A Personal Note from Orion

I remember years ago following him on YouTube and reading his books.  Little did I know that he was going to become one of my closest mentors, that I would have a podcast, and that I would interview him on it.  I don’t think I even knew what a podcast was back then!  I’m so grateful for having him in my life – this is a very special episode for me. 

You might remember Dr. John Demartini from the movie “The Secret”.  He is a self made man, and one of the most brilliant people on the planet! His own story is truly inspirational:  He went from having been told as a young child that he would never learn to read, write and communicate, to living a life that is dedicated to serving others, focusing on teaching, writing and traveling. He’s created so many tools and resources that serve to help people find their true purpose in life.  On this episode, Dr. Demartini shares the steps we can take to find our highest values, incorporate them into our life, and awaken our hidden genius.

 

 

About Today’s Show

‏‏Hello and welcome to Stellar Life Podcast. Dr. Demartini is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on human behavior and personal development. He’s the author of 40 books published in over 29 different languages. He has produced over 60 CD’s and DVD’s covering subjects such as development in relationship, wealth, education, and business. Each program is designed to assist people to activate relationship and empower themselves in all seven areas of their lives; financial, physical, mental, vocational, spiritual, family, and social. I had the honor and privilege of studying with him in person over the last few years. His teachings are truly transformational. Hello and welcome to the show.

‏‏Thank you for having me.

‏‏Yeah, I’m so excited. I am one of your biggest fans. I think you’re incredible. I think you’re probably the smartest person I’ve ever met in my life. I just wanted to share some of your knowledge with my listeners and hopefully help them get tons of breakthroughs and exceed in their life. Let’s start by you telling me a little bit about yourself.

‏‏I’m a guy who on a full time basis I research, I write, I travel, and I teach. I basically have delegated everything else off my plate and I do those four things. Outside that, my brilliance isn’t so high but in that area I do pretty good. I’ve been doing it now, November will be 44 years. In a couple months, it will be 44 years that I’ve been doing that. I just love researching, writing, traveling, and teaching. I’ve been doing that for many, many years. I do it pretty well around the world. I live full time doing that, I’m kind of a nomadic full time traveler just researching and writing. I’m off to Scotland tomorrow morning and then I came in from India before then on the way here, and then I go to Africa, then I go to the States, then Tokyo, then Australia. I just constantly travel, teach, and research everyday.

‏‏Yeah, you teach and you travel and you research and you keep producing tons of material, you keep studying, and you keep learning. That is just incredible. It was not always like that. You didn’t have an easy start, did you?

‏‏I was born with my hand and foot turned in. I had to wear braces on both my arm and my leg to try to straighten them out. Then, I found out that I had speech impediment, I had to go to a speech methodologist at about age one. In elementary school, I had learning problems and I was told by my teacher that I would never read, write, or communicate, and never go very far in life. I definitely did have issues with learning. I was good in sports, I could run fast and I can balance pretty well but definitely school was not so strong. I end up dropping out of school. I left home when I was 13 and I dropped out of school at 13, 14 almost. I was a street kid until just 17, 18. Then, I nearly died and I met an amazing teacher who one night, one hour, shared one big message that really changed the trajectory of my life. It made me believe that I could overcome my learning problems and he inspired me to want to go and try to learn how to read and actually learn how to be intelligent. I always that intelligent people were teachers so I assumed I’d be a teacher and I’ve been loving it ever since. I went out on a journey and it was a slow process, it wasn’t easy because I didn’t have a high school degree and I had to go back and take a GED and learn how to read. It was just a slow, steady process but I was determined and I never gave up on it. Here I am 44 years later, still as diligently trying to learn as much as I can and trying to share as much as I can.

‏‏And so you do. What drives you to keep doing so much?

‏‏I don’t know, I just can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing.

‏‏Yeah, you travel so much more than anybody that I know or anybody. You keep producing materials and reading and you never stop. You still find time to have this interview. How do you find time to do everything that you want to do? How do you do that?

‏‏Well, if you fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, it doesn’t fill up with low priority distractions that don’t. I don’t ever have idle moments. I will put in an interview pretty well anytime, a decent interview I’ll put it in anytime. Anywhere where I get to research, write, travel, or teach, I do it. Before here, I’m working on a textbook on mathematics so right now I’m working on that. I quickly ran and got a bowl of soup, I was down there in maybe 20 minutes, got a bowl of soup, and came back up here. Before that, I was working on mathematics. When I get off here, I’ll be working on that until another interview later. I don’t do anything other than what I love doing which is research, write, travel, teach.

If you fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, it doesn’t fill up with low priority distractions that don’t. I don’t ever have idle moments. Click To Tweet

‏‏You’re never on Instagram or Snapchat or Facebook probably?

‏‏I type things for those social mediums but I don’t just socialize on them per se. I write inspirational things to try to send to my South African office and they’ll put it on the social media because I’d rather be researching and learning new things and rather be sharing and doing interviews or filming. Yesterday, I did two interviews of consulting, documentary film. I try to keep my day pretty well full doing what I love doing.

‏‏What’s the most interesting question people ask you in your interviews?

