Episode #193- Feeding Your Mind- w/Zig Ziglar

Episode Notes:

Ever notice what the primary "inputs" you allow into your mind on a daily basis (news, social media, conversations)?... How do these inputs make you feel, and how do they influence your thoughts and actions?

This week’s episode of the Mind Wrench Podcast emphasizes the crucial role of mental inputs in shaping our mindset and life trajectory. Inspired by Jim Rohn and featuring insights from Zig Ziglar, the episode explores how consciously choosing positive, uplifting, and educational content can transform our thoughts, actions, and ultimately, our lives. 

Discover how shielding your mind from negative conversations, reality TV, and distressing news can set you on a path to personal and professional success. We share strategies to feed your brain with positive, empowering content that redefines your mindset and propels you towards growth and achievement.

The importance of "feeding your mind" with the right information, similar to a healthy diet, is critical to our success. 

3 Key Takeaways:

1. Mental Diet Matters: Just like physical food, the information we consume impacts our well-being. Actively choosing positive and empowering content is essential for a healthy mindset. Negative inputs can lead to overwhelm and stagnation, while positive inputs fuel growth and inspiration.
2. Language Shapes Reality: Our vocabulary and the language we use significantly influence our thoughts and perceptions. Replacing negative language with positive affirmations can reshape our mental landscape and foster a more productive existence. Zig Ziglar's example of the Native American tribes without a word for stuttering illustrates this powerfully.
3. Coaching and Consistent Routines Accelerate Growth: Seeking guidance through coaching provides accountability and support, leading to improved self-esteem and confidence. Establishing daily rituals, such as listening to motivational content, reinforces positive messages and enhances retention. Consistent exposure to empowering information is key to internalizing and applying it.

This epic speech from Zig should leave you with a better understanding of how our daily “inputs” affect our lives, as well as inspire a few things to think about: 

1.      What steps can you take to design a more positive and empowering "mental diet"? What resources (books, podcasts, mentors) can you leverage to support this process?

2.      How can you integrate consistent routines

Chapters

• 0:00 Feed Your Mind for Success
• 8:33 Invest in Cassette Education for Success

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

We are not standing guard at the door of our mind, as Jim Rohn quoted and warned us of many times. We are not paying attention to what we are feeding our minds. We are letting the world around us program us, dumping its garbage into our heads like a dumpster in the dark with no lid. We really get to choose what enters our minds, so we should be feeding our brains on a regular basis with nothing but positive, empowering or educational inputs. What we feed our minds on a consistent basis will dictate the course of our lives.

Speaker 2: 0:34

Welcome to the MindWrench Podcast with your host, rick Sellover, where minor adjustments produce major improvements in mindset, personal growth and success. This is the place to be every Monday, where we make small improvements and take positive actions in our business and personal lives that will make a major impact in our success, next-level growth and quality of life.

Speaker 1: 1:03

Hey, what's up everybody. Welcome to the MindWrench Podcast. I'm your host, Rick Silover. Thanks so much for stopping in. If you're a returning listener and haven't done so already, please take a minute and click the follow or subscribe button and then rate and review the show. When you rate and review the show, the algorithms for Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music and all the other platforms will see that it's valuable and show it to more people that have never seen it before, and hopefully it can help them too. I would really really really appreciate your help, sharing this word with your friends and family as well, and if you're a brand new listener, welcome. I hope you find something of value here that helps you in your personal or professional life as well. Please make sure to click the subscribe or follow button so you never miss another episode.

Speaker 1: 1:47

I think many of us spend a good deal of our lives with our brain just kind of on autopilot, you know, Just randomly consuming inputs from the world around us, Whether it's listening to crappy conversations from the negative people around us, bitching and complaining or talking trash about others, or maybe it's watching mindless reality TV shows or playing some extreme violent video games or simply letting ourselves get glued to the non-stop doom and gloom worlds, coming to a narrative on the mainstream news stations. We are not standing guard at the door of our mind, as Jim Rohn quoted and warned us of many times. We are not paying attention to what we are feeding our minds. We are letting the world around us program us, dumping its garbage into our heads like a dumpster in the dark with no lid. What we should be doing, because if we actually put a little effort and discipline into it, we really get to choose what enters our minds. So we should be feeding our brains on a regular basis with nothing but positive, empowering or educational inputs. What we feed our minds on a consistent basis will dictate the course of our lives. It's simple the more positive inputs we feed our mind, the more positive results we get.

