← The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP 794 | Overcoming Your Self-Limiting Beliefs and the Science Behind How Prayer Builds Resilience With Nir Eyal
01:07:55
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The Art of Leadership Network.
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He is reported to have burst into an emergency room, pills in hand. He collapsed on the floor, and as soon as the medical staff picked him up, he said, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. He's convinced he's overdosed on whatever pills he has, but he doesn't know what's in the pills because the pills were given to him in a drug trial. So they call the people who are running this study and they say, what is in this pills? We need to know what's in them so that we can cure this guy. And they say, oh, he was in the placebo group. They tell this guy, that's what happened. And within 15 minutes, his low blood pressure, his failing heartbeat, all this stuff immediately goes back to normal and he feels fine.
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Welcome to the Carey Newhoff leadership Podcast. Man, I'm so glad you're joining us. If you have ever said to yourself, yeah, it's not gonna work for me, or nah, I don't think, or you know what doesn't work around here, you're gonna love this episode because what we're talking about is self limiting beliefs and how to overcome them. Nir Eyal is my guest. He is the bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractible. Now we're gonna talk about his latest project. We're gonna talk about belief, basically how to go beyond what you believe that's self limiting.
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You.
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This is more than woo woo. A lot of science in it. He's an entrepreneur, former lecturer at Stanford. He writes at the Intersect, Behavior and the Brain, helping people and companies harness psychology for a lasting change. So I think you're really going to like this. Hey, if you're new here, welcome and I would love to have you hit subscribe or follow wherever you're watching, wherever you're listening. And now to my conversation with Nir Eyal. Well, Nir, welcome back. It's so good to have you again on the podcast.
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Thank you. My pleasure. Honored to be back.
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Yeah. So you've written on some really influential topics. I mean, hooked and then indistractable. Right. It was the whole idea back in the early days of social media about how to create a compelling message. That book was wildly successful. Then you wrote a book about being indistractable. How do you get rid of all the things hooking you in, kind of. And now you're writing about belief. Not in terms of like religion per se, but what made you pick this topic? Why is it important and why now?
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Yeah, so there's A few reasons. The main reason was that after I wrote Indistractable, I started getting some peculiar calls. I do these office hours with anyone who wants to call. And I book an hour a week, 15 minutes. So there's four calls per week. And the book did very well. It sold half a million copies. And so I kind of got a backlog of a few months. And every once in a while someone would call me and the call would sound like this. They would say, hey, Nir, I read your book. I really liked it, but it didn't work for me. I said, oh, wow, that's fascinating. Tell me more. I spent five years writing this book. It's filled with 30 pages of peer reviewed studies. It changed my life. It finally helped me overcome distraction. It did so much for me. Tell me what happened. Let's talk about step one. How did step one go for you? And they'd say, you know, Nir, step one. I read step one, I read it, I definitely read it, but I didn't actually do it as a thing. And then they said, okay, no problem. I'd say, that's fine. Tell me about step two. Maybe you skip step one. How did step two go for you? And they say, yeah, step two, that. I read that one too. I definitely read that one, but I didn't so much do that one either. And so I thought to myself, what's going on here? Like, am I nuts here? Like, what's going on with these people? And I thought, well, actually, really, this is me. I do this too. I mean, I've got stacks of books filled with great advice I've never put to good use. I've paid consultants and gurus to tell me what to do and yet haven't put their ideas into practice. And what I realize is that our traditional model of how we think about change is missing something. That it's not good enough to just abide by the traditional economics theory of if you give people an incentive, if you give them the benefit of why they should do something and you tell them what to do, we think they're going to do it, right? That's kind of how our jobs work. Here's your paycheck. Here's what I need you to do. Do it. But that doesn't always work because there's a missing component, a hidden component that we totally gloss over, we don't think about, which is that even if you have a behavior, right, you know what to do. Even if you have the benefit you want, the result of that behavior, if you don't have the belief that's kind of the base of what I call the motivation triangle. If you don't have that belief that A, you can get that benefit or B, you can continue to do the behavior, you're not going to do it. Right. If it was that easy, we would all have six pack abs, we'd all be millionaires, we'd all do exactly what we say we're going to do. But there's something missing that's hidden to most people, is that they don't realize that they are carrying around what we call limiting beliefs. And so beyond belief is the answer to myself. I needed this book more than anyone of why is it that despite knowing what to do, wanting the benefit of that behavior, why don't I do it? And it turns out that the secret, the key is unlocking those limiting beliefs and turning them into liberating beliefs.
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Well, we glanced off this before, but you went through, apparently, because I would never know it in the two conversations we've had several years apart. Transformative fitness journey yourself. Right. Like you were, I guess, a heavier kid and you know, tried the whole yo yo diet thing.
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Yeah.
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You've been fit, I would say lean for a while now. What, what happened? Like how, how did your beliefs work against you in that?
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Sure.
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Because that's been a lifelong battle for me too. Those £20, it's like, come on, man, I hear you.
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No, I wasn't just a little overweight. I was very overweight. I'll show you some pictures.
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Okay. I'll let you call that. I'm not going to tell you what you were.
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You're being polite. I appreciate it. Yeah. I remember my mom taking me to the doctor and the doctor showing me this chart and it had like a green zone, that's normal weight. And then there was the yellow zone that was overweight. And then there was the red and the orange zone which was obese. And that's where I was. And I was the kid at the pool that never took off their shirt because I didn't want anyone to see my belly rolls. And then finally back in, I think it was 1994 was the year that I actually started dieting for the first time. And for the next 30 years, my bookshelf became this graveyard of diet books. At first I started, you remember, back in the day, it was all about low fat and I ate snackwells by the box, but counted the fat grams. And that diet actually worked. It worked for a while. I lost some weight. But then the pendulum swung and now Then I became a vegetarian because meat was the enemy. And so I cut out all the meat. I became a vegetarian for quite a long time, and I lost some weight there, too. But then the pendulum swung and I became keto. I became, you know, I went on the Atkins diet, and that was the latest craze. And then it was intermittent fasting, and I was telling everybody about the benefits of metabolic flexibility. And I was that annoying guy who was telling people at parties what we should and shouldn't eat. And each one of those diets worked until they didn't. Because what happened again and again and again is that a diet would work as long as I believed in it. But as soon as I had some doubts, as soon as I lost my faith in that diet being the one and only true diet solution, I would abandon it and the pounds would come back on. And so what I learned after 30 years of dieting was that there was no one true diet. There was no one true plan. It was pointless to try and find the factually correct diet. Rather, the secret was persistence and motivation over a very, very long time. And so that's kind of the core of what beyond belief is all about, is realizing that there's something very different about beliefs, that we try and categorize things typically as either fact or faith. That fact is an objective truth. So the world is more like a sphere than it is flat. And that's a fact. Whether you like it or not. The world doesn't care what you think. That is a fact. That's an objective truth. Then we have, on the other end of the spectrum, we have faith, which you know all about that. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. So Hebrews faith is that which cannot be seen. God rewards the righteous. There's no evidence needed, no evidence expected for that. That's faith. But then there's belief. Belief is something in between fact and faith. A belief is a strongly held conviction that is open to new evidence. And so the big aha moment for me was that beliefs are very different from facts and faith. Beliefs are tools, not truth. I'll say it again. Beliefs are tools, not truths, that we can adopt these beliefs so that they serve us rather than just carrying around these old beliefs that we carry around just because we always have, even when they might be hurting us. It's like a carpenter saying, oh, this hammer is the one true tool, as opposed to thinking, wait a minute, is this hammer the right tool for the job? Or should I use a screwdriver or a wrench or a saw or other tools for the job. So they're not facts, they're not faith. It's something else entirely. And I think most of our personal problems, our interpersonal problems, and our societal problems come from this unfortunate reality that far too many of us think that our faith is a fact and that the things that we call facts turn out to be nothing more than beliefs. That if we evaluate the proper categories, that there's a place for faith. Absolutely, there's a place for facts. But the vast majority of life decisions, the things that are unknowable as facts or faith. Should I marry this person? Should I forgive that person? Should I start this business? That's not fact or faith. That's belief. And so we need to understand the power of belief to improve our lives.
