A Personal Note From Orion

Life’s biggest questions tend to lead you to miraculous answers. Some of which even have the power to change your life forever.

When you look at some of the world’s brightest minds, everything they’ve ever worked for all started with a spark of curiosity within them. That tiny spark then became their guiding light and northern star, eventually becoming their sole mission in life.

So if you’re still in the process of digging for answers, let this be an assurance that you’re on the right path. My guests today devoted themselves to helping people cultivate their skills in asking the right questions to get the best answers. 

Crystal and Mark Victor Hansen are a power couple! They are internationally sought-after motivational speakers, serial entrepreneurs, consultants, and authors. Together, they wrote the book, Ask!: The Bridge from Your Dreams to Your Destiny. Mark is best known as the founder and co-creator of the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” book series, with more than 500 million books sold. Crystal has helped transform many’s lives, as she specializes in guiding people through depression, anxiety, and hopelessness. 

In this episode, we discuss why it’s so powerful to ask and how simply it can be done when you know which answers you’re searching for. Mark and Crystal share why it’s so important to apply this skill in all facets of life, whether for work, personal, or intimate relationships. And why “googling” isn’t enough to search for answers; the access to the Divine and within yourself will show you the way. 

And now, without further ado, on with the show!

In This Episode

• [00:53] – Orion welcomes her guests, Crystal and Mark Victor Hansen, an international speaker specializing in human potential and an American inspirational and motivational speaker. 
• [05:57] – Crystal and Mark recall their first encounter as they attempt to share it.
• [14:50] – What do you do to attract the right partner? There are four practical and helpful principles that Mark explains. 
• [21:33] – Crystal discusses their new book, Ask!, along with Mark’s advice on how to master asking.
• [30:47] – How can we overcome obstacles in our lives? 
• [38:01] – Orion asks Mark and Crystal how they were able to manifest their miracle. Their personal views on manifesting are discussed. 
• [45:42] – Be childlike in your faith so miracles can occur. Mark shares his conversation with his grandson, which emphasizes courage.
• [49:25] – How do Crystal and Mark manifest miracles and see through illusions in life?
• [57:45] – Orion asks Crystal and Mark how to live a stellar life.
• [58:40] – A reminder for the listeners from Crystal and Mark: 1) bringing your life to new heights in just a matter of making a decision, and 2) getting bigger results requires asking bigger questions. They can be found at crystalvisionlife.com and markvictorhansen.com, respectively. 

Jump to Links and Resources

About Today’s Show

Hello, Crystal and Mark. Welcome to Stellar Life podcast. Thank you so much for being here. 

MH: It’s our great pleasure. Thank you for having us.

CH: So great to be with you, Orion. 

Yeah, I’m psyched. This is amazing. Wow, you guys are awesome and it’s such a privilege to have you on the show. Let’s start by asking how did you meet? 

MH: How did we meet? Is it the question? 

Yes. 

MH: That’s a wonderful question. I was doing a great seminar called Author 101 in California. Her mother saw the ad and said you’ve got to go. By the way, there’s Mark Victor Hansen, and she will add to that. 

Ask!: The Bridge from Your Dreams to Your Destiny by Crystal and Mark Victor Hansen

CH: That’s right. She said you’ve got to go to this Author 101. I was in the middle of writing a book, my first book, and she said she got an email and said you need to go to this event. She’s like publishers and publishers will be there and Mark Victor will be there. I’m like, oh, wow. 

I went and at the VIP reception, I wasn’t even drinking. I’m just going to talk about my business. I’m all business, no drinking. I’m not here to party. Ironically, a woman knocked a glass of red wine all over my white pants and Mark must have been looking my way. 

He came to my side and said I think I know where the club soda is. He was over in that corner of the roof surrounded by this entourage of people. He grabbed my hand and led me to the kitchen on the property because he’d had a lot of events at this big hotel, which was sort of an event hotel. We started talking and just never stopped talking. 

MH: If I may add just one thing. When I asked her out to dinner, after calling her mother and saying I’m going out with Mark, she said I knew it. Anyhow, we got to this great Hollywood hotel because I said we can’t stand the property because there are a thousand people here who want to talk to me for two minutes and there’s no such thing as two minutes and then there’s a crowd again so we got to go off property. 

We go to this great hotel restaurant 30 minutes past 9 PM on a Saturday night and oh, my goodness, there are 50 people. That $100 bill will not get you in at this time. I said let’s do this. We just walk up and the gatekeeper sees her radiant, spectacular, stunning beauty and says okay, I give up. Who is she? 

Because we wrote the book Ask! I teach that you always got to ask. I said you don’t recognize her? Now his mind is on steroids going through People Magazine, InStyle, and Vanity Fair, and he can’t figure it out. He said okay, I give up. Who is she? 

We’re both of Danish descent. I said she’s the queen of Denmark. He said, she is not. All of a sudden he went. Who are you? I said, who travels to the queen? He said you’re the king. Hold on, I got a table. I’m sorry for all the other people. He didn’t get a tip, but it was great fun for us. 

I know it was teasing and once we were there, we couldn’t pull it back. It was out. It was meant to be because we were meant to fall indefatigably in love because I’d written down 267 things I needed in my ideal wife, we had the same values, she had to want to travel. If we both had kids, our kids had to get along. All that was true and it has been spectacular. 

Wow. Crystal, were you even looking for love?

CH: Because I got divorced, I was not there looking, not at all. I was like I need a little time to myself. Some guys who kind of started coming my way right after my divorce and I’m like, I’m just not ready. I had the whole summer planned with my kids. We were doing a bunch of traveling. 

Even when I met Mark, we had that dinner that night. We established I’m recently divorced. He’d been divorced for three years. He’s like are you free to date? I was like I’m just not ready yet. I’ve got a summer plan with my kids and they were dancing in competitions and stuff like that at the time. I was like, I can’t bring someone into their life. It’s just too soon. Maybe by the time they go back to school, we can talk about going on an official date. 

