Training Your Elephant Mind to Create Wealth
Every positive-thinking guru tells you to just change your attitude and the money follows. Dave Wood believed that for years, until a friend on the phone flatly told him it wasn’t true, that changing your energy doesn’t make the actual problem go away. In this episode Dave breaks down the ant and the elephant, his metaphor for the conscious and unconscious mind, and works out which one of them was actually right. Here’s the episode.
Meet the Ant and the Elephant
Back in 2002, when I first started being introduced to the elite inner circle of some of the world’s most influential and powerful minds, I met a guy named Brad. Brad was around 40 years old. He was making millions of dollars a year, traveled around in a private jet, and he was happy. Whenever I heard him speak, you know what he said? He said, change your attitude and change your life. My question for you, as you think about that, is this: have you truly resolved to have a transformational attitude in all situations in your life?
I’ve read a lot of books about positive mental attitude, like The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz, and I actually think that some of the material out there isn’t put into a very useful context, because there’s a lot of telling you to think positive and not a lot of useful instructions on how to do that. And taking it a step further, the reality is that attempting to force positivity on a very real, less than positive experience doesn’t make that negative energy just go away, and it doesn’t solve the problem.
One of my best friends in the world, a guy named Chris, I first met when I was a kid. We were playing basketball together, and later in our adult life we’ve helped each other make quite a lot of money and done some fascinating things together, and helped a lot of people. At one time Chris was having a bad experience, and I was talking to him for hours on the phone. I kept trying to convince him to just let it all go, forgive, and come back to the situation with a peaceful, centered, resolved energy. And you know what Chris said to me? He said, changing my energy, Dave, is not going to make the problem go away. We have to deal with the problem. Who was right? We’ll come back to that.
I remember I was in a conference once in Long Beach, California, with a network marketing leader named Bill Britt. Bill was talking about this in 2002, when I started to meet lots of rich people. For some interesting and yet powerful reason, the words of Bill seemed to be etched into my mind, and I still remember them 14 years later. Bill taught about negative energy and how it affects you, and he also taught how to change your perspective and thinking through a process of filling your mind with transformational, inspirational knowledge from the greatest thinkers of mankind, diluting the negative programming from the past. He said, the secret to pollution is dilution. He had, at the time, around 2 million active team members around the world, and he was doing nearly a billion dollars in sales every year, creating hundreds of six-figure earners around the world every 12 months, a truly incredible and inspirational leader.
His basic thoughts were that you have to tip the scales of negative energy, by putting more powerful and inspirational information, stories, and knowledge into your mind than the negative accumulation of the garbage from the past in your life. The basic model, in my own words, is a series of principles. Principle number one, he taught, is to change your input, through changing what you’re reading, the audios you’re listening to, watching inspirational videos, and constantly filling your mind with new and wonderful knowledge that can bring prosperity and power into your life. Principle number two is to change your relationships, or change the way you relate to them. First change the way that you interact with negative relationships in your life, and then, if they don’t begin treating you in a more powerful and positive way, change the people you have relationships with, because they have a powerful effect in your world whether you want them to or not.
Which brings me back to my good pal Chris, and I’ll share a powerful lesson I learned from his story. But first, let’s go to principle three: take massive action, sharing your vision and building the future that you want. Bill Britt was always teaching from a Christian model I originally learned when I read a book he recommended called Hung by the Tongue, by Francis P. Martin. Martin teaches in this book that you’re creating your experience of the world by the words that you speak. And while that might sound crazy, you don’t have to believe in Jesus to study the powerful effect of written and spoken words on the world around us. If you want to get rich and affect the world in a wealthy way, change the way that you speak.
Why Diluting Negative Energy Doesn’t Work
Principle number four: wait for momentum of the positive to override the negative in your life. In other words, his suggestion was to wait for the energy of positive and empowering knowledge to overflow and dilute the past experience of negativity, reaching an internal prosperity tipping point and changing the way that you think to the mind of the rich man or woman that you have the power to be.
Herein exists a problem in powerfully distorted beliefs. Because the psychological reality of your internal state is that diluting negative energy does not get rid of it. Let me repeat that. Diluting negative energy does not get rid of it. Think about it like this: if you dump a bunch of nuclear waste in the ocean tomorrow, dumping more ocean water is not going to reverse the tide of radioactive waste. Neither will ignoring the pain in your soul make the darkness of poverty, weakness, and pain dismantle on their own. There is a better and more powerful way, and you can step into a new future right now by facing the reality inside. You’ve heard that saying that time heals all wounds. The actual truth is that time does not make negative energy transform into prosperity, love, and power on its own. A decision and release of the negative energy, followed by a new decision, belief, and vision, does have the power to do that. It works better to change the entire meaning and energy behind the negative, and it will dismantle and redirect toward a new intention, if you’re using the right systems, beliefs, values, and practices to change the energy around you.
