002: The Miracle Morning with Hal Elrod

00:00 Beau Henderson: Welcome back to the richest hour on the radio, the one place committed to helping you live a healthy, wealthy, fulfilled life on purpose. And we have a real treat today. You know, one of my commitments to you is this never ending search for tools and things, and ways and resources to live your definition of a rich life, a rich meaningful life. And I ran across a book that, I think, everybody here needs to pick up. I call it RichLife Required Reading. I have a short list, maybe four or five books that I think so useful and versatile that I think it applies to everyone. And I talked to earlier, I had a conversation with a Greg McKeown that wrote a book Essentialism. And I realized that was one of those books that I recommend to everybody and here’s the second I’ve read in the last couple months that, I think everybody should pick up. So, I’m very excited to have a RichLife friend with us, best selling author, who has written a book that has become a movement. Mr. Hal Elrod. How you doing, Hal?

01:02 Hal Elrod: I’m doing well Beau, thanks so much for having me, man, I’m looking forward to this.

01:05 BH: Yeah, me too. So, we talked about this, you wrote a RichLife book. What you wrote is helping thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, you can tell me, the reach of people live a life of their dreams.

01:18 HE: Yeah, we just surpassed 100,000 books sold. Obviously, not everybody is gonna follow through. I’ve definitely been surprised at how many people, you know, stick with it. It’s been pretty amazing. And what’s interesting, I was thinking about this actually this morning, I was thinking about, how many people have we impacted with the Miracle Morning? I know 100,000 people I can measure via the book but something that’s kinda unique is I have had so many people tell me that the ripple effect of the Miracle Morning. So, they do the Miracle Morning and then all of a sudden they become a better dad and they become a better husband or a better wife, better mom. They’ve become a… Better at work, they become a better leader, a better CEO. I mean, it really is, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people I don’t know, but yeah, that’s the answer that I can give you.

02:16 BH: Well, I hope all our listeners, RichLife listeners out there listening, pay attention to what we’re talking about, because again, as Hal described, it’s almost this idea of how you do something is how you’re gonna to do everything and by following what he talks about… I don’t want to give it all away yet because before we really dig into it, Hal, you kind of had one of those pivotal stories that kind of could have set you life on a couple of paths, not necessarily the one you ended up one. Can you share with us kind of what happened and how you dealt with that and came though that?

02:50 HE: Yeah, it’s one of those… It’s a story… It’s something that you think would never happen to you. This happens to other people or you see it one the news, you change the channel and you’re like “Oh, my God, that’s terrible. It’s making me depressed. Change the channel.” Right? And so, when I was 20 years old, I was one of the top sales people in the history of the company that I worked for, which was Cutco. I broke all these records selling Cutco kitchen knives in home presentations. One night I gave a speech and at that conference I gave this speech. I left the event and I was on top of the world. I got a standing ovation. Life was great. I just bought a brand new Ford Mustang which was, at 20 years old, that was like the dream car that I could afford. The Ferrari was like quite a ways off. Right?

03:35 HE: So, anyway, long story short. I’m driving home and a drunk driver hits me head on at 70 miles an hour in my Ford Mustang, he’s driving a full-sized Chevy truck. So we’re both doing 70 miles an hour, approximately, and we collide and our cars are just destroyed. And the front of my car… I spun off the drunk driver and the worst was yet to come, Beau, as the car… My car spun sideways and the car that was just a few car lengths behind me, according to the driver later when he was interviewed, he didn’t even have time to hit the breaks. He just crashed into my door at 70 miles an hour and my driver’s side door, the one that was three inches from my shoulder, right? And if you could imagine having a car hit you in your driver’s side door at 70 miles an hour, the devastation.

04:14 HE: My whole car was crushed into the left side of my body and, instantaneously, I broke 11 bones. I broke my femur, the biggest bone in the human body, it broke in two pieces. I broke my pelvis in three places, fractured my humorous bone, my elbow was shattered, severed my nerve in my arm, punctured my lung, ruptured my spleen, my ear was almost completely cut off, the ceiling buckled, I mean, on and on. I fractured my eye socket, which is all made of metal now. I’ve got like a robo-eye.

