Episode 154: Jon Berghoff on 5 Factors For Re-Wiring Your Personal Potential

[00:04:32] Jon Berghoff: Welcome to episode 154 of the Achieve Your Goals Podcast. I’m still learning how to say all that so forgive me Hal buddy. You’ve been doing this for almost three years. The three year anniversary of this podcast comes up in a couple of weeks here. For those viewers that are not aware if you are just joining this episode at random go back and listen to episode 152 to get the full story of who Jon Berghoff, me, who I am, why I’m here and I’ll give you the short answer. Right now is our dear friend Hal Elrod is in recovery mode. He is healing right now and he’s winning a battle that he’s fighting against cancer.

 

He was diagnosed several months ago and those of you that are familiar appreciate all your thoughts and prayers. Hal has made such a huge impact on this community, on the world on so many of us and myself personally for sure. I’ve been a friend of his for 18 years now and business partner and Hal we are wishing you the best buddy. Thanks for everything that you continue to do to make a difference even as you are battling what you’re battling so we are going to rock this out today. Today’s episode is all about expanding our personal potential and I’ll give you the backstory and how did I really decide what to talk about today?

 

It’s really simple. I was sitting in a coffee shop three hours ago and I was thinking about Hal and I was thinking about going back in my life to times where I got to learn from Hal and I got to be with Hal and I thought, “What are some of the principles that are really teachable and duplicatable?” One of the first things I thought about was the environment that I learned to create when Hal and I lived together.

 

[00:06:05] Jon Berghoff: It’s something that I learned from him and so environment is one of about four or five factors that I’m going to talk about today that over the years I’ve been inspired to discover and explore as ways of expanding our personal potential. Before I get into these five factors, one of my commitments was to tell as many enjoyable stories of my life experiences with Hal. I am going to go all the way back to the fall of 2000 and it’s funny because as I reflect on these stories I think to myself, “That’s hilarious.” Then I think, “I don’t if these are funny to other people or just to Hal and I.”

 

But I’m just going to tell you these stories anyways and I’ll bring you back to the fall of 2000 when Hal and I first lived together. If you listen to our last episode 153 you heard me share the story about how Hal choose to move in not knowing that I lived in a single room, a studio with one bed so that’s the epilogue to the story. The first chapter I guess is when after Hal moved in it was really interesting because when you go from not living with anybody to living with somebody your environment immediately transforms in the most dramatic way. That’s actually the first of the five factors that I want to talk about today.

 

When I scribbled a list a few hours ago and said, “What are the things that I’ve seen, that I’ve learned from Hal and others and through my own experience about really being able to reinvent and re-wire our own inner personal potential?” Environment is a big one. I think about when I first lived with Hal there were so many things that just because he lived with me it changed how I behaved and I think for the most part there were positive behaviors. Especially he brought, I think it’s a Playstation or they may not have had a Play Station back then but there was this video game Jet Moto. We never had a lot of time to play video games but whenever we had three minutes we would play one round of Jet Moto. It’s a jet skiing video game. It was the only game I remember playing with him like a ten year period and Hal brought that in my life so buddy thanks for bringing Jet Moto into my life.

 

[00:08:03] Jon Berghoff: But there were other things that I learned from Hal that were really powerful. I’ll give you an example. I made a joke earlier on the live stream that I’ll probably live out of the actual podcast episode but he taught me a lot about nutrition. He also taught me a lot about fashion. Now if you are watching the live stream as I’m recording this you’re thinking I didn’t learn much from him but Hal always had a certain sense. He understood what was cool to wear and I did not and I still do not but when I lived with him, what was interesting and even though this is a comical example of environment, I would challenge all of us to question how often do our behaviors change either consciously or unconsciously because of who we are around and is that good or bad?

 

When he moved in it was funny because he had like this certain sense of fashion. He had all of his shoes lined up and his pants and his shirts and I knew I didn’t know anything about this stuff so I thought, “Well I’m just going to wear the same thing Hal does.” This is a funny part of our story is that for a window of time in our lives Hal and I wore the same thing every day because I was just mirroring what he wore? The interesting thing is how many things we mirrored in our lives together so not only were we eating all the same food because we were living in the same studio together, we were wearing the same clothing.

