Have You Ever Wanted to Scientifically Program Your Mind for Success?

This is the Momentum podcast.

Have you ever wished that you could program your mind for success on a scientific level, it's actually possible. In this episode of the momentum and podcast Alex is going to share with you how to activate your mind to seek out the things that are successful to you, manifest more of them in your life. He'll also dove into the ways that you can create momentum to gain joy and gratitude in your life. If you're an entrepreneur looking for the best way to hack your productivity and get the most out of your day. This is an episode you won't want to miss.

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the momentum podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazer, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop. And we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate. There could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real.

We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be.

I'm Alex Charfen, and I'm excited you're here today because I'm going to be talking about how to activate, how to scientifically activate your brain to create success as an entrepreneur. But before I jump into that, I want to actually talk about how, as entrepreneurs, we treat success as entrepreneurs. Do we react to goals?

How do we react to achievement? So.

In my career, I've worked with entrepreneurs for about the past 30 years, I'm forty eight years old, I started consulting when I was in my early 20s and I've worked with tons of entrepreneurs, tons of wildly successful people. And I see patterns in entrepreneurs. I see behavioral patterns. We tend to to behave the same way over and over again. We have behaviors that confuse the rest of the world. We are driven by momentum. We're driven by this need to move forward. We're driven by this need to to create to make things happen. You know, as an entrepreneur, do you know what I'm talking about? That restless agitation we feel to be creating forward momentum to making things happen, to making a contribution to to doing what we want to do.

And here's what I know about us as entrepreneurs. See if this resonates like try this on as entrepreneurs, when we are headed towards a goal, the speed with which we approach the goal and the proximity we create to it is the same speed with which the importance of the goal goes down. And as we cross the finish line, we feel.

Like, it's really no big deal, like we the gold no longer means anything to us as we cross the finish line. In fact, for a lot of entrepreneurs, as we approach the finish line of a goal, we'll just reset it and put it back out there so we never celebrate. We never achieve it. We never actually let our mind know that we've achieved what we set out to achieve. Now, the reason I'm sharing this with you and by the way, if you're an entrepreneur and you're watching this, please let me know this resonates. Just say like that's me. Goals lose importance because the rest of the world doesn't really think like this. The rest of the world, like, sets a goal. They achieve it. They get excited about it. They celebrate it. You'll see it on Facebook. You'll see him talking about it. But it really for entrepreneurs, for people like you and I, goal achievement is not really something we celebrate.

In fact, when we you know, for people like us, it's it's how far how fast can we get to next thing, how fast can we do the next thing? Now, that's how we're hardwired. But just because we're hard wired some way doesn't mean we shouldn't examine it and understand it and understand why. See, I believe that as entrepreneurs, we are evolutionary hunters. Try that on for size. I wrote a book called The Entrepreneurial Personality Type. Normally a copy is sitting right here on my desk so I can hold it up and show it to you.

But when you look at us as entrepreneurs, we are evolutionary hunters. We are that small percentage of the human tribe that gets up every morning, goes into the future, creates a new reality, comes back to the present and demands that reality becomes real. And that evolutionary hunter drive that we have is millennia, thousands, tens of thousands of years programing people like you and I to get up every day and go get into momentum, go on the hunt, make things happen. And here's the issue with being an evolutionary hunter. We have been programed either epigenetically or by a higher power or however you want to understand it, we are that small percentage of the population that keeps the human tribe alive. We are compelled to get up and move forward because it's a survival instinct. In fact, if you're an entrepreneur, when you're not moving forward, when you're not in momentum, when you feel constrained, when you feel like you can't move forward, when you can't see the forest for the trees, isn't it one of the most excruciating feelings in the world? When I go out and speak and I say, what is constraint? Feel like people say it's horrible, it's terrible. It makes me feel slow. It exhausts me, it breaks me down. You know what it really does? It makes us feel like we're dying. And when you feel like you're dying, you have run into a survival instinct. So as entrepreneurs, we have what is what is is in fact a survival instinct to ignore the goal and keep going and to just be that evolutionary hunter that goes forward over and over and over again. But there's a way for us to use those instincts to scientifically program ourselves to create more success as entrepreneurs.

And so I want to talk to you about a concept called reticular activation. So what reticular activation is basically in layman's terms is when we activate our minds to see something, we see it everywhere. Let me give you the best description of reticular activation that I know. Reticular activation when it comes to cars is like absolute. So you probably have had this experience. You go to buy a car and you go through the transaction, you drive off the dealership, you're driving home, you're excited about your new car, and then you start looking around and everyone is driving your car. It might have even happened when you were thinking about buying the car. You started seeing a whole bunch of them everywhere. Why? Because we have activated our mind to go look for the car we're in, because now we're in that scenario, we are recognizing what's around us and then we see it everywhere. Those cars were there before, but we see it at a much greater level when there's reticular activation involved. When we are in the moment, in the experience, we see that experience over and over again, duplicated everywhere. And reticular activation can actually be used to help us move towards and create success. We can program our minds to to move forward and create success by using the natural instincts you and I have as entrepreneurs. And this is something I'm incredibly passionate about. I look for ways for us to use our natural instincts so that we can do things that we normally don't achieve or do things that we normally don't do or make things so that they're easy, easier to achieve. One example is if you look at our natural thirst program, we have this program called the 10 Day Natural Thera's Challenge. If you go to get thirsty now dot com, you can check it out. And what we do in that program is we use your natural instincts to reactivate your thirst and help you drink more water than you ever have.