[chuckle]

04:42 HE: But… And an hour later… So, I’m sitting there in the car, I’m unconscious. Look, I was in a coma right away. I was immediately in a coma. Thankfully, I think that, my body just couldn’t withstand the pain. And an hour later, when they pulled me out of the car, they, being the paramedics and the fire department, they were able to use the jaws of life, they had to get me out. And I bled to death. I had lost so much blood sitting in that car for that hour that I died. And I was clinically dead for approximately six minutes. I was in a coma for six days, rushed to the hospital, underwent emergency surgery. And when I came out of the coma, I was told I would never walk again, or probably never walk again. There was… The hope was like, maybe in a year we’ll reassess how things are going. And then they… And I had permanent brain damage. So, like you said, a lot of ways I could have… A lot of ways I could have gone.

05:38 HE: It’s like, “This is horrible. Why did this happen to me? I’m a good person I don’t deserve this. Screw that drunk driver. What a jerk.” You know. And I had to learn something in my sales training called the 5 Minute Rule which simply said that when things go wrong, you can’t go back in time and change it, so, there’s no point in dwelling on it. Give yourself five minutes to bitch, moan, complain, cry, vent, whatever it is. You get five minutes. Literally we would…

06:00 BH: I like that.

06:01 HE: I mean, we would set our timer on our phone for five minutes, and after five minutes, take deep a breath and you acknowledge, “I can’t change it, so the only choice I have here if I wanna be happy, healthy, successful is I gotta move on, I gotta.” And so that was it. I thought after my five minutes was up, I thought, “I can’t change that I was in a car accident.” And the doctors thought I was in denial because I was so happy and I was so positive, and I told my parents, I told my dad, I said, “Dad, I live by the 5 Minute Rule.”

06:27 HE: And I said, “Look, there’s only one of two possibilities.” And this is true for all of us when we encounter adversity or adversity that is to come. We all have rock bottoms coming up, [06:39] ____ by hooks, right? But a rock-bottom, we’ve all had them. It’s just an experience of adversity that is beyond what you’ve experienced before. And whether it’s a loss in the family or something, a bankruptcy or whatever, we have more coming and we’ve gotta deal with the adversity. So the idea was, I told my dad, “There’s only one of two possibilities here. Number one, I will never walk again. I’ll be in a wheelchair the rest of my life.” That is the worst-case scenario at this point in my mind, and I said, “So I’ve already thought through that.” I’ve thought, “Okay, that’s the worst case scenario. If that happens, what will I do?” And I said, “Dad, well, since I can’t change it, I’ll be the happiest person you’ve ever seen in a wheelchair.”

07:19 HE: Because I’m in a wheelchair either way, right? I’m in a wheelchair either way. So why be depressed and sad and angry when I could be the happiest, most grateful human being you’ve ever seen on wheels, right? I said, “The second possibility is I will walk again”, and I said, “That’s where all my energy’s going, Dad. I’m not dwelling on, I’m not putting energy into my fear and what I don’t want and the worst-case scenario. I’ve accepted that, so there’s no… It has no power over me anymore. I’m not worried about it. If it happens, it happens, and I can’t change it. However, since there is a possibility that I might walk again, I’m visualizing that everyday, I’m praying about it everyday, I’m thinking about it, I’m talking about it, I’m speaking it into existence, and I will do that until I’m proven wrong.” And a week later, so three weeks after the crash, two weeks I came out of the coma, the doctors came in with routine X-rays and they said, “We don’t know how to explain this, but your body is healing so quickly, Hal, we’re gonna let you take your first step tomorrow in therapy.”

08:17 HE: So it went from never walking again to three weeks after the crash. And I took my first step the next day, it was a painful step for sure, and the rest is kinda history, as they say. It was a month later I got out of the hospital, and I got back to work against doctor’s orders and that year, I was the number six sales rep in the company out of 60,000 reps, I think, something along those lines. So it was really that idea that we can either make excuses why we can’t or we can find ways to prevail and find reasons that we will.

08:48 BH: I think the 5 Minute Rule, I think that was worth the price of admission right there, Hal, because we’ve done a lot of talking about, be careful being around people that blame and complaint, but I like this point of, “Nah, let me give myself permission to feel that emotion, get it out, but then I’m done with it, and let’s move on.” Love it.