 

We actually took the same classes at the same college and we were selling knives in the same neighborhoods to some of the neighbors of each other which is crazy but I share that as just a fun reminder for me of how fun it was living with Hal back in the fall of 2000. I will share with you, we had a lot of fun playing pranks on each other. One of the pranks that we would play, I saw we it was really me, is in sales in the job that we had the name of the game was making a lot of phone calls and this was back when I don’t even think we had cell phones. We had cordless phones though. We had the first cordless telephones and I would take the cordless phone and before I left our studio I would hide it somewhere in the room because I would drive to the office to make phone calls and I knew that Hal was going to make calls in the room.

 

[00:10:03] Jon Berghoff: I can’t tell you how many times I would hide it and then later find out it took him forever to find it or he’d have to push that button that pages the phone. We used to play a lot of fun games like that to playfully challenge each other’s ability to succeed in spite of each other. There are other crazy things that we did in that studio that I’m going to save for future episodes and some that will never be shared. We had a great time though and I learned a lot about environment especially when I reflect on some of the positive things I learned from living with Hal a long time ago and I’ll tell you one of them.

 

On a very serious note those of you that are entrepreneurs, one of these things, it actually doesn’t matter if you are an entrepreneur, one of the things that I learned from Hal just by watching him is that, and if you are a fan of Chet Holmes who wrote The Ultimate Selling Machine I think that was the name of his book, one of the thing that Chet teaches is that people who are really masters at anything and his arena is sales, that one of the things that they discover in life is that you don’t necessarily need to figure out how to do a thousand things really well.

 

You really have to figure out how to do a handful, three, four or five things thousands of times really well. I got to witness first hand Hal he truly turned making phone calls into a game. He truly got committed to the process without getting overly attached to the outcomes and that’s just another small example where when you see somebody who’s able to remove the emotion from the challenges of accomplishing a goal it’s one of the fastest ways to be able to embody that. It’s when you see that it’s possible. So that’s a big thing that I learned from Hal.

 

That fall, I do think that it’s worth noting not just to brag here but to impress upon all of us that I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that he and I lived together and out of thousands of sales reps he and I were number one and two in the whole company living in the same rooms, sleeping in the same bed, which by the way I just realized every time I say sleeping on the same bed, if you are jumping into these episodes and you are missing the earlier story, you’re thinking all sorts of fascinating things.

 

[00:12:09] Jon Berghoff: I don’t really mind, you got to go back to episode 152 to fully understand that. I told you I was going to share with you today five factors to rewiring your personal potential and the first one, and the rest I’m going to go through really quickly here so be ready for that but the first one I’d want to take some time to share a few fun stories about living with Yo Pal is your environment. If you are watching this as I’m doing this on the live stream while I also record the podcast episode I showed some of you earlier my office here that I work in and everything is by design. Everything has symbolism, everything has depth of meaning, everything is by design in our physical environment.

 

I would challenge all of you before I move on to the next idea, to ask yourselves, to question your physical environment and ask yourself, is there anything about your physical environment that might be energetically slowing you down, that might be causing you to get distracted or to lose focus? I’ll give you an example, one of the things I learned a long time ago from a coach of mine and her coaching came from a spiritual background yet all of her focus was on clutter. This has actually reemerged recently as a trending topic, the importance of understanding the spiritual energy that actually comes from clutter.

 

I’m not going to get into a whole teaching on that because I don’t think I’m qualified to teach it but I will tell you one of the things that I think about all the time in my physical space is what I’m looking at. Is there a certain simplicity and minimalism to it? It’s the same reason why you probably heard it taught that you might not want to have a bunch of books stacked on your night stand next to your bed because all the information in the words or the thoughts or what’s in those books interacting with our minds is actually not helpful to going to sleep. That’s just one idea but there’s probably a thousand things that we could all learn about the power of our physical environment.

 

[00:13:57] Jon Berghoff: There is a reason in our home we don’t have any televisions not just in our bedroom but in any of our bedrooms because that’s just a small example of wanting to control our environment and wanting to stop ourselves from getting tempted by what we could set up in our environment. Think about your physical environment, what does that mean to you? How could you make subtle adjustments that might help you in your world? That’s the first factor I wanted to talk to you about today. It has to do with the rewiring your personal potential because whether it’s the people around you or the space around you or the things that you look at, that you see, there is so much power to that.

