The Success Principles, with Jack Canfield – Episode 231 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Best-selling author and speaker Jack Canfield chats about fulfilling your soul’s purpose and evolving that purpose, choosing love over fear, the secret behind “The Secret”, conducting thought experiments on the Moon, why thinking doesn’t beat action, and always, always, always asking for feedback.

About Jack:

Jack Canfield is most known as the co-creator and co-author of the New York Times #1 best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul book series which currently has 250 titles in the series and more than 500 million copies in print in 47 languages. He is also the founder and President of the Canfield Training Institute, which trains entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, managers and sales professionals in how to accelerate the achievement of their personal, professional and financial goals.

Jack has personally helped hundreds of thousands of people on six different continents become multi-millionaires, business leaders, best-selling authors, leading sales professionals, successful entrepreneurs, and world-class athletes while at the same time creating balanced, fulfilling and healthy lives. Jack is a dynamic speaker and was recently inducted into the National Speakers Association’s Speakers Hall of Fame.   He has appeared on more than 1,000 radio and television shows including Oprah, Montel, Larry King Live, the Today Show, and two hour-long PBS Specials devoted exclusively to his work.  Jack is also one of the teachers featured in the recent hit movies The Secret, The Truth and The Tapping Solution.

Jack’s best-known success resources are the New York Times best-selling book “The 10^th Anniversary of the Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, The Power of Focus, The Aladdin Factor, and Jack Canfield’s Key to Living the Law of Attraction.  All of these resources consist of powerful strategies designed to empower and inspire individuals to achieving success.  Jack’s vision is to train 1 million people his “success principles” to pass on his legacy to others. 

Jack has been presenting these powerful principles and breakthrough strategies for over 40 years to corporations, governments and universities in more than 30 countries. His clients have included Virgin Records, SONY Pictures, Daimler-Chrysler, KFC, Federal Express, GE, Johnson & Johnson, Merrill Lynch, Campbell’s Soup, Re/Max, The Million Dollar Forum, The Million Dollar Roundtable, and The Young Presidents Organization.

Learn more at JackCanfield.com

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

LISTEN:

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR RSS FEED: https://feeds.captivate.fm/the-action-catalyst/

SUBSCRIBE ELSEWHERE: https://the-action-catalyst.captivate.fm/listen

__________________________________________________________________________

(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host: Today our guest is Jack Canfield. Jack co-created the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series, and his book, The Success Principles is a game changer. Thanks for being here.

Jack Canfield: Thanks for inviting me.

Host: After 30 years, what do you think is the biggest difference between people who are successful and those that are not?

Jack Canfield: The first thing is you have to be committed to what it is you want to accomplish. You have to believe it’s possible. And I think you have to study success. Most people study their field. Very few people study the science of success. And it really is a science. There’s a methodology, there’s a system. Unfortunately, most of our culture thinks success is only financial and career and fame and fortune and all and power success is fulfilling your soul’s purpose. And the trick to unknowing that purpose is to discovering what brings you the greatest joy. And so when I’m doing that, then I’m fulfilling. My purpose. And, uh, when I’ve gotten into other kinds of ventures that weren’t along those lines, often they didn’t work out. And even when they did, they weren’t that fulfilling. The other thing I would just add to that real quickly is sometimes that purpose evolves over life. I mean, I started out as a high school teacher and then I became a teacher trainer and then I started writing books and then I started. Training and speaking, and now I’m training trainers and, and, you know, now something’s emerging, I think I’m going to be spending more time talking about love over fear, and that’s a lot different than just a success. And so I think as we go through life, we have to have the courage to walk away from that, which is no longer bringing us joy. Whenever you live your purpose fully, you automatically serve other people. You know, my wife’s purpose is simply to be an authentic, transparent person. In doing that, she gives other people permission to be authentic and transparent. And so it’s not like she’s going to make a million dollars from that. It’s not like she’s on Oprah. But the point is, everyone she touches leaves feeling more permission to simply be truly themselves.

Host: So, what is the biggest obstacle people typically face when fulfilling that purpose?

Jack Canfield: There are several. One is beliefs that they’re not worthy. Beliefs that they can’t do it. Beliefs that it’s not possible. Beliefs they don’t deserve it. As I said, I’ll give you an example. I had a really varied, a natural salesperson, a friend of mine named Scott down in Texas, took a seminar with me. And he was blocked. He could not make more than 140, 000 a year. And this guy should have been making a million dollars a year easily. And we did an exercise where I went, I asked people, what is it you’re trying to manifest? You can’t manifest. Then we do a body scan. We find out where in your body you feel tension, numbness, or pain. We ride that back to the earliest time you can remember feeling that. And he went back to when he had just graduated from college and he got his first check from this insurance company. And he was really proud cause it was really big. Cause as I said, he’s a natural salesperson. And then he went and showed it to his father and his father just grimaced and walked away. And later he found out from his mother, because he was upset that his father was so upset, that his, his check, his first check was bigger than his father’s check, who’d worked at that company for like 20 years. I never wanted to make my father feel bad. And so at this Age of 21, he made a decision that he forgot he made. He was 43 when he took my seminar. And we went back and released that, that belief that he could not make more than his father. The next week, he made one fifth of his income and went on to make over 800, 000 that next year. So, Subconscious unconscious beliefs that we don’t even know where we have most of them are formed between the age of three and eight, but some of them come later. Like with Scott, the second thing that really stops people is fear, fear of rejection, fear of failure. So fear and limiting beliefs. And I think finally I would say lack of knowledge people don’t know enough and they don’t and they live in resignation. They don’t go out and seek out information like your podcast and mine. They don’t read books. They don’t watch ted talks So they don’t know And so they’re living in this place of ignorance, and so we have to commit ourselves to studying that which is going to make us successful.

