Session 14: Help a Client Change State, and Visualization and Imagery Basics

Welcome back. We've been talking about how to change your mindset, we've been talking about how to change your mind and how to change your heart and at the very foundation of that is changing your emotional state. So we're going to talk about how to change your emotional state with affirmations, but I also want to show you some other techniques that you can use to change your emotional state and I want to show you why this is super important. But first, I want to talk to you about a story that happened to me. A few years back, I literally thought that I was going to die.

I was on the edge of my roof looking down and I was completely stuck. Now I knew that I was in trouble when I walked up the ladder because I started to climb up the ladder and I'm climbing up and I was like shaky. I had a fear of heights from a long time ago, I'll tell you why here in just a minute, but I got up, I had to do some handyman work on the roof. My wife had asked me to go up there and so I'm up on the roof and I was fine going up, I was a little scared, but once I looked down, even though it was only like three feet down to the ladder, I literally couldn't do it. Now my wife actually thought I was kidding, right?

How many of you have ever seen someone with like a full-blown fear of phobia? Come on, raise your hand. So my wife, she sees me and I have like crawled. I mean like I'm going to actually do this, right? So like I'm on the edge of the roof, right?

And I have like very gently, this is the edge right here, I've crawled over the edge. I'm looking over the edge and then I make eye contact with my wife, then I look over the edge again and I'm about ready to vomit and I'm totally locked up and I'm totally afraid. Now you might not be able to relate to a fear of heights like that, but raise your hand high if you've had a fear. Come on, be honest. Okay, when you've had a fear and it is like beyond you, you know it is not, you are not in control of it.

It seems to be in control of you, right? Raise your hand if that's ever happened to you, right? It's like, I'm going to draw this out. It's like here's you and here is it, right? We're going to give it a giant mouth, right, with teeth, right?

And this is what it looks like and it's like the giant evil Pac-Man that's going to eat you alive and it feels like it is going to eat you, right? And that's what I felt like. I was right at the edge there looking over and at first my wife was, you know, she's kind of poking a little bit of fun at me. She didn't realize how serious it was. So she was like, ha, hey, do you want me to serve you dinner up there?

You know, I've been up there for like at this point, like 30 minutes, you know, looking over the edge and then, and then she stopped teasing all of a sudden because she saw that I had like gone blanch white and I'm frozen at the edge of the roof looking over the edge and I'm thinking like, yeah, like, could you serve me, like, could you serve me lunch up here? Can you serve me dinner? You know? And hey, honey, does, does the fire department actually rescue people who are stuck on the top of a roof? Right.

You know? And, and she's in like, then she's like, oh crap. You know? And she's like, you know, who do I call? She's calling the neighbors, you know?

Hey, can you, is there like a helicopter service that we could get, you know, that could like, you know, pluck my husband off the road, my helicopters, heck no, you know, they're going to like, they'll float. I'm imagining like, you know, floating and dangling, you know, up above the, up above the neighborhood, you know, fully exposed to humiliation. Right. And so it felt like it was going to eat me. Right.

And if you've ever been really afraid about something, you might have felt that. So let's just, let's just be honest. Let's be real here right now. Who has been afraid of failing? Raise your hand if you've been afraid of failing.

Who's been afraid of rejection? Okay. Who's been afraid of some specific thing like being up on the top of a roof and looking over the edge and afraid you're going to die? Maybe not that, but something else, right? Now when you are in that space, it, what it is, is thought and emotion.

That's what it is, right? It is holding me back. Who's heard that? Raise your hand as you're working with people. It is overwhelming.

Raise your hand. Okay. It has me tied down or it's overwhelming, right? You've had people say things like that, right? Maybe you've even heard yourself say it.

When you get in inside of this it, what defines the it is the thought and the emotion. Everybody repeat after me. It is thought and emotion. And if you want to be a master of your life, you've got to learn to master your states. You've got to learn to master how you feel.