 

And then I have to just have to come on in this as I’m saying this I’m not only looking at all this artwork in my office that has deep personal meaning but there is a bonsai tree right behind my computer. When I glance away I’m looking at a tree that’s been alive for nine years and here, if you are watching the live stream I’ll turn the computer. There is the bonsai tree on that table right there and when I look at that tree I know just enough about bonsai trees and the deep rich tradition behind that tree that it actually has a deep effect on me just being in the presence of it. So environment is factor number one today for re-wiring your personal potential. Think about what we just talked about.

 

The second factor for re-wiring your personal potential is your physical well being, your physical well being and I see that to Nicole Keating who has her own podcast The Art of Epic Wellness. You’ve got to check out Nicole, she’s an amazing human being, one of Quantum Leap Mastermind members. This is something that she teaches in a very holistic way and I want to invite all of you to think about your physical well being and think about a few things here. I’m giving a simplified explanation of what does it mean to really lift up your physical well being? These are topics that deserve multiple episode or an entire podcast like Nicole what she does but there is two things that I’ve learnt personally that if I had to really simplify everything for me it comes down to two things, my physical well being.

 

Number one is movement and the reason I use the word movement and not exercise or weightlifting or yoga is because I think we have to start with the most fundamental understanding of physical energy.

 

[00:16:10] Jon Berghoff: This is not based on some deep scientific understanding that I have although I’m pretty sure there’s some science that backs this up. You may have seen articles that say, “Sitting is the new smoking.” You’ve noticed that today everybody is measuring movement with technology. There is depth behind that, there is value to that and my personal experience has taught me, and I’m an amateur endurance athlete. I’ve run hundred mile ultra-marathons, I’ve run three hundred plus ultra-marathons I know that sounds crazy right there and that might deserve some explanation but I will tell you from my journey as an endurance athlete and also just as a dad and an entrepreneur who is always trying to find the edge with my physical and mental capacity, that movement alone is so fundamental.

 

I go trail running, I practice yoga, I swim, I do a minimalist amount of weight lifting. Now if you are watching the live stream you probably can’t believe that. You think I do a lot of work of weightlifting you can probably tell. This body right here, water aerobics folks. But I’m joking about this because I am not sitting here saying, “Yoga is the answer, bench pressing is the answer, running is the answer.” What is find is that the healthiest people that I’ve met they have some configuration where their movement is not one prescribed thing that happens at 7:00 AM every day.

 

There might be something they do at 7:00 AM, but I have found that the healthiest people I know physically, mentally, spiritually and every possible way there is movement that happens more often in their lives. It’s part of why I’m doing this episode standing and that’s not a façade. I stand pretty much all day long. I might sit down for an hour out of an eight hour work day but I stand because ever since I started standing I noticed that I don’t get tightness in my hamstrings or my hips the way I used to. I noticed that my shoulders don’t get tight, just little things like that happen so movement is super, super important for your physical well being.

 

[00:18:11] Jon Berghoff: My challenge, my invitation to all of you is what small steps can you take? It’s not about whether or not you sign up for run a marathon. It’s about small steps that you could take today. Can you get up and just stretch and then could you do that again and then could it turn into a habit? Add variety into how you move as well because if your movement is always one way there is a real good chance that there might be some sort of imbalance that eventually gets created. If we really want to have total whole well being there has to be a harmony with all the ways that you move.

 

Nicole Keating just posted, “Have a daily dance party.” There you go and those of you that are wondering about this whole standing desk thing, I’ve got a buddy he’s an app developer and he’s got an office in the building right next to me here. He showed me the other day, it will be funny if he sees or hears this because he’ll know I’m joking about his situation and he’s done well enough for himself that he can afford all sorts of fancy technology things. He was showing me about this desk that he bought where you can push a button and it raises it up or lowers it down. I laugh at that because I have found a way of having a standing desk and I’ll show you if you are watching in the live stream.