‏‏I don’t know, it depends. How did the universe begin, that kind of thing. Sometimes, people ask me interesting things about what do I eat, what is my daily routine, things of that nature.

‏‏Oh no, that’s one of my questions.

‏‏There’s nothing really extraordinary about it. I get up and I do a gratitude exercise. I document every night the gratitudes I have. I knew I was going to do this interview so I already typed it in but I’ll type an update before I go to bed. I go through and I document what I have the opportunity to do each day and I make a ritual out of that, that’s a daily thing. In the morning, I’ll get up and I’ll review that in my head and I’ll try to get kind of a teary eyed moment of gratitude. And then I’ll ask myself what are the highest priority actions I can do today to help me fulfill my mission on Earth. Usually, I’ve been doing it so long as it’s research, write, travel, teach so I tend to do that. Sometimes, it will give me a specific and then I’ll write that down usually on a notepad right next to the bed at the hotel. I’ll shower, clean it up, and get to my computer and start to work or I’ll go on to do a talk or I’ll do an interview or whatever I have on the agenda for the day.

‏‏Can you tell me a little bit more about your mission?

‏‏Well, I’ve had a mission to research every ology and discipline that’s known. I’m at 296 different disciplines now. When I met Paul Bragg when I was 17 right before my 18th birthday, I said I want to be a teacher. He introduced to me what he called natural universal laws. That sounded really cool, universal law, things that are applied everywhere. I said wow, that’s fascinating, I’m going to go find out what a universal law is. I went up and tried to learn what is a universal law. Then, a basic universal law, a natural law is a law that applies anywhere anytime kind of thing. Then, I said well, how would I gather that information to get the best information? Then, I decided that I would study every different discipline and try to find the most universal laws applied across every discipline. I made a list in the encyclopedia, every discipline, every ology that a person could study. In the process of doing that, I made a list, I typed them up. I said alright, and then I figured the average PhD reads about 75 to 100 books in each area so I made a goal to read 100 books in each of the disciplines and try to devour that information and try to understand that discipline. That’s put me now at 30,000 books reading but what it’s done is it’s allowed me to develop constructs that are pretty broad, whether it’s physics or chemistry or anthropology. It doesn’t matter what it is, geology, astronomy, I’m looking for the most universal laws that I can build a foundation of teachings on that I can then share with my students so that they have the most profound teaching I can possibly offer them. I want to know every one of those ologies, how does it relate to the evolution of human consciousness and the mastery of life and the maximum potential for a human being. Anything related to any field that relates to human beings, and frankly I don’t know of any field that doesn’t. Astronomy relates to human beings in their ambitions to space. Astrophysics does, nuclear physics does because we’re made out of quantum events. Archeology is the study of our past, what do we do, what was important to us, the evolution to see the trajectory of our future. Chemistry is our organic molecules, mineralogy is the study of the Earth and how our Earth and our environment manifested. Every ology all relates to human beings as far as I’m concerned. I’m inspired to study everything and how it relates to the human being and the experience.

‏‏Wow, what are the common trends that you found between all those ologies?

‏‏Well, there are certain principles of laws that apply. Obviously, the two most significant principles that we can do are two of the forces of nature; radiation and gravitation. I like to think that each human being has both within them. If they are inspired by what they do, they radiate and shine outward because they’re really glowing metaphorically because they’re inspired. People that are living by their highest values, things that are really, truly important to them, they glow and they really shine. They go out and do expanded things that leave a mark in the world. People that are living by lower values and are unfulfilled and are weighing down emotionally, they gravitate and weigh themselves down with emotional baggage and they feel heavy. Inside the human psyche, when you have gratitude and love, you’d have radiation. When you have ingratitude and you have emotions, you have gravitation. I always say that ingratitude is gravitational and gratitude is radiational. Those are basic principles inside the human psyche. One is bringing us down to Earth in the underworlds as the Theologians used to say and the other one is taking us up into the celestial world, expanding our vision and living outside our box and doing something more magnificent instead of insignificant. I don’t know of any ology that’s not tied together with human development.

‏‏People think that things like the movie The Secret is all new information but it’s actually not, right?

‏‏Well, they may sometimes repackage it in new bottles as they say. The principles have been standing around. We can go back and read the ancient Greeks in Plato and [00:15:54] and these guys, they were studying some of these same things. [00:15:59] just asking these same questions and plotting this in the third century A.D. was asking some of the same questions we ask today. A lot of the great thinking has been passed down through the ages. If you’ve not studied those great philosophers, you’d never know it because you’d think they’re modern but a lot of it, the same questions have been asked. Aristotle’s questioning in his book on the soul was probably more in depth than any book, modern new age books on the soul. Those theologians are still derivatives of Plato and Aristotle’s work. When you get to study and stand on the shoulders of some great minds like that, it’s inspiring.

‏‏You definitely do. You wrote so many books. How do you do that? How do you write so many? You wrote about 40 of them?

