Thomas Green here with ethical marketing service on the episode. Today we have John James Santangelo. John, welcome. Welcome, buddy. Good, good pronunciation. It’s very good to have you. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do? Sure. That’s a good question. What do I do? Well, really, I think for a lot of people, we all struggle at some point in our life, life is either an up or down. And a lot of people I’ve seen over the last 30 years of my career, a lot of people focus on the down in their life and don’t realize that there’s an up like anything in the universe, right? It’s the Yin Yang theory. There’s the up the down the black and white, the right and the left. And I came to a point in my life just probably like everyone else’s, it’s do or die. And literally, I think it was for me at that time, I was about 20 years old and I didn’t know what I was doing, graduated high school. I had no idea. You know, you’re supposed to go to college, get a job.
It wasn’t fun for me. At one point, I started doing drugs and I had a bottle of pills in my hand thinking God, is this an answer? And I heard my grandfather’s voice in the back of my head. You’re better than this. And after years of figuring out what I want to do, I went on a quest and I came across a lot of self development programs. And as I was just saying before the interview, I listen to Tony Robbins and I was fascinated with the world of N LP neuro linguistic programming, went and got my certifications, my master’s, my trainers and I just finished my phd and I love helping people and that’s kind of what we do here, right? This is what you do and what I do, we just do it in different medium and it’s just fascinating what evolves from your idea, right? I think a lot of people have great ideas and they never really facilitate it. They never take action on. That’s the real secret to success is action, knowing what it is and then being able to, you know, put it into a plan and then stepping forward into the unknown.
And that’s, that’s the biggest challenge that we find in any coaching field stepping into that unknown. You know, Deepak Tora says the unknown is where all the possibilities lie and the rewards lie in that as well, except we stand on the precipice of that and looking down and going. Wow, this is so scary and we never take that first step in really understanding what it really is to, to dive into it head first. And for me, I’ve learned from now at this point in my life. Isn’t it about that? Isn’t it about time that we take those moments and we take those ideas and put them into action? Because the, the thing that I know and I’ll give you a quick story about this. My wife works as a respiratory therapist in the hospital. She’s the one that pulls the plug on people and stands around with the family and cries. And I, I just don’t know how she does that. It’s, it’s an amazing job but a lot of people at that point in your life when you’re at the last moment, what are you looking back on? Right. You’re looking back on regret.
Most people have regret that they wish that they could have done something they could have taken those steps. They would have said to people I love you more or done that one thing or changed career or, you know, found the relationship that truly moved them. And I believe that’s our job. That’s our job to help people push them past that moment of fear and into that glory and that joy and the happiness that we get out of life. It was a great introduction. Thank you for that. Um I’ll follow up on where you were in your life, when you decided to start pursuing self development, you said that it was kind of one way which was might be perceived as negative and then the other way, which was, um you know, listening to Tony Robbins and, and taking action, uh what happens next for you at that point? And also what would you encourage others to do if they’re in a similar position? That’s a great question. You know, for me, I was just really curious at how things work. I, I I’m a great problem solver. I like to take things apart and figure out how they work. And, and that’s for me, there’s different, um there’s different personality characteristics.
Everybody has, some people are builders, some people are problem solvers, some people are leaders. I think you’ve got to really discover who you are. And that’s the one of the two biggest questions that we ask in life is who we are and what am I doing here? Right? And that, that what am I doing here is your path? That’s your passion. And I can tell you this and, and you probably know this as well that the thing that you find yourself doing in life that you, as we were just saying, you’re really truly passionate about is the thing that you’re best at when you’re a kid that you find doing those same things when you’re playing up until probably, you know, you’re eight or 12 years old, somewhere there that you love doing. And unfortunately the, the system, I don’t know what you wanna call, that you call it society, government, whatever it is, they don’t really allow us to nurture that. Right. They don’t they, what, what’s, what do your parents say when you’re growing up?
Right. Finish school. Get good grades. Go to college, get a job. Really? That’s it. That’s it. I mean, what? And then the weekend, oh, we get two days a week to enjoy ourselves and do something that we love to do. Now, obviously, as a family and you have hobbies in between, you know, most of us spend time either in the job they don’t like or in a relationship they don’t want. And that’s really scary. You know, like I said before, when you, when you look back on your life, I don’t care how old you are. They’re in your twenties and you’re in your fifties, you look back, it doesn’t matter what, what you were doing. Are you enjoying it? Are you? And that’s the real question? And so at that point in my life is you were just asking me the question I kept asking myself was really this because I believe, I believe questions are really important because you get answers, your unconscious mind loves you and it just wants to provide for you. And if you ask the right questions, it will provide the answers. So the question I kept asking asking myself was what do I want to do with the rest of my life if I could do anything? Really. And I mean, it, and I hate to say it like this, it took me 10 years to figure it out.