Chapter two of Resolved by Orrin Woodward briefly covers a subject called reframing, which originally comes from therapeutic modalities and later has been widely taught by the NLP community and thought leaders such as Tony Robbins. Reframing is the core tool of the therapeutic model used in psychoanalysis, a way to change the meaning of negative energy in your life. The word reframing comes from an idea that when you change the frame around a picture, it changes the perception of the picture itself. You can do that with anything in your life.
Problems, I’ve learned, are like pennies. If you put a penny right in your eye and hold it there, you say, oh gosh, this is so big, you can’t see the world at all. Yet if you put it on the ground, it’s difficult for a normal adult with 20-20 vision to even clearly distinguish the features on the face of President Abraham Lincoln down there. Take 30 steps back, and perhaps the problem you once had is lost in the field of grass, and you can’t even find the once looming darkness to complain about. All you see is the beautiful green around you.
The point is, don’t wait for this negative energy in your life to just dilute or go away. It’s not going to happen. Releasing negative energy opens up space in your spirit, your psychology, your mind, through some mechanism I don’t fully understand yet have experienced, by consciously making a choice to forgive those who have harmed me in the past, no matter what they’ve done. Forgiveness is a powerful release process that allows you to free yourself from pain and create love, power, and wealth with the energy left in your heart and mind. The way I’ve changed my past into a new and more powerful future in a rapid and efficient way combines release, reframing, and change work with learning, teaching, and a new kind of action: directly dealing with the problem emotionally, while resolving it, letting it go, or allowing it to spontaneously change into what you want.
I would actually say this change is quantum, but I’m not a physicist, and it’s probably something else. While I may be great at counting commissions as they’re deposited in my bank account and rapidly calculating ways of creating wealth, I’m not a physicist. I’m a life artist who paints the canvas of his future with inspired vision combined with applied knowledge from the great minds that I study. The principles of creative manifestation simply work, for some powerful reason that I can’t explain. And I’m happy that they work, because it allows me to see and experience beautiful things that I created first in my mind, imagination, and heart.
The Toothpick Metaphor for Visualization
So what exactly is this elephant mind of which I speak? Well, when I met Orrin Woodward in 2013, he used a metaphor to describe the conscious and unconscious minds. He called them the ant, for the conscious mind, and the elephant, for the unconscious mind. His assignment for me was to commit a true act of bravery in the human soul, and that is to align my conscious ant with my subconscious elephant, toward my vision. The conscious mind thinks in words, while the subconscious mind thinks in images, feelings, scenery, stories, beautiful things, or darkness, depending on what you’re focusing on. Author Vince Poscente shares in a book called The Ant and the Elephant that the conscious brain stimulates 2,000 neurons in a second, while the unconscious functions inside the mind stimulate 4 billion neurons at the same time, the metaphoric difference between a tiny little ant and a big powerful elephant.
My question is, have you established alignment between the directive power of your conscious mind and the unruly elephant inside? Most of our lives are out of the range of our direct conscious awareness. I modified a powerful metaphor I heard taught originally in the world of neurolinguistic programming to illustrate this concept. What I want you to imagine is that there are 4 billion toothpicks falling out of the sky every second of the day. Out of those 4 billion, there are 2,000 that are marked red and have magnetic properties. If you grab the red ones only, you’re going to get rich and live a life full of passion. Well, how can you do that? Certainly not by moving faster. You’re not going to do it by working harder and faster. But a simple solution would be to go to the hardware store, get some supplies, and build yourself a little electromagnet. Hook it up to where the toothpicks are falling, and most of the 2,000 will get trapped in the gigantic magnetic field and stick to the high-powered electric magnet that you just built.
The equivalent of the electromagnet, to draw the 2,000 magnetic toothpicks out of your unconscious mind to your conscious awareness and power, is visualization, which accesses and harnesses the creative power of the unconscious mind while using the directive conscious resources of the awake mind. Almost nobody in modern society anymore spends any time exercising the creative manifestation ability of their minds. And when they do, everything in their life changes.