‏‏Well if I put all the manuscripts and all the texts and stuff, it’s well over 100. The one I’ve got right now is 422 pages and it’s on mathematics, it’s called Exploration Into Infinity and Eternity. It’s the relationship of [00:17:08] theory and infinitesimals and zero and infinity. It’s all the mathematical explorations of the way we think conceptually, abstractly in day to day living. It’s about what happens, how do human beings, what is their construct of the infinite. It usually is put in terms of theological language but I try to put it in mathematical and theological language. I’m going back and forth between consciousness, physics, mathematics, and everyday thinking and how we think in terms of when we set a goal and when we create pieces of art out of our life. We’re creating a masterpiece out of our life, where does infinity come in? We can approximate it or approach it and how our thinking is always trying to expand and so something in that area. I’m correlating it with the human experience but I’m hitting it from the angles of mathematics.

‏‏Wow, it’s pretty good for somebody who was predicted to not read, write, or communicate ever.

‏‏Well, it is true. I definitely had problems. If you would’ve listened to audio cassettes of mine over the last 35 years, you can see or hear the progression of me learning how to articulate. It didn’t start out that way, I made up a lot of words, I had definitely speech issues. It’s a slow thing, people see it now and go, “You’re gifted.” No, it’s a lot of work.

‏‏Right. I experience the same thing because English is my second language. When I speak in Hebrew, my native tongue, I sound very eloquent but in English I feel like I get stuck sometimes. I can’t find the right words, I know what I want to say but it’s a little hard. That’s an inspiration, maybe one day.

‏‏Well, you seem fine right now so I wouldn’t be too concerned about it. When I was 18, I tried to get back to-I took a GED which is a high school equivalent test and then I took a college entrance exam and I passed it guessing. I tried to take a college and I guessed past that. When I tried to go to college, I failed my first class. I literally almost gave up on the idea of being a teacher and learning and all that whole thing almost stopped but my mom inspired me and encouraged me. She said that no matter what you do, whether you be a teacher, travel the world, or surfer or be a bum on the street, we’re going to love you no matter what. Your dad and I are going to love you no matter what. Somehow when she said that, I learned about love. It was an unconditional love moment. I remember my hand going into a fist and I remember looking up and seeing a vision of me standing in front of a million people speaking. I said I’m going to amass this thing called reading and learning and teaching and I’m going to travel, I’m going to step foot in every country on the face of the Earth, I’m not going to let anything stop me. I made a decision where there’s no turning back. That was a big turning point because then I went and locked myself in my room and started memorizing dictionaries and reading encyclopedias. I just lived in encyclopedias and dictionaries throughout most of the day and just try to increase my vocabulary to catch up with the other kids and eventually exceed them.

‏‏I’m so happy you did. I love your mom for that.

‏‏Well, my parents passed away now but they were very inspired that I decided to go back to school because I was headed down a path that was not going to give me a long life. In fact, I just had lunch with two of the buddies I lived with in a tent 45 years ago the other day, they’re still alive. A lot of the buddies I had are gone, they died early. If I hadn’t had that turning point in my life, I don’t know where I’d be today.

‏‏It’s this moment of decision that your destiny is formed. You’ve done all of that. You teach many courses, you teach breakthrough experience that I had the pleasure to attend in. What are the breakthroughs that people are getting from working with you?

‏‏There’s lots of those. They really show up in almost every one of the main areas of life. I have some people that have learning challenges like myself and I show them how to wake up their genius and how to find out what’s really valuable to them and link whatever they’re learning to that and prioritize their learning because you only have a finite number of years to living and playing. If you’re not sabotaging your learning, days are going by and you’re not accelerating. How to apply knowledge and how to share it as quickly as you get it so it sticks because your memory is enhanced by sharing information. I feel for a lot of young people, in fact in South Africa we had a 27% pass rate of [00:22:18]0 in a town ship. In one year, we converted it to 97%.

Your memory is enhanced by sharing information. Click To Tweet

‏‏That’s extraordinary.

‏‏It is. I was expecting 40%, 45% maybe, but we literally went to 97%. 97% of the kids that took their high school graduation test passed which was unheard of, it was amazing. Getting to implement it in education has been very inspiring to me. That’s extra special to me because they give me 14,000 teachers in South Africa just to train on that. It really made a difference. In business,  a lot of people have gone into the break to experience, other programs have excelled in their business. One of them I met with today has done extremely well in the business. He’s franchising and he’s probably going to have a billion dollar business in a short period of time. I’ve had people that do well in movie industry, I’ve had people in sports. I just had a guy who got on the Hall of Fame of music that’s been with me for six years now and he just got to the Hall of Fame. I’ve seen people excel in their business, I’ve definitely seen people grow their wealth. In fact, the gentleman today I had lunch with, he started following my step by step process to have financial independence. He’s implemented that. We had 128 people in Sydney about a year ago, 85%, about 100 people had all implemented the financial independence pathway program that I developed and they’re just following it, literally following it to the letter. They’re changing their financial destinies. We shifted their values, we set up electronic savings and made investment processes, we structured it where they’re just going to go get wealthy now. We’ve had people save relationships, we’ve seen relationships from the blink, we taught people how to communicate in relationships, how to communicate people’s values, how to own the traits of what they see in others instead of judging. There’s a lot of people that have changed marriage situations, tons of those. In social leadership, when a person’s congruent enough, they can live according to what they really value, they display and demonstrate, exemplify leadership capacities spontaneously. It’s innate with all of us. If some people are not congruent and they’re not therefore demonstrating it and they’re holding themselves back from their leading capacities. Unquestionably, health care is a bit inspired. I’m teaching a course in October on 1,000 health conditions, the underlying psychology, philosophy, and physiology of it. I’m doing that in Houston in October. I wrote a big text, a thousand page text on just health conditions because my background is in health care originally. And then also it’s inspiration, we have people from almost every religion coming to the programs. We have students now in every country around the world and we have people from just about every religion that I’ve seen. We try to help people live an inspired life without being caught in their religious structure and give themselves permission to be inspired and allow the people in their world of inspiration to be loved. I try to help people on Earth, I have students that just about every area and sometimes multiple areas we’ve been able to contribute to. That’s part of my work is to watch lives change. That’s the thing that inspires me the most. That’s why I study everyday.