09:07 HE: Yeah, that’s it. Honestly, that is the most important. I could spend an hour talking about that, and I won’t, but that is the most important lesson I’ve ever learned in my life, is the lesson of acceptance. I’ll give just a quick kind of advanced training on this, if you will. Every negative emotion that you or I or anyone listening has ever felt is self-created, and it’s unnecessarily self-created. We think that the reason that we’re upset, angry, sad, name a negative emotion, and negative’s a relative term but what you’d call negative, unpleasant emotions, things that you don’t really enjoy feeling, if you name any of them, we think it’s the thing that we’re focusing on that’s causing us to feel the pain. “Well, of course I’m angry! Look what she did to me!” Right? “Of course I’m sad. It’s not my fault I’m sad. I lost the most important person in my life.” Right? So we blame the thing, but here’s the reality: It’s not the thing, it’s our resistance to the thing. So to the degree that we’re not willing to accept something that happens, that’s the degree that we create emotional pain for ourselves.

10:21 HE: So I’ll give you an example. I’ll go back in time. If you’ve ever had your heart broken like in grade school, right? When I was in seventh grade, my girlfriend broke up with me. Her name was Brittany, right? That was my first rock-bottom, really. I was like, “I can’t believe it. We were gonna get married and go to the dance” and right on and on and on. And think about any time in your life when you’ve gone from depressed about it or angry about it, to being at peace with it. It doesn’t mean you’re happy, but at peace, it was the moment that you finally accepted, “You know what? We’re never getting back together.” And that was when you accepted it, you became at peace with it. And here’s the thing: See, this isn’t about feeling happy about the things in your life that you didn’t want or didn’t ask for the adversity. I wasn’t happy that I got hit by a drunk driver, I wasn’t happy that I might not walk again. But here’s the thing: Happiness is an emotion. You can be happy one minute and a phone call can change all of that, right?

11:19 HE: And so, that, for me is… Or you have to realize that if you look at… If there’s happiness on one side of the spectrum and then there’s sadness or anger, depression, whatever you wanna call it on the other side, in between those… And if I’m giving a speech, I usually put my hand on one side to represent happiness once, the other side for sadness, and then I put them together kinda heart-center and I say, “In the middle is peace.” And peace is a place that’s rooted. It’s permanent. It’s not happy or sad, it’s, “I’m at peace, therefore, I have a space, I have freedom to choose any emotion that I wanna feel.” And whether it’s losing a loved one or being in a car accident and told you’re never gonna walk again or traffic. Most people can relate to the traffic example. I go… Who doesn’t… Whenever I speak, I go, “Raise your… Hey raise your hand if you don’t like traffic.” And everybody’s hand goes up.

12:11 HE: All right and then I kind of say what you said, I go, “All right. This is worth the price of admission. You just get this, nothing else.” I go, “If you hit traffic, normally you’re like, ‘Oh, come on. I’m gonna die. Go faster. Come on. I’m gonna be late!'” Right? And you’re resisting the fact that there’s traffic. And I say, “Well, how silly that is.” You’re in the car… You’re gonna be in the car for 30 minutes anyway. You’re gonna be late anyway. You get to choose and this is a metaphor for life. You get to choose your experience during those 30 minutes. Everyday of your life you get to choose your experience of that day. You can either be upset, frustrated, sad, angry over the things that don’t go your way, or you can choose to accept all things in life before they even happen, unconditionally, and when you do, you’ll live at peace with all things. It doesn’t matter what happens. I call this “accepting life before it happens.”

12:57 HE: Now, wrap this lesson up by saying this: If you’re thinking, “All right, this sounds too hard, Hal.” Start with the 5 Minute Rule. Okay. Start with the 5 Minute Rule. Give yourself five minutes and what happens is at first you go, “Five minutes isn’t long enough. Can I have like a five day or five week rule?” And what happens is, at first, it feels like it’s not long enough but after you start practicing this, it shifts your mindset because here’s what happens: You go, “All right, I got five minutes,” and then you go, “Oh I’m still upset,” and five minutes goes by, the timer goes off and you’re like, “I still feel upset.” Okay, I committed. All right. Deep breath, can’t change it. Can’t change… And you start to go, “Hey, I can kind of control my emotions by just accepting it.”