And here's the great thing. You don't have to wait today, right here, right now, right where you are. You can decide that I am going to be the master of my state. Everybody put your hand on your heart. Okay.

And repeat after me. I am the master of my states. I am the master of my destiny. And today I choose to be strong because you are strong, right? Poke your neighbor.

Tell him you're strong. Okay. That's right. And you're strong. If we could poke you through the camera here, we'd poke you, right, and let you know you're strong too.

Because even if it is overwhelming, even if it is controlling you, even if it seems like it has got you down, you can control it. And the way to control it is to learn to control your states. Like we talked about, or like we will talk about, your beliefs are run by states. I'm going to draw a couple of diagrams here that I think will really help you out. So I'm going to call these emotional states.

Emotional states, they influence your actions. Who has ever changed what they were going to do based on the way they feel? Raise your hand high. Okay. I did not get down from the roof for hours because there was an emotional state that was driving me.

Okay, beliefs. The very definition of a belief, in my opinion, is having a thought and an emotion. The fastest way to change a belief that is not working for you, we're not going to talk about if it's true or not true, the fastest way to change a belief that is not working for you is to change your state, right? Because states govern beliefs, values. Now there are a lot of values you don't want to change, but sometimes people will start to value things that are not healthy for them.

Who knows somebody who's been hooked on something that's not so good for them, right? Whether it's a behavior or whether it's a behavioral pattern, values are a special kind of belief. It's a belief about what's important. Now some of your values probably work for you, just like some of your beliefs work for you. But if you have a value that is not working for you, it is the emotion, it is the emotional state that is driving that particular value.

If you change the value, if you change the emotional state, you change the value. Typically values will come with two kinds of emotional states. One kind of emotional state is the kind of emotional state that says, I like this. Love is important to me. The other way that a value is formed is when you say, I never got love.

Love is important to me. And usually for most really strong values, we're talking a number one, number two, number three values, the kind of values that drive your behavior and control your life. They are a mix of positive and negative. And when you can learn to shed the negative states that are associated with those, you can step into a greater field of abundance and welcome success into your life in a greater quantity. Who's in for that?

Raise your hand. Hi. Okay, that's awesome. All right. Now, what else?

This one I've had people argue with me about, but I've simply helped too many people change their identity to change who they are. How many of you have gone through an identity change at some point in your life, right? It can happen. People say, no, your identity is fixed. Who you are cannot be changed.

And I'm here to tell you, there is nothing that you can't change who you are, who you believe you are, the beliefs that you have inside about what you can do, what you're capable of and who you're meant to be on this planet. You can totally and completely change that. Okay. One more time. Turn to your neighbor and just look at him with conviction.

Say you can change that. You can change that. You can change it. You can change if you choose and the way to the way to change. We're not going to be talking about this right away, but the way to change an unhelpful identity is to change the state behind it.

What kinds of unhelpful identity statements do people say? I'm not good enough. I will never succeed. I talked about one on another segment. I am not a leader.

That was one that I held for a long time and I had to change the states behind that so I could change my belief about what was possible and that's allowed me to reach around the world and increase my influence and to change the minds and the hearts of people everywhere. And you can do that too when you change your identity. Also capability. I had capabilities, skill sets. I had a 21 year old young man come into my office because his mom had sent him into the office.

He said to me, I will never be successful in life because I dropped out of college and it is too late for me. I will never be able to make something for myself. Now I stood back and I was thinking, you're 21, right? I mean, anybody else have that thought go through their head, right? Like you're 21.

What are you talking about? Like, you know, go to the community college, get your grades up, go back at it, brother, right? You know, make something of yourself. And what had happened is that because he had a stuck emotional state around his skill set and his belief, he thought he was doomed for the rest of his life to an $8 an hour job or a $10 an hour job. And that is not true.

You can change anything. And the key to changing it is to change the emotional state. You got it. So let me draw one more diagram for you. Now there are different ways, different kinds of states that we can access.