Full episode transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
Hey there, my friend, this is Dave Wood, and if you pay attention to this Daily Shortcut episode carefully, you're going to discover how a hidden resource I call the elephant mind can unlock almost magical income creation abilities. These abilities that you're gaining today by watching this episode are transformational, and they're powerful in their ability to rewrite the story of your future. And it's my gift to you. You can take it. My vision with this show is to transform the lives of a million families, to help them step into the freedom they desire to create with the income that they want at the same time.
True liberation through personal freedom. Today is episode number three, and I'm going to give you a gift of unconscious power. If you decide to take the gift and change the world inside your mind, you have the power to shift the world on the outside even more. Too many people think it's the space they're in. That's the reason for temporarily, and notice I say temporarily, not having all the wealth and the riches they want to create.
However, it's actually the space that you're creating that you're living in. Back in 2002, when I first started being introduced to the elite inner circle of some of the world's most influential and powerful minds, I met a guy named Brad. Brad was around 40 years old. He was making millions of dollars a year, traveled around in a private jet. He was happy.
He had a hot wife. Whenever I heard him speak, you know what he said? He said, change your attitude and change your life. My question for you, as you think about that, is this, have you truly resolved to have a transformational attitude in all situations in your life? In today's episode of The Daily Shortcut, we're going to learn to transform the way we co-create our experience of wealth and lifestyle around us by mastering the art of a transformational attitude of wealth, abundance.
I've read a lot of books about positive mental attitude, like The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz, and I actually think that some of the material out there isn't put into a very useful context because there's a lot of telling you to think positive and not a lot of useful instructions on how to do that. And taking a step further, the reality is that attempting to force positivity on a very real, less than currently positive, positive, positive, positive, positive, positive, positive, positive experience, it doesn't make that negative energy just go away, and it doesn't solve the problem, doesn't it? One of my best friends in the world, he's a guy named Chris. I first met Chris when I was a kid.
We were playing basketball together, and later in our adult life, we've helped each other actually make quite a lot of money and done some fascinating things together and helped a lot of people. At one time, Chris was having a bad experience, and I was talking to him for hours on the phone. And I kept trying to convince him to just let it all go, forgive, and come back with the situation with a peaceful, centered, resolved energy. And you know what Chris said to me? He said, changing my energy, Dave, is not going to make the problem go away.
We have to deal with the problem. Who was right is my question, right? Was it me with my almost futile to debate with charismatic charm, convincing Chris to let it go, to come to the situation peacefully with a powerful, positive, positive, positive, or was it Chris who was equally convincing and also charming, close, from the opposing perspective, refusing to deal with the emotions of a thing until he had solved the source of its negative emotions itself? Well, we'll come back to that in a minute, near the end of today's show. I remember I was in a conference once in Long Beach, California with a network marketing leader.
His name is Bill Britton. And Bill was talking about this in 2002 when I started to meet lots of rich people. For some interesting and yet powerful reason, the words of Bill seemed to be etched into my mind. And I always remember them still, 14 years later today. Isn't that fascinating?
Now, Bill taught about negative energy and how it affects you. And he also taught how to change your perspective and thinking through a process of filling your mind with transformational, inspirational knowledge from the greatest thinkers of mankind. Diluting the negative programming from the past and giving you the power to change your perspective and thinking through the power to create wealth and riches through the power of your own mind, he said, the secret to pollution is dilution. His basic thoughts were that you have to tip the scales of negative energy. By putting more powerful and inspirational information, stories, and knowledge into your mind than the negative accumulation of the garbage from the past in your life.
The basic model described in my own words from what he taught is a series of principles. Principle number one, he taught is to change your input through changing what you're reading, the audios you're listening to, watching inspirational videos, and constantly, constantly filling your mind. With new and wonderful knowledge that can bring prosperity and power into your life. Principle number two that he taught is to change your relationships or change your relationships. In other words, first change the way that you interact with negative relationships in your life.
And then if they don't begin treating you in a more powerful and positive way, then change the people you have relationships with because they have a powerful effect in your world. So whether you want them to or not. Which brings me back to my good pal Chris and I'll share a powerful lesson I learned from his story. But first, let's go to principle three. Take massive action, sharing your vision and building the future that you want.
Bill Britt was always teaching from a Christian model I originally learned when I read a book that he recommended called Hung by the Tongue by Francis P. Martin. Martin teaches in this book that you're creating your experience of the world by the words that you speak. And while that might sound crazy. You don't have to believe in Jesus to study the powerful effect of written and spoken words on the world around us.
If you want to get rich and affect the world in a wealthy way, change the way that you speak. It's as simple as that. I'll teach more on this in a future Daily Shortcut episode. Principle number four, wait for momentum of the positive to override the negative in your life. In other words, his suggestion was to wait for the energy of positive and empowering knowledge.
