Discipline, Resilience and Successes Mindset with Sagi Shreiber

In this Episode

• [08:49]Sagi Shrieber emphasizes the role of consciousness and emotional therapy in accessing insights and changing belief systems.
• [09:40]Sagi explains the difference between limiting beliefs and blockages, with limiting beliefs being easier to address.
• [20:18]Sagi introduces his app, Affirmations and CO, which helps users install new programs in their minds through affirmations.
• [22:25]Sagi discusses the concept of leverage in prioritizing tasks to achieve maximum impact with minimal effort.
• [41:54]Sagi shares his experience of meditating during the war and the benefits of maintaining a positive mindset.
• [47:40]Sagi inaugurated the concept of post-traumatic growth (PTG) as an alternative to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
• [50:14]Sagi highlights the role of gratitude and personal development in building resilience and overcoming trauma.
• [53:24]Sagi advises listeners to push themselves out of their comfort zones, practice meditation, and seek therapy.

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About Today’s Show

Hi, Sagi. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. I am super excited to be talking to you. I love everything that you’re about, and I know this conversation is going to be phenomenal. Thank you for being here. 

Thanks so much, I’m glad to be here. 

Before we begin, could you share one beautiful childhood memory you cherish?

Oh, wow, you got me. It’s amazing going back to anything from childhood. It’s funny. I used to drive to my great-grandparents’ house. I was eight years old, and I remember driving in the car. We used to drive a lot, and they were in another city, a 40-minute drive. But still, here in Israel, it’s pretty, which city we lived in — Herzliya — and they lived in Holon. Every time we drove there, I was really enjoying the ride. 

I don’t know why, but I was imagining a small ninja running. Fences and then the brick walls, and on the road, I was just imagining that and going back to personal development, all of that. I also imagined a vision where I’m a prince, and when I grow up, I’ll inspire many people and help them with their lives. Pretty funny, I had that vision, and what we need to do is always connect back to our childhood memories and vision, like how we imagine ourselves. That’s a funny thing. First thing that popped into my mind.

I’m big on consciousness and emotional therapy. I recommend it because in those kinds of sessions, you get insights you cannot access any other way.

That’s so beautiful, and you’re doing it today. I had a mentor who told me, if you want to find your purpose, go back to the things that you loved doing as a child, the things that were not hard, that inspired you. When you build your business, make sure that the business has at least a few elements of that. That’s your purpose, and that’s how you build a successful business. It needs to convey the sense that you are a prince and inspire people. It’s so beautiful because even as a little child, you knew your destiny, and of course, the vision was like in the framework of what a child would think of, but it’s so beautiful that this is what you’re doing today.

I have a few more years to connect to that vision, and that’s great, though I did build Ninja. No, I’m just kidding.

I was a ninja for a couple of years in MMA; I was always a little ninja a long time ago. But not as strong as I used to be. Anyway, if you had to write a letter to that dreamy eight-year-old there on that ride from Herzliya to Holon, what would you tell that eight-year-old about success and business and life? What kind of advice would you give him? 

Number one, everything’s possible. Keep dreaming. Never stop being optimistic. As a kid, we had so many caretakers who were kind of killing our dreams, even if I had told myself that back then, I probably would have killed my dreams. 

Someone else killed your dream, or accidentally said something that might have given you a framework that does not work for you. 

I had a friend come by today. We discussed beliefs implanted in us by our relatives. And he said that something we all believe in, like “working hard brings results.” He said, with the notion of “No pain, no gain.” He always just converts it to ‘no pain, no gain.’ I told him I remember one of my family relatives, she came to me and she told me one day when I was a child, “Sagi, we’re Shrivers. We will always work hard, but we will never be rich.” 

Talking about the right things that people plant in your mind, in your subconscious. The thing is, I didn’t remember that conversation until it came back to me about two years ago in a therapy session.

Wow, that’s amazing. How do you think it influenced you? I do hypnotherapy, so a lot of the time when we go into the subconscious mind, we figure out what was holding us back. Just knowing what it is is the breakthrough; you don’t even need to do it. Yes, of course, you have to create new belief systems, but sometimes just knowing what the thing is that’s the breakthrough.

I’m big on consciousness and emotional therapy, and most people don’t do it again. I recommend it because in those kinds of sessions, you get insights you cannot access any other way, and that’s why I’m big on that kind of treatment. I’ve been going to therapists, and for the past couple of years, it has helped me more than any other mentor or business coach. Although I also do business coaching, I also have a business coach, mastermind groups, and all that. But nothing compares to just single sessions with a good consciousness therapist.

That’s amazing. We all need to connect with somebody who helps us look inside and get the insights. What kind of other beliefs did you discover for yourself, and how did you change them? 