He was really patient. We just kind of struck a friendship. It was a really amazing way to get to know each other, to be honest with you, because the kids would go to bed, I would go out and I’d lie on the trampoline looking at the stars and talk to him. 

Most people were never taught the art and science of asking the right questions. That’s why we built a community to cultivate and curate their ability to ask.

We got to know each other in a really sort of friendship kind of way and it was really great because there was no pressure for anything. It was just getting to know each other. By the end of summer, we felt we kind of knew each other and it was a good time to date—to start dating, yeah.

How many times did you have to ask, Mark? 

MH: How many times have I asked her to get married? I asked every day because I loved hearing her say yes and it was so cool that we had a great friend who is a singer and a seminarist, Matt, wrote us the song.

CH: It’s called Say Yes Again. 

MH: Say Yes Again, because I love hearing her say yes. She never said no, thank God. 

CH: He kept asking me if I’d marry him. Matt interviewed us for the song because that was his gift to us for our marriage. He said I’d like to write you guys a song. He interviewed us and was like how did Mark ask you to marry him? I’m like, well, he’s asking me so many times. He’s like really? Why do they keep asking? I go, I don’t know, because I always say yes again. He thought that was so great that he wrote a song called Say Yes Again.

MH: He put it up on YouTube. A lot of people listen to it and so we’re very touched. 

Yeah, it’s beautiful. Maybe you guys can share a little bit about your background, your passion, and at what point in your life and your career did you guys meet? Where were you in your life and how did that enhance the connection?

The best relationships work out when the timing is right.

CH: That’s really good because I do think sometimes the best relationships work out when the timing is right. For us, Mark had been married 27 years, and I have been married for 20 years. It’s not like we didn’t have some success in our marriages. It’s just that we weren’t still growing together. 

I have started my life coaching practice. I had transitioned my career from being in real estate to going fully into life coaching. I was a certified clinical hypnotherapist. I was really focused on helping people transform as a transformational life coach. 

My clients were having amazing transformations. Literally, people who had been depressed their entire lives were coming and in four or five sessions, they’d be completely free of depression, or anxiety, and stuff like that. It was just so amazing to me to be able to help people through these amazing transitions. Starting over after divorce, after they had a death of a spouse, or something. 

I was loving the work. I started writing about it and that’s when I went to that book fair because my mom said you have to meet some publishers and publicists, so you’ve got to go to this. 

Is she happy right now?

CH: Yeah, she is. He sends her flowers on her anniversary, really. 

Oh, my goodness. Mark, that’s beautiful.

MH: I do. We picked up her older brother one time and I went to Costco right before I picked him up at the airport. He’s very successful, but he sees flowers in the backseat and he says okay, what did you do? What did I do? He said are you in trouble with Crystal? I said I’m never in trouble with Crystal. He said why have you got flowers? I said because I always bring her flowers because she deserves them. 

Chicken Soup for the Soul 20th Anniversary Edition by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Amy Newmark

If you come into our house right now, there are a lot of flowers because we had a big event here a couple of days ago. We have a big house in Scottsdale, Arizona and we do events. We’re part of the Horatio Alger Award. We were recipients and we’re doing something brand new for them. We bought flowers and put them all over the house. She deserves them. Every wife deserves them and deserves more than they get them. I’m sure of that. 

CH: You got to tell her about your Chicken Soup. 

I was about to ask where you were in your life and that moment in time where you met this incredible woman and fell in love? Where you were in your career and her and where she was, how did that work together? 

MH: We’ll go backward and do the Chicken Soup, which is enormously successful. Nobody else sold a half billion books other than me and I’ve written 318 books with numerous great phenomenal co-authors. Now I’m co-authoring with my beloved soulmate with Ask! The Bridge from Your Dreams to Your Destiny because we think everyone’s coded at birth with a destiny. 

Our destiny, I believe to answer your question at a bigger level even, is that we were destined to get together. I thought if you had two come together and they were soulmates, that would be way cool. That’s what I’d written down. The truth is you put two flames together, it jumps exponentially eightfold and so we’re actually twin flames. We can finish each other’s thoughts and all that kind of stuff. 

What happens is most people have never gone for their highest and best relationship. When you’re 16 or 17 years old, you say I want him to be tall, dark, and handsome and I want her to be a hot babe or I want eye candy. Well, that’s nice, but you want bigger values than that and that’s why divorce is way over 50%. 

We’re being asked now to say how do you attract your ideal mate? What I said to you is that the four principles I have taught my old life are number one, you have to figure out what you want. Very few people can answer that. What you really, really want, and it’s got to be exact. It’s got to be specific. It’s got to be in writing. That’s number two, you got to put it in writing. 

Then number three, you got to visualize it to realize it. Then number four, you have to have a team and that means together for accomplished miracles. We’re accomplishing miracles and we are forced multipliers for each other. That’s the real deal in marriage and relationships. 

I just want him to bring home the bread. No, that’s nice, but today a woman can make as much money as a man so that’s not even interesting. Let’s say, what are the higher values of a relationship? How do you get to go through all of Maslow’s hierarchy to truth and beauty or our hierarchy where you start with self-awareness, go to self-expression so you’re doing what you can do, being all you can be, doing all you can do, having all you have, and seeing all you can see. 

Go to self-mastery and then go to self-realization when you’re in tune with the infinite and you know what the infinite wants you to do. What you’re passionate purpose is in alignment with God. For us, that’s writing books and communicating. 

Now we’re doing a film on the first story in here, which I got to give full credit to my beloved Mrs. Hansen because she wrote this thing called The Fable of Micaela. The people in Hollywood are saying oh my gosh, that has to be a movie as big as Harry Potter and we go oh, that’d be really cool. 