Speaker 1: 2:55

I found this clip from my favorite motivational speaker and coach, Zig Ziglar, and I thought I would share it with all of you. Zig explains with great detail and a little humor what it means to feed your mind and the benefits of doing so. Here's Zig.

Speaker 3: 3:09

Now one other example to reinforce what I'll be getting into in just a moment. Several years ago an American scientist was studying some tribes of American Indians and by accident maybe, at any rate it was not planned he noticed that neither of these two tribes that he was studying, that not a single Indian in these two tribes, stuttered. And so he said to himself you know, I wonder if this is a coincidence or if this is characteristic of Indians. He did a study on every American Indian tribe living on reservations and he could not find a single Indian that stuttered, not a single one. And then he decided to do a study on the Indian languages and dialects and when he had completed the study, then he understood completely why there were no Indians that stuttered because in the Indian language and in the Indian dialects there is neither a word nor a substitute word for stutter. Now follow me real good, if there's no word for stutter, how could they stutter? And you kind of snicker as you listen, or you might even grin and you say well, that's cute, ziegler. But so what? The so what is a very simple, a very significant, a very important point. You see, if there's no word for stutter, they could not stutter, because a word communicates a picture and the mind takes that picture and completes that picture. Now follow me on this.

Speaker 3: 4:50

If you were, for example, not necessarily to increase your vocabulary, but to change your vocabulary, if you were to remove the negatives and substitute the positive, if you were to take the word hate and take it out of your vocabulary don't read it, don't see it, don't think it, don't say it. In its place, put love. Say it In its place, put love. If you were to take the word prejudice, remove it from your vocabulary and in its place put understanding, I wonder what the results would be If you were to take the word negative, remove it from your vocabulary and in its place put the word positive. Oh, there are a hundred different words that you could make changes on. And what you're really doing is you're changing your mental diet. That's so important because your mind acts on what you feed it. And if we first reduce, then eliminate the negative input, then it's just a question of time before we reduce and then virtually eliminate the negative output.

Speaker 1: 5:53

If you're looking for a competitive edge for your business or a more effective jumpstart to your personal development in 2024, I'll make your first step super simple.

Speaker 1: 6:01

It is a fact that an incredible number of the most successful business owners, nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies, top-earning professional athletes, entertainers and industry leaders like Microsoft's Bill Gates, former President Bill Clinton, oprah Winfrey, richard Branson, amazon's Jeff Bezos and Salesforce's Mark Benioff all have one thing in common they all have at least one coach and some have several that they work with on a consistent basis, someone that helps guide, mentor and support them, challenge them, help them set and achieve goals that move them forward and then hold them accountable to follow through, driving personal and professional growth. Working with a coach has many substantial benefits. Just for an example, 80% of coaching clients report improved self-esteem or self-confidence thanks to coaching. 99% of individuals and companies that hire a coach report being very satisfied and 96% would do it again.

Speaker 1: 6:56

If, deep down, you know it's time to make those improvements in your business or your personal life that you've kicked down the road year after year. If you're tired of knowing there's a better version of you waiting to shine, but unsure of how to bring that version to light. If you're tired of wanting to enjoy a more successful business but not sure how to start. And if you don't want to go another 12 months without better results, but you don't want to go it alone, then take the first step. It's super simple. Sometimes talking to the right person can make all the difference. Go to wwwrixelovercom contact and I'll set you up with a free consultation. Call with me to see if one-on-one coaching is right for you.