And we are going to play with all of them. One type of state is what one gentleman named John Overdurf has called a high amplitude state. Everybody repeat after me. High amplitude state. One more time.

All together. High amplitude state. There we go. Okay. A high amplitude state is what we've been playing with a little bit already today.

High amplitude state is jumping up and down. It's getting a little crazy. Right. We're going to do a little bit of high amplitude stuff, right? Okay.

Who's excited about that? Give me a hands up. All right. Okay. Awesome.

So high amplitude states. These are high energy states, high amplitude. We call them high amplitude states because you take your baseline energy level. Here's the energy thermometer. Here's negative 100.

Here's positive 100. This is I have just lit my underwear on fire. I'm waving a flag. Amen. Right.

Okay. That's positive 100. Negative 100 is like you're on the ground, spread eagle, arms open wide, and you can't even brush your teeth for three days. Right. Negative 100.

So a high amplitude state takes your baseline energy level. Let's say it's at a zero. Some people's baseline is like negative 50. Some people's baseline is positive 50. Right.

But you take wherever your baseline is. And what you do is you do something to go way up. There's an old saying that says what goes up must come down. Okay. And the hard part about high amplitude states, even though they are very useful, is that usually when people come down, they don't just come down here.

Where do they go? They go somewhere below the line. Who's experienced that? Raise your hand. You go way high.

You're vibrating with energy. You can hardly contain yourself. You're so excited. You are going to change the world in the next morning. You're in a puddle.

Right. You can hardly move. Right. Because the body will try to correct a high amplitude state. So high amplitude states are useful and they are useful in places where people are stuck to break them out of it.

But then we've got to give them something else to do to make sure that energy goes back up and stays back up. Okay. So let's go ahead and do that. Hang on. Let me just go ahead and erase this.

There is a second type of state change that we can help people connect to. They are both useful. They are useful in different contexts. The second type of state change is what I would call connecting to the divine or connecting to something greater than ourselves or connecting to something that is enduring. Connecting to something that is connected into our very being.

How many of you do any kind of meditation practice? Raise your hand. Okay. How many of you do any kind of prayer practice? Raise your hand.

Okay. There are other ways to access this energy, breath techniques, yoga, all sorts of different methodologies. How many people when they pray, since we've got a lot of people who do prayer here, okay, I'm not recommending that you do or don't do it. I'm just saying these are the techniques that most people do to access this. How many of you when you pray, do you find that your energy raises up?

Is it the same kind of energy as a high amplitude state or is it a different type of energy? It's very different, isn't it? How many of you meditate? How many of you meditate? Okay.

If keep your hand up, keep your hand up. If when you meditate, your energy goes up a lot, maybe not all the time, but a lot of the time, raise your hand. Okay. Is it a similar energy to a high amplitude energy or is it different? Does it last longer or shorter?

Usually longer. So here's the secret. If you want to break yourself out of a stuck state, what you're going to do is you're going to burst yourself out using some sort of high amplitude energy, and then you're going to keep a floor on that thing through some sort of strategy that involves connecting with those enduring types of states that come through meditation, that come through prayer, that come through breath, that come through yoga, that come through deep spiritual practices. We're not here to tell you what kind of spiritual practice to have. We're just saying, go find one that works for you and use it.

It will change your life. If it's changed your life, raise your hand. Okay. Keep them up. Look around.

Look around. It changes people and it can change you too. So and again, we're not here to tell you what that is. We're just telling you, go find something that works for you. You know, make sure it's something that connects you into the state.

It is the practice that we're talking about, whether it's chanting, whether it's prayer, whether it's meditation, but it's something that connects you to that deep inner being inside. All right. So let's get in and let's get into the how to, I'm going to give you short range strategies and I'm going to give you longterm strategies for raising up your energy because I'm not just interested in the moment. I am interested in making sure that you can raise your energy for the rest of your life. So can I teach you long range strategies?