‏‏Yes, you do. You have a tool in your website that I love. We’re actually using it for hiring people. It’s called Value Assessment. It’s good personally just to know what your values are and it’s just good when you hire somebody on your team to know exactly where their mind is and what they need and how can they work well with you. Can you talk a little bit about that Value Assessment?

‏‏Yeah. Every human being lives by a set of priorities, a set of values, things that are most important to least important in their life. Whenever they are living congruently, they excel. If they live according to their highest values, they excel. Nobody goes to work for the sake of the company, they go to work to fulfill values, their highest values. If they can see how their job descriptions help them fulfill their highest values, they’re engaged, they’re inspired, they want to go to work, they can’t wait to serve people. They love tackled challenges, they tend to want to expand and progress and grow. But if they don’t and they’re going to be unengaged then immediate gratification will be compensation for them. I’m a firm believer in helping people do that. On the website, the value determination process is 13 questions that you basically ask to determine what your life demonstrates is really valuable to you. If you just ask somebody what do you value, they’ll tell you all kinds of social idealisms. If you actually look at what they actually do and what they live, that’s what matters. It’s not what you say, it’s what you actually live. I look at how they fill their space because things that are really valuable to them they keep around them and things that aren’t they get rid of it. I look at how they spend their time, what they really, truly spend most of their time on. I look at what they’re energized by. I look at what they spend their money on. I look at where they’re most organized, where they’re most disciplined, what they think about, what they visualize, and what they affirm inside themselves about how they want their life that’s showing evidence that’s coming true, what they converse with other people about most, what is it that inspires them, what are the most consistent goals that they have that they’re inspired by that they’re showing evidence of becoming true, and what is it they love learning about? I go through this and these value determinants are very concrete. They’re very objective. If you get there and get those, you’ll get an idea of what they’re really committed to. It’s eye opening to people because many times people don’t know what it is, they think it’s important. They’ll think their family is or they’ll think money is or whatever. I found that literally everybody when I ask them how many want to be financially independent, they all put their hands up. Everybody says that. We go down and do their values, financial wealth building isn’t even on the list. That’s why they keep spending their money on consumables and depreciables and never buy assets that go up in value. I’m really amazed how many people are actually out of touch with what’s really valuable to them. This tool on the website helps people get clear on what that is.

‏‏Yes. It’s incredible. It was an eye opener for me. I love this tool. I also feel like my values have shifted since the last time I did it so maybe I want to go back and do it again. You taught us that if let’s say money is not even on the list and you want to get higher on your first four top values, then you link that thing that’s not even on the list or number 13, 14 to your top four. Can you talk a little bit about that?

‏‏Anytime two values are close together on the hierarchy of values, the list of values, they enhance each other. Anytime they’re far away from each other, they tend to hinder each other. If you don’t have a value on wealth building and you would like to, what we do is we stack up the benefits and reasons for doing the action steps to build wealth. These are not just idea I want to be wealthy but the specific action steps that are proven to generate wealth for people. We stack those and ask how specifically is doing this action going to help me with my highest value? We link it to the highest value and we make links. I tell people to do hundreds of these links, not just a few. I want them to neuron-plastically remodel their brain where they’re literally having now that pathway in their brain to follow. The second they do, they change their financial package. It’s amazing. The guy today at lunch was telling me that he had been running a business and exploding the business, building the business, but he didn’t have any wealth to show for it. He just kept reinvesting everything else and now he’s got the reinvestment portion, he’s got the investment portion, savings and liquid cash, he’s got tax, he’s got his entire financial system structured. He says I’ve made more money since I structured it. I told him that if you manage money wisely, you receive more money to manage. He’s now doing that and it’s making him huge differences in his overall business. He’s got more people now coming to him with money wanting to participate because he’s got cash flow and because he’s got investments. They seem him viable and now more people want to be involved in the expansion of his business. He says he can’t believe the difference. If he hadn’t gone through and done that exercise, he could probably go another ten years and still not figure that out. It pays off to know how to either set goals that match your values or change your values to match your goals but there has to be congruency if you want to maximize potential.

‏‏That’s powerful. I actually used that with my clients. A long time ago, I did this [00:31:27] buddy bootcamp, seven week webinar type teaching. I worked with a group of women for weight loss and mindset and all that good stuff. I actually made them take the assessment and one of them loved her family but body was very low on the list. I really connected with her how taking care of her body affects her children because they’re watching her. We had a whole conversation about that and that just clicked for her. That was incredible, it’s such a great tool, thank you. How did you come up with that?

