Raven: How can we begin to change the direction our life is currently headed into, a more positive direction?

Jack: The main key to creating the life that you want is to visualize that life. First you have to define it. What does it look like? Most people right now are in fear thinking that their life is going to get worse. The economy is going to get worse. They might lose their home, lose their job whatever it might be, and you and I know what you think about comes about.

So, basically, what’s critical at this juncture for everybody is instead of letting their life be controlled by the media, by watching television and listening to all the bad news or radio or whatever, you need to be focused on those people and conversations, radio shows, TV shows, books etc that are going to uplift you that you know are positive in their focus. Then, sit down and literally design the life that you want. Get out a journal or a pad of paper, and say, “Okay, if I could be living in the ideal home, have the ideal friends, have the ideal job, travel, the things I want to own, etc, what would it be?”

Then, put your time and energy thinking about, talking about and focusing on how to create that rather than focusing on the fear vision of, “I’m going to lose everything.”

Basically, your mind has only three things it can do. It can think thoughts, and it can look at images or create images, and it can feel feelings and make decisions basically as a result of that. Maybe four things, so what happens is the most of the thoughts that are being fed to us by the media are negative. Most of the images that we’re creating are of something getting worse.

I spend my day thinking about what I want and how I’m going to get it, as opposed to what I don’t want. So, you can turn your radio channel to WIDW, which would be What I Don’t Want, or you can turn it to the station that says, What Do I Want.

Most people unfortunately, are engaged in conversations about how bad it is. Whenever I get together with Mark Victor Hansen, my writing partner for Chicken Soup for the Soul, we’re just talking about all the things that we want to do, and we call it plussing each other’s idea. “Oh, have you talked to this guy? Have you read that book? Have you done this? You have to connect with them if that’s what you want to do.”

So, it’s always focusing on the good rather than the bad, and the fact is there’s plenty of good out there. We have an eleven percent unemployment rate, which is huge, but it means, eighty-nine percent of the people who want a job, have one. So, let’s focus on that and focus on where we want to get to.

It’s kind of like you’re living in a house, and there’s the gas valve, and it’s turned on, and there’s gas coming out. If you breathe it long enough, you’re going to die. So, the obvious thing to do would be to turn off the gas valve.

So, if the TV is bringing you down, turn it off. If radio is bringing you down, turn it off. If you’ve got friends that are just constant naysayers, stop spending time with them. There are plenty of positive people. You just talked about having Montel Williams on the show and other people like that. I know Montel. I’ve been on his show, and we’ve talked numerous times.

He’s a positive guy, and so there are positive people out there. One of the things that you may have to do, you know that if you’re going to grow a plant, you have to prune it. So, you may have to prune some of the things that you’ve been doing, some of the habits, some of the relationships and connect with.

We have a wonderful minister, and I go to the Spiritual Center with Reverend Michael Beckwith. I go down there about once a month. I live in Santa Barbara, ninety minutes north. So, I am purposely choosing to put myself in places with positive people.

I can download mp3 files, and I can listen to positive music as opposed to negative lyrics. I can listen to positive CDs. I can listen to your radio show.

In other words, we don’t just go into super market and pick up every food, or we don’t go out on the street and eat rocks. We’re very selective about what we put in our body. We should be equally selective about what we put in our brain.

Raven: Les Brown says, “I was hungry for success, Jack.”

Jack: Les is a good example of someone who started out being called mentally educable retarded, and now is a multi-millionaire and a great speaker, and a wonderful motivator. I started out. My dad made $8,000 a year, that’s eight with three zeros after it. We didn’t have a lot when we started out. My mom was alcoholic. My dad worked really hard. There wasn’t a whole lot we had.

I had to work summer jobs and on the weekends in order to make ends meet. I had to work my way through college. As long as you have a computer, you have access to all the information you need. I would love people to buy my CDs, buy my books, come to my summer trainings, etc.

However, if you don’t have that kind of money, you can go on YouTube, and you can watch me, Tony Robbins, Les Brown. You can find any motivational speaker, any educational speaker, and there’s at least two or three hours of their information on YouTube.

You can go to TED. You can hear eighteen minute talks by some of the most brilliant people on the planet about any topic you want, just Ted.com.