I tried businesses, I would try on businesses in my head for months and go God, if I was getting up for work to do this, if I was starting a business and doing this, some, some jobs I actually did. Nothing appealed to me. And then one day I realized this and this is the thing you have to ask, what are you good at is always just saying I was good at entertaining and I was good at teaching. And then I was like, OK, what am I gonna do with that? What is that all about? Right? I became a professional speaker. That was my first question in the self development field. You’ve got to dig, you’ve gotta dig and you’ve, and, and here’s the thing I believe this, you’ve got to take responsibility. You’ve got to truly ask yourself and be honest with yourself is what I’m doing. Driving my passion is it make me happy? And of course, what are most people gonna say? No, not really. And that’s scary. That’s a scary answer to come across. Do you remember when that was that? You figured that out? You said it was 10 years? You mean what age or what, what point in my life. Was it like a process where you gradually figured out that you wanted to be a public speaker or was it just like this light switch moment where you, where it clicked for you?
Um, I would say it was a process, you know, like I said, I, I’ve, I’ve done different things. I still own a couple of businesses and when I realized, wow, I, I’d be good at that then, like every other one I did you venture into it? And when I started the internet was just building itself, the awareness of it was just there. So it wasn’t like, I’d go online and learn how to become a professional speaker. I had to hire different professional coaches, go to different courses and I had some great teachers and I think that’s what it really is about too. Neuro linguistic programming. N LP is about modeling. It’s modeling success. You know, I said, tell clients, I was in the fitness industry for 15 years of my life, 20 years before this and working with people in the fitness industry, most people wanna do what lose weight get in shape. You know, it, it doesn’t matter how much you show them, they have to get it up here first. Right. Most people, oh, I just wanna lose £10.
Losing £10 is simple. Getting in shape is simple. Starting a business is simple. It’s just not easy. You, you have to break through that. I I think most people just call it a comfort zone. We call it an N LP, your boundary conditions, the boundary conditions, your beliefs. What do you believe about yourself? Who you are, your self worth? And once you come to that realization, you’re knocking on that door, you’ve got to open the door and go, OK, I’m gonna do this no matter what happens, I’m gonna sacrifice my time which most people don’t wanna sacrifice, right? They, they wanna spend the weekends. As I was just saying before, they’d rather just do their work and party on Friday and Saturday night and start all over again. Well, you talk to somebody like Elon Musk where he spends eight days a week, 25 hours a day doing what he loves because it’s something that he loves, he’s passionate about it. And then as you were just saying before, when you find something like that, when you find that point in your life where you’re like, this is not work, you’re excited to get up. You’re excited to do the interviews.
I’m excited to work with people. I’m excited to get those breakthroughs with individuals that come to that aha moment and go. This is it. I’m moving on a different direction. That’s just, that’s what life is about for me. You used a, um, a fitness example and I think that there, um, there’s some quite good crossovers from fitness to business and also self development. But, um, in the context of someone wanting to change and take action but not being able to um deep. And you mentioned the mindset. Is there anything that you think of in relation to advice in that topic? Yes. And it’s real simple. When I got into this business, I was fascinated how the brain worked because obviously it starts with everything. We’re not a body that’s walking around without a brain or a mind, right? The mind is out here, the brain is inside the, the mind and the brain have to work together. But I was fascinated how the brain worked and why it worked in that way. And when you start really uncovering a lot of these, you know, tips and tricks and strategies, I call a mental recipes of how the brain works.
It’s easier to use these strategies to get what you want. And so I uncovered this success is really only about two things. It really is this simple. Number one, it’s knowing what you want. You gotta be real clear about what you want and most people won’t even go there because they’re afraid they start prep planning what’s gonna happen, right? Like, oh, I’ll give you a perfect oh, this is a perfect example. When I was going through my hypnotherapy school, we had to do an internship and we had to watch the instructor up on stage and all the students are sitting there and then people would come up on stage that they’d invite from the public to get free sessions if they do it in front of the students. And one woman, shes a wonderful lady and she says all I wanted to do was lose like 20 or £30. We spent over six sessions over a period of time working with her. And if you know anything about hypnosis, usually it works within one or two sessions. If you get a real good hypnotherapist, we spent so much time with her and pretty soon after a period of time, she, the, the, the, the therapist said, are you really interested in losing this weight?