13:35 HE: And then what happens is after you do this for a few weeks, the 5 Minute Rule becomes too long. After a few weeks you go, “Oh, damn. I can’t believe that happened. All right. Five minutes, here we go. Boom. Timer five minutes. I’m so pi… I’m so mad! I’m so mad!” And then like 30 seconds goes by and you huff and you puff and you kinda pick up your phone and look at your timer, you’re like, “And I get four and a half minutes left.” And it’s kind this awareness of like, “I can put myself through this for another four and a half minutes or I could just accept it now and focus on what’s in my control.” And that’s what happens and then eventually you become so conditioned this way that you don’t even need five minutes. It becomes the five-second rule and then eventually you just kind of accept all things before they ever even happen to you and when they happen, you go, “Oh, can’t change it. Let’s move on.”

14:22 BH: That’s powerful.

14:23 HE: It really is powerful. Yeah.

14:24 BH: Just by being intentional and being aware, yeah, no. It can make all the difference in the world ’cause probably when you’re complaining before for two weeks about something, you probably won’t even know where or how much you’re complaining. But now we’re putting intention on it, changes the ball game.

14:39 HE: Yeah, yeah. A 100%.

14:40 BH: So, Hal, you… You we’re dead at age 20, came back and walked. I didn’t even tell people earlier and I mean this might sound crazy to some people, you ran a 52-mile ultra marathon. So all of that just from the success to the devastating deal on [15:00] ____ back, that could have been a story for the rest of your life and you did have a book about that, I believe, right?

15:04 HE: Yes. Taking Life Head On, and yeah, that was the first book. Yeah.

15:07 BH: Okay, so what beyond that, what was the motive? So I mean you already had your story, you could’ve probably talked and spoke about coming through your obstacles from then on. What was the motivation to take this plunge into The Miracle Morning?

15:20 HE: Yeah. It was never going to be a book I did. Like I wrote my first book out of a sense of responsibility. I thought, I endured… In fact and it was friend of mine that like told me, he goes, “Hal, dude, you have to write a book. Like you died and the way you came back from it was like it was crazy but it was practical where you can teach people how to accept the things they can’t change and how to be grateful, and how to achieve these amazing goals you’ve achieved. You owe it to the world.” And so he kind of like guilted me in to it almost but I bet I was like, “Yeah, you’re right. You know I guess you’re right.” I never thought about it ’cause I’m not a… I wasn’t writer. I still don’t think I’m a very good writer. And so I got to do it. So I wrote the first book and then I’m like, “All right, bucket list item done. Never again.”

16:00 HE: And in 2008, the economy crashed and at that time, I went from my, I just hit hall of fame with my company, I had launched my, like three of my dreams. I always wanted to be a professional speaker and so I started speaking. I always wanted to be an author, I’ve written that book or not always want to do, but you know once I’ve decided I should write a book, that was a dream and it took me six years, I think, to finally write the book. And then I had wanted to become a success coach because I’d hired a coach and he totally changed my life and I thought I wanna pay it forward and kinda be a coach. So I was doing all of that.

16:30 HE: I bought a brand new $350,000 house at the height of the market in California like the worse time to buy and I bought a car, like I was living above my means. It was first time I really had money and that things were good and I got in the best shape of my life, I met the woman of my dreams, everything was great, and when the economy crashed, I crashed with it. I lost over half my income. I went from being debt-free, no credit card debt to $53,000 balance on my personal credit card, climbing every month. I went from being happy and energetic, to deeply depressed. I went from being the best shape of my life to I literally because I had no money, I cancelled my gym membership. I stopped exercising completely for six months. I didn’t exercise for a day. Not one day did I exercise in six months and so much fear and uncertainty, I lost my house. I become deeply depressed, and to… This is, it could be a long story but to keep it short it was… A friend of mine encouraged me to go for a run. I said, “I hate running”. He said, “What do you hate worst, running? Or the circumstances that you just described to me?”

17:33 BH: Wow.

