the same thing,
you don't substitute Stevia for your molasses,
you're gonna get the same pie.
And so the same thing is true with life.
If you know what to do, and I've studied,
literally I've read 3,000 books, took 600 seminars,
I've watched pretty much every TED Talk
that was every given.
I have narrowed it down.
I interviewed 75 of the most successful people I could find.
Generals, CEOs, Olympic athletes, Gold Medalists, all that.
And what I found was they were all living
the same principles, whether they were unconscious,
and it was for some, and some were conscious.
And I started to say, okay, it's not just me,
it's not idiosyncratic, this is a understood thing.
And so I said how could I write one book
so if people read one book it would change their life
forever and they'd never need to read another book.
Please read more, but if you only read this,
it'd be enough to get you to accomplish,
become a golf champion, become the top salesperson,
become a millionaire, best-selling author,
have your own TV show, whatever it might be,
that there would be enough in there.
And so, very quickly, may share a couple
of the success stories?
- Oh, absolutely.
- So the first thing you have to do
is take 100% responsibility for your life.
Most people don't do that.
I always say to people, you wanna be married to someone
who's 99% committed to monogamy?
No.
Same thing with success.
You have to be 100% committed.
Second thing is you have to take responsibility
for all of that.
No blaming, no complaining, no excuse-making.
That rules out most people living their life.
Second thing you have to do is you have to have a vision
for what it is you wanna bring into the world
that has to be in line with your purpose.
You first have to figure out, what are my values,
what is my purpose.
I believe everyone's born with an inborn purpose
that you're hear to manifest in life.
Third thing, turn your vision into goals.
They have to be measurable and specific,
how much by when.
Fourth thing, you have to believe it's possible.
This is where that belief work we've talked about
comes into play.
The fifth thing is you have to then energize your goal
with affirmations, I'm so happy and grateful that I now,
and you describe them in present tense and then visualize it
as if it's already occurred.
The next thing you have to do is take action.
Most people don't take enough action.
That's why that rule of five,
I think I mentioned that earlier,
you gotta do five things a day.
That second thing is not all actions will work,
so you have to get feedback.
Most people don't ask for feedback.
How am I doing in my relationship with you,
this TV show, with my clients or products, whatever.
So good question, on a scale of one to 10,
how would you rate the quality of our relationship,
this product, this seminar, whatever it might be.
Anything less than a 10 gets a follow-up question
of what would it take to make it a 10?
We've all been to places where we didn't get the service
we wanted, but they never asked us how the could improve it
so it doesn't get better.
And most people are afraid to ask you 'cause they're
afraid of what you're gonna tell 'em.
And so you gotta be willing to do that.
Action, one of the most important actions,
this goes for entrepreneurs, asking,
ask, ask, ask, ask, ask, ask, ask.
Actually coined a term, we all have to become askholes.
- I love that.
- We have to be willing to ask and most of us
are afraid of rejection.
So rejecting rejection is the next principle,
it's like rejecting the 144 rejections
for "Chicken Soup for the Soul."
I think we probably talked to an equal number of people
for the Success Principles before we found a publisher.
Then it's called perseverance, never give up.
And then there's more things you can add in there.
It's good to have an accountability partner
to hold you accountable, have a mastermind group.
Meditate, I'm a big believer in meditation.
That's how we got the title for "Chicken Soup for the Soul"
was in a meditation.
Everything else is useful, nuancey,
but those are the key things.
If you would just do that, people watching this
just do that, their life would radically transform.
- Wow.
Jack, thank you so much for coming on the show.
- My pleasure.
- This has just been a dream come true for me
because I've been a fan for a number of years
and thank you.
And I did get my ask in gear, I did ask you,
so thank you.
- Yes, you did.
You got your ask in gear.
- I did get my ask in gear, yes, I did.
Anyway, Jack, thank you so much.
- My pleasure, thank you.
- This has been Lea Woodford with SmartFem and Friends.
Thanks for watching.