‏‏Well, instead of seeing super genius stuff, it’s just simply understanding how people are driven inside. There’s intrinsic drive and there’s intrinsic. If you link it to highest values, it goes into intrinsic drive. You do it spontaneously. We’re getting to work with [00:32:23], she’s got a huge following around the world where she does workouts. She’ll go into a city and there will be 2,000 people working out with her. She does amazing stuff. She specializes in weight loss so now she’s going to be incorporating that. We’re going to do a documentary kind of film or I guess a promotional film system with her in about a month or so down in Australia. She wants to incorporate that in because she watched a group of 20 women who had done that and their performance in the workout and their weight reduction rapidly changed. They go whatever you did, I want everybody to get that. It’s a very powerful tool. These people now all of a sudden were working out spontaneously, were eating differently, and they dropped weight. Where beforehand, they were just YOLO-ing all over the place. She said I want that incorporated into my system so we’re going to partner on that and put that in.

‏‏Congratulations.

‏‏I’m inspired by her. She’s a really hard working lady and she’s helping a lot of women.

‏‏Beautiful. The beauty of it is that when you help one person, you don’t only help that one person, it creates a ripple effect in the world. It affects their family members, it affects their friends, and it’s just a beautiful thing. When you change one life, you change a whole world around them. How do we awaken our genius? This is not a question.

‏‏I think every human being has a genius hidden inside. I think a genius, anytime you’re pursuing something that’s extremely meaningful, really high priority, really high value, you actually embrace challenge in the pursuit. They found that anytime you’re pursuing something that’s inspiring something but challenging to you, you will wake up the genius, the creativity. Creativity is a byproduct of pursuing challenges that inspire you. It’s that simple. For instance, let’s say you have a 12 year old boy and he love his video games. He’s working on his video games, working on his videos games. His parents are telling him do your homework, clean up your room, do this, those are boring to him. He loves his video games. The second he goes and masters his video games, he goes to his parents and tries to figure out a way of earning or getting the next, more challenging video game. The second you’re doing something that’s really inspiring to you, that’s high on your values, you actually look for the next challenge. It’s a spontaneous thing to want to solve the next challenge to go another level to push yourself. When you’re not doing something that’s meaningful and high in your values, you want to avoid challenge. This is the key, making sure that what you’re doing is something that’s inspiring to you, that’s high in your values, and you will then pursue challenge that inspires you. It’s the challenge that literally activates the executive center and initiates the creativity.

‏‏Let’s say we awaken our genius and we found our purpose, how do we get over obstacles?

‏‏When you’re doing something that’s so inspiring to you that you can’t wait to get up in the morning and do it, you turn obstacles into opportunities. You get creative with your challenges. When the challenges come, you just get creative and come through them. If you’re doing something that’s not inspiring to you, you’re going to want to avoid the challenges and you want to give up. When you’re doing something that’s extremely meaningful, you don’t stop. You go look for solutions, you come up with solutions, you go get help, you get mentorship. You do whatever it takes to solve them. That’s a real test of whether something is really important to you or not. If you perceive challenges as feedback as opportunities, that’s a sign you’re doing something you love doing. If you see it as an obstacle and you want to come up and bitch about it and be a victim of it, that’s a sign you’re not really inspired to do it, you’re doing something that you think is important that’s not really important. I would say that we all have challenges, that’s the nature of our day. If you go after challenges that inspire you and fill up your day with those, that’s really what makes a great life. The person who cares about humanity define that find the biggest challenges in the world to solve are the ones that do the greatest things in the world. You don’t want to trick, you want to just get your mindset realizing I want a challenge, I want the biggest challenge I can tackle in one life. That’s a sign you’re going to do something amazing on planet Earth.

‏‏What if people listened to those voices that say you can’t do it, you’ll never read, you’ll never write, you’ll never amount to anything.

‏‏That’s usually a sign that they’re pursuing something that’s not inspiring to them. They’re going to believe outside sources. By the way, everybody is going to project their values onto you no matter what, they’re going to have their own way of looking at it, they’re going to project their values on it. You can’t let the voices on the outside dictate your destiny, you have to let the voice and the vision on the inside run it. Everybody’s projecting their values onto and making you do and encouraging you to do what they think will help them the most. You have to decide to fill your day with things that are inspiring to you that help other people, not do it because they’re asking you to do it, do it because you’re inspired to do it because it helps them.

‏‏Do you have bad days?

‏‏I don’t really have bad days, I have days that are challenges that I didn’t anticipate like flights that get cancelled or delayed and then I’m going okay, how do I make the next connection flight? I have those kind of things. They’re challenging at times. I have two ways of dealing with it. I try nice, if that doesn’t work I get tough, if that doesn’t work I get really tough and I try to bully my way through sometimes. If I realize that none of those are going to work, then I sit down and do my own method and clear my own charge on it and come up with plan B because sometimes there’s nothing you can do, it’s weather, who knows what it is.

‏‏Oh yeah, believe me I travel a lot. Just recently, I spent a whole night on a little bench in the airport. On the way back, our flight was cancelled three times. It was not comfortable.

