Recently, Jairek Robbins was a guest on the “22 Minutes to Having It All” podcast and discussed the emotional blind spots ruining the happiness of so many people. We bring you the excerpts from that podcast interview hosted by Marlo Higgins.

Is there anything that you would like to elaborate outside of the bio we have?

There’s two things that I would like to mention with regard to questions about who I am. First, my number one goal every day is to make my wife feel like the most loved, adored, cherished and appreciated woman on the planet.

Number two, regarding what we do through our different vehicles of coaching, speaking, training, podcasting, writing books, and so on; all of this is underpinned by our desire to help the people that need help the most, at the moment they need it, and with the message they need. 

Tell us about your motivation- why did you select this career?

Well, my career of speaking and coaching companies or individuals is a vehicle for me to reach the person who needs my message. Actually, if I thought my message could only be delivered by riding and doing flips on a tricycle, I would learn how to do that in order to deliver my message. 

Based on my current talents and capabilities, the best vehicle to deliver my message is through the options currently available to me. Speaking, podcasting, writing books, coaching. If I could sing, I would gladly learn how to do so because I know music penetrates the soul a lot faster and more easily. 

We do speaking because speaking allows us to take little messages and throw them out there so that we can reach that one person at the very moment they need our message. We do coaching because it helps to influence the lives of the individuals we coach, their company, their families and their communities so that everyone can be at their happiest, healthiest, and wealthiest level possible.

We use products like educational courses to take material that wealthier people can pay for during one-on-one coaching, and we take that material and put it on a CD, partner with organizations like yours which reach millions of people, and then discount a, say, $200 dollar program and sell it at about $11 so that more people can access our message.

What is your take on motivation and how it has impacted your career?

Well, I get given the label of a “motivational speaker” but I would never give myself such a title. I am a researcher of practical tools that get instant results. For example, a lady hit me up on Instagram saying she’d separated with her husband, was out of a job and was engaged in a custody fight with her ex-husband. She was tired of it all and wanted to commit suicide and was wondering if I could motivate her to keep living.

I told her to immediately call the suicide hotline since I wasn’t the right person to help her with her situation, and I told her that as she waited for them to get to her she should go take a 3-minute cold shower. She was like “what?” I told her I didn’t fully grasp what she was going through and I wasn’t a therapist, but the cold shower would reset her biochemistry. A friend who is a specialist in neurochemistry has proven that a cold shower of that duration can trigger the best and most positive aspects of the fight or flight response.

And so we use practical tools that bring really fast results. I can show you how to do the same thing using a breathing pattern. The key here is to get an adjustment in your biochemistry so that you can trigger an adjustment in your mindset.

Most people try to feed their mindset hoping to get an adjustment in their biochemistry. It doesn’t work. Reading a bunch of positive stuff when you are stressed out leaves your biochemistry in a stressed state, but shocking your biochemistry into a more positive stance has an almost instantaneous effect of changing your mindset for the better.

The beauty is there’s so many ways to achieve this whether through breathing, movement, temperature-driven adjustments to your body, and so on. None of these are new. It is just like the monks on the hills in Tibet meditating while wearing just a loincloth sweating and yet the weather is extremely cold (10-inches of snow). People used to take an entire lifetime to learn these techniques but today, 5-6 days are enough to learn and apply the techniques. 

So you are passionate about teaching such concepts?

I am passionate about the results! I like showing people ways they can use to bounce right back when life has shoved them to the ground; they can say “I can get through this, I am going to breathe my way out of this.” 

So, how do you tie your soul into this? Give us some insights about how powerful a soul-based approach to life is.

I got the first flavor of that when I got told by a doctor I had six days to live while I was in a village in Uganda and I was suffering from a second bout of malaria. Lying on my supposed deathbed, I had a soulful experience during which I asked myself whether that was it and I wondered if that was all my life was supposed to be about.

Something beyond ourselves comes in at such points, and your spirit, which is your best self, takes over. It is when your spirit is in control and you are the best version of yourself that you can cheer on someone who has conquered a goal.

When you are your worst self and your best friend succeeds, you won’t be too thrilled about it because your inner spirit which connects with everyone around you will not be in charge.

You make this sound so simple. What advice do you have for a young entrepreneur wanting to become a high achiever?