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You know, it's interesting. You know, I want to come back to that theory in just second nir. But, you know, when you talk about your fitness journey. Anybody? I mean, my podcast listeners listen to a lot of podcasts. You don't have to be into health and fitness to get all the latest theories about why you should never eat or why you should only eat, or how sugar is killing you or how intermittent fasting. I mean, honestly, I always joke with people who are really into this stuff. It's like half of the advice contradicts itself. And everybody. Most people have tried. I tried keto, I tried paleo, I tried this, I tried that. I tried juicing, I tried this. And then it's a season, right? And then they give up. So if you could just loop the thread. Cause I'm in the middle of it. I was in three really healthy years, good trainer, lost a bunch of weight and was really happy with where I was at. Then I got sick last year and I got prescribed a medication that is known for causing weight loss. So I'm trying to now get rid of, hopefully by the time this airs, last five to seven pounds. And what I've learned is there's no silver bullet. Just eat less. Then you burn. You're going to lose weight. Like there's a number if you just hit that number. And it can be a steak, you can have a little bit of ice cream if you want. You don't have to totally cut it out. You just like, you can live. You just can't do too much. And you better work out. Resistance training three or four times a week, right? Plus some cardio. So I do that. I'm healthy. But, you know, that's what I think. My core belief on fitness is moving forward. But it is really hard to get back once you were healthy and then, you know, you had an incident and that kind of thing. So I'd love to know how that stuck. When did it stick? You said 30 years of yo yo dieting. So that would put you into what, 2014, 2024. What, what year did it really click for you?
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Yeah, well, I mean, the last. I mean, I've always been conscious of this. I think, I think the important thing isn't, okay, what is the miracle cure? Because I think a lot of what we thought was scientific fact. And what I was telling everybody about why keto was right or why vegetarianism was right, or why intermittent fasting works or, you know, a lot of those things, like you said, they have, there's conflicting evidence because a lot of this stuff isn't fact. It's, it's. We're, you know, the human body is so complex. There's so little that we actually know about how things really work, let alone the brain. You know, we, we act like we have some kind of understanding of what consciousness is and how the mind works. We have no clue. We are totally in the dark. We are, it's, it's, it's.
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We can't even agree on the definition of sentience or consciousness. Yes, I agree.
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It's right. And so, so much of this, unfortunately, maybe someday we can turn this stuff into facts, but so much of this stuff right now is just based on belief. And so I think that the, the more important question isn't necessarily what is the right way to do things, but rather understanding that our beliefs drive what we see, what we feel and what we do. And so if we can adopt the right belief that serves us rather than hurts us, that's what we should go for. So if intermittent fasting is working for you, if low carb, if low fat, if whatever is working and helps sustain the most important part, which is persistence. And at the end of the day, it's not about doing it in a weekend. You know, it's not. When I, when I used to crash diet, I, you know, I joined one. The first athletic thing I ever did, I was terribly unathletic. I joined the wrestling team and I never won a match. Like, literally, I wrestled for three years. I never won even one match because I was always very heavy but had very little muscle, no cardiovascular fitness. So I lost every match. But part of that yo yo dieting was that you had to cut weight. You had to cut weight, and that never works, right? You can dehydrate yourself and starve yourself and you'll show the scale decreasing for a weekend or so, if that's what you're trying to do. But that's not sustainable. What really changes your life is sustained, persistent action, right? Consistency is more important than intensity. Consistency is more important than intensity in so many facets of life. But changing that belief was essential. Understanding that what really matters is the long run. That's why Beyond Belief is really a book about motivation. It's about how do we sustain that persistent action. There's a great study, maybe I can share with the audience, about an experiment that was done by Kurt Richter back in the 1950s. And he did this amazing study where he took these wild rats and he wanted to test how long they could survive in a cylinder of water. So he filled up the cylinder about halfway. This was back in the 1950s when you could do stuff like this. I don't think you can do these types of experiments anymore. But he took these wild rats and he put them into these cylinders and he timed how long they survived for how long they could keep swimming. And turned out that a wild rat in a cylinder swims for about 15 minutes, okay? Then he took these domesticated rats, these lab rats, and he did the same thing, and they lasted much, much longer. And he wasn't really sure why. And his theory was, is that they had something different, not only about their. Their bodies, but about their minds. Because if you think about it, you would think that the beefy, the wild rats who were, you know, much fitter, they were better natural swimmers, they were far more aggressive, they were grittier, they were tougher. You know, the typical mentality that we have today is that people who are big and strong and tough and aggressive, those people are more persistent, right? They're the ones who have more motivation. But that's not what he saw in the rats. In fact, the wild rats died first, right? Why did that happen? So he conducted another experiment. He took those wild rats, he put them back in the cylinder, and he timed for how long they were swimming. And right before they are about to give up, right before the 15 minutes, he plucked those rats out of the cylinder, he dried them off, he let them catch their breath, and then he put them back in the cylinder. And he did this a few times. And what he found was remarkable, that not only did they start swimming as long as those domesticated rats did, they actually swam to an amazing degree. So they went from 15 minutes to guess how long. Now, maybe you've read the book, so maybe, you know, the Answer.
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I did read the book.