17:33 HE: And I was like, “All right, jerk, I’ll go for a run,” and I went for a run, and on the run, two minutes into the run I heard this quote from Jim Rohn and Jim Rohn says, “Your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development because success is something you attract by the person you become.” And in that moment I realized, just, I think it’s true for like 99% of people on the planet, I am not dedicating a personal develop… Dedicating time everyday to personal development at the level that I need to be to become the person that I need to be to create the success I want. And I had this epiphany, “What if I go figure out what do the world’s most successful people do everyday for personal development, and I do that?” And I went home I spent an hour researching, and I was looking for like the one thing and I couldn’t narrow it down to one. The most narrow I could get it was six, there were six practices. And these six practices it depended on who you asked as to which one was the best. You ask that one millionaire, it’s a visualization and you asked this billionaire, Ray Dalio, runs the largest hedge fund in the world, he said, “It’s… Meditation is the key to my success.” It just depends in who you ask.

18:45 HE: So long story short, I think I probably said that seven times, I decided that the epiphany was, “Dude, what if I did all of these?” None of the research I was doing showed me any human being that was doing more than two or three at the most. I thought what if I did all six? I woke up the next morning, I did all six, even though I was horrible, I sucked at them, I wasn’t good, I didn’t know what I was doing. But that morning, even though my life was in shambles, I felt unstoppable, and I thought, “If I feel this way to start everyday, it’s only a matter of time. I thought maybe like six months to a year of doing this, I can turn it around.” It was two months later, I had doubled my income from $6,000 a month which unfortunately was not enough to pay my bills, to $12,000 a month.

19:28 HE: In two months, I went from being in the worst shape of my life, hating running, to deciding, “I hate running, I’m gonna commit to a 52-mile ultra marathon, and I’m gonna use The Miracle Morning to develop myself mentally, physically and emotionally to be able to follow through and finish that.” And I finished it a few months later. And I went from being deeply depressed to like I said I felt like I can do anything, and I started to do anything. Because my life changed so fast, I started calling it my Miracle Morning, and it was never gonna be a book, it was never gonna be a movement, it was never gonna be a movie which is now a movie, we’re filming, it was my little morning ritual, and I taught it to my coaching clients and probably 80% of them went from, “Hal, I’m not a morning person, I don’t think this is for me,” to, I said, “Let me teach you how to be a morning person in like five minutes.

20:20 HE: Tomorrow morning, do these five steps tonight, you’ll be a morning person.” And a week later, they all come back, “Oh my gosh, you were right,” and that’s when that whole sense of responsibility came rushing in. Like, “Damn it, I have to write another book. I have to tell the world about this.” And now it’s one of the best selling books of all time. We’ve sold over 100,000 copies and like you mentioned I’m now very much in awe of what’s happening. I am very humbled by it. I am very grateful for it, and I kinda feel like I’m along for this ride and this Miracle Morning is like it has a mind of its own.

20:58 HE: It’s out there doing… I told my friend of it, I said, “Matt, if I died today, I’m almost positive The Miracle Morning, the book will sell millions of copies and it will impact millions of people because it’s doing it from word of mouth. It’s changing people’s lives so profoundly that they’re having all of their friends, their colleagues, their co-workers, their family, buy the book, read the book. They’re buying it for them, is its own kind of self-sustaining thing. So I don’t know if I probably gave a little too much there but that’s a wrap.

21:26 BH: No, that’s great. It reminds me, just recent conversations we’ve had, one this idea of, when you were explaining this movement. It’s almost something I’ve experienced and felt before it that almost like you’ve been given this thing, ’cause [21:43] ____ asked for life to go like it did the way it did, and you’re just like saying, “Hey, I’m the guy that needs to steward this and make the best of it I can. I’ve got a responsibility here.” And then the other piece as you explained it Hal, is so exciting to me is, there’s a lot of talk out there about lifestyle business right now, this whole idea of, “I want a business to do what I want, where I want, with who I want.”

22:05 BH: A lot of people I think think, “If I could just quit work and lay on the beach”, they’d be happy, but what I find through a lot of conversations we have here, is really there’s a deep yearning inside us all to have meaning and kind of a challenge we have here on the RichLife show at times is, let’s make it a legacy business, to where… William James, it’s a quote from a psychologist said, “The greatest use of our life if to spend it for something will outlast it,” And I go through that whole piece there to say, that’s what you’ve done my friend and that’s really exciting.