One of the biggest beliefs I had was “Money comes only if you work hard, and you’ve got to work hard, you’ve got faith challenges,” and we just need to reprogram our minds sometimes and look at our belief system that’s holding us back. It’s really hard to do it alone. But I wouldn’t want to recommend anybody do it alone. I just let you talk about the first thing. Let’s look at the glacier. Everybody can imagine a glacier. You see the glacier on the top. There’s a small mountain at the top, and then it goes into the water. 

Blockages are different from limiting beliefs because they are deeper past traumas—people implanted in us when we were young that we don’t even remember.

It’s like it goes into the water, spreads widely throughout it, and then thins out into the water, deep down below. The bigger part is actually underwater; the small part is above water. If we’re looking at our consciousness and our not as subconscious, but our conscious consciousness, it’s like we have the things that we know that are just regular everyday thoughts we have, let’s say, in the things that are limiting us, we have our limiting beliefs. Those are just underwater, and they’re not too deep. We can work on them, making sure that we can, because it’s easier to access limiting beliefs. 

If I ask you, “Orion, what your limiting beliefs are?” You would be able to answer me pretty much straight away, right? You throw a fishing stick in the water, pull one out. Done. But now, if I say, “Orion, what are your blockages?” Blockages are different from limiting beliefs because they are deeper past traumas, things that drive us, things I can believe in, and systems like that —people implanted in us when we were young that we don’t even remember. Those are in the subconscious level, deep down in a water where you have to dive in a very specific gear and with very specific people that accompany you. It’s even dangerous to go down there sometimes. That’s why therapy is needed. But, good therapist, you need to go down there. 

You need to find those past traumas and blockages, bring them to the surface, and treat them. Once you bring them up to the surface, it’s like 90% done already; you’ve got 20% left to delete them. But when it comes to limiting beliefs, there’s a very good way to delete them, and it’s very simple. You just put them on trial. It’s like, you say, “What am I not good at? What do I think I’m not good at?” “Oh, I’m not good with money. A lot of people say, I’m not good with money.” “Okay, you’re not good with money, great.” If your child came up to you and said, “Mom, I’m not good with money,” How do you answer?

“Of course, you are. You’re great with money. You can learn, excel, and have everything you want.” 

How would you think about your child and money?

I believe my child is capable.

By the way, a son or a daughter? I forgot.

I have one son, and he’s six.

Your amazing six-year-old son—if someone came to him and said, “You’re not good with money, son, you’ll never be.” How would you look at that person? 

I won’t look at that person. I will drag him by the neck.

That person, basically, it’s the same way when we’re looking at limiting beliefs, we look at them, we say, “If someone told that to us when we were our parents, and if we wouldn’t let someone talk to our son that way, how would you let yourself speak to us that way?” 

It’s so interesting because, when it comes to my son, I am a lioness. I will do anything for him or to protect him, and I’m not afraid of anyone or anything when it comes to my child. Even though I teach that right, there’s still more work to do. 

But the rational intelligence side of things, we understand. There’s no way I should think like that —like I’m not good with money or whatever —like someone is saying to themselves, ‘Of course, I can learn.’ ‘Of course, I can do everything.’ 

You need to identify past traumas and blockages, bring them to the surface, and address them.

All the options and opportunities are open to me. I can do it. Once you know that, and you set your mind to it, you have just installed a new belief system in your neural networks. You’re just now creating a new neural network in our brain. We have our thoughts, which are now being processed; anything that comes through our senses, like our eyes, our taste, our smell, and thoughts that arise, comes through. 

There’s like the gatekeepers, or basically what gives it meaning, which is our neural networks, which are like neurons that fire and wire and like everything is based on our childhood, kind of the way we grew up in our caretakers and our inner voice, and that framed our belief system.

Therefore, over the years, from childhood to now, we have collected evidence. Okay, those neurons—the brain’s job is not to think. It’s to collect evidence of what we know that is true, and therefore, we collected evidence just as much as you know how to walk out the door of the room you’re sitting in right now. Your brain collected evidence of where the door is. You know exactly what to do. Your brain collected evidence about your belief system, and now it thinks everything’s true. 

If someone is a Christian, they think it is the best religion. Someone’s a Jew, the best religion. Someone’s a Muslim, the best religion—no other religion, no other god, no other whatever. If someone is left-wing, right-wing, or anything that they believe they are, they have collected evidence for years regarding that. Most of us do it from an early age, like the family we grew up in, and those values were instilled in us without us even having a say, and we grew up all our lives collecting evidence that that is true. 

‘We’re not good with money. Money is only for the rich, and the rich are bad people. Money doesn’t grow on trees.’ All those cliches we heard from our families are just bogus. Going back to limiting beliefs, we have just rationally and intelligently installed a new belief system. Now, those neural networks, their job is one job: collect evidence. So once we’re installed, ‘Of course, I’m good with money.’ ‘Of course, I can learn.’ ‘Of course, all the opportunities are open in front of me.’ 