We broke this down into a simple formula that we call “learn it, live it, teach it.” It starts with where you want to go or what you want to accomplish. It follows the following steps that I call my personal PhD on a subject;

• Put together a personal curriculum. For example, I used to have relationships that never lasted beyond 3 months, so I determined to learn how I could have a beautiful, passionate, loving and lasting relationship. I studied for 5 years before I met my wife. I took courses, read books, you name it. We have been together ever since and we continue to learn even if we got the result we wanted.
• Once you have all the information on the topic of your personal PhD, immediately start applying it. Live it, as we say.
• If you accumulate enough research and practical experience of what works or doesn’t work, start sharing it. Give it. I see a lot of people take a course, and then immediately begin teaching that course. Like really? What are you teaching that you haven’t even lived? I literally wrote a book called “Live It!” as a way of telling people to first implement or put into practice what they learn. My favorite quote on this is “what you do speaks so loudly I can’t hear anything you are saying.”

I am curious, was your wife also self-studied before coming into this relationship? Because lots of people hearing this see you guys as a powerful role model of what a relationship should be like.

When I met her, we were studying different things. But now they have overlapped. When I met her, she was working on her MBA and she was practicing and applying business while I was practicing and applying love and relationships.

And since then, we have kind of done an alignment and blending of interests. I had studied a little bit of business before I met her but when we got together, we kind of amplified and lifted up that research and study. We joined a mastermind group about business growth, we took 3-5 masters level business courses, and we have been studying piles and piles of business material together.

I also invited her to start studying relationships with me, and together we have studied both of those topics (business and relationships) for a collective 10-11 years. She’s about six years ahead of me in business, but I am approximately 5-6 years on my journey studying my personal PhD in business. 

So you saw the need for that personal PhD. Where else do you see the most need for it?

Everywhere! I see a lot of people who want instant answers. They want a guru or someone who tells them do this and everything will be fixed immediately. A lot of people are so consumed with the problem that they are not even trying to seek deep answers. A lot of people resort to distractions; going to do stuff to entertain themselves in order to avoid having to do any of the heavy lifting that goes into this process. But if you look at it as a process of learning, things get amazing.

I have a friend who grew up on the streets of Detroit, dropped out of school but later spent 13 years to get his GED, and from there it became an addiction. He went on to get a college degree, a masters, and eventually a PhD in education. And now he goes to speak to young people and big corporations too! He tells them he was a homeless kid sleeping in abandoned buildings and eating out of trash cans but now he has his PhD and this is what it has done for his life. 

My favorite thing with him is that he says he’s not the smartest guy but he’d wake up at 3a.m. and study hard in order to be able to compete with the smart guys he was studying with. You don’t have to be the smartest guy to make it. 

What advice do you have for somebody who wants to be a high achiever and they are struggling to get there?

I work with predominantly male entrepreneurs aged 35-45 years old. Their main challenge is they have so many things going on in their lives. They have a relationship, they are trying to keep healthy, and they usually have 0-3 kids or one on the way.

My type of clients will wake up and miss breakfast and have their tank at 25% from yesterday. They somehow think they will manage to coast to their destination while they are in such a state, and this is a very idiotic and silly decision. 

We emphasize little things like eating the right things at the right time. We always look at someone holistically and recommend sleep, diet, exercise, movement, mindfulness, peer group, happiness, and relationship. Then we say let’s measure where you are at on each of those parameters.

Research shows that about 60% of what we do is unconscious habits, meaning that people usually have a few bad habits that are giving them the result called “struggle.” We purpose to go back and identify the habit causing the struggle, and we rewire it to get a result called “amazing world-class results.” They can then work to get addicted to this helpful habit, and the 60% they do unconsciously will give them phenomenal results.

Most people are aiming for the results achieved by the top 0.001% in the world, but when you look at their habits, they are still stuck in the region of the majority 99% who aren’t super happy, aren’t doing well financially, don’t have amazing relationships, and so on. The math doesn’t add up; if you remain with the habits of the 99% you will never get the results of the top 0.001%.

The question now becomes, what is that one habit which will get us to the top 1% even if you don’t get into the circle of the top 0.001 percent? Once you figure out those habits, now you know what to work on every day. And you are on your way to massive success!

To Your Success,

Jairek Robbins