‏‏Yeah, I have occasionally that. I can’t say it’s very often but I do have sometimes crazy ones. I got hijacked going to Peru one time, we got a Cuban hijacker. That was a wild event. I had somebody the other day who tried to tell me that-I had a first class seat, I’ve done 17,300,000 miles in travel. This guy said, “Well sir, somehow you’ve been bumped.” I said well I’ve got a first class seat, I’ve got millions of miles, how did you bump me? He said, “I don’t know.” I said I think you need to go and check and maybe bump somebody else because I’m not going bumped today. I stood firm and he found me my seat, it was quite funny.

‏‏That’s incredible. For somebody who’s experiencing right now listening to you and they’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s Dr. Demartini. He can handle stress very easily. For me, I’m different.” How can you advise them to deal with stress or anxiety or overcoming fears?

‏‏Usually, fears are your friend. Fears are usually feedback mechanisms to your conscious mind to let you know that you’re setting goals that aren’t really important to you. If you have something that’s truly important to you and it’s really high in your values, the goals activate your executive center which help you strategically plan and lay out plans to get what you want. When people don’t have strategies and plans to get what they want, they have a lot of anxieties and fears. Usually, that’s a symptom of not having really going after something that’s extremely important. If you really have something extremely important, you’ll plan it out, you’ll think of every detail, and you’ll make sure it gets done. But if you’re setting a goal and something is not really important, you’ll live in fear all the time, or you’re setting unrealistic expectations. I always say there’s three sources of fantasies that create fear. Shooting goals that are impossible, shooting goals that are improbable, or shooting for goals that are un-strategized. If I had a goal that I’m going to be in a relationship that’s going to be always supportive and never challenging, always positive never negative, always kind and never cruel, always peaceful and never war-ful, that’s a delusion. Now if I start to see the person anxious or stressed or critical, I’d be having a phobia because I’ve got unrealistic expectations. If I expected them to live outside their values and live inside my values, I’m going to have a phobia. If I’m expecting to do something with them that I haven’t thought through and planned and discussed. We set up our own fears a lot of times because we’re not thinking ahead and having foresight and we’re just reacting. I find that when I have a fear about something, it’s usually because I’m setting a goal that’s not thought through very well, it’s usually a fantasy. Or, I’m trying to get somebody else or myself to do something outside my value systems.

‏‏What exactly do you do when you feel the fear or the anger or the negative emotions? What do you do?

‏‏I have to be accountable for my fear. It’s mine. I sometimes will sit down and write down okay, usually if I have a fear, the phobia, there’s a fantasy that I’m holding onto. For instance, let’s say you’re dating somebody. Let’s say you’re infatuated with them and you think they’re amazing, I just want to be with them and everything like that. You have a fantasy about how they’re going to be. If all of a sudden they say well I’m leaving now, I’m dumping you, now you’re going to have a fear because your fear of losing that with you’re infatuated with. There’s only two primary fears, the fear of loss of that which you infatuate with which is registered in the middle part of the brain as the fear of loss of food, starvation. The other is the fear of gain of a predator, something that challenges your values that you resent and don’t want to have. There are only two. When you’re living by your highest values, you’re more resilient and you don’t have such a black and white thinking. You’re more resilient and adaptable and you’re less likely to have fear. When you’re living by lower values, because of the un-fulfillment that’s occurring, you tend to want to have a positive without a negative and so you’re striving for something to get easily infatuated or easily resentful. People that are very engaged in doing something that they love doing are a lot more resilient and adaptable and less frightened and less flick, they’re more objective in their goals. The person that’s basically uninspired and not doing what they really love everyday, they’re more likely to get caught in infatuations, resentments, and have more philias and phobias. I’m a firm believer just if I’m in fear, it’s a feedback, it’s letting me know that I’ve got a fantasy about how things are supposed to be and I’m afraid of it not occurring or I’m afraid of losing it. I go into the fantasy and I look at the drawbacks to it and then I look at the benefits of what’s happening. I balance out the equation. Once the equation is balanced, I don’t have fear or phobia or philia.

‏‏Right. That’s beautiful. How do we train that great thinking? No expectation thinking, how can we live with that? We have so many expectations, I have so many expectations.

‏‏You want expectations, you don’t want to not have expectations, you just want it to be real. My highest value is researching, writing, traveling and teaching. That’s the four top ones, teaching is the highest one. Some of my lowest value is cooking, domestic duties, driving. I haven’t driven in 26 years and haven’t cooked since I was 24 years old, those I don’t do. I hire people to do that. If I set a goal that I’m now going to open up a cupcake manufacturing company and delivery service, that’s not too bright because that’s not something I’d be inspired to do and it’s not likely to go very far. I don’t set up unrealistic expectations on that. If I set realistic expectations, I don’t have all those symptoms. I know what I’m up to so I set goals that match it. If you set goals that match what’s really valuable to you, you’ll get it, you’ll go after it, you’ll achieve it.

‏‏Beautiful. I’m going to go back to all your travels and your traveling 360 days out of the year, right?

‏‏Yeah, I full time travel. Even when I’m at my home at my ship, I’m traveling. I don’t sit still ever.