We don’t do anything, we can’t do sequels and prequels because our books change lives. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have sold a half billion books literally around the world and been to 80 countries together and talked to 7 million people. 

Ask! The Fable of Micaela by Crystal and Mark Victor Hansen.

It’s been miraculous, but that’s what happens when you’re in tune with the infinite. The infinite gets in tune with you and miraculous stuff happens. What Einstein said is either everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle. 

Yeah. Crystal, how was it for you to step into the role of a wife of somebody so big and well known? Was it intimidating? Was it smooth? What was it like? 

MH: She shakes like a leaf.

CH: It wasn’t intimidating. I grew up in a big family, nine children, the same two parents, and I don’t know. I guess I don’t know what conditioned me. My dad was a very powerful guy, a very successful attorney. Both of my parents raised us to be very strong, confident, and independent. 

I always believed I could do anything, be anything, or have anything. I loved learning from the time I was really little. I did well in school. I wasn’t intimidated by learning anything new. Very shortly after we started dating, I stepped in. 

You’ve been doing miracles for people, but I bet your stage is now so much bigger. I feel like you need to step into a more elevated version of yourself and he needs to step into a bigger version of himself to contain the bigness of you in this life that was all about him, pretty much. 

CH: You know what? That’s really intuitive of you, Orion, because I think he finally kind of met his match. 

MH: I beg your pardon, yes I did. 

CH: I wasn’t intimidated by him. He was divorced for three years, I think a lot of them were like woo, but for me, I’m just real. I look at him the same way. I love people. I think the big difference was Mark was so in the light. 

I performed as a kid. I did a lot of dancing and singing. I’d also done some modeling. I was not afraid of any of that, but Mark was on stage so much and so often there’d be someone who wanted to interview him or something and he’d call suddenly and go here, interview Crystal, too. I’m like, whoa, no, don’t do that. I’m not ready and so I think I did. I had to step it up in terms of being ready. I need to define what I’m going to say to the world that I’m doing and be ready to share it. I had to be more ready to share. That was a step up for sure. 

MH: I’d like to go back to your intuitive question as Crystal noticed that you’re holding up intuition brilliantly today. When we’re falling in love, we’re sitting next to this old man of the cloth, he was 92, and he said for 72 years I’ve been running Billy Graham relation ministry. Do you know what will keep you indignantly in love? I thought, well, that was a set of questions if I ever heard one. Yes, sir. Tell us. He said you got to pray out loud each and every day together. Both of us prayed in the church, at eulogies, at funerals, all kinds of stuff, but never spouse-ly. 

This morning and every morning, we wake up and we do a prayer, meditation, and visualization of what we want that day, what we want in our life, what we want for our business, and what we want for our kids. We have five kids in our blended family and six are phenomenal grandkids that we want magic for. Today, what we said is that we’ve got to elevate some because we believe the spiritual world runs on mental, which runs a physical, which runs your results.

Some of your viewers and listeners may go, I didn’t believe that. I believe there is no such thing, but that’s their problem. That’s not my problem. If you’re in tune with the infinite, like I said, that gets in tune with you and then you go out and do stuff. In my case, we sold a billion books. In our case, we believe we’re going to have a magic movie. It’s hers, but I get to have my name because I fell in love with her, lucky me. 

We got a lot of other stuff that we’re doing because we’re involved in so many charities and we’re here to see not how little a difference we can make in life, but how maximally elevate we can make a difference. We push the edge of our own envelope and you say, well, you’re 73. Well, I’m going to live to be 127 with options for renewal. I’m going to be a kickass 100-year-old, as healthy as I am today so there you go.

There is infinite intelligence in the higher power, and we all are welcome to access it; we just have to be willing to learn.

Yeah. I’m very much into biohacking. Dan Sullivan or maybe Dave Asprey, one of them, predicted to be 180.  

MH: Peter Diamandis, who’s also a friend. Both those guys are like that. We know him very well. He wants to live to be 700, you’re right. 

CH: Yeah. Crazy. 

Yeah. You raised the bar, why not?

CH: Yeah, exactly. 

I’ll do that too, probably. Okay, that’s incredible. Can we talk about your new book, Ask! What do we ask? Do we ask ourselves, the people around us, the creator? What is it about? 

CH: We actually say there are three channels through which we all need to learn to ask. Those are ask yourself, ask others, and ask God. Each one of those, we feel is equally important. 

When we looked at the range of people that we’re so privileged to know—because we’ve traveled so much throughout the world—what we noticed is those people who achieve greater success and those who are having not as much success as they want, one of the biggest differences is the really successful people also happen to be masterful at asking. 

They know how to formulate the right questions at the right time in the right way to get a different result, to take them on a new path, to find a solution, an illumination, an understanding that they didn’t have before. It’s not a topic that we talk about enough, but it’s probably one of the most important skills, if not the most important skills. We call it an art and science we should learn to master in this lifetime. When you learn to be a master asker, you literally can change every single thing about your life. 

How do I become one? That’s a good question. If I say so myself.

Successful people also happen to be masterful at asking.

CH: How do you become one? Do you want to answer that? 

MH: Let me do it in two levels. First of all, the level that benefits everybody listening quickly is they can go to askthebookclub.com online and they get a free seminar with us. Just so we go deep, because we’d have this every piece of spiritual literature, but in the American economic system, Christianity is like 90% of us. He said ask and you shall receive, but he never detailed it. What we do is we detail it. 

Back when I was bankrupt back in 1974—it’s hard to believe 50 years ago basically, I went to the third one—I said okay, God, what does he want me to do? He said, no, what do you want to do? I thought wow, that’s interesting. I said I want to speak to people who care about things that matter, that would make a life-changing, transformative difference. He said okay. 

The next morning, I’m with my roommates in Hicksville, Long Island, New York and I ask them. I say, guys, you know anyone young that’s not a Broadway star, not a celebrity, not a lawyer, not a doctor, somebody young enough I can relate to? The guy said here’s my ticket or the kid maybe 10 years older and you’re talking about hopping and going to New York. 