Overflow and dilute the past experience of negativity, reaching an internal prosperity tipping point and changing the way that you think to the mind of the rich man or woman that you have the power to be. Herein exists a problem in powerfully distorted beliefs. Because the psychological reality of your internal state is that diluting negative energy does not get rid of it. Let me repeat that. Diluting negative energy does not get rid of it.
Think about it like this. If you dump a bunch of nuclear waste in the ocean tomorrow, dumping more ocean water is not going to reverse the tide of radioactive waste. Neither will ignoring the pain in your soul make the darkness of poverty, weakness, and pain dismantle on their own. There is a better and there's a more powerful way and you can step into a new future right now by facing the reality inside. You ever heard of that saying that time heals all wounds?
The actual truth is that time does not make negative energy. It transforms into prosperity, love, and power. A decision and release of the negative energy followed by a new decision, belief, and vision however does have the power to do just that. It works better to change the entire meaning and energy behind the negative and it will just dismantle and it can redirect altogether towards a new intention if you're using the right systems, beliefs, values, and practices to change the energy around you. More on that in a future episode.
Chapter 2 of Resolved by Oren Woodward briefly covers a subject called reframing which originally comes from therapeutic modalities and later has been widely taught by the NLP community and thought leaders such as Tony Robbins. Reframing is the core tool of the therapeutic model used in psychoanalysis in one way to change the meaning of negative energy in your life. That is one of the things we cover in great depth in some of our courses such as the mass performance course. The word reframing comes from an idea that when you change the frame around a picture it changes the perception of the picture itself. You can do that with anything in your life.
Problems, I've learned, are like pennies. If you put a penny right in your eye and you hold it there and you say, oh gosh this is so big you can't see the world at all, yet if you put it on the ground it's difficult for a normal adult man or woman. A woman with 20-20 vision to even clearly distinguish the features on the face of President Abraham Lincoln down there. Take 30 steps back and perhaps the problem you once had is lost in the field of grass and you can't even find the once looming darkness to complain about. All you see is the beautiful green around you and the prosperity, the abundance, and the love and power of the universe.
The point is, don't wait for this negative energy in your life to just dilute or go away. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. It won't. Releasing negative energy opens up space in your spirit, psychology, your mind, through some mechanism I don't understand yet have experienced by consciously making a choice to forgive those who have harmed me in the past, no matter what they've done.
Forgiveness is a powerful release process that allows you to free you from pain and create love, power, wealth with the energy left in your heart and mind. The free energy comes out of your heart and mind. The free energy comes out of your heart and mind. You can now create beautiful things in your life, like the human mind and body are designed to create. Wonderful and powerful changes around you as you learn to see and experience the world in more abundant and beautiful ways.
The way I've changed my past into a new and more powerful future in a rapid and efficient way, combines release, reframing, and change work with learning, teaching, and a new kind of action. Directly dealing with the problem. Emotionally. While resolving it. Letting it go or allowing it to spontaneously change into what you want as a transformational approach for altering the structure of the universe and your surroundings to be in your favor and bless those around you, helping you create great riches and wealth and friendships at the same time.
I would actually say this change is quantum, but I'm not a physicist and it's probably something else. While I may be great at counting commissions as they're deposited in my bank account and rapidly calculating ways of creating wealth, I'm not a physicist. I'm a life artist who paints the canvas of his future with inspired vision combined with applied knowledge from the great minds that I study. The principles of creative manifestation simply work for some powerful reason that I can't explain. Can you?
And I'm happy that they work, because it allows me to see and experience beautiful things that I created first in my mind, imagination, and heart. I'm not a physicist. I'm a machine, but I know that I can do creative work. So what exactly is this Elephant Mind of which you speak? Get to the point that's going to help me step into riches and overflow with commissions, you might be asking.
Well, when I met Orin Woodward in 2013, he used a metaphor to describe the conscious and unconscious minds. He called them the ant for the conscious mind and the unconscious mind he called the elephant. This is an example of how the elephant just went. His assignment for me was to commit a true act of bravery and dare in the human soul, And that is to align my conscious ant with my subconscious elephant towards my vision. The conscious mind thinks in words while the subconscious mind thinks in images, feelings, scenery, stories, beautiful things, or darkness, depending on what you're focusing on.