Who's okay with that? Say I. Okay. All right. So we're in, this is, this is the compass of energy raising and this idea can change your life.

It will help you take you wherever you are with your energy thermometer and it will help. Let's say you're stuck down here. It will help you move north and that's what we're looking for. These are not put in any particular order. These are just ways to remember.

I can move north. I can move south. I can move east. Anything that I do will move my energy and then I'll give you a technique or two that you can hang your hat on. Is that all right?

All right. So up here we can work on mind. Mind means thought and emotion. Okay. Everybody touch your head and repeat after me.

I can work on my mind. I can change my thoughts. I can change my emotions and I can change my life, but a lot of people will stop there and that is all they will do. They will only try to change their mind. They will only try to change their emotions and the reality is, is there is much more that affects your energy and if all you do is work on your mind, you are leaving out at three, at least three major components that will affect your energy moving forward.

So who wants to know the other three? Raise your hand. Okay. Say I. Okay.

There we go. So the other thing that you can do since we've already talked about it, mind or emotions down here, we can talk about what I call spirit or energy. You want to come up with a better name for it. That's fine. But what I'm just doing, what I'm describing about is that deep sense of inner being inside of you.

If you don't believe you got a spirit, that's okay. If you don't believe there's something deep inside of you, you find your, your deep inner energy, that interconnection to your deep inner being and you learn how to change that. I'm not talking about religion here. I'm talking about practices. I'm talking about practices like prayer.

I am talking about practices like meditation. I'm talking about practices like yoga. I'm talking about practices that will help you connect deep into your inner being and change everything. And what I see with people and their energy is if they ignore this, their energy drops. And if you want to raise your energy high and keep it up high permanently, you need some kind of practice that will feed this part of you.

If you believe that, raise your hand, say I, that's right. It will change your life. Now over here we have physiology. What is physiology? This right here.

It is the body. Okay. Everybody do this. Say, I've got a body and it's important and it is important. How many people can abuse their body over time and keep their energy up high?

Can you do it? No, you can't do it. If you abuse your body, your energy drops. Repeat after me. If I abuse my body.

energy drops. If I take care of my body, my energy raises. So today I choose to raise my energy by taking care of this. Okay, turn to your neighbor and just go, I'm taking care of this. All right at home too, right?

So let's go ahead and let's talk about physiology and let's talk about a couple of techniques to change your state. Your breath changes your mood. Who already knows that? Raise your hand. If you are anxious and you breathe high in your chest, will your, or you stop breathing, will your anxiety get smaller or larger, larger a little bit or a lot?

How long does it take you to do deep breathing before you feel your emotions calm? So some people say, who says less than a minute? Let's just get a hand raise. Who says less than three? Okay.

Who says less than 10? Okay. Depends on the person. I've seen people take just a second. I've seen people take a few minutes, but typically speaking in under three minutes, you can completely change the way that you feel.

And I'm not talking from a woo sense. I'm talking hard science, pulling out cerebrospinal fluid from the back, which hurts like the Dickens and measuring neurotransmitter count in three inside three minutes. You can change the way you feel based on the way you breathe. So you got to remember to breathe. Breathing changes the physiology.

It affects the mind and it affects your spirit or your energy. Okay. If you believe me, raise your hand, say I okay, there we are. So what else with physiology? We can go out and we can, we can run or if you hate to run, you can like walk, right?

Or you can go do like some kickboxing, right? Or whatever it is that you enjoy doing. But when you move, you feel better. Who feels better when they move, raise their hand. That's right.

When you move, you will feel better long-term for feeding your mind, for feeding your long-term energy. You need a movement plan. If you hate to move, you need to fall in love with moving. You need to find some type of movement that you enjoy doing. And when you do that, you will find that your natural energy level raises.

If you believe that say I, that's right. Now, the other thing that we can do is we can change chemistry. Now I want to be very clear. I am not a doctor, right? I don't think we have any doctors in the lives, live audience.

