Starting from Nothing – The Foundation Podcast

Guest Name Interview – Rob Scott

Introduction: Welcome to Starting from Nothing – The Foundation Podcast, the place where incredible entrepreneur show you how they built their businesses entirely from scratch before they knew what the heck they were doing.

Frank: Welcome to another edition of the Starting from Nothing podcast. I’m your host today, Frank Mocerino. Today we’re actually bringing on Rob Scott for round two.

For those of you guys who don’t know Rob yet, Rob is a transformational coach, marketing expert, and business consultant. Rob helps people simplify their lives, stop procrastinating, and get focused on what’s important to them.

Ultimately, he guides people to lead centered, purposeful, and productive lives and is a master of helping people shift their identity so they can shift their entire paradigm.

I was actually first exposed to Rob’s ideas two years ago when I initially went through The Foundation and his mindset re-patterning exercise is still something that I use regularly to this day.

So Rob, thank you for all of that content that’s been with me for the last two years and welcome to the podcast for round two.

Rob: Hey Frank, it’s great to be here. Thanks for sharing all that and I’m so excited to hear that you’re still using some of that stuff.

Frank: I certainly am. You can quiz me about it at the end if we have time but I want the guests to know that this very simple exercise that I went through of identifying limiting beliefs and then re-patterning in new beliefs that were more beneficial to me has been a practice that I’ve actually gone through every single day over the last two years to really condition my brain to believe in the things that I want to believe in rather than to let the subconscious sabotage my progress and my life.

Rob: Nice.

Frank: Thanks, Rob.

Rob: Yeah. I couldn’t have said it any better myself. That’s perfect.

Frank: Awesome.

So, you’ve actually been on the podcast. It’s been over a year now. You and Andy actually recorded an episode called Psychologically Shifting Your Way to Success which was from September 2014. So what I really like to do today, and by the way, if you guys actually want to check out that original episode, it’s from September of 2014. Check it out after this.

Today, we’re going to go deeper down the rabbit hole with Rob about some really interesting steps about biology and the neurology of behavior. And also some really cool things that Rob is in particular excited to talk about.

What I wanted to do to get it started here was to go through Rob’s story. For those of you who don’t know his back story so we can understand a little bit more about what’s driving this man and kind of how he arrived at this place in life of being the mindset guru or the mindset shifter.

So Rob, tell us a little bit about what your back story is about. How you came to this where this type of transformation is so important for you to be able to facilitate and not only your own but in other people’s lives.

Rob: Sure thing.

For people that have heard this before, I’ll be as brief as I can be. But I think that even if you have heard this usually there’s some new once and some other stuff.

I mean the big overarching idea here is that I went through a lot of really, really tough stuff as a child. I was really badly abused and I was raped a bunch of times through the young part of my life. We’re talking about age like three or four to age maybe eight or nine in there. It’s a very developmental time for the brain, for feeling safety, for having balanced emotions, for what you learn about the world and kind of set out some of these patterns.

What that end up leading for me was I started to get into drugs and alcohol at a very, very early age; like I started playing around with that stuff at seven years old. By the time I was in middle school, I was in trouble all the time. By the time I was in high school, I was barely going to high school. Was lucky enough that I was smart enough to kind of get through that schooling without really paying attention or doing much there.

In my late teens and early 20s, I ended up in and out of institutions, in and out of jails, halfway houses, rehabs, and I ended up homeless and out on the streets; with very serious drug addictions and very serious alcohol stuff. I usually fly by that part of the story. Maybe someday I’ll share more about the horrific time that that was.

But what happened for me was that there was a genuine and legitimate time in my early life, and many times later too, where I was genuinely a victim. That was probably arguably a true state. But what I woke up to in what I call this fundamental shift was that nobody was punching me in the face anymore. But I was carrying this story of poor me, aren’t I tough, look at all the stuff I’ve been through, whatever. I was so eager to kind of share with people like “You have no idea what I’ve been through.” That kind of energy was going on for me.

And so what I woke up to in a moment was that I was really kind of dragging my past into the future and just creating this situation of victimhood and, I guess, loserness and all these kind of bad things. I really started to work on the problem of what is it to be alive? What are we doing here? I was so mad at the world really because I was in this place of, like, I didn’t ask to be here. I didn’t stand in line to be born and yet I was born into this really, really difficult situation.

And so as I went through all this suffering, my brain eventually kind of popped. What happened in that was I got kind of access to a lot of how I was thinking or what that was creating in my life.

To make a long story a little bit shorter, what happened was after that is once I started to kind of come back from homelessness and start to deal with the world again, I went from being like a tempt in a basement filing papers to vice-president of a company running technology. Having built and sold very expensive software company and ended up helping the company that I was working for sell itself into a bigger organization and was able to have a really nice exit from that.