Is this something you really want to do? She was well, right there, we knew if you’re not committed, it won’t work. Right. So, the therapist says to her, what’s holding you back? She was, oh, well, if I lose this weight, I’m gonna get divorced. We’re like, what, where’s that coming from? Well, here was her train of thought and this is how most people think when they want to achieve something. She goes, well, if I lose the weight, I’m gonna have to buy all new clothes. We’re like, ok, that’s reasonable. Well, yeah, but then if I buy new clothes, I’m gonna feel a lot better about myself. She goes, ok, that’s, again, that’s another train, another link in the chain. But then, you know, if I feel better about myself, I’m gonna go on to go out and do things and kind of show off like, OK, that’s, that’s good for your ego. She was. Yeah. But then if men are attracted to me, they’re gonna ask me out and I’m not gonna be able to say no, therefore I’m gonna get a divorce and we’re like, wow, that’s fascinating that she came to that conclusion.
And yet we all have these, we all have these preprogrammed beliefs about what we’re gonna do and how they’re gonna happen and the result. And for her, it was, I wanted the goal but not that bad because in N LP, we call it a value system. What’s most important to you making money is really important to you. You’re gonna have to at some point, spend more time at work or spend more time. And if you value one of your value systems is family, you’re gonna spend less time with your family. Now, if that value of family is here and work is here, guess what’s gonna win, right? Your family val. Therefore, you’re gonna spend more time with your family and less time at work or the same thing about health, right? If money is really important, but fitness is up here, which one’s gonna win. And so we don’t really understand that process. So knowing what you want is Napoleon Hill in his book, Think And Grow Rich wrote, you’ve got to have this burning white heat of passion to understand that driving force.
And the second one is really learning to get out of your own way. And we all do this kind of what I was just talking about, right? That’s self sabotage, procrastination. You gotta learn those negative strategies at what holds you back. And again, that’s taking responsibility. I love this quote by Wayne Dyer. Doctor Wayne Dyer, he says responsibility is responding with ability. It’s just a perfect way to say it. I love how uh immersed you are in the self development uh world. It’s, it’s kind of like, um, I don’t know, be being among other people that are like you because I’m, I’m kind of the same in the sense that, you know, I’ve got little quotes for various different things and I just, I just love to see it. I thought I’d say that. But, um, the second thing I was gonna say was about the fact that based on the example you gave, uh and the fact that many people suffer from this problem, your value system is probably quite important in determining what it is that you want. So, have you got any exercises or thoughts perhaps on how people can figure out what their value system is?
Yeah, it’s real simple. You know, the exercise we do. If I have a, a live class, I always like doing live courses because you get people’s reactions right away, not over a course and then an email or a call later on what we do is I’ll just ask them this simple question and you can, uh, whether this question can be, it can be done in sales, you could do this with your kids and, or your spouse. And the question really is simple. It’s what, what is most important to you about? Blank, right. What’s most important to you about your life right? Now, what’s most important to you about your kids? What’s most important to you about making money? What’s most important to you career? What’s most important to you about your health? Most people will come up with a list if you’re really honest, I mean, and that’s again, it, it comes down to this. If you’re not honest with yourself, don’t bother trying because your brain won’t even recognize the fact that where you are. This is a funny question that I love asking my clients when they first call me up on the phone.
If we’re doing a coaching session. The first question I ask is, let’s pretend, let’s pretend I’m your travel agent. What’s the first question I’m gonna ask you? Where do you wanna go? Where do you wanna go? Now? The crazy thing Thomas is this. People will always say, well, you know, I’ve been in New York, I don’t wanna go there and that’s just, you know, and I’d love to go to, I’d love to go to Canada. Ban Banff Lake is beautiful this time, but it’s so cold like, ok, I get that. I get that. But where do you wanna go? 000, I love Mexico. But, you know, I’ve been there so many times. It’s just, and that’s what people do. They go back into the past and they bring up their, you know, where they’ve been or what they don’t want, what they focus on what they don’t want and they really don’t want to go there what they do want because again, they have all these preconceived beliefs about what’s possible out there. And so if you don’t really understand that, then what’s the idea? So what’s most important to you write it down and then look at it honestly and think, wow, this is interesting if I asked what’s most important to me about my life, family is number one, maybe God or religion, you know, health.