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Maybe you've heard this study. Okay, so you know the answer. It was longer than an hour. It wasn't 60 minutes. It was 60 hours. Not 60 minutes. 60 hours. They swam 240 times longer. Okay, is that not, is that not incredible? Think about that, right? That how many of the things that we do in our life, we're just swimming for 15 minutes, right? We're just giving it our. And we think, oh, we're spent. That's it, we're tired, we can't anymore. We're. But really there's this hidden reserve that's unlocked based on our beliefs. Think about it. These rats, their bodies didn't change, right? Nothing changed in their physical condition. The cylinders didn't change. It was the same experiment. Something was unlocked in their minds because now they knew that salvation might be possible before they thought it was hopeless. And then that hand reached in, took them out of the water. And now there was hope. Yeah, hope of salvation. And now their persistence completely changed. They got 240 times more persistent. And so what does that say about us? How many areas of our life are just waiting to be unlocked? If we could change our beliefs, if we could change our mind.
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This episode is brought to you by Compassion. For 74 years, Compassion International has helped millions of kids through its child sponsorship program. To do this, they partner with local churches here in the United States and in communities around the world to make churches love their neighbors and, and go and make disciples. In seven decades, they've seen God do incredible things. And you know what's been the common thread?
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Compassion.
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Not the organization, but a posture of compassion. The kind of compassion Jesus showed in his ministry. And they know that when people lead with compassion, it changes everything. It changes the person who receives the help. It changes the person helping. It changes the churches, the leaders, the families, entire communities. It changes everything. This is a church driven organization that I'm personally passionate about. We sponsor kids and support Compassion through other ways. There are so many opportunities to connect your church's mission to a partnership with Compassion. It's a way to advance the kingdom together. And you'll see how Compassion really does change everything. So check out compassion.com carrie for free resources and more information about these opportunities. That's compassion.com C A R E Y. You know, I want to drill down a little bit more on that, but just to tie a loop on it because I'm curious, what is your current philosophy belief. About diet and fitness.
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About diet and fitness. Yeah.
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How do you make sure that near doesn't go back to elementary school near, because again, like I said, you've been consistent on this for a while now.
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It's nothing remarkable. I mean, it's exactly what you said. For the vast majority of people, there are some exceptions, 0.1% of people who this doesn't apply to, but for the vast majority of people, you have to eat right and exercise.
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That's it.
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That's it.
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There's no magic, like, you know, like. Yeah.
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Now how do you do that? I mean, I'm not saying it's, it's easy. I think that for a lot of people, our environments make it very, very difficult. So one thing I've chosen in my life is to live in places where exercise is effortless. So part of the reason I was so overweight is because I lived in central Florida where you went from your air conditioned house to your air conditioned car, to the air conditioned school, to the air conditioned mall because you never walked. Well, now I live in cities by choice. I live in areas that are walkable. So I walk 10 to 20,000 steps every single day without even thinking about it. So that allows me. Because I like it, right? The less time I spend in my car sitting on my butt, the more time I'm spending moving. And so that allows me that extra. Every mile is about 100 calories. So if I'm doing an extra five miles a day, that's an extra 500 calories. Well, it doesn't sound like much, but 500 calories extra times seven days, that's one pound of fat every seven days. You know how easy it is to eat 500 extra calories? It's a joke.
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That's a handful.
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That's a handful of almonds. Or that's like what, like three apples? That's not very hard to do. But so by having so shaping the environment, that does actually, you know, for me that's had a big impact. But the rest of it is not rocket science. It's about the consistency of doing that thing that you know you should be doing.
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Well, you talked at the beginning about the difference between belief and faith, but you also talk about faith. So where does that fit in? How does that fit into your schema, so to speak?
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Sure. So I had a real transformation in the process of writing this book around the power of prayer. Now I'll tell you my background. So, yeah, so I stopped praying when I was about six or seven years old. I remember I used to pray a lot when my family first immigrated to America. They got scammed out of their life savings and they basically had to start over. And I remember they were going through a really tough time. I remember them yelling at each other full throttle. And that was a really tough time for my family. And I remember going out to the driveway in front of our home and just laying on the ground and talking to God. And that was very, very helpful. I still remember that vividly. And then as I got older, I stopped and I kind of grew up agnostic. And I thought, okay, I wasn't really. Who was I talking to? What was the point here? No one was listening. And so I didn't pray for most of my adult life up until writing this book. And as I was writing Beyond Belief, I started with the incredible power of the mind to change our bodies. And I came across the placebo effect and the nocebo effect. And then I came across these studies around prayer. And the research just knocked my socks off that the literature is very conclusive that people who pray have tremendous benefits. They live longer, they have more friends, they have fewer health problems. All these good things happen from prayer, which is interesting. But what really changed my mind was that they've done studies where even if you don't have a faith, even if you are a secular person, but you engage in prayer, you still get those benefits. They did a study where they had people put their hands into very, very cold water, painfully cold water, and they stood there and the scientists measured how long these participants could keep their hands in this cold water. And they had essentially three groups. They had a control group that did nothing. They had a faith based prayer group, and then they had one group that did prayer, but without any particular faith. They could, they could pray to Mother Earth or consciousness or whatever they wanted to, but they didn't identify as having a particular faith tradition. So what happened in this experiment that the people who had a faith tradition, they lasted much longer with their hand in that cold water, their pain tolerance was much higher than the people who didn't pray at all. The interesting part, that even people who didn't have a particular faith but still prayed or also had much higher pain tolerance. And we can kind of see this in our lives, right, that people who have faith, they're able to get through difficult situations in a way that other people don't seem able to. It's kind of like that experiment that I told you about earlier, the Richter experiment, where the rats kept swimming and swimming and swimming because they thought salvation was possible, right? That something might save them. And so they persisted 240 times longer. And prayer seems to have that kind of effect. So I became fascinated by this. And so I began to pray, and it was life changing.
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Really?
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How so? Yeah, well, I stopped. I released myself from the belief that if I can't objectively prove that everything that a religion says is as it says it is and without doubt, then I can't participate. That was my belief. And I think it's a belief of a lot of people. You know, this stat that the largest religious community in America today is the nones, the N o N E. Right. That's kind of who I was, because I thought, well, if I can't agree with everything, I can do nothing. I can't participate whatsoever. And I think we have made a huge mistake. I made a huge mistake because the benefits. And so what I did, actually, I went to five religious leaders. I went to a rabbi, a priest, a monk, a swami, and an imam. It sounds like a joke, right?
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Yeah, it does.
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They all walk into a bar, right. And I asked them the same question, which was, can you pray even when you have doubts about faith? And I took one thing away from each of those faith leaders. And this wasn't a scientific study. It was just talking to faith.
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Personal questions.