Just had very, very high-level functioning in this fundamental shift basically coming from this stem of understanding how to be more self-aware and self-aware in a different way and really editing my thinking and editing kind of how I viewed the world and taking it from a way that was incredibly not useful to a way that was highly useful.

Then, once I start to do that, about 10 years ago, I started a podcast and sharing some of these ideas with the world and people all over the world started asking me for coaching. That invited me to kind of leave the corporate world and start my own company.

Now, I’ve been blessed enough to work with just absolute rock stars, worked with people that have changed national policy on a government level for us here in United States; worked with top level entrepreneurs that probably many people have heard of and some famous people as well. It’s just been a true shift.

What my work is now that I’m really interested in doing is how to codify that shift, right? What is the most useful part of that. I think a way to say that is that it matters much less what you think than learning how to think.

And so people think like, “Oh, what are the mindsets that I need? What’s this one idea? What if I thought about myself differently as an entrepreneur?” Those are going to be useful. There’s no question that you want to change those. But the meta-level of that is learning how to think differently and so that’s what I teach people now.

Frank: Oh, man, alright. We’re definitely going to come back and dive in to that kind of codifying the shift idea.

Rob: Yeah.

Frank: I wanted to actually step back into your story a little bit so you kind of -- You went from being in this position of being a victim and then your trajectory really goes up where you become the vice-president of a company and you help them sell other companies and ultimately sell themselves. What was that initial pop for you? Like how did you go from being a little bit overwhelmed in life? What were the first steps out of that place that you’re in?

Rob: Yeah. I think, for me, my trauma was so dramatic and loud and difficult for me that I was truly suffering.

I was just interviewed recently on a different show and I came up with this idea of the gift of trauma which I’m sure as I say that now is probably not the first time anybody said that. Recently I’m kind of sneaking up on that as this idea that in my life, my trauma has been this huge gift to me in lots of different ways. It’s not that for everybody.

A lot of people who go through that little trauma end up dead, they end up suffering, they’re in and out of jails, like whatever that is. But it can be this incredible gift.

If you think of like a Viktor Frankl or some of the holocaust survivors who have gone on to do amazing things and be incredible people. There’s an opportunity in our suffering to get to the other side of it with a deep wisdom and a deep maturity that isn’t available to people that haven’t been through that in some sense.

What happened for me was I was basically working on the problem of my suffering, my addiction, my sadness, my overwhelm, my anxiety. I had so much anxiety, I had so much -- that’s true but a better word than that is so much shame, like I was fundamentally full of shame in my being. I don’t know if you can imagine kind of living your life feeling like you shouldn’t have ever been born. After having been told that, it was a really horrendous place to be.

I was kind of like -- as I mentioned, mad at the world, and I was working on it like a Koan, right? Like an Eastern tradition. There’s this unanswerable question that they’ll invite people who are meditating to kind of consider. Like what’s the sound of hand clapping or what did your face look like before you were born or something like that, right? And so my Koan was like why are we here?

What happened for me was a very deeply spiritual experience. It actually has never left me. My brain kind of broke open and I have this intense, deep connection to the oneness of all things, right? I didn’t feel separate from anything in this experience and I sort of saw the illusion of separateness that human beings in our current level of consciousness that we all carry. That there’s this survival, scared kind of way that we think there’s a big pie out there and we’ve got to get our piece. That’s not completely untrue but it’s not the total truth either. That’s certainly a perspective that we can look at life from, right? We are separate in one sense but we’re not only separate.

And so I was this 19-year old kid at the time and this huge epiphany of very high-level state experience kind of opened up for me and this deep wisdom kind of followed. What came of that that was probably the most useful to share with listeners was that I was self-aware in a new way; I started to see the stories that I was telling myself. When I say that I mean literally like having my own brain say something like, “I’m a loser” or “This won’t work out for me” or “People don’t like me” or “This isn’t safe” or whatever, right?

And now this isn’t safe might be a thought that’s really useful in a certain moment. But what I was starting to wake up to was that there was all this illusion, there were these lenses that we were looking through that were altering how we see the world. I could start to edit those lenses and be much more wise with choosing how I thought, what I believed in, etc. Because what happens is those negatives thoughts, they end up being what we believe in the moment.

When people use the word belief, it’s a tricky word because people often think of that as something that they’re consciously choosing like a certain religious belief like Christianity or Judaism or something like that. They know they’re kind of choosing an idealogy, right?

When I say belief, what I mean is that in the background there’s this like assuredness of meaning, right? That if I say “I am a loser” that when my system kind of accepts that, it changes how I behave, it changes what I think is possible, it limits literally how the neurons in my brain are going to fire, and it fires off different hormones in my system. It literally changes my reality through how I think and what I believe in the moment.