The interest rate was at 28%, nothing was selling. This guy’s talking to 500 realtors and he wows them. He laughs. He’s joking. He’s making fun with them, but he built up their self-esteem, their self-confidence, and their self-realization. I went up to him at the end of the meeting named Chip Collins, he became my best friend. 

I asked him may I take you to lunch so I can learn how to do what you do? He said, look, kid, a chance that you make this is one in a thousand here. Go do something real. You don’t have to take me to lunch. I said yes, I do. Just tell me how to do it. I’ll make it. He said you’re not one in a thousand.

I take him to lunch. He tells me four things to do. He said stay out of real estate. I own the five boroughs of New York. Nobody can mess with this and I’m not teaching you how to screw up my business. I said give me another industry. He said life insurance at the bottom of the pit for motivation. You’ll never run out, they always need it, 90% turnover. I said great. I did a thousand talks a year for the first three years because I went on asking and asking, and that’s the way you do it. 

Most people have never been taught the fine art, the science, cultivated, and curated their ability to ask. What we’ve done is we said hey, look, get that one copy of the book, get two, and go over it with whoever your best bud is. It could be your spouse or spouse’s equivalent. It could be your churchmate, temple mate, or synagogue mate, I don’t care who it is, your mastermind partner, your business partner. Go over every question and then write out the answers, and your life will transform. 

We say it’s the butterfly effect where you cannot look at a caterpillar and predict the chrysalis, which we’ve all been in thanks to COVID-19, and find butterflies. COVID is here to have people wake up and get out of harm’s way and find out what they’re really supposed to do. The only way you do is to ask your heart, soul, mind, and body what it is I’m supposed to do? Then you do that with another person and say can we work together to achieve greatness?

There’s greatness, there’s divinity, there’s outstanding talent. Nobody should die—metaphorically, you know the song with their music in them, or their book in them, or their invention in them, or their business in them, or their podcast in them, or any other ism in them. 

There are so many ways I can take this, everything that you said. Before I do, Crystal, do you have any thoughts about the matter?

Chicken Soup for the Soul Cookbook by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Diana von Welanetz Wentworth

CH: About what? 

About this, the way you ask. 

CH: The interesting thing about asking is we all are born as these beautiful little uncorrupted children who just are so good at asking for everything. At that point in our lives, we haven’t been corrupted. 

I know, I have a toddler.

CH: You know, right? We want to know who, what, when, where, why, and how. We drive people crazy wanting to know everything. We’re also not afraid to ask for more for ourselves. I want more. Can I have more? Depending on how we were parented and what happened in school years, quit asking so much. I’m tired of hearing from you. Sit down. Don’t ask unless you’re called on. 

Then you go to work, you have jobs, and your opinion is not valued. Suddenly, instead of being this unafraid, unashamed little asker that you were when you came into this world, you’re now a full-grown adult, kind of ashamed not to have all the answers. You don’t want to let anyone know that and are afraid to ask for anything. It’s very sad because it happens to almost everybody in a way. 

What we’re saying is it’s really important for each of us to recognize that we’ve all been shut down in some way and to look at ourselves and figure out what ways were we shut down, through what experiences, and how to get ourselves back. How to get that asking, that beautiful ability to ask shamelessly again. We talk about that in the book. We talk about the seven roadblocks to asking and we can go through some of the roadblocks if you like. They’re really important for each of us to recognize what those roadblocks are inside each of us. 

Yeah, I just heard about the term spiritual bypassing where you just use spirituality to avoid your shadow parts and avoid everything you need to heal inside. I think that the way to the other side is through if you have fear, you actually have to go deep, and experience it. I do hypnotherapy as well so I totally understand the depth of healing our traumas and some belief systems that we adopted throughout the years. 

When we are embracing those parts of ourselves, I think this is the most spiritual thing you can do. A lot of people are just like let’s connect with the quantum field and angles. They’re just flying high, but we’re like a tree. We have to be with our branches in the sky and our roots in the ground, we need both.

In order to be so grounded, I feel like we have to heal those fears and behind asking many people, there’s a lot of fear—fear of rejection, fear of whatever. As you said, a kid was bullied in school because he was asking the wrong question in class, and then for 20, 40, 50, 60, and 70 years, they’re afraid to ask. I’m sure you came across clients that had this fear. Maybe you can take us through some of those roadblocks and how we can conquer those?

You can’t run away from any part of yourself.

CH: I love what you’re saying about that spiritual bypass because people are like if I stay in my spiritual zone, I think positively, and I just don’t go to any of those places. If that is what’s sort of lying beneath the surface, I talk about mind excavation in my life’s transformational work, you can’t run away from any part of yourself.

It’s not that you want to obsess over those things in the past, but if there are things that you need to look at and it’s so important to turn around, face them, look deep, and start asking those questions even of yourself. That’s why we say it all kind of starts with asking yourself.

We talk about holding up the mirror questions in the book and we have the self-intervention questions because those are so important to get gut honest. I say it is like a mind excavation. You have to dig beneath the surface because if you try to build a house on a foundation that has a bunch of debris underneath, you just try to pour a foundation on that, you haven’t even tested it, the earth will not compact. It will not be solid and stable for you if it’s full of junk and debris.

If you root all of that junk out, dig it out, get rid of it, bring some fresh dirt in, compact it, and then start building the foundation of your life, that’s how we need to think of this, this asking journey. It’s like we have to dig deep. 

The first roadblock is unworthiness. I would say that it’s just this conditioning from our childhood that we all, at some point, carry this feeling that we don’t even like to tap into or be aware of. It’s like that feeling that you’re just not enough. You’re just not enough in some way and so many people carry that. 

God, Universal Intelligence, Infinite Wisdom- they don’t care what you call them; you just have to know they’re there.