22:38 HE: Yeah, once I had that realization, that conversation, my friend, no, you’re right, it was exciting. I think the three things that I think for us to be fulfilled and to have a lifestyle of freedom, it’s Impact, Income and Legacy, those are the trifecta, kind of. And typically, most people are focusing on income before they focus on impact, and when you focus on impact first then income kind of comes. Zig Ziglar, I don’t think anybody said it more eloquently when he said, “You can have enough everything in life that you want if you help enough other people get what they want.” And I recently was talking to my wife and I said, “Sweetie, I had a realization during my Miracle Morning this morning,” and she’s like, “What’s that?”

23:16 HE: I said, “Every dollar that we make is a dollar because we impacted someone’s life.” Whether it was through my speaking or my coaching or my event, or whatever, that’s really cool. So anyways, so I think you focus on impact first, how can you impact more people? Many doesn’t just show up magically because you make a vision board. Right?

23:40 BH: Sure.

23:41 HE: You find a way to change some lives and add some value for people and then money follows value.

23:49 BH: Very good. Hal, there’s one thing I wanted to talk about. So, we’ve talked about and I’ve read probably every personal development book out there for the last 20 years or something. And I have some ideas but I’d love to hear your take on it, what is it that makes this book unique, The Miracle Morning?

24:08 HE: Yeah. I think the biggest thing is that it… Well, there’s a few things. First and foremost, if there’s anything I’m good at… I don’t feel exceptional much, it’s dumbing things down. I don’t know if that’s the best way of putting it, but I guess it’s making things… Simplifying them so that they are practical and that they are actionable, and that they are results-oriented. And a lot of these practice, I think that’s why the book resonates with people so much, and they get results is because most of these practices are taught in The Miracle Morning, the six practices. I’ll run through them:

Silence, which is meditation or prayer, or both. Affirmations, visualization, so these are the SAVERS, by the way. This is an acronym, S-A-V-E-R-S: So silence, affirmations, visualization, the E is for exercise, the R is for reading, and the final S is for scribing. And again, if you go study successful people, you’ll find that… You’d be hard pressed to find someone that’s very successful that doesn’t do at least one of those consistently. And what made The Miracle Morning unique was doing all of them. And so… But again, I think what makes it resonate is, those practices are… Many of them are… They are taught in a way, like they’ve been taught over the years by gurus in a way that’s really fluffy and kind of like woo woo, and you don’t really get results. You might feel better while you do it, but it doesn’t really change anything.

25:39 HE: And I’ll give you an example. Affirmations, and this is a good example of kinda how all the SAVERS are practical, results-oriented. Affirmations, the way they’ve been taught for decades, maybe even centuries is, one of two ways that are very ineffective in my opinion. The either lying to yourself, that’s like the strategy number one. “You wanna be a millionaire? Just tell yourself you’re a millionaire over and over until you believe it.” Right? Say, “I am a millionaire! I am a millionaire!” But we’re all intelligent human beings and our subconscious mind goes, “Bullshit. You’re not a millionaire.” And you’re trying to lie and it’s like this, there’s this internal struggle between the truth and this false identity you’re trying to adopt. So lying to yourself is never optimally effective. The second way that affirmations are taught is this passive fantasy that makes you feel good in a moment. So here’s an example of a financial or money affirmation that’s been perpetuated for, I don’t know how long. Some version of this, it’s, “Money flows to me effortlessly and in abundance.” [chuckle] right?

26:44 BH: You need some waterfall music in the background.

26:46 HE: Yeah. But that’s not… Money doesn’t flow to you effortlessly. You gotta do something to… People don’t just give you money and that’s… And here’s the problem, is people that do those affirmations, they like them because they’re like, “Man, I’m broke. But during those moments I’m reading my affirmations, I really feel like things are gonna change.” You go, “How long have you been reading that affirmation?” “Oh. For so long.” [chuckle] Like, “Have your finances increased?” “Yeah. Not really.” So the way that I see affirmations are, you’ve got to create affirmations that are very specific. So, my affirmation… There’s basically four parts to the steps I teach in the books to outline your affirmations.