All the options and opportunities are open to us. Once you know that, and you set your mind to it, you have just installed a new belief system in your neural networks.

Now you don’t even have to do anything, subconsciously or not even subconscious, just a neural network will try to collect information that now builds more neurons that fire and wire together. And throughout 60 to 70 days, you have a new neural network based on top of that old network that really ran over. The new program is installed.

You ask better questions and look for different answers, instead of “Why am I not good with money?” Or “How am I amazing with money?” How do you do that?

The best way to achieve that is with affirmations. We all look at it like a technological advancement, as if we have the best iPhones. Affirmations are a technology, and we look at it that way to get you to install new programs in your mind. This is just for limiting beliefs. Now, going back to blockages. That’s a completely different issue. It’s way harder. Affirmations will not get you to release blockages. 

Sorry, but no, you have to understand what your blockages are. To do that, you have to go deeper. That’s meditations, that’s therapy, that’s like specific ways of understanding and learning about yourself. That is deeper. But many people will not do that. They will not go to the therapists, right? They will not do the work. If you take anything out of this show, anybody here listening is like, seek a good consciousness or emotional therapist, find one that is really good. Go there and work with her or him on whatever you need, because that’s a game-changer for your life. 

One of my mentors, Marisa Peer, is talking about telling yourself a better lie because those old beliefs are, in fact, lies. After all, we’re infinite potential. Somebody told you something when you were in a very sensitive place, you could have been a child. It could have been 20, it could have been 40, because we get into a trance state many times throughout the day, when we’re watching a video or driving from one place to another. We can’t remember how we got there, and when we are in that trance state, or maybe on a low like you can be in a trance state, and in a low emotional vibration, somebody says something, and all of a sudden, boom, a new negative belief just form, and then you start building your identity from this belief, and you’re telling yourself those lies. 

Why don’t we tell ourselves a new lie, like, “I am great, I am amazing, I am great with money?” And then your mind is like a puppy. Its job is to do what you tell it. If you tell yourself for years that you are not capable, and then one day you feel capable, your mind will be like, “Hey, wait a second. We know that we cannot do that. So hold your horses. Let’s go back.” If you put in this new affirmation over and over and over and over again, even though it sounds like a lie in the beginning, it will affect you at a time when I was in an abusive relationship. 

The brain’s job is not to think. It’s to collect evidence of what we know that is true.

I was broken and I had zero self-esteem and lots of blame, shame, guilt, really a shot of myself, and I did Louise Hay mirror work, and I tried to say, ‘I love you,’ and my reflection started crying. But I never gave up. I did it every day. So in the beginning it was, ‘I love you,’ and I’m crying. ‘I love you,’ and I’m tearing up. ‘I love you,’ and I can hold my face still. ‘I love you,’ and I can just smile a little bit, and slowly but surely, I started to have this lie become more of my identity. 

And yes, it took a long time, and I feel like when it comes to self-love and appreciation and that hurt inner child, it is a work of a lifetime. But if you do a little bit every day, by the end of a year, you’ll be a completely different person, even though it seems like nothing is moving or changing. Just be patient with it and keep going for it. 

Yeah, 100%.

You have an app for that, right? 

I actually have an app for affirmations. It’s on the App Store. It’s called Affirmations & Co. You can search for it in the App Store. There’s a lot of affirmation apps out there, but I created this one because, number one, I thought it should be more inspirational—more affirmations, up or just like regular text—but we made it with nice images in the background. And there’s also the widgets and the notifications you get—the push notifications during the day with the affirmation. It’s completely free at the moment. Also looking for a development partner on that —if anybody here is a developer. Looking for government partners to keep pushing new features, since we’ve put it on hold for now. But yeah, it’s just an app. I use it for myself. 

How do you use it every day? 

I have an affirmations widget on my phone, and I installed the app store version. It takes about 24 hours—I don’t know why—for the widget to show up, but I probably see it over here on my phone; it just sits there, and it changes affirmations every couple of minutes, meaning you open your phone, swipe up, and you see some information. Next time, swipe up for different information. It’s amazing. 

That’s amazing. You went from believing that only hard work could satisfy your need for wealth. You worked really hard, and it was super frustrating. What do you do now differently, and how did it impact your life, your family and who you are? You’re still a hard worker, but you probably do it in a more balanced way.

This goes into something we talked about before the recording. We basically called it 75 Hard. Let’s talk about leverage. Okay, how many of your audience are business owners or people with jobs?

I think at least 45%.

This goes for most business owners. For any professional working in any field, any place of work, any place in life, prioritization is key. We’re looking at prioritization. We ask ourselves, ‘What do we prioritize?’ We have so many tasks going on. We have so many things to do. ‘How do we prioritize?’ The answer is one word: leverage. ‘What is the minimum I can do to get the maximum impact?’ If we’re comparing it to a lot of people who work very hard, like they work really hard. And if I imagine a scale, it’s not really a scale—let’s imagine a log, kind of like a wooden plate sitting on a round log. 