 

If you are listening to the podcast and you are, “What does he mean by live stream?” I’ve started streaming these as I’m recording them into the Miracle Morning communities so you can catch us in the future. But here is my set up. We had these tables here that are, I don’t even know if they are a normal standing height tables but look what I did. I put bed riser underneath the table so that the table is the right height and then on top of that I stacked my laptop on top of this file folders thing and on top of this box of LSTN headphones. Instead of buying a two thousand dollar robotic electronically adjustable standing desk I’ve got a pretty cheap version here and here’s the kicker, you are going to love this, bonus tip for those of you that are all about this, I want you to see the chairs that we have in our office.

 

[00:20:03] Jon Berghoff: What we use for chairs are director’s chairs and those director’s chairs are the perfect height so that if I want to sit I can just slide right back into the director’s chair. The other thing is the director’s chair ergonomically allows you to really easily sit and keep a really healthy posture so a couple of bonuses there on we are going back to environment but your physical being. I want to say something else about your physical well being. It’s not just about movement but it’s also about what you put into your body. This is something that I have found over the years the more I had become self-aware of what I had put into my body I can tell you that I’ve gotten to a place where I can notice really microscopic changes, the smallest changes when I eat one thing versus something else.

 

Sometimes it’s really noticeable, sometimes it’s subtle but it’s often those subtle changes that I’m able to sense I go, “Wow I’m actually a lot smarter right now.” I actually notice that when I change my diet my speech actually speeds up a little bit because my ability to wire between my head and my mouth actually speeds up just when I’m changing my diet. When I say changing my diet, I’ve got a pretty good diet but I have found that when you eat really well you’ll actually notice even more of those microscopic changes.

 

I think that if we put trash into our bodies, processed foods, anything that doesn’t come out of the earth, that you might notice the changes. I don’t know but I can tell you that when you are in a really good place you notice the difference and for me that’s inspiring to want to keep elevating what I’m putting into my body. I’ll go on one little rant about what we put into our bodies and let me first start by saying I’m not 100% on anything but I do believe that whenever we do something artificially to help ourselves so with any kind drug. Let’s talk about caffeine for a minute and I’m the first one to tell you I consume caffeine. I’m currently off of caffeine.

 

[00:21:58] Jon Berghoff: I’ve been off of it for twenty minutes, that’s a joke. I quit smoking two hours ago, that’s doesn’t count no but I actually stopped consuming caffeine a handful of days ago not because I think there is some moral ethical problem with caffeine or because I think I can’t consume it in moderation and be okay but because I was reminded as I noticed myself unconsciously wanting to up my quantity to go beyond the one latte that I was getting, I realized that’s a trigger. That’s my body telling me that it has stopped learning how to naturally create energy because I’ve been continually artificially creating energy. Look, this is basic supply and demand, this is really simple stuff.

 

I just think about this in the most logical sense. Every time we artificially give our bodies an ability, our body is going to slow down its natural ability to create whatever we are artificially giving to it. I find that when I come off of caffeine there is usually a couple of days where there is some negative reactions but then by about the third day or fourth day I actually have more energy, it’s more sustainable, it’s more consistent and I’m mentally a lot sharper.

 

Today now I’m drinking, this is homemade bone broth, I’ve been drinking bone broth every day for quite a while. It has a lot of nutritional benefit go check it out. Bone broth is like the remarketed word for chicken stock I think, I really don’t know but we actually buy bones and my wife makes bone broth and when I drink it. It tastes amazing and it’s apparently really, really healthy. I said we are going to talk about five factors today to rewiring your personal potential. We talked about your physical environment or your external environment, we talked about your physical well being. The two things that I want to emphasize was movement. Move around. Find ways to move more often. Stand up. Stretch. Create some variety. Also nutrition. Be really thoughtful about what goes into your body even if the smallest thing you do is just drink more water. It’s amazing the difference you’ll notice in energy just by upping the amount of water that you might drink every day.

 

[00:24:00] Jon Berghoff: The next factor I want to talk about here to rewiring your personal potential is what I would call perspective. Perspective. Now, perspective we could go a lot of directions with this but I actually want to talk about what I would call a macro level self-awareness. What do I mean by macro level self-awareness? Well the good way of explaining this is thought a concept called the hero’s journey. If you’re not familiar with the hero’s journey, I encourage anyone who’s interested in this podcast to go explore what is ‘The hero’s journey’. I’m going to make sure that there is one video, there’s a lot of videos about it, there’s one short like three or four minute video that summarizes it really well. I’ll make sure we put that in the show notes.