1. Number one, “What do you want?” So an affirmation should start with an objective, a measurable result that you want to create in your life.
2. “Why do you want it?” You’ve got to reinforce. “Well, what are the benefits? Why is it worth you working everyday to make it happen, overcoming the challenges, the adversity, the discomfort, whatever it’s gonna be required.” So why is it important to you?
3. Number three, is when… Or I’m sorry, “What must you do?” Which activities must you do to ensure that you achieve that goal, that result, that outcome?
4. And then, number four, when specifically, are you committed to those activities?

28:07 HE: So you’re not trying to… Your affirmations aren’t… They’re not fantasy, they’re not lies, they’re literally programing your subconscious mind with the mindset, the focus, the belief that you need to actually achieve the things you wanna achieve in your life. And so, I have affirmations for my… For as a dad, for my finances, for the impact I’m making, for almost every area of my life. I’ve got affirmations that everyday, they remind me and program my subconscious to live in alignment with who I need to be to ensure that those things become a reality. So those are… That’s just… I could go on each of the SAVERS in-depth like that, but that’s basically just that type of practicality and results-oriented nature is how all of the SAVERS are different than they have been taught over the years by gurus for a long time.

28:57 BH: And we’re talking to Hal Elrod, the author of The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life [Before 8 AM]. And what you are saying there, Hal, about the affirmations, that’s what I got out of it. Hal goes into depth, just like he laid out that one area of the SAVERS. He goes into detail in this practical step by step information on how to implement it. And what really impacted me and made it effective for me to use is I could use it the next day. And it didn’t have to be perfect. I didn’t have to go prepare anything. I could start the next day and get better as I go. And that’s what I really loved about The Miracle Morning.

29:38 HE: Yeah, I think that you touched on the other point of what made it unique from other books, is it’s a behavior change. Most books change your thinking, but as soon as you move on to the next book or you stop reading, the book that you’re reading, that change in thinking is, either it fades away out of memory, or it’s replaced by a new book that you’re reading with a new change in thinking. Whereas like you said, you read The Miracle Morning, day one you start doing it and then it creates this structure where you can now bring books into it, you can bring new affirmations, you can bring new meditation, you can learn different… Right, it’s scalable, it’s actionable, you could do it in six minutes a day, you could do it in 60 minutes a day. So I think there’s no reason that someone can’t do it and the book makes it so easy that it’s like, “Why wouldn’t I at least give this a shot?” And once you give it a shot, most people never want to go back to life without it.

30:27 BH: Well, and so the SAVERS, that might sound a little daunting. Well, Hal, that’s a lot of things to try to get in, because I know for me, I’m interested in so many things I’d feel frustrated because I’d never, would be very consistent, so how in the world do I get in all these things before I go to work?

30:42 HE: So I mean again, like I said, it’s a scalable practice where you can do one minute each, and I literally teach you in the book how to do one minute each as opposed to 10 minutes each, if you’re doing a 60 minute SAVERS or a 60 minute Miracle Morning, it should be one minute each. But how to get 70 to 80% of the benefit in one-tenth of the time? And that’s a… There aren’t too many things you can do one-tenth of the time and get 70 to 80% of the benefit, and the Miracle Morning, it really is one of those things. It’s also customizable, there’s a whole chapter toward the end, once you learn the whole thing, it’s how do you wanna customize it? Maybe you only wanna do three of the SAVERS. Maybe you wanna do alternate, where you do three on Monday, the other three on Tuesday, the other three on Wednesday, right, and you alternate back and forth. So there’s all these varieties, so that you can make it meet your lifestyle, and I even teach you how to spread them out. If you wanna do the Miracle Morning, do two in the morning, two in the afternoon, two in the evening, so there’s literally… It’s unlimited to make sure it fits your preferences, your schedule, your lifestyle so that it works for everybody.

31:45 BH: Well, and that’s what I loved about it, is that it’s flexible and anybody can apply tomorrow, so we speak of that. So somebody got ahold of the book, they’re listening to this, they get ahold of the book. And they wanna do the Miracle Morning tomorrow. Any advice or suggestions on how do we do this, how do we get started to be successful?