Now the plate is moving, and I have forces pushing the plate, like pushing it against the ground. Now, what would be easier for me to push that wooden plate to the ground? Would it be closer to the log in the middle? Pushing it closer to the log? Or would it be at the edge of that plate? If you push it from the edge, obviously, you have a way better chance of getting it to the ground with way less effort. If you push it next to the log in the center, you’ll have a really hard time. It’ll be really hard to get it up to the ground. 

That’s leverage you can act on. Every one of us has this wooden plate full of tasks. What tasks are at the edge of the plate? Some of them have so much leverage that it will put all the rest of them like dominoes, and some of them would just make everything much easier. And some things, it’s not even in the physical world, and maybe even mentally, would make all the rest of the tasks easier for you, something like, “What’s the leverage in everything you’re doing right?” And when you’re thinking about leverage, you’re thinking about operating leverage, and we can talk about finances. 

You need to be able to adopt new habits and skills at any time. It’s resilience and flexibility.

Leverage comes in the form of investments. There are so many ways to talk about leverage, but how do we become ones to create and take actions that have leverage? Well, you need to be ones that not only adapt but become strong in an ever-changing, dynamic, chaotic environment, which is called the world. If you want to be someone who can operate in a very effective way, acting with leverage in a dynamic, chaotic world, you need to be a person who can basically have the ability to adapt dynamically. How do you adapt dynamically to different situations, like in chaos, in uncertainty? How do you operate? The answer is that you need to be able to adopt new habits and skills at any time. 

Some call it mental toughness. Some call it mental flexibility, different resilience, but it’s not only resilience, it’s also flexibility. Let’s call it flexibility and resilience. And the resilience is also about not knowing how to take a punch or how to operate without losing your mind over a setback, and still keep your habits, still keep your skills. And we just said that even new thoughts are a habit, and the thing we just talked about is how to take your limiting belief out, judge it, put it on trial, create a new one, or tell yourself a new lie. That’s a skill.

There’s a skill. And not only that, when you create a new affirmation, a new belief system, you create a new neural connection, but it’s a weak one, so you need to repeat it, again, again, and again. To strengthen it, you can’t just say something once and forget about it.

What did we do now? We got the new skill. Now we need to build a habit, and so we know —everybody listening to the podcast has already been preaching to the choir. Because everybody listening to podcasts is a person who is a constant learner and wants to build habits and skills. But let’s say, now, okay, you got the new skill —now you need to implement the habits. So, can we say that if we become people who can build habits and skills to acquire new skills and habits, we can become invincible and operate in a chaotic environment? Pretty much. It makes us way better humans. We would also understand how to build the skills and habits that will help us identify points of leverage. And the leverage goes bigger once we adopt new skills that would take us.

How do you identify those points of leverage? Because sometimes, when you’re in the picture, you can see the leverage. Sometimes you have to step out, or have somebody from the outside looking in to tell you, “Hey, there’s leverage here. There’s leverage there.” How do you get out of your own way?

Great question. It’s something that I’m even learning. Everybody is at work, learning how to be everybody. If we were all like masters at finding leverage, we would be millionaires. Everybody here now, no problem. Number one: understanding what leverage is for you —that’s the most important thing. And knowing what leverage is, knowing alone, will make you ask new questions. What am I going to do now? Is it like a decision that will operate leverage, or a mundane task, or a task that leverages? Is it like an act of leverage or just a mundane act? 

I think that it also connects to everything we talked about until now, habits and skills. Habits and skills will develop you as a human, and the more you develop as a human, the more you’ll be able to find the things that are right for you. You’d connect to yourself, and when you do, what leverage points do you need to operate on? It’s not only about money or stuff like that; it’s obviously about happiness. 

We all want to be happy, and if we want to be happy, we want to know what will make us happy on all fronts of life. And for each one, it’s different. Some people, for instance, want to be amazing family men and women. Some people don’t want to even have children. Some people want to be multimodally millionaires, or whatever. And some people just aren’t driven by money at all. Even when they live in a place where they don’t need so much money to live off of, everybody’s driven in different ways. 

Once you have a vision for your life, that would really help you. You have a vision, and you can think about, “Okay, where do I see myself in 10 years from now?” You can make decisions that leverage that, which is what’s called the ‘north star.’ Have a north star that will help you make decisions that will push you closer to your north star. Some people are just letting life happen. Is this decision important for me? I don’t know. I don’t know where I don’t want to go. How do I know whether this would be a good idea? Well, just try. So you try something, and it has no leverage. It doesn’t take you to where you want to be, but if you know where you want to be, this decision has a very good chance of taking you there. 

Habits and skills will develop you as a human, and the more you develop as a human, the more you’ll be able to find the things that are right for you.