That's just a small system that we have a small process.

We have to help entrepreneurs be successful when it comes to reticular activation. Here's what I want you to know. Instead of blowing by our goals, I want you as an entrepreneur to start recognizing where you're successful in two ways. This is two ways every day. The first one is recognizing what you are grateful for. Now, the science of gratitude is is now there's so much research and so much out there that the science of gratitude is almost absolute. When we are grateful for things we now know, we live a better life, we have better outlook. We actually achieve more. We bring more of those things into our lives. So when we recognize gratitude, we magnetically attract more of the things that we are grateful for into our lives. And then the second way that you can activate reticular activation, that you can make sure that you're looking for successes on a daily basis to recognize where did you win.

Here's what I know about you as an entrepreneur. I'm going to make some assumptions because I think you and I are so much alike. Entrepreneurs we do not recognize wins. In fact, at the end of the day, when we look back at the day, we look at the three or four times we were uncomfortable. We feel like we made a mistake. And when I talk to entrepreneurs, they can actually recall mistakes, errors in judgment, things that they did wrong for years. They can go back ten years and tell you the things that went wrong that didn't work, that they weren't how they wanted them to. But when you ask somebody, where did you win yesterday, oftentimes it's blank. You ask an entrepreneur, what are you grateful for yesterday? They have to take a minute and understand it. What does that tell me about us as entrepreneurs, the muscles for recognizing gratitude, where we should be grateful and the muscles for recognizing where we won are weak in entrepreneurs.

We are set up for achievement, but the recognition of that achievement needs to be developed, and if day after day and this is what I do every single morning, I sit down and I write down two things.

What am I grateful for and where did I win? Today, I use our momentum planning system. This is part of it. This is the particular activation part. And I'll share with you this morning. I wrote What does what am I grateful for? I wrote Ariel, who's the principal at my kid's school. She's absolutely amazing, our team, the opportunities we have right now and our content and cadence. And the reason I wrote this is yesterday, my team was amazing. We have incredible opportunity. And we actually used our systems, our processes, our own content to get out of a major issue yesterday with our team and get clarity so that we can move forward with confidence. And then yesterday, where did I win? I wrote down I won in our monthly targeted interaction, which is the monthly meeting we have with our team. That's where we used our content. I won in the accelerator training. I did a training for our membership yesterday. Actually, I didn't do it. My my director of operations and I Hailie Hard did it. Haley crushed it. She's amazing. And the acceleration accelerated training was on how to give raises and how to do profit sharing. Your team. It was amazing. And then I also wrote our call with Ariel because my wife and I actually had a call with the principal of my kid's school yesterday. And so I feel like the call was a win. And I want to recognize that I'm grateful for her and the call that we had. And here's why I do this.

Every single day I'm building the muscles so that I can build the muscle memory of activating gratitude and winning all day long.

[00:11:01] I want my brain looking for what are we grateful for and where are we winning and how do we win again? How do we create more gratitude? How is there more that we're going to be grateful for like that? This simple process, just daily basis, writing down, what am I grateful for and where did I win? Today is life changing.

And we just I'm not the only one who does as we've proven this with the hundreds of members we have with our team, with my family, with my wife, with my kids. This simple practice is life changing. In fact, we do this with our kids every night at dinner. They show what they're grateful for. And every night before they go to bed, I ask them where they want. We call them besty. It's like, what were the best things that happen to you each day? And my kids are eleven and fourteen and they've been doing that their whole lives. The reticular activation is strong in my daughters because we've we've created this process where they build the muscles, then the muscle memory of being ridiculously activated to gratitude and success.

This is game changing now.