32:06 HE: Yes, yeah. I mean the first thing, I always say the essence of the Miracle Morning is it’s not even about the Life SAVERS, and it’s not even about waking up earlier, it’s waking up better. And what I mean by that is the essence of the Miracle Morning, if you really break it down in its simplest form, it’s about waking up and dedicating the very first part of your day to your personal development. To become a better version of who you were when you went to bed the night before. And if every day we become a better version of who we were the night before, we just keep getting better and better and better, and as we get better our life gets better, right? And that’s kind of what I realized at one point is that on a scale of one to 10, we all want level 10 success in every area of our life. And if you’re measuring the level of success you want, we want to be as happy as we could be and as healthy as we could be and have our relationships be as thriving and fulfilling as they could be and make as much money as we can. We want level 10 success in every area.

33:06 HE: But what I realized is that back when I had that on that run, that epiphany that Jim Rohn quote, I’m not a level 10 person in these areas. I’m like a level two. I’ve got to develop my knowledge and my skills and my confidence in each of these areas, and that’s what the Miracle Morning does is it helps you become a better version, so if you’re at a level two in an area, but every morning you do Miracle Morning, well, after you do it for a week, now you’re a level 2.5, and then after another week you’re a three and all of a sudden, James Altucher said this really well. James Altucher is the best-selling author of “Choose Yourself” he’s a very famous podcaster and I interviewed him for The Miracle Morning movie. We filmed him out at his house, him and his wife a few weeks ago and he said, basically with the Miracle Morning, every six months, his life has been… It’s just totally different. Like it’s radically transformed. And that’s that compound effect. You get a little bit better every day and then all of a sudden in six months you’re like, “Holy cow! Look at how different I am and how my life is than it was six months ago”. Then you keep doing it and same thing. And I add… I’ll close up with this.

34:08 HE: I had somebody ask me on an interview a while back, it was the first time anyone ever asked me, they said, “Hal, you created the Miracle Morning to get you out of the rock bottom, right?” I said, “Yeah”, and they said, “Well, you’re not at rock bottom any more, you’re pretty successful or whatever, right?” I said, “Yeah, okay”, and they said, “So why do you still do it? What does it do for you now compared to what it did for you when you were at rock bottom?” And I was like, it almost… It kind of stumped me for a second, I’m like, “Huh, that’s a good question”. And then it came to me very quickly, I went, “It takes me to the next level”.

34:41 BH: There you go.

34:41 HE: That’s it. And that’s the one thing, that I don’t care who you are, every human being on the planet, even if you’re a billionaire or a millionaire or a philanthropy, whatever you are, human potential is something that’s unlimited. You never fulfill your potential, you just get closer and closer and closer and closer. But when I’m 95 years old I’ll be doing the Miracle Morning, I’ll be like, “I’m almost there”. So that’s it, it’s taking yourself to the next level so that you can take your success to the next level, because it only happens in that order.

35:10 BH: Love it. No, great takeaway piece of advice and Hal, as you were explaining that, I was thinking about that, “Hey, you know what, my level 10 goals today, if I grow to them, maybe my level four goals in the future, and I just set new level 10 goals.”

35:24 HE: Yeah, and that’s a great way of putting it, exactly. Once you’ve become a better version of yourself, you just have to realize that you’re capable of way more than you thought you were capable of six months ago.

35:33 BH: Well, guys, get The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. I know it’s available on Amazon. Hal, would you prefer people come through the site and get the free bonuses or other ways to contact you?

35:44 HE: No, the best place to get the book is Amazon, unless you’re, if you’re an Apple user, an iBooks user, you can get it on iBooks for the iPhone, the iPad, et cetera, the computer. Amazon gives you Kindle, paperback, audio book, it’s all available on Amazon. So yeah, those are the places to get it, either iBooks or amazon.com.

36:04 BH: Perfect. Hal, I gotta tell you, your book is blessing hundreds of thousands of people and will continue to do so. And I know it’s made my life and our listeners’ lives a little richer and I appreciate you for that. And I hope to see you again before too long.

36:18 HE: Cool, Beau. Thanks man. I appreciate you.

36:20 BH: All right man. Thanks.