Wow. Money is not even on that list of 10. If you think you’re gonna be really successful in your career or making money, it’s not on the list, it’s not gonna happen. Right. And that’s a whole another process of taking inventory and then moving that number up into the top three because that’s really what it is. It’s the top three that we focus on and that’s what gets our most attention units. The other thing you, I was gonna ask you about was the, the steps that that lady was thinking about in terms of all the way down the line after I lose weight. Um, do you think that there’s value in doing that, taking the long term view. Uh, because from my perspective, it’s a useful exercise to look at that long term view, but not if you’re going to, should we say, read into something? Which is not necessarily true. What are your thoughts on that? Well, that’s a great idea. Although you have to have somebody like a coach to bounce those ideas off, you can’t do it in your head again. We’re stuck, we’re stuck within those boundary conditions. We only know what we know, right?
And it, it, it, you know, I, I do this exercising class with the students. I go pretend this wall, all the walls, the ceiling, the floor around me are the boundary conditions of the belief, let’s say about money. And as soon as I start moving closer to this wall, the unconscious mind which runs 90% of who we are. 90% of our beliefs, our value systems, our meta programs, our attitudes, everything’s built in who we are. Our identity is in that 90%. And as we move closer to the boundary conditions, that belief, now what we want is on the other side of that wall, right? Because everything we know is in this room as we move closer to that wall, the unconscious mind goes, whoa, whoa whoa, hold on, hold on. We don’t know what’s over there. We don’t want no, that’s just gonna bring us pain. We don’t like pain and the number one prime directive of the unconscious mind is to avoid pain at all costs. That’s it. It’s to preserve the body. That’s its primal instinct. Anything that brings us pain, whether it be, well, this roof could fall on my head or my, it, it’s raining outside or you know, somebody’s ridiculing me.
That’s all pain. Stepping into the unknown outside of these boundary conditions of this belief is that’s gonna bring me pain. Therefore, we stay away from that in N LP. We say we do more to avoid pain than gain pleasure. So what do you think the unconscious mind is gonna do when you introduce something new into the system? It’s gonna go. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s the unknown. We don’t go there. So you have to be brave enough to really set that goal, become clear and know what’s in your way and step through that. And the funny thing is everybody says this, every single person says this once they’re on the other side of the boundary conditions, that old belief go oh my God. That was so easy because that’s really all it is. It’s not a physical wall, right? It’s something that we perceive as pain, fear, ridicule, self worth. I can tell you this, I’ll tell you this from working with all the people, whether it be companies, individuals, every person that comes to me when we drill down to what the problem is.
The core essence. We call it an onion in their life, right? We start peeling away the onions of their life. The core is always about self worth, always comes down to self worth. Every single problem. How you feel about yourself. Can I do it? Should I take this step? Am I worthy? That’s a great question. Am I worthy of having? This? Seems like a very important thing to follow up on then how does someone change their self worth if they don’t feel worthy of what it is that they’re looking to achieve? That’s one of the next books I’m working on is mastering self-confidence and that really is all it’s about. And, and I think the easiest way to do this, I love giving people tasks. My, I think my responsibility and what I do is give people a strategy AAA recipe to do something and then break it down into chunks, right? You, you see this big monster of a problem and you go, oh my God. Well, you break it down and something that’s simple. Oh, I could do that and then I can do that and then I can do that pretty soon.
They’re, you know, they’re up the staircase or up the ladder. Um I believe is taking small baby steps, right? Let I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you wanted a relation. You want to get into a relationship. Well, what’s the first thing you wanna do? You gotta take assessment of who you are, right. What are your best traits and your characteristics? Right? You can build in characteristics. Those are easy. Those are just habits, right? Learn something that this potential person you want would like in you. Right? And then build that characteristics within you. That’s another thing. Maybe if it’s, I need to lose a little weight before I, I, that person that I want is attracted to me. Ok, then what are the steps in? You losing weight? All right. Maybe I need to update my wardrobe, right? Maybe I need to learn a little more patience. You write that list down and start knocking those things off little by little. But unfortunately, most people don’t even wanna go there. They look at that as too much work as we were saying before is you gotta look at the end goal to keep the motivation, the passion alive.