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Yeah, yeah. Personal quest. And it really changed my mind. And so now when I walk by a place of worship, I'll stop in if they'll let me in, and I'll pray. And it really has benefited me. So I've released that idea that we have to have perfect certainty that I think keeps a lot of people away from church. And I'm hoping that perhaps my experience can inspire others to find their way back to church.
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So you're kind of on a spiritual journey right now, or where does that leave you? Near.
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Well, I think what I've discovered is that you can have practice with doubt. Right. Without perfect certainty. And that I've relieved myself from that, that I don't need to know all the answers with 100% certainty because the benefits are so immense. The community that you get, the reminder of your values, the regular practice, the something bigger than yourself. I think this is what a lot of people who leave a faith community, this is where we really harm ourselves. We threw out the baby with the bathwater for a lot of folks. And what I'm hoping is that now we can perhaps find our way back. And I think also this is a little bit of a call to religious institutions if they want to increase their following, to perhaps not have such a purity test for people like me who need to declare that we believe in every single T and I, that everything needs to be exactly the way it said, that maybe we have doubts, and that's okay because perhaps we're still welcome, that we can still come and participate.
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You know, it's interesting because you have got a lot of church leaders listening, and mostly Protestant, although we have some Roman Catholics, some other faiths listening, but mostly Protestant evangelical leaders. Church leaders. When you think about that church looking from the outside in, is there anything you wish we would do or do differently that would make it feel like a welcome place for you?
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I think it's exactly this idea of not requiring any sort of purity test, that nobody asks the Pope if he has perfect certainty. We just assume. We don't ask. And I think that a lot of folks like me are repelled by that idea that we have to believe everything with perfect faith. And if we don't have perfect faith, if we have doubts, that we're not welcome. Because I think what we find, at least the more people I spoke with, that many, many people have doubts, that in fact, doubts are welcome. But I think that message is not clearly communicated to a lot of folks. At least it wasn't for me.
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No. And you know what? If the message isn't heard, the message wasn't given properly. Yeah, Yeah, I think that's very true. You know, a lot of. We talk about dark nights of the soul here where Christians go through a season of doubting. I know I went through a deep, deep season of doubting, and I still have my questions. Right. There's a few things about which we have clarity and a lot of things about which not so much. And, you know, I think the temptation for a lot of us is to try to be absolutely clear and unequivocal on everything. And I think if God speaks in a loud voice, we can speak with more confidence. If God is quiet on something, be careful not to overstate what God hasn't directly said. That's my own view.
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Right, right. And encouraging folks to continue the practice. One thing I learned from the rabbi that I spoke with, he said that there's a verse in the Hebrew that says. Which translates into, this is when the Israelites are in the Sinai and they say, we will do and we will hear that first comes the doing, then comes the understanding. And I think that's a beautiful reminder that I had it completely backwards, that first I need to understand exactly what I'm doing, and then I can do it. But there's amazing benefits to the doing first. Right. That you can get the benefits of prayer. Even if you don't agree or understand exactly everything, that's okay. That understanding may come. It may never come. You may always have doubts, and that's okay.
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Forgive me, because I don't know the answer to this question. Was that your background growing up Jewish, or was it else? Okay, yeah.
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Yeah. But that just happened to be the first religious leader between the imam, the priest, the swami, and the monk and the rabbi. That just happened to be the first person I spoke with.
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Yeah. You know, and you get into monk traditions within Christianity, it's very much about that. The understanding comes through the doing, through the keeping of the daily office, the hours, et cetera, et cetera. And I sit right there, whoops, right there in the morning, and I have my doing. And it makes a big difference. Big difference. And not every day where you're like, ah. No, no, not at all. Once in a while you get an ah. For the most part, it's just a long obedience in the same direction, and I appreciate you sharing that. Anything else on belief and prayer and faith?
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Yeah, I think that was a big transformation for me, and I hope it inspires others as well. I think I have a lot more respect and appreciation, I think, for people of various traditions. I think that we have so much to learn from others, that allowing ourselves again back to this amazing gift that comes from learning others, that we can, that releasing some of that certainty and judgment. I think a lot of what I learned from the Buddhist tradition was around how pain is certain, but suffering is optional. That, in fact, it's our judgment, it's our constant judging of good, bad, good, bad, good, bad in everything in our life, whether it's what's happening to us. We're delayed at the airport. That's bad. Our publisher doesn't sign us. That's bad. We judge so much of our life, and that is actually the source of our suffering. The source of our suffering is from this constant judgment because we don't know. We don't know.
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Noted.
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A much more beneficial belief is to have that uncertainty, to say, who am I to think I know what will, at the end of the day, result in good or bad? That a much healthier belief is. We'll take it as it comes. That I choose to see the learning opportunity and the benefit of what happens to me.
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A
Today's episode is brought to you by my Art of Leadership Academy. One of the key insights I took away from my recent podcast conversation with Les McEwen is this. If the church can only move at the speed of one leader's insight. A church is always going to be limited by that leader's capacity. I love having great guests on the podcast. Les was one of them. Put it another way, church growth accelerates when leadership is shared. So my Art of Leadership Academy is designed to help you and your team think, decide and lead at a higher level together. Your whole team is learning the same language. When you join, imagine that you share values. Imagine that your leadership frameworks are actually shared and you stop relying on one voice because you feel the pressure as a leader, right? And you start building a leadership culture that lasts. That's what can happen when you join the academy. So here are a couple of simple ways to get started. You could, for example, read an article that we post in the academy and talk about it together in a staff meeting or a Slack channel. You could download my preaching cheat sheet and bounce sermon ideas off each other and really move to team collaboration when it comes to your weekend services. Or you could sit down and work through a course like the Art of Preaching or fund the future and get moving on your future together. So if you want to get started completely free, just go to theartofleadershipacademy.com or click the link in the description of this episode. Remember, don't just grow as a leader, grow as a team. Click the link in the description and you can get started today for free. Wow, I'm really glad to see that chapter of your life open up and really anxious to see where this goes. So self limiting beliefs. I think that's huge. I mean, that's been a part of my life. Like I'm trying to get over still at this stage and age, self limiting beliefs. But one of the things I hear from, from church leaders and just leaders in general near is I'll hear, well, that's a great theory. Very similar to your office hours. Great theory. Let me explain to you why it doesn't work here. And it bothered me for years, right? Because we saw by the grace of God, a church grow explosively an hour north of Toronto. And I would drive to Toronto and sort of report on what was happening here. And they would be like, oh yeah, well that won't work here in the city. And the reason is. And I'm like, have you been to where I am? Like, we have cows for neighbors. Like, this is working. But they always had all these ideas about why it would never work. And I hear that from leaders and I've sort of come up with a line that, look, if it's not Gonna work in your town. Then Apple wouldn't sell iPhones there, they just wouldn't. Right. Meta wouldn't offer Facebook and Instagram in your community because people are just so fundamentally different. But as leaders, I don't know, what does that do? Does that make us feel special? Does that justify a lack of results? Like what does the. This isn't going to work in my town. This doesn't apply to me. What is that self limiting belief? Where does it come from? And do you see it? What do you do about it?