The point is that the education is available, but you’ve got a choice. Are you going to sit there and watch Desperate Housewives, and therefore produce a desperate life, or are you going to educate yourself, expose yourself to things that will uplift and transform your life. The choice is always yours.

I always say the only thing that’s going to change your future are the decisions you make and the actions you take. In other words, if you keep doing the same thing you’re doing, you’re going to get the same results you’ve always been getting. So, what you did and what everyone has to do if they want their life to change is make a decision.

In that decision, you intended, “I want my life to be better.” As soon as you put that intention out, the universe responds to it. Your subconscious mind responds to it. People around you respond to it. So, just by choosing to read, to study, to take action, you can almost say somebody is up there watching goes, “She wants something. Let’s give her a little bit of success, and see what she does with it.”

I always like to say we all have a purpose, and whether you call it God, source, universe, infinite intelligence, nature, whatever, we are born with a purpose, and when we fulfill that purpose, we’re given more to do with it.

It’s like a general in the army says to a sergeant, “Here’s what I want you to do. Go take that hill.” The sergeant goes and takes that hill. Well, they make him a lieutenant. They give him more men to command because he’s already proven that he can do what he’s told when he’s guided, what he’s here for.

So, I think the same is true in our lives. The more we are aligned with our purpose doing what we’re meant to do, which is not sit around and watch TV and lament how bad things are, but to actually serve through sharing our gifts with the world through our professions, through our entrepreneurship, through our jobs and so forth. Then, we get more to be responsible for, and as a result more success.

One of the things I have people in my seminars do is make a list of twenty things you love to do. They can be anything from “I love to watch television,” to “I love to surf,” to “I love to help people organize things,” whatever.

Then, we look at how could you monetize that? How could you make money doing that? Recently, I read an article in the newspaper about a woman who had moved to Hawaii. She loved to surf, and she was making a living teaching high level management women how to surf. She was using it as a metaphor for how you surf is how you manage.

We know the principle of how you do anything is how you do everything, and she spends seven days a week on the water in a bathing suit with surfboards working with women doing the thing she loves which is surfing, and she makes a six figure income. I have a friend who loves to travel. So, she leads groups around the world to sacred sites like Matchu Pitchu, and Egyptian Pyramids and the Taj Mahal, and so forth. She takes these groups, and she gets to go all around the world, and she gets paid to do it. It doesn’t matter what you love to do.

I have friends who are caterers. They love to cook, and they make a very good living. One of the real needs in high end communities is for people to cook and deliver food to them, so they don’t necessarily cook their meals. People at a high level don’t want to cook, and many of them don’t want a chef living in their house and encroaching on their privacy.

So, there are a number of people I know that prepare food. They deliver it. People heat it up. They deliver it every three days, and they’re making a fortune doing that. So, whatever you love to do, if you can get out of the boss employee mentality that I have to have a job and move into I need to fill a need, rather than to have a job.

I’ll just give you a quick example. A friend of mine used to work for Avery Label Company, and he would sell labels. This one chain, I think it was TGI Fridays said, “Do you think Avery could print the days of the week on the labels? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday so that we could label our vegetables when they come in, we know which ones came in on Monday, so we use those before the ones that came in on Tuesday.

He said, “I’ll ask them.” Avery said, “No.” He said, “Let me see what I can do here.” So, he bought a printing press, bought the labels from Avery, printed the days of the week on it, and sold it them to TGI Fridays.

He started doing this to the point where he started his own company called Day Dods. He produces millions and millions and millions of these round labels with M for Monday, T for Tuesday, and just recently sold his company for tens of millions of dollars because instead of thinking like an employee, he thought like someone who was there to service the needs of the customer. There’s always a need.

My mentor, Debbie Clemenstone said, “Find a need and fill it.” There was a woman, I read about her in the newspaper as well where when the mortgage foreclosures started to happen, we know that when people leave a home that they’re kicked out of, they tend to trash the home. They don’t leave it all nice and beautiful like if they sold it and made a profit on it.

So, she went to the banks in her community and said, “I would like to be the cleaning service that cleans up the homes that are foreclosed on.” She got five banks to hire her to do that. Now, she has eleven employees. There’s always a need, but you have to look for it.

Raven: I guess that goes back to what I’ve heard you talk about inspired thoughts. Can you share with the listeners what that is?