And then you’ve got to have the discipline enough every single day to take those steps forward because the question that you asked is really about this success builds on success. It really does. When you feel good about doing something simple as writing down a list, you’re like, oh God, I did something. This is amazing. Right? Look, I never thought that this would be possible. And look, and I’ve written it down because when it, when you write it down, it becomes a reality. It’s not a dream just stuck in your mind. And so when you feel good about one small step. You’re more apt to take the next step in doing something simple again, simple little tasks will lead you forward to get what you want. You touched on something which I was gonna ask you about. Um, and it’s habits. So let’s say you want to build a particular habit like um a characteristic into your, into your life. Um How do you go about doing that the same way the brain learns again. If we go back to the process of N LP and modeling, how’d you learn how to walk?
Did you do it the first time? Did you stand up at, you know, at a year or a year and a half old and go on the end of the bed or the end of the coffee table and go, oh my God. This is so easy. No, it takes practice. That’s how the brain works. The brain learns through repetition, repetition. That is it, those are habits now. Unfortunately, we learned bad habits as well. Right. Raise your hand if you’re a listener, if you’ve ever been in a relationship that didn’t work, raise your hand. Come on, raise your hand if you’ve ever gotten dumped before, to be honest. Right. Did the first relationship you ever have work out? No, because you’re not ready and that person, no matter how much you wanted them wasn’t right for you. And it’s a learning process. You’re learning, hopefully who you are, who you are and how you fit into the world, right? We don’t make the world and I’m probably gonna piss off a lot of manifests in saying this is, you know, you don’t manifest the world and it comes to you, you become the person first, your vibrational energy becomes and then you fit yourself into the world because they’re attracted to each other.
They just don’t, is one of my coaches you say goes if you want money, a bag of money just doesn’t fall out of the sky. It just doesn’t work like that, right? You’re attracted to the job that gets you there. Or you know, there’s a cute joke. I love this joke. There’s a gentleman. He’s, he’s praying to God every day. Lord, please just let me win the lotto. Just let me win the lotto, I’ll do whatever it takes, you know, days gone by. He’s like Lord, I, I’m doing whatever. Come on, please. Just let me win the lotto and weeks and months go by and he f he finally comes down to earth and he says, buy a ticket, buy a ticket. You gotta do what works, right? You gotta do what works. And I think that’s what it is. Building great habits is practice, practice, practice. Well, a lot of these principles I I love by the way and um they, they go towards being a my perception, a successful person. Um The flip side of success of course, would be failure. So, um, let’s say someone, uh, attempts to implement these and they get smacked in the face by life. Uh, what, what thoughts do you have smacked?
Well, let me turn the tables on you when you started this podcast. Was it out of necessity or was it out of want and desire? Hm. I, I would probably say if it had to be one of those two categories, it would be the second one. I, it was more out of, uh, making something good out of a bad situation, I would say. Right? Ok. So we call that the towards and away from, we move away from pain and towards pleasure for most people, for most people, they’re moving away from pain. Right? I hate this job. I gotta go find something different. I’m broke, I’m living on the street, I’ve gotta go, I gotta go make some money or find a place to live or get some food. They’re in a bad relationship. Right? Most people don’t come to the realization of something they want out of the height of where they are. They don’t go. Oh my God, my relationships. Awesome. I wanna make it better. Holy macro. I’m making a million dollars a year. I wanna make 10. I’m not saying people don’t just very few get to that point that, that away from strategy is usually what drives people’s results.
The unfortunate thing, we kind of call it like a thermostat once you I’ve given, it’s a perfect example. I wanna make money. Let’s see, you have a normal job you’re making. I don’t know what’s normal in the world nowadays. 50,000 a year, you’re making 50,000 a year. You’re like, I wanna buy a house, but it’s gonna take me 100 and 50,000. So I’m gonna go make some money. The challenge is most people move away from that pain of, you know, only having $50,000 and once they start making 100 and 50 that drive that passion wanes because there’s no pain anymore. And so then the fire kind of subsides and they stop doing the things that they need to do. They start, you know, they, they don’t schedule the meetings. You know, they’re not doing what they want, they’re not telling their employees that they have employees that they’re doing a great job and all of a sudden they find themselves back at $50,000 again because that there’s no, there’s no fire underneath them anymore. Right. And I think, you know, the next question I would ask you is what were you fearful about when you started the business? Or was it just gung ho and go until I figure it out?