 

Also if you want to spend a little bit more time learning about the hero’s journey, go check out Finding Joe, a documentary film by our good friend Pat Solomon who’s one of our guests, mentors and our Quantum Lead Mastermind coaching program. The hero’s journey in a nutshell, let me give you my definitely butchered version of the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey is a concept you could call it a philosophy, it’s understanding that was introduced to the world by a philosopher by the name of Joseph Campbell a number of decades ago. Joseph Campbell his background was in theology and mythology. One of the things that Joseph Campbell discovered is that when he looked across religions and across cultures and across time and across mythology he noticed that all of these stories…

 

Now here’s what’s crazy about hero’s journey is if you actually go look at the plot line, for many, many of the films that you and I watch, the Hollywood blockbusters and the most viral independent films, many of them actually follow this journey called the hero’s journey. What Joseph Campbell discovered and then really brought to the world is this discovery that even though there’s all these different explanations for life whether it’s through a religion, a myth or any other explanation of how things, why they work or what’s happening, what Joseph Campbell uncovered is that across all of these understandings there’s actually a unifying connected story that all of them are passing through.

 

[00:26:22] Jon Berghoff: Again, if you go research this on your own you’ll notice that the hero’s journey, and I’ll give you the essence of the hero’s journey right now and what has this to do with your personal potential? What it has to do with it is I have found that we’re able to develop a distant perspective, an unattached-detached perspective on where we are in our lives. It helps to understand that we’re at a certain stage which might be just enough of an understanding to give us the hope, the faith, the confidence or in some cases the wisdom to know what to do next because as Jim Rohn teaches in The Seasons of Life which was the first personal development book I ever read, someone handed me The Seasons of Life back in 1999 and one of the things Jim Rohn taught is that in life we go through seasons.

 

What’s important is not fighting the season but understanding the season and the winters of our life we’re dealing with challenges and it’s important to go inward and to reflect so that when we get to the next cycle we’re able to take what we learn from that reflection and plant the right seeds so that the next harvest can be fruitful. You can take any of the seasons and extract metaphors.

 

It’s a great example where we learn a lot from nature. Nature’s constantly evolving, transforming, constantly emerging and changing so are we. Have any of you noticed this? Have any of you noticed that certain things in your life happen in cycles? I’ve noticed that I have certain career changes. They have always it’s happened like at certain cycles like one year cycles I’ve seen certain things happen. I’ve seen other things happen in my life and like three or four year cycles. If you study generational cycles you’ll see that across all the human race like everything happens in cycles.

 

[00:28:05] Jon Berghoff: There’s debating theories as to whether or not that has to be true all the time or whether there is a randomness to it. We’re not going to get into that in this episode. I’m certainly not qualified to have that debate. However, I’ll say that when I’ve learned of the hero’s journey and when I look at my own life and when I look at all the people we coached and worked with and learned from I’ve seen that there is a universal journey that we’re all going on. If you go look at that hero’s journey, the framework is quite simple.

 

The first part of the hero’s journey is when each of us individually feel some sort of calling, there’s some sort of voice that’s calling us, as Campbell says, it’s calling us to an adventure. In fact each of us that could mean something different. For some of us it’s an explicit calling. Like you have kids for the first time, you’ve got a call to adventure that you pretty much can’t deny and ignore and it’s right in front of you every day. For others of us, it’s a voice, it’s a whisper that says maybe you should take this path or this pivot or this direction in your business.

 

One of the things I’ve learned is to listen to those callings.  Not to necessary follow every single one of them but to learn to listen because as I learn to listen to what is the world telling me… By the way just to connect a couple of dots, I found that I am more connected to those callings that the world is sending my way when my physical environment and my personal wellbeing are at optimal places. When my physical energy is not where I want it to be I’m missing signals that a few days later I realize, “Oh I see that signal now, just because I’ve actually gotten more rest taken care of my body.” It’s interesting how it all works.