- [36:19]
B
Well, we see it everywhere in society these days. In fact, there's a chapter in my book called you, labels are your limits. And it's one of the chapters at the end because it's one of the more controversial ones. And so I didn't want to make a lot of people angry at me in the beginning. But I talk about the Nocebo effect and I'll give you a little anecdote here that blew my mind. There was a case of a gentleman by the name of Mr. A. They had to anonymize his name, so they called him Mr. A in the literature. And this was a young man in his 20s, and he is reported to have burst into an emergency room, pills in hand. He collapsed on the floor. And as soon as the medical staff picked him up, he said, I took all my pills, I took all my pills. They rush him to the operating room, they observe him, they hook him up to every device they could possibly think of. His blood pressure is dangerously low, his heart rate is falling. And all the staff is convinced he's overdosed. He's convinced he's overdosed on whatever pills he has, but he doesn't know what's in, in the pills because the pills were given to him in a drug trial. And so he doesn't know what the pills are made of. When the doctors ask him, because there's no. It doesn't say on the label because it was given in this drug trial. So they call the people who are running this study and they say, what is in this pills? We need to know what's in them so that we can cure this guy. And they say, give us one minute. They look up his records and they say, oh, he was in the placebo group, that this, the overdose was of an inert substance. Right?
- [37:58]
A
There was nothing like that.
- [38:00]
B
He took sugar pills or something that was completely a placebo. This is a real reported case. They tell this guy that's what happened. And within 15 minutes, his low blood pressure, his failing heartbeat all this stuff immediately goes back to normal and he feels fine. Wow. And so that is such an amazing demonstration of what we call the nocebo effect. We know the placebo effect. The placebo effect comes from the Greek, I shall heal, I shall please. The nocebo effect is the opposite. It's I shall hurt. And we carry around these limiting beliefs like nocebos all the time, these labels that we oftentimes really like. I mean, the thing I take to task, I think, is I think, our over medicalization of a lot of things. We know that the United States of America has, I think, a population of about 5% of the world's population and 85% of the intake of ADHD medication that 25% of US boys have ADHD. How what are we talking about? There's a wonderful quote that I cite in the book, and I can't remember who said it, but it was genius that someday medical science will advance to the point where. Where we're all sick. And that's exactly what's happening. It is because we have so many interests that want to prescribe us, that want to label us. And I'm not saying that that's wrong. Clearly there is a time and a place. It's very helpful when you have a sickness to be told what that sickness is so that you can do something about it. However, when that becomes our identity, when that becomes something that we take comfort in, we call this the Rumpelstiltskin effect. Do you remember the Rumplestiltskin story of the princess who has.
- [39:53]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [39:54]
B
The princess has to weave the hay into gold or whatever, and she's approached by a little troll guy who if she guesses his name, then she can break the spell. So that's actually in psychology. It's a known phenomenon. It's called the Rumpelstiltskin effect. That by naming something, by having a special condition, we get control over the uncontrollable. So I'm having difficulty doing X, Y, Z. Ah, that's my label. That becomes my diagnosis. That's very comfortable. We see this on social media all the time. All these made up diseases that don't exist. They only exist on social media. They don't exist in the medical literature. You know, all these crazy things that you hear on social media, but people glob onto them because it makes them feel better and helps them have control. So it's exactly what you said. This won't work here. What are we doing? We're labeling our situation as special, as different as other because it absolves us of the responsibility of control. Because if we're different,
- [40:55]
A
nothing can be done.
- [40:56]
B
I don't have to do anything. So I'm not saying that's the case in all circumstances, but very often what we find is that our labels are our limits. And that can be a huge cognitive trap.
- [41:08]
A
What are some other limits that you see in leaders all the time? Because I think this is really important. There's sort of this view that ignorance is bliss, but ignorance is also really helpful. I've been in leadership for 30 years now and I talk to other people who are in a similar season. And I think part of what made the early years of leadership so explosive is we didn't know what we weren't supposed to do. Do you know what I mean? Like, you just get in there and it's like anything is possible. And suddenly anything is possible. You can sell hundred year old buildings, you can merge three congregations, you can reach a whole bunch of new people, you can build buildings, you can do all of this stuff that everybody said was impossible because you're kind of dumb. You're just starting out, you don't know any better. And I'm wondering, you know, what are some of the other self limiting beliefs or factors that you see out there?
- [42:04]
B
Yeah, it's such a great point. And this is what we call this entrepreneurial alertness. And there's a scientific literature about this phenomenon, entrepreneurial alertness. And it comes from the fact that people who have an entrepreneurial bent literally see reality differently. They can literally. This isn't figurative, they actually see reality as different. We see this all the time. There's all kinds of experiments that we can run on people that show us that you can perceive reality differently based on your beliefs, based on your, what we call priors, your prior experiences. There's a beautiful experiment where they gave people who were self identified optimists or pessimists, they gave them the same task and the task was to look through a booklet, a little magazine and circle all the E's. Everywhere you saw an E, you had to take a red pen and circle all the E's. And when you were finished, you get a little reward. They gave you some money. What they found was when people did this experiment, there was a little bit of a trick that as they were going through this task, there was an ad in this little pamphlet in this magazine that said, if you're reading this, the experiment is over, go collect your money. People who were optimists saw that ad at a much higher Rate and went to go collect their money than the pessimists. The pessimists were there like dope, circling all the E's until the very end. They literally did not see the ad. They didn't see the opportunity, right? Staring them in the face because they had different priors. They expected things to be the way they are. Oh, you know, this task, if I'm getting paid for it, it's gotta suck. It has to be miserable. It has to be effortful, So I better just sit there and cross all the E's. And so they didn't see the opportunity staring them right in the face. Literally money on the ground that they could just have to bend over and pick it up. But they didn't believe it because they didn't even see it. And so I think that's a wonderful demonstration of somehow sometimes how that naivete, how not having those prior beliefs of why things don't work can actually really benefit us because we see opportunities that other people just can't see.