That’s worth looking at and wondering where did this idea come from? This feeling, when did I first experienced it? All of these questions lead you down that path to opening the closet and looking deeply in those portals of your mind and saying wow, was it even true? Somebody was involved in that interaction that wasn’t an expert on life. They certainly weren’t an expert on me and so do I need to take this forward?

By looking at it and exposing it, it’s like you’re free. Unworthiness is a huge one. Doubt is like this gray zone where just like oh. I doubt it’s going to come out. If I ask, I haven’t ever got a positive response. You just live in this really dull gray zone of your life, doubting that anything’s ever going to work out, and it’s just a miserable place to be. 

Naivete is another one. It’s interesting because we don’t realize how naive we are. There’s a story in the book about we had this woman, a Filipino woman, who was lovely. When our children were really young, she would come and make all these amazing dishes from her homeland. 

She came one day and she cut up this orange fruit on a plate. She goes, Crystal, has some of this. I bit into it and I said Melda, what is this? This is like the best fruit I’ve ever tasted. She goes it’s mango. I go, mango? How come I’ve never tasted a mango? 

I thought I’m so worldly. I’ve traveled all through Europe. I’ve been to so many places. I was still young in my late twenties and I thought, how did I miss the mangoes? I go, where did you get these thinking she must have imported them from the Philippines. She goes to the grocery store. I go how it is that I’ve been walking past the mangoes every time I go to the grocery store. 

It’s because I’m from Idaho. We grew up with a lot of potatoes, but no mangoes. I thought, what else am I missing in life? What people do I just walk past because I think they’re not a part of my world. I just don’t even see them because I just am not looking. I’m just naive in my own space and my own zone. What opportunities am I passing by because I’m not curious enough to wonder? 

What opportunities am I passing by because I’m not curious enough to wonder?

Wonder and curiosity are a part of the asking journey. If I wonder about things, I’m asking the universe what is that? What could I learn from this? My curiosity is just one big living question and so that’s what we try to teach people. Naivete is a big roadblock because we’re all naive in our own ways. 

There are things that we know, there are things that we know that we don’t know, and the things that we don’t know, we don’t know. I love that question of what else is there and how can I tap into the realms of what I don’t know what I don’t know? 

You are asking God, do you believe in angels? Do you believe in intuition? What’s your belief system about connecting to what I call the universal Google or higher power and getting answers from that place? 

MH: First of all, I wrote the forward to the book 367 Names for God. God, Universal Intelligence, infinite wisdom, doesn’t care what you call it, just know that it’s there. Anyone who doesn’t understand the name–

In Kabbalah, they have 72 names for God. 

MH: The universe is infinite and it’s immediate. That’s what’s amazing to us. We’ve just done a whole book on that, which won’t come out until January, probably. The biggest black minister ever was a dear friend of mine when I went bankrupt in New York. He taught me how to get rich again and said look, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. 

He bought it in 1935 when these little kids were starving to death and said look, either that’s true or it’s not true. Now, if it’s true, then I got to participate in God and Jesus said, I’ve come to you so you may have a life more abundant. He decided to become abundant, had 26 Rolls Royces, 20 million people here, 20 million in Africa. 

We just finished the book on them called Unlimited Riches because he teaches that when they ask Christ where is God? And he says, Heaven is within. As I said, it’s God within. Do that work under whatever name, it doesn’t matter the name. There’s infinite intelligence, the universe spirit is a continuum, and the spirit has been forever in each of us. 

We have been listening to Neale Donald Walsch right now and that’s continuous. All the people who have died, have gone to the other side, and then come back, which is now over 20,000 recorded people at Duke University. All of them went to the other side, came back, and God said you’re not really supposed to be here yet so adios, sayonara. 

I know you’ve been dead on the bed for an hour and a half back in that hospital, but we’re going to infuse you back into life. Poof, they come back into life and every one of them says, holy cow, I didn’t do my assignment because we believe when you learn to ask, you were coded at birth of the DNA and RNA with an assignment.

CH: Destiny. 

MH: Yeah, destiny. What did I say? An assignment, that’s your destiny, your destiny code. I believe my destiny is to be a great and inspiring writer, teacher, speaker, life transformer, and business coach to a great number of people. Obviously, we’ve sold 374 million books in China and while we don’t agree with the CCP, we love the Chinese people. We’re thankful they love our books, all of them. 

How you’re experiencing your life is what you’re magnetizing back to yourself.

Wow. How do you manifest miracles? How do you connect the power to ask what you want? Esther Hicks and Abraham-Hicks, have the book Ask and It Is Given. It is about the law of attraction and how you work with a law of attraction to get what you want. 

What’s your take on manifesting? Obviously, there is that part of taking a lot of action along with the law of attraction, connection, and asking for what you want. What is your idea around that, about manifesting a miracle?

CH: It’s such a good question because people are like, well, I’ve tried the law of attraction. I sat there and said I want this, I want this, I want this. It’s a little more than that because it is about asking. What we really are in this universe is a magnet to what we’re getting. 

The first thing we need to do is look around our life and say, do I like what I’m getting? Because this is the program I’m putting out. Whatever is happening in your life, there are other players in your life, but to the greatest degree, how you’re experiencing your life is what you’re magnetizing back to yourself. 

The greater question is what do I want? What do I really want, but how do I become that? How do I magnetize that which I want back to myself? That’s why we say when you ask, there are three phases to asking yourself. Where am I right now? Do I really like what’s going on? Is this what I want? Is this what I plan to have or is it something different? That’s the first phase, really figuring out where you are now because you can’t really figure out where you are going unless you know where you are now. 

Then the second phase is where do I want to be?  Where do I really want to be? Really not thinking with limitation when you go to that place, think with your imagination, think with the highest degree of your imagination, the nth degree of where do I want to be, who do I want to be? 