‏‏What’s your ship like?

‏‏What’s the ship like?

‏‏Yeah, you live on a ship, right?

‏‏Yeah, I’ve been for 15 years living on a ship off and on. I travel most of the time but when I’m there, I’m there. It’s a condominium ship, it’s the one and only condominium ship around the world that travels around the world. It goes wherever water is. There’s 80 or so of us that own it and we just travel around the world. It’s the best address I know of on Earth, I don’t know of a better address where I’d be having it, that’s the best address I’d be able to find on Earth.

‏‏I love it.

‏‏It full time navigates around the world. It goes from the Arctic to the Antarctic and goes to every sea, every major river, anywhere where water allows us to go we go. It’s a big ship so we have 295 staff members just running it. It’s a fabulous floating six-star resort just going and exploring the world.

‏‏Beautiful. It’s an address with no zip code, that’s extraordinary.

‏‏Yeah, it is. Some amazing people live on there and yeah, I’ve met amazing people go to amazing places and got to do amazing things. We have expeditions for the Antarctic or Madagascar or to the great passage, North West Passage. We may go to, I don’t know, we’ll just explore things. We’ll go on Amazon journeys, we’ll do all kinds of stuff.

‏‏That’s extraordinary. With all the travels and the flight delays and doing all the things that you do, how many hours do you sleep, how do you eat, how do you keep healthy?

‏‏For many years from probably age 18 all the way into my 50s, I’d say 55 or so, 56 maybe, I did pretty well four hours of sleep everyday, that was my normal routine. Today, my eyes get blurry and I put on my little glasses because I love reading. If I’m getting blurry eyes, I can’t do my reading. I think the computer has something to do with it too. Now, if I don’t get about five and a half, I start to get blurry eyed. I don’t seem to be able to do the four hours like I used to but I still sometimes I’m on a role where I’m getting less sleep sometimes. I have a very intense schedule sometimes but I’d rather do that than not. I figure I can rest in the afterlife.

‏‏Right. What do you think about the people that say you have to have eight hours of sleep and you have to eat five meals a day or do intermittent fasting or do this or do that?

‏‏Occasional fasting and food restrictions or caloric restrictions has known to extend life, that’s one of the variables that’s known to extend life. I think it’s wise to eat light. I had a bowl of soup and some olives, bowl of soup and a little piece of bread tonight, that was my dinner. I don’t eat a lot. I eat to live, not live to eat. I eat wisely, I have fresh fruit in the morning and usually some kind of cheese or yogurt and some multigrain toast. At lunch, I had multigrain bread, some turkey slices, some tomato, avocado. Tonight, I had a bowl of soup. I eat well, I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t do smoking or drinking or any of that stuff. I drink water, and I drink some vegetable juices, and that’s it. I do pretty good. Sleeping, I’ve never slept eight hours, I don’t think. I might have done it once but I don’t know of any times that I’ve done sleeping eight hours. I’ll be 62 in a couple of months so I’m doing pretty good, I’ve got more energy than most anybody I know. I think I’m doing pretty good.

‏‏For sure. Yes, you are. You don’t do exercise?

‏‏I do push ups and some sit ups and light exercises, stretching, yoga kind of activities. Sometimes I go surfing, I do a lot of walking. I don’t do the gym, I don’t do the gym thing too often.

‏‏I love the gym thing.

‏‏Sometimes, on occasion I’ll go there but that’s not my normal thing. I just do it on my own right here in the room.

‏‏Right. Awesome. Do you have any tips to enhance brain activity?

‏‏As I said, it’s important whatever you’re wanting to pursue and learn, you want to link to your highest value. Your highest value is the directive in your life. Any time you can see how you’re doing that and see things all on the way, you expand your brain. Your brain is a highest value seeking and fulfilling organ. Anything you do if you link it to the highest value, you maximize brain function. That’s the thing. One of the greatest questions you ever ask is how is whatever I’m doing right now helping me fulfill my highest value? How is whatever I’m experiencing right now helping me fulfill my highest value? How is whatever I’m about to learn and what I want to learn, how is it going to help me fulfill my highest value? The more you link it to that, the more you absorb information, retain it, use it, apply it. You activate your brain function and your brain myelination neuron-plastically most effectively when you’re doing something that’s meaningful. It’s about meaning, not pleasure in life that maximizes brain function. I’m a firm believer that if you’re not using your brain, you’re losing it. It’s wise to read everyday, study, learn, try to learn and absorb things everyday, expand everyday. I read everyday so I’m constantly filling my mind with new ideas and I think that’s essential for the brain.

‏‏ Amazing. What’s your tips on succeeding in life?

‏‏First, define what it is you’re going after and prioritize things. If you don’t fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, it’s going to fill up with low priority distractions that don’t, you’re going to have lowered self worth. Take command of what it is you want to do. Nobody’s going to dedicate their life to you except you, nobody’s going to get up in the morning and try to go, “Okay, I’m born on this planet to make sure you fulfill your life.” Nobody’s going to do that. You want to make sure you decide what you want to do yourself. I asked myself what is it I’d absolutely love to do, how do I get beautifully paid to do it so my vocation and vacation is the same, what are the seven highest priority action steps I can do today to make it happen, what obstacles might I run into and how do I solve them in advance and foresight instead of hindsight, how do I do it more effectively and efficiently, what worked and what didn’t work today and how do I do it more effectively and efficiently and how did whatever I do today help me fulfill my mission? If you do that, you’re going to get your mission.