That’s leverage, and the more you identify it, the better you can make decisions. So, north star and aligning with yourself — that’s not easy, because you need confidence. How do you have confidence again? It goes back to habits and skills. There are only good habits or bad habits. If you’re eating poorly, then that’s a bad habit. It’s not that you don’t have a good habit of eating healthy. You’re eating poorly; that’s a bad habit to eat poorly so much. 

What I’m trying to say is that you can have bad habits or good habits, and once you have good habits and the skills to understand what habits you even need, then you are confident. So how do you build confidence? Like, we want to start running or doing this or that, and we never do, right?

You have 10,000 hours to actually be masterful at something.

Nobody wants to put in the work to do 10,000 hours, right?

But they want to be confident in it and really good at it.

Confident people make better decisions. Let’s think about what confidence is. I’m confident that I can build skills and habits that create new ones. I’m the kind of person who can build any skills and habits at any given time to help me develop the ones I’ll need for whatever comes in a chaotic world, because I don’t know what skills and habits I will need tomorrow, with AI taking over the world. I’m just throwing it out there that AI will not take over, but it’s something we need to understand.

We are definitely on the verge of something huge. I know that even Amazon said that they’re going to—I read it somewhere—replace 600,000 employees with robots; a shift is coming. That’s for sure.

We’re in the middle, we’re in it. Actually, we’re indefinite in it. But it’s not only AI, it’s wars. It’s like dynamic COVID wars, AI, spaceships, aliens, whatever is coming. Geopolitics, we need to understand: like, what skills and habits would I know tomorrow to create, and I would have confidence that I can make. 

Aligning with yourself is not easy because you need confidence. Having confidence goes back to building habits and skills.

I love what you’re saying, because even if there is a storm coming, you can always find the eye of a storm. Even when there is a recession, there are always people who make a lot of money during a recession. So when you have those habits and skills and you prepare yourself, you become resourceful and you find your way. But if you’re just like, ‘Oh my goodness, just gonna let the storm carry me and be sad about it,’ it’s not going to help you. So tell me you did the 75 Hard challenge. What is that?

We talked about technologies. I’m applying a technology to install the program of habits and skills. Okay, that’s what it is. 75 Hard is a challenge created by an entrepreneur, Andy Frisella. I have no affiliation. It’s not even a money thing. It’s a free challenge. Anybody can do it or not do it. But he created this thing for himself, and he has a very big podcast. He built a nine-figure company. He’s a very successful entrepreneur, completely bootstrapped. Built it brick by brick. He has a lot of credit for that. Mental toughness was his thing. But I love to call it mental resilience, and because I think it’s a better word, I don’t like the word ‘toughness.’ It has too much machismo. 

But I’m looking at it as a mental resilience and a confidence challenge. What does it do? It says, once you decide that you’re beginning, you’re now in a 75-day streak where you cannot stop in the middle, or you go back to day one, where you cannot fail in what you have to do in those 75 days. Or you go back to day one, and every day you have to do the same things. What are those same things? One is that you have to do 45-minute workouts every day. 

And those 45-minute workouts have to be separated. They cannot be consecutive. You have two 45-minute workouts that aren’t connected, and one of them has to be outside, no matter the weather. Okay, that’s number one. It can be walking, yoga, or all kinds of things. It doesn’t have to be like strength training or running—something you’d kill yourself over— but you have to understand what your goals are and do it properly.

Even just a strength-training and stretching session will be amazing, or strength training and cardio.

Exactly. Number two is, you have to drink a gallon of water. It’s a lot of water to drink. But especially if you’re training, it’s good. Then, you have to read 10 pages of a book that would teach you something new—personal development, or something to learn. It could not be fiction. It’s not a fiction book. Four, you need to pick a diet and stick to it—no cheat meals or cheat days. No alcohol as well. Number five, take a selfie every day. You take a progress stick, a very small task, but still something to do, so those five things you have to do for 75 consecutive days. If you fail to do one of them on any of the days, you go back to day one. That’s the entire challenge. 

For two 45-minute workouts, one needs to be outdoors. Stick to one diet, no cheat meals. Read 10 pages of an inspirational book or something that will move you forward. Drink a gallon of water. Oh, the selfie. Yes, I have a hard time drinking a lot of water. I know it’s good for me.

A lot of us are. When I started this, the first time I did it, you run to the bathroom every, like, you know, I wouldn’t even be able to have this entire podcast episode with running to the restaurant.

Because your body isn’t used to it, it’s like, ‘What’s going on now? Is this a way to see if it’s healthy to drink a gallon of water every day?’

Obviously, for some people, it’s usually about many different metrics—how much water is optimal for you. But I can say, like so many people have done this challenge and are okay with, just one gallon of water. I checked with my doctor. For me, I’m okay. Everybody should check with their own doctor. Obviously, if not, fine, don’t drink two liters or whatever your doctor says, right? But don’t try to cheat. That’s the whole thing about this challenge: not trying to make it for your sake, making it 75 soft. It’s called 75 Hard. You have to do five things, and you have to do them for 75 days. If you fail in one of them—if you read 9 pages instead of 10, if you do a 44-minute workout, you forgot that last minute—no matter what, you have to do all five things every single day.