Then imagine yourself and your life on the stage of your mind, stage of your imagination, what that looks like and what it feels like, what it is like, and really live in that place in your imagination because there’s a reason God gave us imagination. We’re the only animal that has imagination. We’re the only animal on this earth that has the ability to imagine things into existence. 

If you think about it, every single beautiful, amazing thing, invention, anything that’s ever been thought of on this earth, everything we use, everything we enjoy came from someone’s imagination. Just like you, someone like you. That’s the beauty of imagination. If you can create like that, you can create anything. You can certainly create your own life the way you want it. You just need to spend more deliberate time asking those questions but asking from your greatest vision of what you really want it to be to the nth degree. 

You can’t really figure out where you are going unless you know where you are now.

In this greatest relationship that I’m living, that I’m asking for, what are we doing? How are we treating each other? How do we interact with each other? What does that relationship look like, sound like, feel like? What do I enjoy about that? I have to have a clear idea of how that’s living out before it actually is going to play out in my life. 

The same thing with a career, it’s all the same thing. You’ve got to really imagine yourself as that person doing those things. In that way, you start to become a magnet. Now, it’s very active. You’re very active in your creation and you have to become active. 

The final phase is what specific action steps I need to take because this is a physical reality. As you start to ask these questions of yourself, answers will come to you. I promise you they will and you’ll get an idea or you’ll get an intuition like maybe I should go to that place tonight. Don’t shut those intuitions down. 

Maybe that is the place you’re supposed to go to meet that amazing person you’re supposed to be with or when you think of that person, you say you’re trying to put a business plan together or get something to happen, and you suddenly think of this person out of the blue, call them. Pick up the phone, take action, reach out, do something. Moving your plan into action one step at a time is a necessary thing in this life. 

MH: If I may add to what you said, we’re saying miracles. That was the first part of your question. I don’t know that we fully answered, but you’ve got to live in the assumption of the wish being fulfilled. I’m bankrupt. I’m upside down. I have no connections. I have no ability. I have no natural training yet and I decided I’m going to be a great professional speaker and found the right guy almost instantaneously. 

Then they said “man, gosh, you’re the best storyteller I’ve ever heard. Back to the law of attraction. You’re a magnet that Crystal was talking about. Do you have that in the book? I got to take it to my wife, my boss, my employer, my company, whatever.”

I did the first book and the next year I sold 20,000 copies at $10 each and made $200,000. Today’s dollars multiplied out because of crazy ass inflation, that’s $2 million. I’m 26, I’m rich, and I got a brand new Chrysler Cordoba car with Corinthian leather. 

Now I’m without a wife and say, I’ll never have another one of those. Boy, I don’t want that twice. I wrote down the impossible 267 ideal goals. I put it in my 20th-anniversary issue of Chicken Soup for this whole book and it’s called My Love Story. She had to show up because I was reading it every day, which you got to implode into your mind, branded in your brain, etched into the fabric of your being if you want a miracle to come out. 

It’s got to be an idea that you take so much, that you get rid of all the noise in the world. You forget the news. You forget what your friend said. You forget what your kids said. You forget what you’re saying, all the people that put you down, depressed you, and the junk that you bought into it. 

I said, there are 8 billion people on the planet, there are 4 billion women, and whatever the age is that I put appropriate, she would fit all the categories and she was 267 and I had 267. That’s why I say you never cross out your goals because all of us have pulsating waves in our life, but it comes back to what she’s saying when you make yourself a magnet, you have miracles. 

Our life is a miracle. The book is a miracle. It’s selling miraculously because people are getting results just like Chicken Soup. It’s called handle on value in the book. Have you read Chicken Soup? She was just at your beauty salon. I better let you tell this story. What happened? 

CH: No, it’s just fun. It’s always fun when you’re just in a random place and one of the other stylists leaves her booth or her section, she comes over, and she’s like, are you the author of Ask! 

Oh, my goodness. 

When you change someone’s life with ideas, words, and sharing, it’s just really magical.

CH: Yes. She’s like “I love that book so much. It’s changed my life so much.” That’s really the goal. That’s the goal for us. When you change someone’s life with ideas, words, and sharing, it’s just really magical.

 MH: One more thing, Orion, you said that you’ve got a toddler at home, congratulations. We think having a lot of kids is the most wonderful thing in the world.

That was a big manifestation. 

CH: Good manifestation. 

MH: It took nine months.

No, the doctors gave me a 5% chance to conceive. I had to do a lot of work around that and co-create with the divine.

CH: See, what a miracle? See, miracles happen every day. You’re asking about miracles? Absolutely, that’s the thing. I think we’ve all had many miracles, but we fail to see them sometimes. We just kind of go oh, okay, that was lucky that happened. No, it’s a miracle that you manifested. 

MH: We own an energy device-making company in Hawaii called naturalpowerconcepts.com. Leonardo Da Vinci makes pop-up windmills called Wind Charger. We got the coolest stuff ever to really solve the energy problem and energy has got to be solved fairly quickly in the world because we have a lot of faceless bureaucrats that don’t understand anything. 

Anyhow, we’re in Hawaii and we’re on the beach, we get a call on our little cell phone. It says, from a Dick Tracy watch. Our little grandson was six years old and his Dick Tracy watch, it said it was the gizmo. There’s only one guy with a gizmo that we know, our six-year-old at the time. 

He said “Grandpi, can I talk to you?” I said “yeah.” “Are you alone?” I said, “no, I’m with Mimi and we’re on the beach. There are probably only 10,000 people on the beach here in Oahu, but what do you want? You know you can call us 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We’ve told you that again and again. We’ll never stop telling you.” 

He said “are you still writing all those great books like Chicken Soup?” I said, “yes, sir”. He said, “Well, is Mimi listening?” I said, “yes, sir.” He said “can I write that book with you?” I said, “yes, sir.” The first story we have is with our grandson because he had the courage to ask. 