Do we have any doctors? Okay, good. So there's no doctors here. Not good. Like good.

There's no doctors, but I want to make sure I hadn't missed somebody. That's what I meant, right? You're welcome here. If you're a doctor, we love you, right? We do.

But you can change your chemistry. Now, one way to change your chemistry is you go to a doctor and the doctor helps you change your chemistry. That is usually not the first thing that I would recommend to my clients, right? What I recommend to my clients is I recommend that my clients change their chemistry by what they put into the body. What you put into your body affects your energy level.

When you eat like junk, okay, we'll keep it PG here, right? When you eat like junk, your energy level goes down. When you eat really, really cleanly, your energy goes up. If you find yourself in a chronic condition where you are tired, where you are overwhelmed, where you are full of fear, one of the best ways that you have to change your energy level is to change your physiology and to change your chemistry. And if you need help with that, you go find a good dietician, you go find a good coach, you go find a personal trainer, you go find somebody who can help you rearrange your habits.

If you have a hard time overcoming old habit, you remember you got to conquer the mind, you got to conquer the heart, but it means that you do all four of these things. I'm going to ask you a trick question, okay? But I'm warning you, which one of these is most important? None of them. None of them.

You can get so wound up in one end of this, you can ignore one quadrant and your energy can drop. If you find yourself way down here below the zero line, if you find yourself struggling long-term with your energy, you need to pay attention to every quadrant here. And when you do, you will find that it all changes. Now, if you're so far behind, you're like, well, I've never thought about any of this. I never knew that my energy was directly tied to these four things.

Then I've got good news for you. You get to pick any one of them and start there. Okay? Turn to your neighbor and tell him you get to pick. You get to pick, right?

This is awesome. You don't get to pick your nose. You get to pick your quadrant. You pick your quadrant and you start there. If you had to start somewhere and you weren't doing any of these four things, I would recommend you start with your physiology.

Physiology. And that's what we're going to start with right here, right now. Rather than give you something that's explosive, because we're going to do that too, we're going to give you something that's a little bit more calm. But I need three people to fill the chairs. I think we had one person earlier.

One, two, who's the third? You got to play all out if you're coming up. Okay, play all out. Come on up. Okay, but this is a calm kind of playing all out.

Okay, so come on up. Come on up. Take a seat. We need to fill all three seats. And we're bringing them up just so we have somebody to look at, but I want you guys here in audience to play along and at home, you play along too.

And then I'm going to show you a clip here in a minute once we're done. But we're going to give you two techniques to do this. Okay, this first technique is simply a deep breathing technique. Okay, deep breathing techniques. You're going to put your feet up there.

You got it? Square yourself up. Everybody put your feet flat on the floor. And what we're going to do is we are going to access a deep energetic calm kind of place. Is that all right?

So it's not high amplitude energy. It's not burn a flag, wave it around. This is a get calm, get ready, right? So I'm ready. I'm calm, right?

And that's what we're going to do. So now what we're going to do, how we're going to do this is we're going to take a slow breath in as deep as you can. So watch me here for a minute. So we're going to take a deep breath in. We're going to hold it for about a second or so.

And then we're going to exhale all the way out very slowly through pursed lips. Again, you're going to take a deep breath in. You're going to hold it. If you can breathe from the diaphragm, you do that. If you don't know how to do that, just do your best to breathe in nice and deep.

We are going to do this for one minute. Starting now, everybody together, cameras on these guys. That's where the action is. You can close your eyes if that helps you out. Nice deep breath in.

I'll start you off. Breathe in nice and deep. Hold it and slow, slow, slow. Breathe out. There you go.

Breathe all the way out and breathe in deep at your own pace. Everybody's physiology is just a little bit different. Breathing in. Breathing out. There you go.

About 30 more seconds. There you go. A few more breaths. Grounding yourself into the present moment. Very good.