Basic training for the entrepreneur, like boot camp for entrepreneurs or people in general.

For people in general. It’s like anything hard that you do. It’s a marathon or anything you train for that you do. The thing is, you can start today, and everybody can start with this thing today. It’s like, yeah, okay, you’re strained for a bit for the first couple of days, because you’re not used to working two 45-minute workouts. But you can still do two walks a day, each for 45 minutes. You don’t have to run for 45 minutes. You can walk. You can do yoga or stretching for 45 minutes. It is definitely possible for anybody to start at any given time. 

You don’t have to prepare for it. You just go for it. And the thing I recommend, if anyone wants to try, is also, by the way, I wouldn’t want anybody to stop themselves from starting because of what I’m saying. But you can do it while you’re doing it. Pick a diet. Pick something —for instance, like me, no gluten or dairy products. That would be a 75 Hard. Just eat normally. Just lose all the gluten and dairy products. 

But anything you know is good for you, that you always say, “Wow, I need to do this,” but you never do it. That’s your diet, probably. Now, what I did the first time around, in the middle of the challenge, was say, “Why am I not stepping up my game?” I went to a nutritionist and I got myself a personal trainer at the gym. By the way, I started going to the gym. I’ve never been to the gym for five hours, so I’m finding myself doing two workouts a day. I’m like, “Why am I not doing strength training? I know it’s good for you.” So I went and found a personal trainer. He was with me until this day, and I’ve done it as if it were six years ago, when I started.

Strength training is the bomb. It’s amazing. 

Confident people make better decisions.

It’s important. And that challenge alone —number one —gets you to physical places you’ve never been before, but it also gets you to a mental place you’ve never been before. When you finish this challenge, and you know, you’ve gone 75 days of doing things like being out on walks when nobody’s out on walks, understanding at midnight, when you had a very busy day at work, and you forgot one exercise or forgot to read a book. You get out of bed, put on your shoes, and go for a walk, do yoga, or whatever, and maybe even if you fail. 

I failed, and my second time around, I felt at day 66, and my wife was doing it with me, and she finished, and we already had a hotel booked, and we decided that we’re going to have a hotel, and we’re going to drink, and we’re going to eat very sh*tty, eat cakes and stuff. And so I knew that we had the hotel booked in 18 days. I could have stopped and said, “I’ll take a break for like 18 days and then go back to it or whatever.” But I didn’t. I went back to day one. That’s the program. Went back to day one, failed again, 18 days later, with my wife in a hotel, and went back to day one again. I’ve done it again, 75 days. 

That’s 75 Hard when you know you are the one who carried it out, and you say, you become the person that says, “I’m going to do this,” and then you’re going to do this. We have such a problem with saying that. We always say, “Oh, and I want more. I’m going to do this tomorrow. I’m going to start habits and skills.” So this is the program —the technology to give you the skills and the confidence to build any habits and skills. It’s the two workouts that should stick with you after 75 hard, that’s not the point. 

You’re not going to keep 75 Harding your whole life. That’s like a marathon or something. You do it once, and then you can do it again every once in a while. I started last week. I’m doing it for the fourth time now, and it’s amazing. I’m drinking a lot of water. I’m working out twice a day. I still have one walk to do. I had a book to read. I still have a lot of water to drink, but I feel great. I can say that every time I came back to the challenge, I came back for a different reason, and I gained a different insight at the end, which almost every time stuck with me, and that’s one of the most important things that I think anybody can do with their life right now. Isn’t it this kind of challenge? 

I don’t know any other challenge like it. We have a WhatsApp community, by the way, but when I did it, I thought I posted on LinkedIn, and a lot of people joined, and we had people from the last round join us. So we have people who are doing it with us. I recommend joining a community where people are doing it. There’s also the hashtags on Instagram and Twitter and stuff. Suppose you see other people doing it. It’s for women and men at any stage of life.

That sounds very intriguing. I might join the community myself when I’m back from my travels. It’s going to be too hard to travel and do all that. The last year in Israel was quite tough with the war, and all the politics were very stressful for everyone. How did you think you handled it with the tools that you have?

When we work on ourselves, we become the rock for everybody around us, and the people who are weak around us.

Everybody had it different. I didn’t have my house hit by an Iranian missile. So, number one, I practiced a lot of gratitude. And gratitude is another thing. Number two, I doubled down on what I know helps: meditations, workouts. It’s funny —I’ve been in a meditation session, in the middle of the war, when there’s like a missile, and then after that we had the session. We had to go into meditation just after a siren. It was like, you’re still kind of shocked by missiles that fell in from Iran, and people were killed.