Miracles happen when you have the faith of a child.

Miracles happen when you have the faith of a child, which is what we wrote a whole little chapter on there. Most people get out of faith. They go because your polarity is you’re either full of faith or you’re asking out of fear. If you ask out of fear, you shut down your miracles. That’s the point.

Yes. I think I have a lot of spiritual amnesias. We know we know a lot of things, but we tend to forget. Sometimes we just need someone to remind us that everything is good. We are guided that miracles happen every day, and just put a mirror on our face and just show us our greatness. Sometimes we need somebody that believes in us a little bit more than we believe in ourselves. 

CH: Yeah, that’s right. So true, Orion. 

MH: We had 15 kids here on Friday. The bottom line is we’re validating all of them as (a) they are important, (b) they’re courageous, (c) they could tenfold their confidence and make their dreams and businesses come true and their relationships come true and we are so excited. We had dinner here at our house with them and we’re doing that now on a regular basis. We’re deeply thankful that we get to be the spiritual gadfly to wake up that energetic system because everyone’s got it inside, but they got to get somebody to hold up the mirror and say, you are really wonderful. You’re really competent and you have the talent. You got what it takes. 

CH: Just a reminder, just exactly like you said. 

Do you guys put mirrors on each other a lot? I bet you do. 

CH: Yeah, we do. We hold up the mirror for each other. Yes, absolutely. 

MH: Her more than me. I need a lot of help. Men are usually called clueless. 

CH: It’s important. It’s not just to improve, it’s also to recognize your value, your talents, and stuff like that. 

Yes, I was overhearing my husband having a conversation the other day and they were talking about the movie The Matrix. He said it’s not a movie, it’s a manual. 

We have so much power that we often need to tap into it. There are so many illusions that we need to see through in order to manifest and really let our light shine and see our greatness. You guys are playing the game on a very high level. 

CH: Thank you. 

What’s your experience with the matrix, not the movie? 

CH: In terms of the movie? 

In terms of creating miracles in your own life? 

CH: Oh, my gosh, no. We live it. We know everything. We see these miraculous ways that our life has come together in impossible synchronicity. It’s not impossible because we created it. Through our intention, our vision, and even the way we met, it’s crazier than that. We talked about it briefly, but it’s just really crazy. We know that God pulled us together at this exact time, this exact place. 

Each of us had always had this very clear vision of what we wanted our relationship to be like, but we’d both been in these long marriages where there was like this sort of, it’s not to put down our former spouses, emptiness because it wasn’t that person that we felt that we could really like. We didn’t quite get each other. It’s almost like a little empty hole. The way we came together was absolutely impossibly sacred and it was like God winks the whole way. We see it again and again and again in so many parts of our lives. 

In fact, in the Fable of Micaela, I write about some of the crazy things that have happened to me because I happen to have these sorts of dreams. I’ve always had these amazing dreams in my life that have guided me. I took some when I wrote the Fable of Micaela, it’s Micaela’s world, so the details are a little different, but the dreams are very similar to actual dreams that I’ve had. 

I absolutely know that—and there are so many things I haven’t written about—our bodies don’t just stay anchored. Our light body is actually very mobile in some ways so we’re very connected to everything that is. When we focus on things with our heart and with a pureness of thought and mind, heart and mind, it’s amazing the things that can happen, the things that can come through. 

We really have access to everything we want. We have access to all of history, all wisdom, all knowledge. People, I think, are going to start to realize that more than ever. It’s not just going to come from books you read and things. As you start to open up more to universal wisdom, it’s all there for you right now. 

You have to spend time with yourself, though, that’s the key. We live in a really noisy world and I think it’s sort of been intentionally distracting because if you can distract people enough, you sort of minimize their power.

That’s what happened in the last couple of years. 

CH: It’s exactly. You control what everyone’s looking at, make a lot of noise, learn everything they want, and all their likes so that you can just throw things in front of their face and distract them. What it’s really doing is keeping us from going into that deeper part of ourselves. Like the scripture, be still and know that I am God. I am God. The I am God is part of you. I am. You find that in the stillness. 

If you wanted to control society and program society to operate the way you wanted it so there are a few powerful and the rest of us are controlled, just keep them constantly dinging, notifications, and pings. 

MH: I agree with everything she said and then let me go back. We said ask yourself, ask others, ask God. I just want to hit on that ask God. I’m bankrupt, upside down. I’m starting a speaking business, but I need to make $100,000 a year. That’d be the first minimum and then add a zero, instead of $400 a day, 250 work days, that’s $100,000 at zero, 4250 work days is a million, which I learned how to do. 

I learned this principle of asking and you do it 400 times before you go to sleep. Then I wanted $400, $400. I’m going to earn $400, $400, $400 and then you pull yourself to sleep and your subconscious never sleeps. It goes out in the universe as she said, your mind is a broadcasting receiving station. Two fifty-nine in the morning, I woke up and I knew the law. The law said to figure out which one and write it down. 

First of all, I said Bill Widner. I wrote that down. Never heard of the guy, never saw him, didn’t know it. Then said, State Mutual, which is an insurance company I have never heard of. It was never in any zone that I’ve got, but I know the law is the law. If you want something and you tell yourself what you want it for before you can sleep, God and you will answer, but you’ve got to put it in writing.

The next day at lunchtime, I am at this building called Metropolitan Life Insurance, which is the biggest company and big client of mine, I raised them 10%. They made me a lot of money. I made them even more. I go in and it says on the front of the Marquee, because insurance companies are by insurance companies, just like fast foods are by fast foods, Taco Bells, next to McDonald’s.

Anyhow, it says, Bill Widner, State Mutual. I went, holy cow, and I had to note my little suit pocket, and I pulled up and went, Bill Widner, State Mutual. That’s incredible. God, you really know what you’re doing here. 