Speaker 3: 7:34

Because, you see, the truth of the matter is nothing could come out until it has first gone in. Nothing can come up until we first planted it. So we quit planting the negative and remember, we bring out the most recent crop that's been planted in our minds. And so we stop planting the negative and stop letting others plant the negative and we put the positive in the positive in. And many times people say well, zig, you know I'm a busy gal, or I'm a busy guy, man alive, I'm running just to stay, even right now. When am I going to have time to do all this mental eating? When am I going to have time to feed my mind, like you're suggesting? When do I read all of those books? When do I listen to all of those recordings that you're suggesting that I listen to? Well, first of all, let me ask you a question. Did you hear about the woodcutter whose production kept going down because it didn't take time to sharpen his axe? That's kind of the situation that you find yourself in. Let me pursue this one more step. I have no earthly idea what you girls spend at the hairdresser. I don't want to know. I'm afraid that if I found out what my own sugar baby was spending down at that hairdresser, maybe I'd be a little disturbed, I don't know. So I don't want to know. But this I do know. I know that the average man spends approximately $200 a year dressing up the outside of his head. Some spend a great deal more than that. Now I'm talking about shaves, haircuts and the gook that goes with all of these things. Okay, now he spends $200 dressing up the outside of his head. The average professional man spends over $1,500 a year on clothes. Some spend a lot less, some spend an awful lot more. That's to dress up a body that costs about $1.65. The average professional man and again, girls I apologize for not knowing the figures for you, I just don't know them, but I imagine they would compare the average professional man spends in excess of $3,000 a year on transportation. Okay, now that's to get them to where they're going. Now, after getting all of this money has been spent, okay, what have we done? We've got a well-groomed, well-dressed, mobile professional individual. Now doesn't it make sense to know what to say and what to do after you get to where you're going, does it? Ladies, would you say yes? Okay, then I'm going to suggest that we start feeding their mind with the proper mental diet, and I'm going to start talking first of all about cassette education. Now, obviously, since you've got this course, you've already made an investment in cassette education.

Speaker 3: 10:21

My next statement might well sound like an exaggeration. Please believe me when I say that it is not. It's actually an understatement. Personally, if I could not replace my cassette recorder, $5,000 would not even come close to buying it. Two other statements I do not personally know a self-made millionaire who does not have and use on a regular basis a cassette recorder to listen to.

Speaker 3: 10:55

When do they listen? They listen while they shave. They listen while they apply makeup. They listen while they boil the beans. They listen while they do 101 other things. They listen while they clean house. They listen while they boil the beans. They listen while they do 101 other things. They listen while they clean house. They listen on the way to the office or on the way to a sales call. They listen at any time. They're not physically having to pay attention to what they're doing. Driving a car, for example, is a tremendously effective time to do it.

Speaker 3: 11:22

University of California, several years ago, discovered that if you lived in Los Angeles and obviously most of you who listen to this will not be living in Los Angeles, but I use that example because they gave it to us that in a three-year spell, if you're an ordinary person in Los Angeles, california, in going to and from your normal activities, in a three-year span while in the car, you can acquire the equivalent of two years of college education. I can tell you with certainty that Alan Bean and some of the other astronauts, for example, listened to cassette recordings while they were on the space platform circling the earth and on their way to the moon. I can tell you that HL Hunt, the billionaire, when he was past 80 years old, was still listening to daily recordings. I can tell you that my friend, bernie Lofchick, in Winnipeg, canada, at a recent national convention, they had 19 winners in a particular contest. Of their top 19 people, 17 of them including the top 11, listened on an everyday basis to cassette recordings. Are they important? I believe they're critical.

Speaker 3: 12:36

I personally have in excess of 300 hours of cassette material that I've accumulated over the years from an awful lot of people and I never go anywhere by myself that I am not listening to these cassette recordings. Over and over and over, we fill it in our minds. Let me see if I can clarify a couple of things. First of all, you can never get the information in one listening. Another major university discovered, for example, that if you hear something just one time, two weeks later you will only remember 2% of what you've heard. They discovered that if you listen to it six consecutive days, that two weeks later you will remember 62% of it. But of infinitely more importance, you will be more inclined to take action on what you have heard, to take action on what you have heard.

Speaker 3: 13:27

I've come to discover that you need to listen to something about 16 times in order to get the complete message. And we've also discovered that even after you've heard something 20 or 30 or even 40 or 50 times, that you are still responding emotionally to the message itself. And let me remind you that our thinking brain is only 10% as large as our feeling brain. We need to keep feeding in that positive reinforcement so that we feel and are excited and are motivated. We, as salespeople, know the tremendous importance of that.