- [44:28]
A
I think about that a lot. You think about Richard Branson, and he saw stuff like, oh, we can create a record label. We can create record stores. Hey, why not start an airline? Hey, why not start a cruise line? Like, my brain doesn't quite work that way. Or take Mark Zuckerberg, right? A little more recent example, a very plausible story for Zuck would have been, yeah, we had this cool little thing called the Facebook. It was an app that me and my friends built. We built it when we were in college, and then I graduated, and then I got a corporate job and kind of died there. Became one of the biggest companies in the world. And I'm always asking myself, like, what causes that. I did an interview a few months ago with David Ashcraft, who went to, literally, Mennonite country and built a church that would go on to become one of the largest churches in the nation. In the middle of nowhere or. Craig Groeschel, Oklahoma City. I went into Oklahoma City, best basketball team in the NBA right now. And just down the road, biggest church in the United States. As I'm flying in, I'm thinking to myself, if you were sitting there in the 1990s and said, okay, we're going to plant the biggest church in the United States. And you know what we've done? We've selected Oklahoma City because this is where all the growth is. It's not where all the growth is, but people just see things differently. And I'm curious, when you think about that, is that something that can be learned or Is that innate or what is that like when you think about Zuck or you think about Richard Branson or some of these church planters who go in and literally make something out of nothing. Tell us more of what's behind that.
- [46:14]
B
Yeah, I think it is. They say that the people who have these world changing ideas, they tend to see the world differently. When you read Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, he talks about how people would say that Jobs had a reality distortion field that followed him everywhere he went, that he just saw the world differently. And what was amazing is that he could see the world differently and then will it to actually be different. And why is that? It comes from persistent action. Right. It comes from believing in an opportunity and then following that belief over a very long period of time. But without that belief you don't get that sustained motivation. And I think that's the critical part that we miss. And I think part of it happens. Unfortunately there's a trap that happens to smart people that all too often smart people analyze themselves out of good ideas because probabilistically none of these world changing ideas makes any sense. Right. Like you pick it up, it's probably
- [47:21]
A
not going to happen.
- [47:22]
B
It's probably not, because it doesn't. I mean if you want to start a company because you want to get rich, you're just bad at math because the probabilities of succeeding in that business suck. Right.
- [47:34]
A
Like you're just. Yeah, you're likely run the numbers, right.
- [47:37]
B
So what does smart people do? They run the numbers. They say it's unlikely. Nah, never mind. I'll stick with my, my boring job that I hate and I'll just work there for a hundred years and that'll be my life. Well, that's not the people who change the world. Not that there's anything wrong with working a long term job if you love it. But if you hate it and you can't see the opportunity ahead of you, you can't see, see what other people are seeing out there, well then you're going to live your life, I think with regret. So it turns out you can actually make your own luck. That luck isn't chance. We think that there's such a thing as lucky people and unlucky people. Turns out that statistically that's not true. That the same lucky and unlucky things happen to just about everybody. Right. Everybody's on this distribution curve.
- [48:17]
A
What do you mean by that? Like luck? Luck is just to explain that because I always say I'm very fortunate, I'm Lucky like that this podcast took off. Come on, man.
- [48:28]
B
Perfect. Oh, my God, this is so perfect. You've absolutely nailed it here. You think you're fortunate, that you're lucky, that good things just happened to you. And you know what's in life?
- [48:37]
A
You're dead. From my basement. Come on.
- [48:39]
B
Yeah. And what's amazing is because you believe that you see opportunities that other people don't see. Like physically, your eyes register different information to your brain. You are sending different signals to your brain. And because of what's called priors. So the way the brain works. We used to think the brain was a computer. That's not true. That in fact, the brain doesn't compute with little mathematical functions. What the brain does is that it predicts reality. That in fact, your brain is taking in right now 11 million bits of information. 11 million bits of information per second. That's like reading War and Peace twice every second. So the light hitting your retinas, the sound of my voice, the floor against your feet, all of these things, that information, your brain is actually taking in all that information. However, your conscious attention can only process about 50 bits of information. 50 bits versus 11 million bits. So you're actually. Your conscious mind is only processing 0.000045% of all the data that's coming in. How does your brain do it? How can it possibly make sense of all that information? Well, what it does, it focuses all that information through a tiny keyhole of attention. And what is that filter? That filter is belief. What you let into your conscious attention is filtered based on what you believe. So for you, you look at your life, you look at what's happened to you, and you think you're fortunate, you think you're lucky, you think good things have happened to you. Right? If you think you're unlucky, you see all the terrible things that have happened to you, even if the same thing happened. Exactly.
- [50:21]
A
So different things, Right. It's like I put on my, oh, woe is me. I mean, I have woe is me days, but they tend to be a couple a year. Like.
- [50:32]
B
Yeah, yeah. And so that, that it. What it comes down to, it's called an internal locus of control. So it turns out there's two kinds of mindsets, if you will, around how people see the world. There's an internal locus of control and external locus of control. External locus of control. You know, these people, it's, you know, this will never work in my town.
- [50:50]
A
Never gonna work in my town.
- [50:51]
B
Yeah, it's, you know, it's the economy, it's the other political party, it's my stupid family. It's all this stuff outside of me that's the source of my problems. It's all this stuff outside of me. An internal locus of control. That person believes that they can affect change, that they actually control their outcomes based on what they do. Now here's the amazing part. We all kind of have seen people like this. What blows my mind though is that we know that people with an internal locus of control, the ones who believe that they control circumstances rather than circumstances control them. They have more success in every area of their life. They make more money, they have more relationships, they contribute more to their community. All the good things happen more to the people with an external loads of control even. Even when there are objective circumstances that make them less well off. You get the point here. Even if your situation really, really does suck, you're still better off thinking you have an internal locus of control, even if you have every reason to complain. Wow. That.
- [51:54]
A
So I'm. I'm beat down. You know, it's interesting because one of the things I'm really working on, Anir, is I want to stay and be optimistic for decades ahead. And life grinds at that. I want to believe I have agency and control. I don't know, there's kind of a dumbness to it. You know what I mean? I'm going to defy the odds. Is that sort of that positive filter at work or is that delu. There's a thin line between that and delusion, right? Optimism and delusion.