Host: You were a big part of the film, “The Secret”, which delves into the law of attraction. For people who are unfamiliar, can you explain that?

Jack Canfield: Well, the Law of Attraction basically states that what you think about and feel strongly about, talk about, put your focus and intention on, you’re going to bring about. And so a lot of our, our thinking is outside of our own awareness. We’re not even conscious of what we’re thinking. So if we’re thinking thoughts like, I don’t deserve it, I can’t afford it, it’s never going to happen, I’m going to lose my house, etc. Then actually we start to attract the conditions, the resources, and the um, physical reality that will bring that about. In my seminars, I will do, I use muscle testing, where people put their arm out, then I’ll push down on their arm. I’ll ask them to think a thought like, I can’t, um, skydive, or I can’t make a million dollars. I can’t be the top salesperson. Their arm goes instantly weak. So what happens through our nervous system and through our brain waves, we’re sending out signals to the universe, kind of like a universal spam, you will. And you know, you’ve met people and you can instantly tell that they’re depressed or they’re happy or they’re enthusiastic or confident or whatever coming from their energetic field. So everything’s energy and energy is controlled by thought. And there’s all kinds of experiments that have been done to prove that. And so we also know that your thoughts travel a minimum of 250, 000 miles. We know that from experiments that were done on the moon when astronauts were up there and they would open up envelopes with shapes in them and they would be random and then they would think about or concentrate on that shape for about five minutes and students down at Duke University in the psychology program would close their eyes and they would actually receive the same shapes they were thinking about on the moon. So there was no electronic transmission. So basically that’s one piece of what happens. The other thing is when you. Talk about and visualize and affirm. That’s why visualization and affirmation is so important because it’s intentionally focusing your thoughts on what you want. And what happens is you also open up a part of your brain called the reticular activating system that allows in things that you’re not aware of normally that are going to help you achieve your goal. For instance, right now, you and your viewers are not aware of what you’re feeling in your right foot. But as soon as I say right foot, you can feel it. That information from your brain, or from your toe rather, your foot, coming up your nervous system into your brain, was filtered out by the reticular activating system. The same thing occurs when we look out at the world, we only see that which matches our beliefs. If we think it’s a loving world, we’ll see people being loving. We look at the same scene and two people will see very different things. Uh, we look at the same reality. We get Republicans and Democrats, we get conservatives and liberals, and yet the same reality is out there, but it’s our beliefs about the world that filter what we see. So when we can focus on our goals, believe in them, affirm them, visualize them, then we start to get. Impulses to act. We start to get inspirations to take action and we start really attracting to us opportunities. People and resources will sit on a plane next to the guy that can solve the problem. The person in line is Starbucks behind us or in front of us becomes the person that could be our business partner, our client, our spouse, whatever. So the law of attraction is about energy and we attract that which we are vibrating out. First, you have to clean up your thinking and that requires focus, you know, reading positive things, listening to podcasts like this, surrounding yourself with positive people, avoiding negative news, all of that visualization, which we just talked about. I think the thing that gets in the way for most people is that they don’t take action. They think that they just have to think it or believe it and it’ll happen. Sometimes that actually does happen, but it’s not the norm. I think there’s a clue. The last six letters of the word attraction are A C T I O N. Action is required. You have to take 100% responsibility for your life, which most people don’t. They blame, complain, and make excuses. You then have to have a purpose. Create a vision for what you want your ideal life to look like. Set goals to do that. And then do the affirmations, the visualization, the positive thinking, the surrounding yourself with positive people. I think most people need an accountability partner or a coach. I think a lot of people that are listening to podcasts like this are what I call solo entrepreneurs. They’re salespeople. They live on their commissions. They’re entrepreneurs. If they don’t take action, nothing happens, but they don’t have a boss to make them do it. We have to take action. And here’s the other piece that most people miss. You have to pay attention to the feedback. Feedback is the breakfast of champions, as Ken Blanchard, who wrote the One Minute Manager said. And that is, are people signing up for my podcast? Am I building my mailing list? Are we making more sales? Am I getting invited to more parties? Am I losing weight? Does my daughter speak to me? All of that is feedback. And most people don’t ask for feedback because they’re afraid of what they’re going to hear. So ask somebody on a scale of one to 10, how would you rate? Then you fill in the blank. This podcast, my book, this seminar, me as a father, me as a husband, me as a boss, me as an employee, me as a vendor, whatever it might be. And then anything less than a 10 gets a follow up question. What would it take to make it a 10? Most people never learn that tool. And if they get negative feedback, they get angry at it, or they cave in and give up. So neither of which worked very well.

Host: So what’s one lesson you would want our listeners to walk away from this with?

Jack Canfield: I would say that if you have a desire, you have the capacity to make it come true. I really, truly believe after working with millions of people around the world, that you’re not allowed to have a wish or a dream that you don’t have the capacity to fulfill. You may have to learn some new things, read books, join up with people, whatever, get more skills, but you have the capacity. We all have unlimited talent. And we just have to exercise it, discipline it, direct it, train it. And, um, so never give up on your dreams. I mean, I, Chicken Soup for the Soul was rejected by 144 publishers over an 18 month period before we got a publisher. And yet the publication of that book made me a multimillionaire. I’ve traveled all around the world. I live in an amazing House and an amazing part of the Santa Barbara. I mean, I’ve got everything anyone could possibly want and it’s all because I believed it was possible and I never gave up.

Host: Thanks for being so generous with your time.

Jack Canfield: Thanks for inviting me.