What was the one thing that bothered you? The one thing that you were most afraid that would have could have happened, uh, is a question about the business or the podcast. Well, the podcast when you started the podcast. There’s a lot. You did, you didn’t know a whole lot about it. I mean, maybe you were a guest on podcast but doing a podcast is completely different. Right. I suppose the, um, the fears were putting something out which was sub par, which wasn’t very good. And then also, um, you know, no one would be interested type thing. Right. Right. And guess what, what does that come back to when we start peeling away the onion, our self worth, right. How I feel about myself. But you know, people are gonna ridicule me for it. It’s not gonna be good enough. Am I gonna be good enough? Yeah, I have the same thing nowadays. You know, we all have moments, we’re human, right? We’re human and take that into consideration that I’m a human being as Wayne Dyer says I’m a human doing as well, right? You can do this. But, but also you have to be human and knowing that you were gonna make mistakes.
And I think for me, one of the what we call an N LP A presupposition of success. There’s 14 of them. One of these statements is there is no failure, only feedback. And that was huge for me. That was huge for me because my father was driven beyond. And I can tell you this, he came from a lot of pain in his childhood. So he was moving away from that pain and he did really well. In his life and he was a perfectionist. And of course, you know, as Children, we model our parents, you either become like them or you move away away from them completely. Like if they’re an alcoholic, you become an alcoholic, you never drink, you know, in your life. And so for him, my father was such a perfectionist that nothing I did was, you know, good enough. I remember one time he, he said to me, I was eight years old. I think it was seven or eight years old. And I know he didn’t mean this, but it just came out of his mouth and he said, you’re so damn lazy. I’m eight years old. Come on.
Right. And so that stuck with me for a long time. Even today. I still hear that. Now I moved away from it completely. I mean, if you saw me every day, in fact, my wife gave me a great compliment last night. She goes, you’re the hardest working person that I know and I do and that’s to move away from that. Right. I don’t ever wanna be considered lazy. And so we gravitate or move away from those pain strategies or those goal strategies. And, you know, I, I if people can recognize it, I think awareness is such a huge compliment to this body is really recognizing what we’re going through and give yourself a break and ease up on yourself a little bit. And as my mom used to say if you don’t pat yourself on the back, no one’s gonna do it for you. Right. The world out there is not a nice place. It’s not, you know, people are and I don’t wanna say mean, that’s probably a bad word to use for personality traits because nobody’s, well, there are some mean people, sometimes they don’t even think they mean it, I think that’s just their background talking.
Right. That’s just their parental issues they got going on because they don’t feel good about themselves and you know, they want to placate that on, on other people and, and we’re fighting that as Children. I mean, I think the autonomous stage when we’re young is about 13 years old. When you start to get in middle grade somewhere in there, you start to find out who you are and what are you, what are most of the kids around you doing? They’re trying to figure out who they are and they don’t want you surpassing them. So unconsciously, they’re trying to hold you down. And so our society is comprised of most of the people that we hang out with even to this day, look at the five friends and this is just a crazy quote. People say you are who the five people you hang around with and then that’s the energy. I think. I don’t know if it’s true. I think if you’re hanging out in the gutter with your friends, you wanna become successful. I think it’ll work. You wanna up level your life, go hang out with millionaires, go hang out with great people that have a wonderful relationship, right? If you wanna become really healthy, go to the gym, hang out with people that are in that energy vibration simple.
You mentioned in your answer about your dad and a lot of you, your work is um about emotional states controlling your emotional states. So do you think he would have benefited from the stuff that you know now? And uh if that’s a loaded question, if there is a uh a person who doesn’t want to control their emotional state around their kids, what would you encourage them to do? You know what’s crazy is we had a party for Christmas at my sister’s house, the whole family, there was like 60 people. My dad’s Italian, eight kids, 13 grand and I sat with him in the backyard and I wanted to ask them this question and literally, he’s 85. He’s in sucky health. Health was not important. He still smokes. He says, I don’t care, I’m gonna smoke until I die. Whatever. I’m having a good time. OK, great. I asked him, I said, can I ask you a personal question? Dad? I believe everybody could do this and should do this because most people when they’re going through pain in their life or they’re doing something and all this fear comes up, that’s their past.