Jack: Well, basically, there’s two kinds of actions. You and I know the only time anything changes is when you take an action, and you either ask for something or you offer something or you do something. So, there are two kinds of actions in the world. There’s what I call obvious actions, and there are inspired actions.

What I found is when you start being a visionary, meaning you’re living your life based on the vision of what you want to create, then what happens is you will start to get inspired thoughts. You will be sitting there, and an example I use a lot is let’s say you want to go to medical school, and you’re sitting there doing your biology homework or your human anatomy homework. You get this inspiration you should take cookies to the lady down the block who recently lost her husband.

So, you do, and you make some cookies or you get them out of a bag or whatever, and you take them down maybe with some tea or something. You knock on her door, and she says, “Oh, Jack, good to see you. Come on in.”

So, you go in, and as you walk in, she says, “I’d like to introduce you to my nephew.” So, you get introduced to the nephew, and you find out a few minutes later he’s the admissions director for the school of medicine at Harvard University. You go, “Whoa, I have a little inside track now.”

If you hadn’t followed that inspiration, to go down and take the cookies, you would have missed out on that opportunity. So, the idea is once you’re intentional, like we talked about you making the intention to change your life, then what happens is believe there’s almost like a traffic director in the sky that says, “I can see you need to get off at this exit and go over here because that’s where an opportunity is going to be for you.”

All of a sudden, you have this inspiration that you should get off and go over to the Border’s bookstore and buy a book. While you’re waiting in line, you start talking to the person next you, and it turns out that they’re someone that becomes a business partner over time.

So, you have to trust these inspirations to start a business or to make a phone call or to take an action or go to a seminar, whatever it might be. Trust them. The only reason we don’t trust ourselves is either somebody talked us out of it, disciplined out of it, or scared us out of it.

Obviously, who should we trust more than ourselves? I used to teach self-esteem workshops and ideas that we need to trust our own feelings, trust our thoughts, trust our desires, trust what we’re attracted to, follow our heart, follow our bliss, follow our curiosity.

You and I are people who have followed that which we were interested in. We took the seminar we were interested in, and we read the book we were interested in. We went on Google, and we looked up stuff. We surfed the net, and we just pursued that. As a result, we found things we were passionate about, and then we were able to share that with others who were equally in need or equally passionate about it.

So, the point is the person you should trust the most is yourself. Who knows more about you than you? Not your mother, not your father, not your friends, not your boss, and so we have to regain trust in ourselves, and trusting that God is acting through us as us and trusting that ourselves is when we’re tapped into God through meditation, or just following our true inspired thoughts, then it works. It’s like we’re tapped in.

A friend of mine says an iron only works when it’s plugged into the wall. People only work when they’re plugged into their source.

A friend of mine wrote a book called Make the Second Half or Your Life the Best Half of Your Life. For many of us, we’ve been hypnotized into believing that we’re supposed to retire and then just sit back and vegetate. One of the really sad things about retirement, we know that the majority of men die within a year or two of retiring, and the reason is they’ve lost sense of any purpose, any sense of value, any sense of what keeps them around, gives them something to do. We know that a lot of people in their eighties will die right after a major holiday, the reason being that they got through. They knew they had to stay alive until Christmas when their grandchildren were going to visit them or whatever. So, they have a goal. They have a purpose, but as soon as that purpose is gone, their life force kind of ebbs and disappears.

So, it’s critical that even in retirement, if you want to call it that, once we’ve left the job that we find something to do that makes a difference whether it’s volunteer work, a new job, a new way of doing something valuable in the world.

What I’m trying to stress here is that if you find and follow your heart, find that which makes you joyful, that which gives you fun and pleasure, that which is interesting to you. You will automatically find a way to make money. There’s a wonderful book called Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow by Marsha Senatar, which is one of the ways I’ve lived my life is not work for money. Work to express yourself, work to have an impact, work to make a difference, work to serve.

Raven: I want you to share your insight and thoughts to our listeners on how important it is to visualize our success, Jack.

Jack: What you want to do is spend at least two sessions a day, about five minutes, close your eyes and visualize your life – perfectly, ideally the way you want it to be.

So, there are many techniques you can do to support that. You can create it on a vision board where you have pictures of all the things that represent your ideal weight, your income, places you want to visit on the planet, vacations you want to take, the house you want to own, the car you want to own, etc. You see that in The Secret with John Assaraf and his ideal home was a beautiful example of how a vision board works.