 

The point I’m talking about here is macro level awareness of your stage in your life. I believe this is a key to rewiring and elevating our personal potential. When we understand the stage that we are at. For many of us we could be at a stage where we’re hearing a calling to do something. Then the next stage and I’m summarizing what our 12 different stages that Joseph Campbell teaches in the Hero’s Journey but the next stage is what Joseph Campbell calls crossing the threshold.

 

[00:30:07] Jon Berghoff: Crossing the threshold. Crossing the threshold is where what’s happened is we’ve listened to that calling that world has given us. That calling it might not be about a better business, it could be just a calling to transform ourselves personally. It could be a calling to make change in our lives, but once we’ve stopped denying that calling and we’ve chosen to follow it, we call that crossing the threshold which is really when we finally made a commitment, not just interested but committed and pursuing that call to adventure, whatever that call to adventure is, personally or professionally.

 

What happens is once we commit, as Joseph Campbell points out by looking across stories, across all different types of stories is that there’s a commonality that once you accept that calling the world is now going to throw some big boulders, some big obstacles in your way. The world is going to put “enemies” in your way whether that’s people or personal addictions or personal crutches, it’s going to put certain obstacles in your way as soon as you commit to that calling. So as Joseph Campbell teaches it, what happens is as we’re dealing with those obstacles, we’re also meeting not only enemies but allies.

 

It’s important to realize in our lives, at whatever stage we’re at, it’s important to be aware that anybody that we meet could be an ally and not all allies are created equal but as we meet people and we become open to, what is the journey that I’m on? What’s the difference I’m trying to make for myself or for others? That helps us to be more aware of who are the types of people that I want to invite in or attract to become allies of my mission? Or who can I become an ally of? Because maybe I meet someone who’s on a similar journey and by partnering together we can both help each other? Once we cross that threshold, we might meet enemies, we might meet allies but then ultimately there’s a moment of transformation where we all go through an ordeal.

 

[00:32:00] Jon Berghoff: You might be listening, watching this right now and you could have personal ordeals in your life which is just another word for challenge obstacle. In the hero’s journey, the way they introduce and talk about it is as you go through that ordeal, we all have certain transformations that happen. Just because we face an ordeal doesn’t mean we have a transformation because sometimes we might choose to hide or run from actually facing that ordeal which might only prolong the challenges, it might stop us from ever experiencing whatever is on the other side of that but in the hero’s journey, when we get through that ordeal, we often are given a gift.

 

That gift is a lesson and so think about any ordeals you’ve been through, and maybe you’ve been through your own ordeals or you’re facing them right now and I have found personally that it’s the moment that I’m actually able to ask the question and then answer it. That’s often the moment where the gift shows up, where I just stop and say, “What is the gift in this? What is the lesson? What is the wisdom? What is the power that this now gives me?” Because by asking that I’m more likely to find the answers, create the answers and then the final stage of the hero’s journey is once you’ve gone through this journey now you have this new wisdom, this new learning, this new enlightenment or insight and you can now bring that back to your world, returning to the community as they call it, whatever that means.

 

So you might be on one of many journeys at the same time but the lesson I wanted to share right now is that when you become aware that life operates in stages and that there’s no such thing as a good stage or a bad stage, sure on the surface it could feel and look that way but you realize that everything has a reason or a season and that there’s a harmony to how it all connects together. I found that that gives me faith and hope in the most challenging times which for me just as another human being, I pretty much need that to help me every single day because within the big story we have micro moments when we need to stop and recognize this is a phase or a stage, let me just embrace the beauty in this moment or that I can get from this or give to it.

 

[00:34:04] Jon Berghoff: That can really help us out I think in transforming our potential to achieving anything. Nicole Keating actually just posted the world ‘trust’ and I’m glad that she did because I think that when we are able to understand that there is this journey that we’re on it does allow us to have more trust in the journey which is awesome. All right, the next and I think I only got one idea after this. I’m coming up on my 30 minutes Mike Miriam or if I just lost that bet just let me know.

 

The fourth idea I want to share with you today, fourth factor for rewiring your personal potential, we’ve talked about having a macro level awareness of a journey that we’re on in life and now I want to talk about having a micro level awareness of what’s going on inside of ourselves.