Nobody’s at the front desk. I go straight to what I perceive as his office, knocked on the door, he says to come in. He assumes he’s going to hire me to sell insurance and in five minutes, he has written me a check for $400 for buying my seminar package. He said I didn’t care if he ever came back, you’re so happy. You uprated my spirit and all that. We became great friends. He got me trained in his whole company, as it turned out, and I trained literally around the world. It was a big company and invisible to me at that time. 

The point is, what she said is you have an attachment to all wisdom and it’s not Google. It’s inside you and you’ve got a spirit body that is light. Thanks to Kirlian we now can take pictures of how much spiritual work somebody has done, how much auric energy they have, and what is their light body. 

A high form of mind hierarchy is spiritual realization.

That’s why I said that a high form of mind hierarchy is spiritual realization. If you’re working on yourself and doing prayer meditation, you’re going to become a higher person. You’ll just walk in and your presence will get theirs before you do and the business is yours. It’s miraculous. 

Well, can you see auras and light bodies? 

MH: One of my authors can. We’re just with a lady who did Chicken Soup for the Soul Cookbook and her husband would see the three of us working and see all the colors dancing in between us. That’s not my shtick. There are seven basic prophetic things. She’s got prophetic dreaming, one of hers, which she just told she wrote. 

CH: Intuition. 

MH: Prophetic dreams and intuition. I can tell you where business is going to go and I can show you how to tenfold any business. That’s why I got hired as a consultant speaker because people come in and say, I’m going to sit with you at lunch or breakfast before you talk and just tell me how we got to do this business. What I tell them just about always works because I know before I get there what they’re going to ask me and I can pretty much go if you go this way, it’s wrong. If you go this way, it’s right. Businesses do miraculous amounts of business. 

Nice. You guys are so brilliant. I wish I had more time with you, but I have to be respectful of your time. Before we say goodbye for now and thank you for everything that you shared. It was amazing and awesome. I have so many more questions. Where can people find you and what are your three top tips for living a stellar life?

CH: People can find us, obviously, on social media. I’m at Crystal Dwyer Hansen and Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. Then, of course, Mark Victor Hansen, all of the above. My website is crystalvisionlife.com. He’s markvictorhansen.com, of course. 

Then our book, probably the best place to get it is Amazon. It’s there in every form, Audible, Kindle. Don’t forget, when you get the book, go to askthebookclub.com so you get an invitation to the free webinar because we’d love to have you join us for the free webinar.

MH: We want to help you become a master asker because if people learn to ask, back to what you say, they elevate, they ascend, they accelerate, they exponentially go, grow, and glow, and everybody is supposed to let their little light shine, so to speak. 

What are your three top tips to live a stellar life? 

Stop looking around outside of yourself to get your cues on what to do with your life.

CH: The three top tips for me, remember, stop looking around outside of yourself to get your cues on what to do with your life. What you’re looking at has already happened, it’s already passed, and it can help you define what you want to do and don’t want. The place to go is to go deep inside yourself and take the time every day, every single day, in silence to ask yourself these important questions that will help you refine and define exactly where your life is going. Those are the most important tips I can give you. 

MH: You have to figure out what you want, put it in writing, visualize it to realize it, and get a team member. To get your dream together, you have to get your team together. 

Got it. Any final words for the listeners? 

CH: Just remember that today is a brand new day and you can start a brand new life right now today. You just need to make a decision.

MH: The size of your question determines the size of your results. When I asked how to make $100,000, I made $100,000. When I asked how to make a million, I made a million. I’ve done more than that since then, but you get to do whatever you want. Most people ask too little. That’s why we don’t know of a better book or another book that’ll do what this one does and that’s why it’s a stellar best seller. 

I love it. Crystal and Mark, thank you so much. It was such an honor and a pleasure. I really appreciate you guys. Thank you. Thank you for being here. You’re awesome. I appreciate you. 

CH: You are wonderful. Thank you so much. Take care. 

MH: Bye-bye.

Thank you and thank you, listeners. Remember to look inside every day and ask the right questions because you will get the best answers because the best answers are inside of you. You are connected. Visualize your dream and have a stellar life. This is Orion. Till next time.

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

{✓}Formulate the right questions to get the best answers you’re searching for. In doing so, you begin to look deeper within yourself if you’re curious about what’s inside you. 

{✓}Remove the shame of not having all the answers. No one in this world knows everything, so don’t hesitate to ask if you’re clueless about something and are interested in learning more about it.

{✓}On the other hand, don’t shame others for not knowing about a certain topic. When someone asks you a genuine question, answer them the best way you can. Aim to guide them to become better.

{✓}Visualize your goals and dreams as clearly as you can. Write them down, create a vision board, journal them, etc. Be as specific as you can. For example, if you want to become a millionaire, write down the amount of money you want to see in your bank account one day.

{✓}Take action as soon as you start digging for answers. Going after the things you want in your life is a quest wherein every tool you stumble upon along the way is a key to the next level. Utilize that key to your best advantage. 

{✓}Remember that miracles and opportunities are everywhere, no matter when, where, or how. You magnetize your goals better if you have the innate trust the Universe will provide.

{✓}Build a team of individuals who share your values to help you achieve your goals. Accept the fact that you cannot do great things on your own. You will always need a helping hand, and there’s no such thing as self-made. 

{✓}Be hyper-aware of the distractions that life throws at you. Even a small notification ding from your cellphone can hinder productivity. Weed out what’s not important and always put your top priorities first.

{✓}Choose a life partner who aligns with your hopes and dreams and vice versa. Growing together in a relationship is vital. The Universe conspires magnificent things when you’re with the right person.

{✓}Grab a copy of Crystal and Mark Victor Hansen’s book, Ask!: The Bridge from Your Dreams to Your Destiny and join Ask – The Book Club to become a part of their community of master askers. 

Links and Resources

About Crystal and Mark Victor Hansen

Mark Victor Hansen