- [52:25]
B
And in fact, blind positive thinking doesn't work. There's actually a chapter in the book where I talk about why just blind positivity is not the right approach. That doesn't work either. But what you're doing is actually a demonstration of a very powerful concept called a turnaround. A turnaround is when we take our belief getting rejected is bad. Okay, yeah. That's your belief. A rational person could very easily, I think the default would be. And probably your knee jerk reaction. Mine certainly would be. That sucks. That's bad news. What a turnaround allows us to do is to take that exact same belief and turn it around and ask ourselves, could the exact opposite be true? Is there any chance, even a 1% chance that getting turned around, that getting rejected is a bad thing, that it's not a bad thing? Could the opposite be true? And that's what you did naturally, which is brilliant. It's an amazing technique. I used to have all kinds of interpersonal problems with my family and this and that and the other. And then I adopted this technique that I describe about the turnaround. It is a life changing practice. It's not comfortable. Sometimes it's very difficult to do. But doing this practice of a turnaround allows you to collect what's called a portfolio of perspectives. The amazing thing is it doesn't necessarily have to be true. Okay? You don't need to necessarily do a turnaround in order to find the true answer, because what is the truth? It's, is it good, Is it bad? This is not fact, it's belief. Right? So it's in between. So when you have that portfolio of perspectives, you don't necessarily have to choose the one that is most true. You have to choose the one that is most useful to you. Even if it is true that it's bad that you get rejected, does that serve you? Does that help you? Does that motivate you? No, no and no. A much healthier belief that you can adopt a much better tool that can improve your life is actually, it's wonderful to get rejected by your publisher because now you get degrees of freedom. You get to learn more, you get to prove them wrong, you get to do all these other things that you couldn't do before. So it's not self delusion, it's picking the tool that works best for the job.
- [54:41]
A
We got two kinds of listeners right now. Some people are like, yeah, I'm that optimistic framer. That's what I see. Other people are kind of like, no, I always see what's working against me. I have a lot of woe is me days. It just doesn't work out, you know? Can a leopard change his or her spots?
- [55:02]
B
We definitely can change, but you're not going to change because you have to. Okay, there's that proverb that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. So if your life is good, if you're happy, if you're contributing the way you want to contribute to the world, if your faith is strong, if you, if you feel like you're living a good life, do whatever you're doing. But if you're like me a few years ago, where I knew I was capable of more, that I, I felt like I was missing something, that there's something wasn't clicking, that I wasn't living up to my full potential, then maybe there's another way. And so that, that's, I think the question to ask is, is, are my beliefs serving me or are they just things that I've adopted from other people? Right. Because so much of what we believe, and again, I'm not talking about faith, I'm not talking about fact, I'm talking about these beliefs, these strongly held convictions open to new evidence. So much of these self limiting beliefs we just adopt from other people that, for example, I'm no good with money, I'm not a math person, I have a short attention span, that's just the way I am. You know, we hear these self limiting beliefs all the time and we adopt them because at some point in our life they probably served us in one way or another or what we hear a lot of that. We feel like if we tempt fate, thinking we want more, or possibly even thinking of a good thing happening, well then maybe it won't happen. Right. We're trying to protect against some evil eye or something and that can actually be disruptive, that we can actually hurt our possibilities of seeing those opportunities of living that better life because we're just tunnel visioned into the way we've always done things. So we can absolutely change. The first step, of course is awareness about that. Yeah, the first step is awareness that taking a step back, I think the best place to start, at least for me, was with my relationships. I'll tell you a quick story of how this came about. So a few years ago during my mom had her 74th birthday and I was living in Singapore, she was in Florida, and I wanted for her 74th birthday to send her flowers. And I started researching how do I get these flowers to Florida and how do I make sure that I find a good florist who doesn't rip me off? You know, I need same day delivery so that they're not in the van for too long and get burned. And like, you know, I did all this research, I stayed up till one in the morning, I paid extra to make sure they were same day delivered. It took a long time. I called her up the next day for her birthday, she thanked me for the flowers and then she said, listen, those flowers you sent, they're already half dead. Don't buy from that florist again. And so, yeah, okay, so you're on my side on this one, right?
- [57:59]
A
I get it, I get it.
- [58:00]
B
I immediately, my initial reaction, immediately, you know, I, here I am 47, I've written three books, I've been working on myself for all these years. And I immediately went into 15 year old mode. I became that petulant teenager. Yeah. And here's what I said. I said, well, in that case, remind me to never buy you flowers. Again. And that went over about as well as you'd expect. Now, after the call, my wife was with me. After the call, my wife looked at me. She said, would you like to do a turnaround on this? And so we talked briefly about what turnarounds are. And here's how I did this turnaround. So the first turnaround is a turnaround of my belief. So I literally wrote. I took out a piece of paper and I wrote down the belief. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Carrie. Right. That's a fact. Right? You heard what just happened?
- [58:50]
A
Yeah, that's a fact.
- [58:51]
B
That's a fact. My mom is too judgmental and hard to please. How could that not be true? Okay, well, what a turnaround forced us to do is to take the opposite view. Could that. Is there any chance that the opposite could be true? My mom is not too judgmental and hard to please. Okay? Doesn't matter if it's true. Doesn't matter if it's true. It's a tool, not a truth. Could that be true? Okay, fine. Maybe it's true. Maybe she wasn't too judgmental and hard to believe. Maybe she was just stating a fact. She did thank me for the flowers, right? And so maybe she was just trying to protect me from not getting ripped off. So, okay, fine. That's one turnaround. Another turnaround, and this is the one that really hit is I am too judgmental and hard to please. Whoa. Could that be true? Wait a minute. I am too judgmental and hard to please? Well, I did kind of expect her to recite the exact script that I had in my head about how I wanted to be thanked for those flowers. And when she didn't comply with my script then and did something different, well, then I lost it. So who was being judgmental and hard to please? Here I was. So now this tremendous burden was lifted off my shoulders because my prior belief required her to change so I could be happy. It only gave me one choice. She's the guilty party. As opposed to now. I have a portfolio of perspectives. I can choose the belief that serves me best. And you know what? It gave me a lot more degrees of freedom to ask myself. Maybe I was being the problem here. Maybe I was demanding too much. Maybe I was the one that was hard to please. And whether that's true or not doesn't matter. Maybe you're listening to me and saying, no, no, no. Your mom is still hard to please, and she judged by that. That's not what we're talking about. It's not about fact, it's about belief. And the belief that served me best was an alternative from the one I originally had. And so I could pick that perspective. So that I think is a wonderful place to start if you can do that with other people. I'll tell you one more thought that I think is very useful in terms of where is a good place to start. I think my mind really started to change when I asked myself, how do you measure love? How do you measure love? Like when you say to somebody, I love you so much, what does that mean? My initial reaction was kind of hedonic, that like, oh, you make me feel good, right? You do things for me, right? But that, that can't be it, right? That can't be why we love people a lot. Because, you know, I remember when my daughter was born, you know, babies don't do a lot for you. They make messes, they throw up, they cry all the time. They're not doing anything for you. And yet when I held my daughter for the first time, I loved her more than anything in the world immediately. So why was that? Well, I think we measure love by the benefit of the doubt. Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. How much you love somebody has to do with how much benefit the doubt you give them. Because in life we tend to judge other people that we don't love very harshly. That person cuts you off in traffic. Ah, what a jerk. They're doing that to annoy me. That waitress or waiter is being short with you. Ah, what a lazy person. They have such a bad word work ethic. As opposed to, well, maybe that driver was driving to the hospital because they had a sick family member. Or maybe that waiter was having a double shift and they've been on their feet all day. So with other people, we tend to judge them harshly. But with ourselves, well, we explain why we messed up. If people just knew the circumstances that I was operating under, then they would understand, right? So we have to explain ourselves. So we give ourselves a lot of benefit of the doubt. We give the people we love a benefit of the doubt. We don't think that babies cry to annoy us. They're babies. It's the best tools they have. Well, we're all babies. We're just grown up babies. So as we get older, we give people less and less benefit of the doubt. We love them less and less. And so I think that what's really helped me is understanding that the way my mom behaved, she, you know, I can't read her mind. I Don't know what her intent is. I don't know what was happening. I had beliefs, I had filters. Right. I had perceptual lenses that told me that she was being judgmental and hard to please. But in reality she was just operating with the best tools she had. Just like a baby. Right. They cry because that's what they do. That's all they have to offer. That's the beliefs that they're operating under. And that's the same with everybody in our lives. So by testing that in that one narrow domain of relationships, right. With your family, with your co workers, with your community, with your church members, and then extending that grace and that ability to shift our perspective, to shift our beliefs in other areas of life, there's no area of your life that this doesn't touch and improve.