I feel like with all the work that I’ve done, I’ve done so much throughout my life, every time I hear a siren, it’s kind of like hijacking my nervous system. It goes into fighting off light mode, especially with little kids, like you’ve got to get them to shelter. It’s not when I was just me. I’d be like, “Oh, it’s okay. I’m just me. I can handle it.” But when you went, since I became a mom, there is this extra layer of like, “I have to protect my own, I have to protect my kids.” So it’s a little different.

It is. And then again, here you are, you have to be there for your children.

Not only that —like my elderly mom, who can hardly walk when there’s a siren —there are so many layers.

When we work on ourselves, we become the rock for everybody around us, and the people who are weak around us. The grown-ups who have not worked on themselves become a bad anchor that weighs everybody down and creates trauma for years and years. Think about that: if we become resilient, know how to handle stressful situations with focus, and keep our sanity. Talk properly with our children, as you know, and we invest in every word. We think about the wording we use when we talk about and explain a situation we have. Our children have a far better chance of not carrying this trauma and going forward in their lives if they ever have to experience such a trauma, and not develop post-traumatic stress disorder like a lot of other people.

But what if you are resilient, but the people around you are very fearful—I was with family, they were very fearful, and I was calming everybody down—it rubs off on you. It’s like with newer connections: when you’re in the same room with them, your mind starts creating the same patterns, whether you want it or not. Walk me through that.

First of all, it’s a very interesting conversation, because you and I are Israelis, and we suffered the war now. So it’s a conversation that not many people in the world get to have. I think no one offered that much. You know, wars and we and everybody might say, “No, what about Gaza?” But no, I don’t know, I was like, above 100,000 rockets shot at us in the past two years.

Something crazy like that. A building near my mom collapsed to the ground, and a whole street of shattered windows. There was damage. 

You walked in just today; even last week, we were in Tel Aviv. When we saw the hole in a building, and the center of Tel Aviv, and still it’s kind of like, oh shit, that’s a huge hole in the middle of the freaking huge building. And you’re like, it’s not a kiddie game. It was like, real rockets coming in that were real, that was really, really scary. And had to be there in that situation. And we had to be parents in the situation. And for our kids, really intense, really extreme.

We felt that we heard it. We felt the wall shaking. It was real.

It was real. It was there. But again, it comes down to the fact of the consciousness around you, right? Like you, you’re in a room with like fearful people. If you were fearful as well, the entire room would be more fearful. And the people we really care about —our kids —will grow up with more fear. If you’re the rock that now balances this fear a bit, your kids may notice. They would stick to you, and they would you would have way more chances with kids, like getting out of the situation. For instance, I canceled on most of our phones in their homes. 

Oh, me too. That’s crazy. That’s so strong you can’t wake you up with so much anxiety, right?

Most people don’t cancel it. Like, even my wife argued with me. Like, don’t cancel it. Doesn’t it save eyes? I’m like, “No, we have one at home. We don’t need more. Let’s cancel that.” Also, like, that 15-minute one before, like, if there’s a rocket, we’ll know about it. We don’t need to wake up 15 minutes early. Stay up all night. That would ruin our sleep, right? So many bad things just because of the stupid, like, alert that, yeah, maybe some people need it, if their shelter is far away and they have to walk for 10 minutes or whatever, they have to wake up downstairs, walk to the shelter. We don’t have a safe room. That’s where we’re going, that’s 30 seconds away. In 30 seconds, we can all be in a secure room. We don’t need 15 15-minute warnings before rockets come in. That’s just creating more trauma again, more of the things that now we look at motorcycles in the street running like, “Oh, siren, no. It’s a motorcycle.” 

I had time after the war when I would hear an ambulance or a motorcycle, like I had to do for a second day. Wait, is this? Oh no, okay. And my child, too. I think even with being calm. We’ve all been, to some degree, traumatized by this whole thing. It’s not a normal reality.

Yes, but it’s not a normal reality. I’m not any guru or any like that.

You’re a prince.

The creator wants you to be exactly where you are. The more you understand that, the more you can accept situations.

But I would say the creator wants you to be exactly where you are. The more you understand that, the more you can accept situations. Number two is more on the clinical side. I heard people talking about PTSD, but I listened to some just once, somebody talk about something that changed my entire perspective on PTSD, and that’s equal to like, PTG, post-traumatic growth.

I love that.

What if you are just right? It’s just, what if you transfer just the mindset about trauma instead of like, “Oh, we have PTSD,” and we tell ourselves a different story, again, a different lie. “Oh, we’re now growing out of this situation; we have post-traumatic growth.” So it’s like, “Okay, okay, great.” And if we look at stress, we know that eventually, biologically, if something doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. And that’s so true, like any situation in our lives. Anybody here listening to the podcast, if you know they had a setback in their life, they know that they probably grew stronger after that setback. Like the setbacks, it gets worse before it gets better.