We know have on a screen saver vision board. Mine is on right now because I’m not on my computer, and literally streaming by me, I’ll tell you, there’s a picture of me and my wife on an island looking out representing the idea of vacation. Then, there’s a picture of a million dollar bill. It says, “I’m masterfully manifesting eight million dollars a year personal net income to me.” There’s a picture of a Time Magazine cover going by with Mark Victor Hansen and my face on it. It says, “One billion sold,” which is the image of having sold one billion copies of Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Visualization is critical. The term visionary, we think of Mandela, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Steven Spielberg, as visionaries, Walt Disney, but why? Because they continually held the vision of what they wanted in front of their head, and then they ended up with Disney World and Walt Disney theme parks all over the world. He saw those in his mind years before they ever manifested, but he always kept coming back and holding that vision in his mind everyday.

If you were sitting in my office where I am, and you were looking out where I’m looking, the door that comes into my office, the entire back of that door that I’m looking at is covered with images that I want to visualize or I want to manifest in my life.

There’s a picture of the world that says, “Peace,” on it because that’s critical to me. There’s a picture of me and my family all hugging each other and looking happy when we were over in Africa which represents world travel, and I want to go back to Africa with them.

So, the whole door literally from eight and a half feet tall, whatever it is, down to the floor is covered with images of future goals of mine. There are also eight million dollar bills, the kind that motivational speakers hand out that I’ve got on that door.

I also have four Canadian million dollar bills someone printed and gave to me. I surround myself constantly with the images of that which I want to produce. The first thing is you sit down and write what I call an ideal scene. What would your ideal life look like and all the seven areas that I talk about in my book – finances, job and career, relationships, health and fitness, travel, contribution you want to make, things you want to own, etc. Once you’ve done that, then start visualizing what we’ve just been talking about, and then you’re going to get these inspirations to act, which we also talked about. So, start taking those actions.

What I recommend is that you take at least five actions a day, intentional actions, toward one of your major goals – whatever is the most important. For me, this year, family is my most important goal, reconnecting with my older children and my younger son who is in college, etc, and basically, everyday, I make five phone calls, talk to my kids, talk to my friends, talk to my mother-in-law, etc, so, five actions to bring that into reality.

Now, if my main goal was financial, I might be making five outbound making calls or telemarketing calls or doing five radio shows like we’re doing right now so that everyday, there’s five specific actions that I take in the pursuit of that goal.

If I’m in a dead end job, and I’m looking to go somewhere and do something entrepreneurial, then I would take five action steps that day that would move me toward having that.

The other thing that I think is critical in this time in history is to ask. We have to ask for support, ask for guidance, ask to borrow a book, ask to be included in something, ask for the sale, whatever it might be, and not let rejection get in our way.

So many people are so afraid of hearing the word no, they say no to themselves by not taking action. So, it’s critical that we reach out and get involved with others. The other thing that I would do is I would say, “What habits will I need to have in place in order to be more successful?” Maybe I need to plan my day the night before. Maybe I need to do five things a day that we talked about. Maybe I need to develop a mastermind group and connect with them. Maybe I need to call back every call that I get within 24 hours so that I stay current, or to be more appreciative of the people in my life.

Now, once I have discovered or delineated what those habits are, then I want to pick one habit for three months, and I want to focus on that one habit. A lot of people say, “Well, I’ve got a lot of bad habits I need to replace.” Well, one every three months, now what happens is in three months, that will become an indelible part of my life.

Think about this, in five years, you’ll have twenty new success habits. That’s enough to transform your life beyond anything you’ve imagined, if you’re visualizing, asking for what you want, being appreciative, eating better, getting enough sleep, and we can go down the list of all the habits of successful people. What happens is you’re just going to see your life magically transformed to the highest level you can think of. The only thing, when something comes up, instead of saying, “Well, I can’t do it,” ask yourself, “How could I do it? If it were possible, what would have to happen? How could I make this happen?”

If you don’t have an initial answer, find someone who has already done it and ask them, “How did you do that? How did you manage to be a mother of three children, single mom, have a business and still take two weeks off and go to France?” Ask them, and if there’s no one to ask, then ask yourself. Just let your unconscious work on it. Visualize being in France. Then, what will happen is you’ll start waking up after a week or two with ideas. Then, you put those ideas in action.