Speaker 3: 14:02

When I'm out of town, I always call my wife every night and one of the things I try to persuade her of is the fact that when she said I do nearly 29 years ago that that was the smartest thing she ever said, and she tries to persuade me of the same thing Now. When I call her, I always tell her how much I love her, for two reasons First of all, it's true, and second, I don't want her to forget. Now. The truth of the matter is I don't educate her when I say I love you, but what I do is I keep the account open and I keep it up to date and I keep her enthused and I keep her inspired and I keep her motivated.

Speaker 2: 14:44

Why do I?

Speaker 3: 14:45

want to do that? Very simple, as I said earlier, I love her and I want her to stay exactly like that. Am I educating her? Not at all. She knows I love her. Then why do I say it? The same reason that you need to listen to the same recording over and over and over, john said a long time ago said we don't need to be told, but we do need to be reminded. You see, nobody is smart enough to remember everything they know. So you keep putting it in the same thing over and over and over.

Speaker 3: 15:13

Now a lot of people have another erroneous idea about cassette recordings or motivational books or inspirational books. They believe that they're excellent to read or to listen to when you're down. Well, I would agree. They will have a tendency to pick you up. But let me emphasize something that might have escaped you as you've gone through your career.

Speaker 3: 15:34

The best and most opportune time to listen is often when you're at your very peak, when you're riding high, when you're the most enthusiastic, when you're going full speed ahead, when you are so positive that nothing is buying you. That's the best time to listen. And the reason is very simple. The first few times you listened, it brought you up to one level of awareness. I have a friend, sandy Bregner, who's one of the most enthusiastic, most motivated people that I've ever seen, and Sandy says you know, zig, a lot of times people listen to something and that brings them to one level of awareness. Then a month later they hear the same thing again and because they're at a higher level, it moves them even further. A very significant point A lot of times when you are down, you will reject some of the most productive ideas as not being applicable to you. But when you're riding high and the idea is presented to you into your subconscious mind forcefully and enthusiastically, then you say, hey, that's exactly what I've been looking for.

Speaker 3: 16:39

And now you accept an idea that you had previously rejected because you were a little bit lower. Let me emphasize a point. These books and recordings can serve as stepping stones to get you out of the dump. I'm not saying don't listen while you're down. By any means Do, because they do get you out of the dumps. They can also serve as a step ladder to get you off mediocrity row out of the crowd at the bottom, or they can serve as an unencumbered escalator to take you all the way to the top.

Speaker 3: 17:12

Now I want to emphasize something Initially, because this is a good habit, like getting up in the morning. You've got to force yourself to do it, you've got to remind yourself to do it, you've got to write yourself those little notes. You've got to really force yourself into taking the action. As I mentioned in an earlier recording, when I started the running program, when I set the goal of losing those 37 pounds, many times when that alarm clock would sound off I fussed about it. I said I don't want to get up.

Speaker 3: 17:39

But then I would look down at that 41-inch waistline and I would say to myself Sigrid, do you want to look like you or do you want to look like that picture you got hanging in the bathroom mirror. I didn't want to look like me, so out of bed I'd get. And then, after I forced myself to do it for a while, as I mentioned earlier, one day I found out I was having fun doing it. Then the third step will take place. You'll find that you are learning from doing it and then you're going to find, eventually, that you will instinctively start doing something about it. So, ladies and gentlemen, the four steps are very simple Get up in the morning, enthusiastically, establish those symbols, the positive symbols, set your goal lights and feeding your mind on a regular basis.

Speaker 1: 18:24

Well, I hope you enjoyed that little message from the motivational master Zig Ziglar. I know I sure did. He is absolutely one of my favorite speakers. In fact, every time I listen to him I always feel inspired to do something a little bit better with my life. This is a perfect example of feeding your mind. This message can be found available in Audible. I'll leave a link to it in the show notes. Thanks again for tuning in. I really appreciate your support and I hope you have a great week. I can always be reached at wwwrickselovercom, where you can find all my social media links podcast episodes, blog posts and much more.