 

The simplest word I could come back for this is the world mindfulness. Now, I have a coach and a mentor, Julianna Raye, Unified Mindfulness. You go check out her website she’s got all sorts of great freedom videos and resources, she’s one of our mentors for our Quantum Leap Mastermind members and Julianna has taught me a lot over the last three or four years about mindfulness. I was introduced to meditation 16 years ago. I think my first introduction it was actually an audio program by Deepak Chopra and it was called The Power of Synchro Destiny I think. Something like that.

 

In this audio program he teaches these seven different like native mantras that you repeat them and I’ll never forget I listened to his audio program, I actually wrote out his mantras word for word. This was like three CDs. I wrote it out word for word and I repeated them to myself every day for several months. That was a transformative moment in my life because by repeating those mantras it brought to me an awareness of what was going on around me at a level that I’d never had and it led to some real major positive outcomes, professionally and personally.

 

[00:35:57] Jon Berghoff: That was my introduction to meditation but then when I meet Julianna Raye, I got really excited because she taught me something that I’ll share today. What she taught me is the power of having a formal meditation practice. The reason why I say it that way is because I’ve always thought to myself I do yoga, I go trail running out in nature, doesn’t that count as meditation? What I’ve come to learn is that it’s not a given but it can depending on how I approach it. Especially if I have the training and the tools to turn any moment into a meditation. I’ve also learned that depending on how I approach that activity, I might get none of the benefits of having a formal mindfulness practice. What I’ve learned from Juliana is that when you have a formal practice, there’s three specific skills that you develop and I’ll share this with you really quickly here.

 

Then on future episodes we’ll dive deeply into this. One of the things I’ve learned is the more you’re aware of these skills, the more you actually appreciate the importance of bringing a formal mindfulness practice into your life. That’s what I’m hoping this might inspire some of you to develop here. Here’s the three skills and these are what Julianna taught me as the three attention skills because really a quality mindfulness or meditation formal practice should be developing all three of these skills. What I love about Unified Mindfulness is it develops these three skills much more explicitly that any other practice that I’ve come across.

 

But the three skills, here’s what they are. Number one is what we call concentration power. Wouldn’t we all love more concentration power. Concentration power, I’m going to give it a definition, it’s the ability to focus on whatever we deem to be most important at any given moment in time. It’s the ability to stay focused on whatever we believe or think is the most important thing to stay focused on. I don’t know about all of you but I have times all the time where I tell myself I need to focus on this and then I lose focus. I experience all the time what it means to lose concentration or not exercise concentration power.

 

[00:38:01] Jon Berghoff: I don’t think I need to say anything to convince any of us that concentration power is something that we want to develop. What I’d encourage you to think about is do you have a formal mindfulness or meditation practice and if you don’t think about developing it really quickly because it might be the fastest way to strengthen your concentration power. The second of these three attention skills is what we would call sensory clarity, sensory clarity. Now let me give you an analogy to understand sensory clarity and this is going to date myself here but can you go back to a time before we had high definition television or before we had satellite radio?

 

Do any of you remember when we had to actually like tune things and adjust your radio or your televisions so that you could get clear reception? There’s like half of you that have no idea what I’m talking about right now. So let me describe this. The television used to have these like antennas that literally stuck right out of the back of your TV. Sometimes you’d have to actually manually adjust the antenna to be able to see what you’re watching. Yes, that existed folks. Google it. Well here is the deal. When you adjust the clarity… So you all get this example as new technology comes out like on an iPhone or a television the quality of the picture gets sharper and sharper and sharper.

 

Well, sensory clarity in our mind is the ability to have a sharper and sharper and sharper awareness of what’s going on inside of ourselves. So let me give you an example. If any of you have ever had this happen where you get distracted or you get emotionally thrown off by something. By the time you actually get to a place where you’re like, “I’m really distracted” or “that emotion has been running me for a while”, if you get what I mean by that. How many of you have had this happen? By the time you realize what’s going on so much time has passed by that that distraction, loss of focus or allowing that emotion to grip you has caused some sort of unproductive outcome in your life.