- [63:40]
A
Are there other keys to reformulating your beliefs?
- [63:45]
B
Yeah. So I think so. Step number one is realizing that your beliefs aren't permanent, that their tools, not truth. I think realizing that you can turn around these beliefs and then practicing it every single day and particularly relishing the turnaround. I think for a long time I was indoctrinated to think that changing your mind is bad, that if you're a flip flopper, that's like a character flaw, that you don't want to change your mind. That means you're inconsistent. We don't trust people who change their mind around here. Changing your mind is the best thing ever because that means you're growing, that means you're realizing a higher state. Right. You're getting a clearer picture of reality, of the world around you. And so I think we shouldn't be so down on the ability to change our minds. I think that's great. Starting with these low stakes things like these beliefs around how to diet, what we think about our neighbors, what we think about our family members, these slow and low stakes ways of the joy. I think very few people have experienced the joy, the bliss of wow, I was totally wrong about that and now I learned from that experience. That's such a gift.
- [65:04]
A
Yeah. When you think about your own attitude, that's one thing. But a lot of us lead teams. If you sense self limiting beliefs on your team, what is the key to taking that out to the people you work with or lead?
- [65:20]
B
So if you talk to business leaders, and I know you've talked to many, many, many, I bet if you ask them what is the key to your success, 1, 2 or 3, they're going to say probably number one is culture. Am I wrong?
- [65:35]
A
Everybody says culture Culture.
- [65:37]
B
Culture, yeah, it's become a cliche.
- [65:39]
A
Right, but that kind of starts with you, right?
- [65:43]
B
I think it starts with your beliefs. What is culture? Culture is just a set of beliefs. And what's interesting is we think that there are these universal beliefs that work across every company, that they tend to be these touchy feely beliefs like, oh, we should treat everyone with respect and the customer is number one and we should all be able to say what we feel and be respected. And that sounds nice. We all want to work in that type of work environment. But let me tell you, there are many companies that don't have those beliefs, they don't have those values, they don't have that company culture and they still succeed. They still succeed. These things that we think are universal, of course, everybody needs to be respected and customer. There's lots of companies that do great that don't have those values. They have other values. Right. So what's interesting about this is that again, beliefs are tools. Not true. So the same belief at one company in a different industry will not work. So it's really about fundamentally evaluating which of these beliefs are serving me versus which are hurting me, and tailoring those beliefs to the industry, the team, the whatever that you're working in, using that exact same process. But once you have those beliefs, cementing them into a culture. Right. Recognizing what type of beliefs here work best, what kind of beliefs serve us, and blindly copying them because you read it in a business book or because some business leader said that that's what they did at that company is not necessarily the right way to go. What you want to do is to figure out what beliefs, what values, what culture you're going to adopt in your situation among your team.
- [67:16]
A
If you end up with somebody who just doesn't change their mindset, what do you do with them? Do you just say, well, that's just the limit. You let them go from your team because you can't control other people. So what do you do if you have that sort of Debbie Downer, so to speak, on your team?
- [67:38]
B
None of this says that you have to suffer. Just because I changed my mindset and my beliefs around my mom, it doesn't mean that if my mom is abusing me that I have to put up with it, I have to be in that situation. So there's nothing that says it's always your fault and you have to suffer through that. No. If there's somebody who's a toxic person and is not serving you, that is a good step to potentially part with that. Person. I would say though that I don't think it's our job to try and change people's beliefs. I think that is something that when the student is ready, the teacher appears that when they're ready. Hopefully this book will help people evolve their beliefs as well. But I don't necessarily think that's something that we should try and change with people other than maybe saying, hey, here's a book I really like that you might enjoy as well.
- [68:28]
A
Other than that, kind of like you set the bar, everybody's invited, see who comes to the party.
- [68:33]
B
Exactly, exactly. I think that's the right approach.
- [68:35]
A
Well, the new book is called Beyond Belief. It's out now wherever you get books. If people want to track with you online, you're a very interesting follow. Where can they find you?
- [68:48]
B
Absolutely. So my blog is@nearandfar.com, near spelled like my first name n I r&far.com there's also a free 120 page belief transformation journal, a 30 day belief transformation journal. It takes you step by step on exactly how to find these limiting beliefs and change them into liberating beliefs. That's completely free at that blog address.
- [69:10]
A
Nirfar.com well Nir, I'm sure this won't be our last conversation, but thank you so much. It was good and challenging. I appreciate you.
- [69:17]
B
My pleasure. Thank you.
- [69:19]
A
Well, that's challenging, isn't it? And that's really interesting about prayer. I also love having guests who are on a spiritual journey. So this probably won't be the last time we have Nir on. If you want more, you can get show notes. You can find everything we talked about including links to his latest on over in the Art of Leadership Academy. Just go to theartofleadershipacademy.com join over 16,000 church leaders, set up a free account. You'll get access to this and every other episode and a whole lot more inside the academy. Well, next time we have Mark Lutz. He is talking digital church. What do you do? If you really want to reach the people who live online, we've got that. We've also got John Acuff, Todd Wilson and a whole lot more coming up on the podcast. So thank you so much for watching. Thank you for listening. Really hope this has been an enjoyable episode. You know what I'm excited about? Spring's coming, man. My absolute favorite season. Spring, summer. Sign me up all day long, get back on my bike outside. It's going to be great. And wherever you're listening, really glad that you tuned in this time around. I hope our time together today helped you identify and break a growth barrier you you're facing.