It’s interesting about Israel. Like, even in this horrible situation, people are still living their lives, partying, and creating successful businesses. Sometimes when life is really hard, you start valuing life differently. When you see life as so fragile, you’re like, “Okay, today is what I have. So why don’t I spend more time with my family? Why don’t I build that business? Why don’t I do that thing that I always love to do? I’ll go painting, I’ll go dancing, I’ll go singing, I’ll do the things that I love to do, because life is so beautiful and it’s so precious.” And I love what you said about feeling grounded. 

I think the most grounded you can be is when you believe in a higher force, whatever it is for you, for me, it’s God, and knowing that you are in the right place at the right time, and you’re always guided, protected and loved, and there is a big plan for you. And yes, I see that we can dance within this plan and go places. It’s almost like a maze where you, like, choose your own adventure. But there is also, I feel, the divine plan for us, for our lives, and if we take the right steps and show the right desires, we’ll get to a beautiful place and a beautiful state.

I’m 100% agreement on it. I think there are limiting beliefs and blockages that are way deeper. There’s also post-traumatic stress in people that you know in this war who have lost their homes or loved ones. Many people lost loved ones, which is so hard to grow out of. But I’m also seeing it with and again, I’m not judging. It’s not meant to be critical or to criticize anyone, okay. Still, I’m just saying you see some of the hostages who came back —everything they are now, how they came out of it, how they survived it, and now how they feel their world reflecting in the way they talk and in the words they use. 

You see who is still feeling like a victim and who is already not a victim, which is like blessing the world. You see that, but it’s not the thing that they experienced when they were there, and it was a traumatic experience. It’s actually their belief system. The more we work on ourselves, the more I believe the tools —again, skills and habits we acquire—will help us deal with the worst in life, situations we can ever imagine. And again, these guys have been in hell, so I don’t judge anything. 

We raise our kids to be optimistic, to have faith, to believe in a higher purpose, to pursue personal development, and to teach them gratitude. We teach them everything in the world and faith, and they will really be way more prepared to deal with traumatic situations in the future —that’s the work we’re doing ourselves. I didn’t have gratitude, but you didn’t grow up with the perfect kind of family, either. Nobody grows up with the ideal family.

My childhood was very messy, but yeah, I like what you said about discipline, because when you build that discipline and that identity as a disciplined person, you also build the identity of being stronger than your mind. I am the observer of my mind, and I can be disciplined with what I do; therefore, I can be disciplined with my thoughts, because thoughts create actions that create our reality. So if you develop that physical discipline, which is also mental discipline, then you can discipline your thoughts into, I am strong, I can connect to a higher power. And then you gain the strength, especially when it is so difficult outside.

When it comes to mental resilience and mental toughness in very extreme situations, it’s important.

Yeah, wow, beautiful conversation. Sagi, I know this is gonna be amazing. I knew it, so before we say goodbye for now, what are your three top tips to living a stellar life, and where can people find you?

Do send yourself hard, or anything that pushes you out of your comfort zone. For me, it’s a game-changer. Another tip is to meditate and learn meditation. It’s the only way to connect and to reprogram your mind. I believe or seek therapy. Seek therapy, practice meditation. The third one is, know that whatever is the creator, the way you see it, he created you with a piece of it, like you’re part of that, like, we’re 99% energy and 1% matter, because we’re made out of atoms at the end of the day, and that energy we rarely tap into. So seek ways to tap into that energy. That’s the energy of the Creator. That’s energy that will make anything in the world happen. Seek ways to acquire knowledge and build skills and habits to tap into that energy. That’s the only way for you to really excel. All my growth is like understanding that, and everything else is. Everything comes with it: happiness, money, relationships, and everything.

Amazing, Sagi, thank you so much—such a pleasure. I’m so happy that we’ll see each other in person sometime soon, and I just can’t wait. This was an amazing conversation. Thank you for your wisdom. Where can people find you, learn from you, and get more?

I want to offer something like a meditation I created. It’s called Genesis. We haven’t had a chance to talk about it. So, if you want to ask me about 75 Hard, just find me. You can find me on LinkedIn and Instagram, that’s where I’m most active. You can ask me for any tips, and I can sign off if you want, but I can also sign off on the meditation called Genesis. I’ll send you a PDF with what it entails and how to do its 10 Minute Meditation. I’ll even send you my way of building a vision, which I also share with a lot of people. I have a Google Doc with like three recorded videos, especially for free. I have nothing to sell you at the end of it. Again, I have my own businesses, but this is just for creating a vision like for like. So, I can send that to you as well. 

Amazing, Sagi, thank you so much for being here. It was a pleasure, and thank you, listeners. Remember to push out of your comfort zone, meditate and seek therapy. Know that you are part of creation, tap into that energy, and have a stellar life. This is Orion, till next time.