 

[00:40:08] Jon Berghoff: We can all relate to that. Well the idea of sensory clarity is that the sooner we can detect, the sooner we can detect…. Imagine any distraction or a negative emotion like a wave that comes and goes… Instead of waiting until the wave is so big that it crashes down and crashes us, can you detect it when it’s smaller? One of the things that I’ve learned is that when we detect it when it’s smaller just detecting it by itself will cause it to sometimes level out and then eventually go away. What we’re not talking about here is being in denial or denying these things or not talking about avoiding them. We’re just talking about learning how to work with the things go on inside of ourselves.

 

It don’t always help us and I have learned when you have a formal meditation practice, you not only build concentration power, the ability to focus on whatever was important but you also have the ability to detect, to distinguish and to discriminate what’s going on inside of me. I can feel there’s an emotion coming up. I’m using my hand right here because that’s what emotions, the first place I’m going to notice it is in my body, not my mind. By the time I’m able to actually label it, it might be too late. When I do feel it, that’s the next thing I’m going to do.

 

It’s see if I can label it and actually describe it because once I learn how to label it and describe it right now it starts to diffuse its control over me because I’m at least working with it. Same thing with just distraction. It might not always be emotion in my body, for me personally it’s often voices in my head. Did any of you talk to yourselves a lot? If you Google that, there’s a lot of people that will make you feel good about yourselves because it means you’re a genius. It also means you’re a psychotic. You pick the definition that you want but here’s the deal. Some of us, more than others have a lot of voices in our head, especially those of you that are musically inclined. Your auditory people, like if you’re always tapping your foot or humming, you probably most likely, more of your distractions are coming from voices in your head then the physical body first or then visions in your head. You follow that right there?

 

[00:42:01] Jon Berghoff: For me I often find that as soon as I get anxious, overwhelmed, stressed or I’m losing focus or any of these disempowering tensions the first place where I’m able to start to diffuse it is by going into listening to hearing what’s going on in my head. Instead of saying I feel like crap but I can’t quite figure it out or I know I am seeing things in the future that I don’t want to happen but no. For me this is actually what I’m saying to myself. As soon as I can just connect to that, those voices can start to diminish.

 

Mindfulness develops these three skills; concentration power, sensory clarity and then the third and final one is what we would call equanimity. Don’t worry about remembering that word. Equanimity is the ability to avoid the push or the pull the tag that our inner experience has. So let’s talk about emotions. It’s the ability to experience certain emotions but not let that to grip us and to take control over us. All I’m going to say is you develop a form of mindfulness practice and you will be able to develop these three skills and it can be absolutely life changing. All right, I had one more final idea today and I think I’m going to reserve it for a future episode. I’ll tell you what the idea was. I started this episode by saying there’s five factors.

 

By the way there’s not five that just happens to be how many things I scribbled down before I ran out of time and said I should record an episode. But these were some of the first five that came up to me that I felt would be fun to share with you today. I hope you’re enjoying this. I started by saying there’s going to be five factors for rewiring your personal potential and I’ve shared with you today your physical environment, your physical well-being, mindfulness, understanding on a macro larger level what journey you’re on in life. Then the fifth and final one I was going to share is understanding what is motivating you. Understanding what is motivating you. Understanding your motivations, your reason, your purpose that you might be prescribing to why you’re doing what you’re doing.

 

[00:43:59] Jon Berghoff: I’m going to save that topic for a future episode because it deserves a lot of attention and energy because it’s a big one. All right, before I sign out a couple of reminders. We’ve got, coming up Miracle Morning for Couples book, Stacey Martino is launching in about a week. I think it launches maybe Valentine’s Day or the day after so those of you that are interested which is many of you in this community, keep an eye out for the Miracle Morning For Couples and any other announcements or reminders.

 

I had a whole list out there and then I forgot what they were but hey, as always thank you for being here, Achieve Your Goals Podcast listeners. Does Hal have a name for you? Is it goal achievers? I bet that’s what it is. That’s my guess. And speaking of Hal, I want to close out by asking all of you just to send some positive energy and love Hal’s way. Send to his family too, they need it as much as he does. While you’re doing that don’t stop with Hal. Hal for many of us is just a symbol and a reminder of anybody that would benefit from our love, attention and energy.
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