There's advanced reticular activation. In fact, as a company, we train advanced reticular activation. We train process based team wide, company wide reticular activation. Let me share with you how we do it. We have a process. We are the core process of our company is called the Charfen Process. It's five steps. It's five steps to achievement. It's five steps to creation. It's five steps to creating the outcomes you want to see in the world. Excuse me, I'm getting excited. I'm like, my throat's getting a little dry because I love this topic. So the five steps for the Charfen process are analyzed. Prioritize, commit, execute and renew. Let me explain this. So the Charfen process is a system for decision making and achievement and execution. And here's here's the five steps. And I'm going to go through these quickly because I actually have another podcast called The Charfen Process. If you want to go to our website, Charfen Dotcom, go to the podcast page and share or search for Charfen process. You can hear this in detail. So I'm going to go high level. The five steps are analyze all the available opportunities, prioritize which ones are most important, commit to the most important opportunities, execute those opportunities, then renew and renew means, review what happened and then go achieve again. And here's why. This is advanced reticular activation. We're building entirely new muscles with the Charfen process. It's far greater than recognizing gratitude and wins, which I think you should still do. But here's why this is so different. In the entrepreneurial world, most entrepreneurs just go. There's not a lot of forethought, there's not a lot of planning. In fact, we talked to thousands of entrepreneurs a year on our sales calls and our events in the US. When I go out and speak and I ask how many of you have a clear strategic plan that you could pull up right now and show me what you're doing in the next month?

In the next quarter, typically, it's less than one percent and can and there's a reason for that.

As entrepreneurs, we want to be in motion. We want to be a momentum. We want to be going. But the challenge is if we just go, what we often do is fire ready, aim. And we waste a ton of time, effort, energy, focus and resources.

It is frustrating.

Now, if we go through a process where first we analyze all the available options that creates confidence in us, that actually creates a muscle memory of what are the options. Then we go through a process where we prioritize what should we do first? What's most important, what is the priority right now, advanced muscle memory of looking at options now, creating what we should do right now. Then the third step is commit. This is one of the things that entrepreneurs have a hard time. When we have a hard time committing to execution, to just moving forward, to just making things happen, to not changing the rules and and saying this is what I'm going to do. So when we do that, we now build the muscle memory of this is what a commitment looks like. And then when we go execute on that commitment, because we've analyzed and we prioritize, we committed and then we execute, we have entirely different perspective as to the success we are achieving. And then the last step renewing means we review what happened. We look and we say, what success did we create? And then we do it again. Now, why is this advanced particular activation? Because when we analyze, prioritize and commit. We convince ourselves, we show our brain that we have gone through the options, we've selected the ones that are most important. That's why we're committing. And then when we move into an execution phase where we stop asking, what are we going to do? We stop asking, where are we going? We just execute the plan. Then we have the opportunity to say what how was this successful? And we build muscle memory to create a commitment to execute that commitment and come back and do it again. This is how you scientifically program your brain to create the results. You want to create the effect. You want to go out and build the company you want. And if you commit to doing this, you will see your entire business. And here's what's more important. You'll see your life change when we recognize what we're grateful for, when we spend time looking at what we won, our relationships improve our time with family, improves our time with ourselves, improves it, makes everything in our lives more progressive and move in the right directions.

So for us as entrepreneurs, we need to realize that as we achieve, we lose interest in the achievement and pulling it back. And briefly, I'm not saying you have to throw competitor balloons or any of those things unless you want to. But when we pull it back and we briefly on a daily basis, let our brain know what we're grateful for and where we're winning, we completely shift how we look at the world and when we are willing to in our lives and in our business, analyze, prioritize, commit, execute and renew. We create advanced reticular activation where we become success, creation machines, contribution creation machines. This changes how we perform in the world and how we grow our businesses. And my hope for you is that you can use the evolutionary hunter instincts. We've all been gifted with that you can use the entrepreneurial personality type that drives you forward to create momentum, that that takes you on that journey of going into the future, creating a new reality, coming back to the present and demanding it becomes real and putting up with all the challenges and issues and frustration that that takes. That's what I want for you. And so.

As you go through your life, try these practices out and you will see your entire perspective shift, in fact, just try this for the next few days.

At the end of the day, write down three to five things you were grateful for, three to five things where you felt you won and see how you feel at the end of five days. If you do it for five days, you'll feel a shift. You do it for five weeks. You'll start seeing success in your life like you haven't before. You do this for five months, you will become a scientifically programed success, surging machine that is going to go out and change the world. I want to help you make growing the business easier because it's never easy. And I want to help you go out and make the contribution that you know you want to make. So thank you for being here with me today. I really appreciate it. If you know someone who should hear this, please share this. And if you'd like to understand more information about our company and what we do, you can go to Charfen dot com forward, slash, build momentum. My teams put together some of the best resources we have on the entrepreneurial personality type and creating success, including the natural thirst challenge. So if you go to Charfen dot com, build momentum, you're going to go to a messenger interface and then you will quickly see a carousel of options. And one of those is the natural there's challenge. Another one is the book that I just talked about. Another one is the Our Five Core Functions document, which shows you how to make better decisions in your business. So don't miss this. Go to Charfen dot com for slash, build momentum, grab some of the downloads. They are life changing. And thanks for being here.

I love you all and I'm excited for you. This practice is so simple, but sometimes the simplest changes we make make. The simplest changes we make are those that are most life changing so soon. And thanks for being here.