That’s not their future. The future is unknown. We don’t know what’s gonna happen tomorrow. It could be good or bad. It’s a 5050 roll the dice flip of the coin. But most people act on from the past, right? They act on what they know, not what they don’t know. So I asked my dad, I said, can you tell me about your childhood real quick? Now, I knew a little bit about it. My grandmother died when I was 17. He says, why do you ask that? I go, I just wanna get a little bit of background on where you’re coming from. So I can understand where I’m coming from. Right. That’s called genealogical behavioral traits. We pass that stuff down. He says, you know, my, my mom, she was, she was sort of mean when I was young, she would, this is back in the fifties. She cut up like cleats, their baseball cleats have little spikes on them back then. There was no such thing as sneakers. We didn’t have sneakers or tennis shoes. They weren’t invented yet. So it was really important to him as a kid. Those cleats were like everything to him. It was like, wow, she really cut him up. She must have been pissed.
I go what you do because I, I don’t know. I was bothering my sister. She was one day she came in, I had model airplanes hanging from the ceiling. She knocked them all down like Wow. Now I’m paraphrasing the conversation it took, you know, of course, over a half hour because one time she made my father, she made my father make a whip out of some leather and he cut it up in like five strips and put a wooden handle on it so she could smack me with it. I’m like, holy shit. Can I say that? Holy mackerel? No. Sh And, and I, this is a dichotomy in personality. I could say she was a wonderful person because I was her grandson, I was the first born. So she treated me like gold, but her own kids, right? The point in this is I had a lot more empathy for my father rather than blaming him for things that I didn’t get as a child or he should have could have would have done. He was a great provider. He was a great leader. We had a nice home all the time, but he was never home. He was never home seven days a week. He was working, I mean, literally seven days a week.
And I think that was him escaping the past, right? And so this is the second time I did it. I did it when I was 30 years old and I did it recently and I learned a lot about him, right? And, and here’s one of the saying is when you start blaming other people, you start pointing the finger. There’s three pointing back at you, you gotta take responsibility for your actions and who you are. And a lot of people don’t wanna do that because it’s so much easier to point the finger and go. It was my parents. Oh, it was my boss. Oh, it was my first wife. Right. It’s the kids. It’s the dog. It’s traffic rather than taking responsibility and go. Everything that happens to me, everything that I see in my world right now is a cause and effect of who I am. I love. The accountability or the responsibility, as you say, um just coming back to the, if you wanted to change that behavior, let’s say you’re guilty of doing that to your Children. How do you control your emotional state when that’s, that’s a tough one. That, that, that, that’s, that’s the question. That is life’s question, right?
Because if we are operating from our past and what we know and everything we know up until eight years old because the unconscious mind doesn’t even develop until you’re eight. We believe everything that’s told to us in that period. Everything you don’t question it. Not until about eight or 10 where you go. Really? Santa Claus comes down that little hole in the chimney. Come on the Easter bunny. Really colored eggs. I mean, come on. It’s a metaphor, but that’s what happens in life. So if you believe I’m lazy, that becomes part of your personality, right? If you believe you’re not worthy, I’m not good enough. I mean, we have all these beliefs in our system again, write them down because when you write them down, they, you start looking at them. Is that really who I am? Is that really what I’m all about? I mean, I could ask your listeners, what are some of the beliefs that your parents download it onto your little hard drive? A lot of, a lot of it is this money is always an issue.
It’s always an issue unless you come from a very rich family and they gave you everything and even then they have negative beliefs about money. Don’t share it with other people. Keep it. Don’t, you know, don’t, you know, spend it wisely but most people come to beliefs right around, probably 16 years old about money. When they start getting a job is, money doesn’t grow on trees. Right. It’s hard to get. Money is not easy to get. Right. I have to work too hard to get it. Where all those preconceived ideas. What, what about relationships? What are the beliefs about relationships? I dated a woman once and it was crazy. I couldn’t even believe. She said this. She goes, my mom told me over and over again. You don’t need a man. You can do everything on your own. Thats sad. That’s sad. Not uncommon, I don’t think. Yes. Right. And to say you don’t need it. Well, you don’t need anything. Right. We want things to enjoy the process of life. But the, but the way she said it was, don’t ever rely on anyone, especially a man. That’s the way I took it. And that’s the way she really said it to me. And I’m like, that’s, that’s unfortunate.
I, to this day, unfortunately, still she’s still single and it’s, you know, you have those beliefs going on in the background, you’re gonna abide by them, you know. And so to answer your question is write this stuff down, write it down because when you, when you write it down, you look at it and go, oh my God, do I believe, I don’t believe that, but that’s a conscious decision, right? That’s, that’s the 10% like an iceberg, 10% is above the surface, that 10% is looking that and go, I don’t believe that when the 90% that’s below the surface is going. Yes, you do. Look at your life, look at what you’ve produced. Money doesn’t grow on trees. Money is hard to cut. You gotta work your ass off to get, get what you want, right? That’s really the core essence of who you are. So I believe writing them down and here’s the great thing and people don’t like doing this because it’s scary is share those negative beliefs with other people because what happens is people go, are you kidding? That’s stupid. That, that gives you leverage, that gives you leverage going.