If you don’t fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, it’s going to fill up with low priority distractions that don’t, you’re going to have lowered self worth. Click To Tweet

‏‏That’s amazing. What makes you happy?

‏‏I don’t strive for happiness, I strive for meaning more so than happiness because happiness is a fleeting emotional state. Fulfillment, I like the word fulfillment, I don’t like the word happiness necessarily. What makes me fulfilled is living according to what’s most meaningful to me which is learning. There’s three things that inspire me that I love doing most. I like to think of the universe as a constant puzzle and that anytime I get to find another little piece that fits into the puzzle from all the different ologies I get to study, I love plugging in that piece. Go bang, got it. It locks it in and gives me more certainty about the laws. And then I love sharing that with new groups of people. Whenever I get to go to a new country and share it with new groups like last week was India, I loved it. One of the programs was with a thousand people there and I got to share with a thousand new people in India new information. Next day, we had another thousand, it was really great. I love also reading about the lives of people that do extraordinary things and overcome amazing odds and obstacles and achieve things. I just did the fourth of a new book for a gentleman who’s climbed seven of the highest peaks of the world twice, Mt. Everest four times, hiked to the North and South Pole and lived with I think eight different tribes that have never been known by human beings. He found tribes that he went and lived with and actually stayed with tribes that nobody even knows about. He’s an adventurist and he does amazing things. I love meeting people like that. I did a talk in Dublin the other day with a guy that did 32 marathons in 32 days.

‏‏What was the book?

‏‏You Have The Power is the name of it. It’s coming out soon.

‏‏Nice. Out of your 30,000 books that you read, what are one or two that you can recommend for our listeners?

‏‏I get asked that a lot. The two most significant books that I can tell people to read is Syntopicon in Volume 1 and 2, produced by Mortimer Adler with the Britannica Series. It comes with the great books of the Western world, the Great Ideas book series. It is two of the best books I think a person could read in life.

‏‏What is it about?

‏‏It goes literally through the alphabet. What it is is a summary of the greatest minds, the greatest thinkers of the last 2700 years and the greatest ideas that they all discuss and thought about that were most important ideas by the most important minds over the last 2700 years.

‏‏Wow.

‏‏It’s a great piece. Anybody I’ve turned it onto that they found the books, they’ve said thank you. It’s in depth reading but it’s fabulous reading.

‏‏I’m going to say thank you in advance.

‏‏Find it, it’s worth doing it. Sometimes you can get them on rare books online for a few hundred bucks, you can get the whole set. There’s 60 volumes but these are the first two, buy one and two. These are really beautiful masterpieces of writing.

‏‏Right. I know you gave us so many tips so far, a lot. I really appreciate it. I think people should study this episode and just go back and listen to it over and over again because of all the information that you shared. Because I ask everybody the same question at the end of the show, I want to ask you too, what are your three tips to living a stellar life?

‏‏A stellar life? To honor that you’re a star in the making, just know that the magnificence of who you truly are is greater than any fantasies you’ll impose on yourself. Come to know what you really value most, prioritize what you do to live by that, do something that serves people so you can earn a living doing what you love, delegate lower priority things to other people that would love to do that so you’re free and liberated from having to do anything other than what you love, and take a portion of what you do and pay yourself and invest it so your money works for you so you’re not having to work for money, you’re having money work for you. You’re not a slave, you’re a master. Go do what you love and spend your life doing what you love.

‏‏Thank you so much. Where can people find you and find about your seminars and books and CDs?

‏‏They can go on my website, drdemartini.com and there’s tons of material on there. They can spend probably the rest of their life probably just studying what’s on there. Radio shows, TV shows, magazines, newspapers, articles, all kind of educational things, YouTube, there’s plenty of stuff on there to keep them busy. There’s hundreds and hundreds of articles. We’ve done 8,000 interviews and a lot of them are on there. That’s probably the best thing to do, just go to the website and see where it takes you.

‏‏Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate our time together. It was so enjoyable. I just love talking to you. It’s always such a pleasure. You’re such a joy, thank you so much for your time.

‏‏Thank you.

‏‏Thank you so much listeners. Go and awaken your genius. Live a happy, stellar life and I’ll catch up with you on the next episode.

Links and Resources:

• Dr. John Demartini
• Determine Your Values
• LinkedIn – Dr. John Demartini
• Facebook – Dr. John Demartini
• Instagram – Dr. John Demartini
• The Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas Volume 1
• The Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas Volume 2

About Dr. John Demartini

Dr. John Demartini is a world renowned specialist in human behavior, a researcher, author and global educator. He has developed a series of solutions applicable across all markets, sectors and age groups. His education curriculum ranges from corporate empowerment programs, financial empowerment strategies, self-development programs, relationship solutions and social transformation programs. His teachings start at the core of the issue, addressing the human factor and range out to a multitude of powerful tools that have proven the test of time.