Author Vince Poshance shares in a book called The Ant and the Elephant that the conscious brain stimulates 2,000 neurons in a second while the unconscious functions inside the mind stimulate 4 billion neurons at the same time. The metaphoric difference between a tiny little ant and a big powerful elephant. My question is, have you established alignment with the directive power of your conscious mind with the unruly elephant inside? Or is the elephant trying? Are you stomping around on your quest for riches as you try and ignore the imbalance inside?
You have the power through transformational thinking to create riches from poverty. Most of our lives are out of the range of our direct conscious awareness. I modified a powerful metaphor that I heard taught originally by the world of neurolinguistic programming to illustrate this particular concept. What I want you to imagine is that there are 4 billion toothpicks, 4 billion, billion, falling out of the sky. Every second.
Every second of the day. Out of those 4 billion, there's 2,000 of them that are marked red and have magnetic properties. And if you grab the red ones only, you're going to get rich and live a life full of passion. Well, how can you do that? Certainly not by moving faster.
I mean, I don't even know if you were the Flash or Superman if you could do that. You're not going to do it by working harder and faster. But a simple solution to that would be to go to the hardware store, get some supplies, and build yourself a fancy laptop. And you can do that with a little electromagnet. Hook it up to where the toothpicks are falling, and most of the 2,000 toothpicks will get trapped in the gigantic magnetic field and stick to the high-powered electric magnet that you just built.
The equivalent to the electromagnet to draw the 2,000 magnetic toothpicks out of your unconscious mind to your conscious awareness and power is visualization. Which accesses and harnesses the creative power of the unconscious mind while using the directive conscious resources of the awake mind. Both of which happen to be paying attention right now, aren't they? Almost nobody in modern society anymore spends any time exercising the creative manifestation ability of their minds. And when they do, everything in their life changes.
Would you like me to share some powerful concepts on visualization to unlock the power to manifest riches and wealth in your life? I've developed three powerful learning shortcuts I'm going to give you today to help you do just that. And if you put your name and email in the form below this video. I'm going to give them to you today. They're my gift to you for free.
Why? Because I believe that you are a powerful and divine creator of the life that you're designed to live. Maybe not the one that you're living right now. And that by focusing on your heart and mind, you can change the world around you and mold your environment to one of abundance, freedom, blessing, and happiness. In your free PDF download I'm going to give you on the next page, you're going to get a completely complimentary bonus.
Transcription of today's powerful lessons along with some of the most powerful visualization exercises I do personally to step into my own future and create the wealth and freedom that I want. In your free audio download today, you're actually going to get an MP3 of today's lesson so you can listen to it again and again in your car. Because as you continue to come back to get the daily shortcut, the world inside your mind will begin to change and the world around you will begin to create prosperity and majestic blessing. Because you're going to get the wealth and freedom that you want. Transcription of today's powerful lessons along with some of the most powerful visualization exercises I do personally to step into my own future and create the wealth and freedom that I want.
Because you, my friend, are a powerful human being with the ability to change the world around you by first changing you. And you are worthy of it. You can step into the blessing of it. I believe in you. Period.
The most important gift to you today that I'm giving you is my entire online wealth creation business, which I call the Total Shortcut System. Your shortcut to creating the wealth and the freedom that you've always wanted. So you can spend time with the people that you love doing the things that you desire inside your heart to do. All you have to do to claim your powerful bonuses is now enter your name and email below this video and click the button that says, give me the total shortcut. I'm thinking about renaming that to give me the total shortcut, Dave.
Not only are you going to get powerful lessons daily with free resources to help you create the life of your dreams, you're going to get them for free. And it's my way of saying thank you. Thank you for what you might ask. Thank you for being beautiful, powerful, and inspirational. You, my friend, our divine creation, have the power to step into a life of honor, of wonder, of beauty, of power, of transformation, of artistic majesty.
As you're claiming your bonuses, leave me your thoughts in the comments and share this on Facebook now. And you may just be the winner of a secret prize we announce daily. Ranging from $100,000 to $100,000. From free books, cash, and you might even receive a more powerful blessing of inspiring someone you know to live a more empowered and wonderful life. I'll see you in the next episode of The Daily Shortcut.
And you may be wondering, so who was right? You or Chris? I've been waiting this whole time to find out. Well, I will share that with you, my friend, in the PDF download that you're about to get right now. When you put your name and email in the form below and hit the button that says, give me the total shortcut, Dave.
You may be the winner of a secret prize we announce daily. You may even get rich by taking action when you know it's time and continuing to come back and soak in the powerful knowledge that I'm continuing to share with you for free. Because I believe you can change into the person you've always wanted to be. I'll see you on the inside.
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