Oh Maybe it is stupid. That is kind of a dumb belief. Right. I don’t need men. I’d love to have a man in my life. Right. I’d love to be in a wonderful, healthy relationship. You challenge those negative beliefs. Well, um, I think you’ve given, uh, an amazing amount of, uh, value today. Um, I was gonna ask you about goals in general but, um, based on the fact that you’ve setting goals, I just wanted to ask you about your own goals. So, what are you looking to achieve at the moment? And, um, what’s that look like? You know, I’m the kind of person that’s got 100 things going on at once. And this year, my number one goal, literally my wife and I, every January 1st sit down, we go to a hotel somewhere, dress up really nice, have brunch and we do our goals for the whole year. Our marriage goals, our health goals and our thing, goals. What do we want? The things that we want? One of them was I wanna be more disciplined in doing one thing and, and executing that wonderfully.
And for me, it was building an app and putting all my content into this one app. And so people can go to the app store, Google Play Store and download the app and all my content is gonna be there. And that’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. I’ve got to rewrite scripts, record, audio, record video and that just doesn’t take a couple of days as, you know, recording is a pain because you’ve got to do a lot of editing as well. Right. And so for me, that one goal is to bring everything I know in the last 30 years out to the public and some of this is gonna be free on the app and I’ll, and I’ll pitch the app. It’s not ready yet. It’s N LP guru dot app. And when it’s done, write that down, it’ll be done in a couple of months and we’re gonna have a big launch for it. Uh on my website, I’ll tell you this. You wanna start off and start making simple changes in your life like we were describing before, go to my website L A like Los Angeles, Lan lp.com and there’s a link up there, it says free mini course and it really gives you an email lesson every single day to start paying attention to what you’re doing.
Like your internal language. How do you talk to yourself? What’s the internal dialogue that you use? Because if you’re constantly saying I’ll never do this, God, you’re such an idiot. You’re, you know, you’re stupid, whatever those things are, you’re not worth it. You gotta, as you were saying before, you gotta become aware of that first, you gotta become aware that what you’re doing isn’t working because most people focus on what’s not working rather than what is working and simple lessons in the second lesson. I think we talk about word power. Words can be powerful the word but try and problem, get rid of those instead of the word but use the word an instead of the word, try use I can or I can’t or I want to or I don’t want to because most people go, hey, I’ll try to make your party on Saturday night. You know, they’re not gonna make it in N LP. We say it’s, it’s excusing failure in advance. You know, you’re not gonna make it and get rid of the word problem. Use the word challenge because the problem is huge and your unconscious mind looks at that as something that’s, it’s insurmountable. Use the word challenge. Yeah, I could do that.
It’s, it’s easy enough, right? That’s the free mini course. I think you really enjoy it. I think so too. And uh I’ve no doubt that there’s tons of value in it. So thank you for, for sharing it. Um Is there anything I should have asked you about today? Oh, you were a great host. You really ask great question you ask, you ask really deep questions, not just surface level stuff. All right. Well, um I know you’ve uh you’ve said the, the app and the site is there anywhere else that people can connect with you? Well, you can go to Amazon, look for the books, you know, that’s always the easiest way to do it. We got eight books on different subjects. If you’re willing to put yourself out there and if you really want to take the next step, go to the website and sign up for a free 30 minute coaching session with me. Let’s just go over your plans, what you’re doing. I love it. Or we can just go back and forth through email. You know, I, I love giving back. You know, I’ve had wonderful instructors and coaches in my life. I still have great coaches. I, I’m always looking to better myself. Right. That’s the whole idea about life is getting further along and looking back at the top of the mountain going.
Wow, that was a wonderful journey. And you’re never done. You’re never done, you know. So reach out, I’d love to talk to some of you guys. Well, uh I reiterate, I think you’ve been amazing in terms of providing value. Um, do you have any closing thoughts for us today? Yes, real simple. Go for it. Go for it. That should be your mantra every day. Go for it. Ok, good one to end on John. Thank you for being a great podcast guest today. You were a rock star buddy. Thank you.