All right, go ahead and just open your eyes. Bring your attention back up here and raise your hand if you felt your state change. So when I was sitting on the ledge and I was overlooking the end, once I regained my mind, I realized that the it that was chasing me was not outside me, it was inside me. What I finally did is I sat down. I laid back down on the roof in a very safe position, right?

And I started to breathe deep. And I breathed deep until I introduced a calm into my state of being. And once that calm came inside of me, I knew I was going to be okay. And then very cautiously, I managed to climb back down and it was not a high amplitude state. It was not jumping up and down, although that may have worked too.

But I was nervous about jumping up and down because I was on the roof, right? It was not any of that. It was this. It was breathing. And you go, how would that change anything in the long run?

The data is overwhelming. Over a long period of time, when you start to access these states of calm with regularity, when you start to make this a daily practice, your brain starts to change shape, starts to open up to new possibilities, and you start to shed fear. And one of the main strategies that I use to overcome my fear of heights was the breath. And my experience is, is that connecting to these deep states of inner being through the breath, through the physiology are super powerful. You can change almost anything by changing your state with breath.

Now there's other ways to do it too. Maybe we'll come back around to some of them. But if I had one thing to teach you today, it is that you can change your state by changing your mind, by changing your physiology, by changing your chemistry, and changing your deep inner energy through spiritual practices. And when you do that, you will find yourself gaining a freedom that you never knew that you'd have. I want to show you a video because in that moment on the roof, I realized I had to change and I decided to start to conquer the fear.

Now I did a lot of things. I used some high amplitude energy. I used some affirmations. I used some other emotional release techniques that we'll be talking about later today. But mostly what I did is what I just showed you right here.

I thought about my fear and I breathed into it till I was calm. How often? Over and over and over again. And eventually I conquered my fear. And we're going to show a video.

Let's roll the whole thing. Roll the whole thing. We're going to watch a video. If we could pump in sound into the studio. And this is what I did just not that long ago.

Overcoming. If we get sound, that'd be awesome. You're going to see just what I did. All right, William. How's it going, man?

Dude, I'm super stoked. This is like my first jump ever. I am just like way excited. Perfect, man. What's the special occasion?

Well, it was for my birthday. My wife surprised me. Yeah. She was asking me if there's anything. I just turned 41.

So is there anything you've ever wanted to do that you haven't done? I was like, I'd love to go skydiving. Just on a walk. Forgot about it. And then on my birthday, she's like, dude, you're going to jump.

So today is my late birthday present. Yes. Best surprise ever, though. Oh, it's like amazing. That's awesome, man.

I'm super stoked. Cool. Well, let's go have some fun in the sky. Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

Oh, baby, don't leave me, baby. I love this. What's our altitude? 6,025. Nice.

How's it going, Will? Yeah, it's going good. Enjoying the ride? The ride's amazing. The view's incredible out here.

It's stunning. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing to watch the mountains from up here. Totally. Totally different, yeah.

That's great. Actually, we're only at about halfway, so we've got another 6,000 to go. Halfway? We're still climbing? Yeah.

Nice. Do you want to say anything before we go? None. This is just like a dream come true, man. Yeah.

All right. Well, happy birthday, man. Thanks. Woo-hoo. Go party.

Yeah. Woo. Woo. Was that good? Yeah.

Woo. What'd you think of that? Yeah. So much fun, man. Let me help you up here.

I appreciate that. OK, and that's it. We can go ahead and cut. What'd you think, dude? Oh, dude, that was incredible.

OK, now here's the question that I got. And this is the reason that I showed the video. Did that look like a man who was terrified to go up into the air and to jump out of a plane? No. But I tell you, if that had happened even a year earlier, I would have been terrified.

You can change anything that you want in your life if you are willing to learn to change your state. So if you are frozen by fear, if you are frozen by failure, if you are frozen by it, whatever your it is, I want to let you know you can change. If you're ready to change, raise your hand and say, I can change. I can change. And you can change, too.

I love you. You're awesome. And you deserve to do what it takes to change now.