So, becoming very aware of what you’re believing is certainly a huge lever that we can play with and start to change in our own success, in our own fulfillment, in our own happiness.

Frank: I’m feeling really curious about something and it’s actually kind of going back to when you initially have that shift and you experience this feeling of not being separated from anything.

What I feel curious about is what was that actually like for you? What was the texture of that experience? What did it feel like? Did it happen for five seconds? Did it happen over a period of days? I really want to know, like, what was that like for you?

Rob: It changed everything. It was, without a doubt, the most important moment of my entire life. It’s certainly beyond words. I’ve tried for -- It’s beyond words that I can find today, let’s put it that way. It was so incredibly profound. I mean literally colors changed, ideologies dissolved. I took all the frames of assumption or beliefs that I had and it kind of melted all of those.

Have you ever had a really good idea? I mean a really good idea is the same thing but on a much smaller level. All of a sudden you don’t understand something and then you deeply understand something. It’s fundamentally important, right? Like going from hating sales in your business to realizing that, “Oh, sales is easy and I just have to connect with people and like them.” Somebody who’s really fundamentally gone through that, it’s a game changer in your business, right?

Well, this was like a game changer in the whole existence of being and it also gave me, like, a deep purpose because I saw that all of humanity was kind of suffering from what I call this current level of consciousness that we’re in, right? Everything is playing a part in that.

From how the media is talking to us, to our geopolitical concerns, to how corporations are run, to -- all these different things: the interfamily dynamics and all the stuff. We’ve got this certain level of consciousness that’s obvious or normal and then there’s this other level of self-awareness that can come up. And when this other level of self-awareness kind of cracks for us and opens up, you don’t have the same concerns.

I was no longer afraid of the same things. I, in fact, very little fear kind of enters in at all. And so you can go from a place of being, like, really in a panic about public speaking or something that honestly now in my life seems silly but was so serious to me, like I took that so seriously. Literally, everything changed and it was the greatest aha moment that you can have. I think that it was really what seeing truth looks like. I had all of the illusions dissolve away and I saw truth.

Frank: What facilitated this experience? Were you meditating?

Rob: No. I was actually walking on University of Pennsylvania campus. I was actually kind of like a bar runner there. I was running food. I was a mess in so many ways in my life. It was as if I was working on the stuff and it was funny.

I had a friend that I was starting to share some more philosophical ideas with and I ended up running into a guy that tended bar at this place where I was working and his name is Ken Kweder. Actually he’s sort of known in Philadelphia for playing music. I didn’t think he’d remember me because he was quasi famous at the time. He was the guy that would -- as I was running food up to the restaurant, he would leave like a shot of Jack for me, right? We were buddies at the time.

But I saw him literally 20 years later or whatever it was, just a couple of years ago, he remembered me. He was like, “Dude, you’re always talking about all these deep stuff and doing all these things. You kind of went away and I didn’t know where you went.” A lot of tough stuff happened for me after this. This was not the beginning of my rise to fame. I didn’t go from 19 to 23 Vice-President. It came much later. In fact, I ended up homeless after this. I’ll explain that more.

In the moment, I was literally just constantly kind of working on like why are we here? My addiction at the time, maybe we’ll talk when we get into the neurology and the biology of what’s going on. Maybe we’ll talk about addiction in different ways too.

But my addiction was not like I just wanted to party. It was almost like I was medicating suffering. I was in such pain in my normal state that it was like I couldn’t even leave the house without drinking half a bottle of Jack and doing three hits on a bong or something. I couldn’t even be in public my kind of panic. But if you settled my nerves with that amount of substances, I could go out and have these high-level conversations. Almost I had my courage in a bottle if you will.

So I was really, really out of balance in lots of ways yet I was having very high-level thinking and almost philosophizing if you will. There was a lot of high-level like, “What are we doing here?” kind of questions.

One other way to say this. I’ve always been the guy -- If I went up to people at work and they were kind of around the water cooler talking about Desperate Housewives or something, it always was weird to me. I was like how are we not talking about being here? Isn’t it weird that we’re here? I’m constantly in wonder of that. I’m constantly in kind of awe of [izzness 00:18:29], right? That I’m pink and half ten fingers. That’s weird to me still.

What’s different is it was angering me before because I was like, “Why?” and “This sucks!” and “Why am I here?” What shifted for me was it went from a hateful anger about it to a real wonder and appreciation and gratitude for it. And so it shifted into, “Oh, I don’t need to know why. That’s a silly human question. All I need to do is be with the [izzness 00:18:57] of it and experience it.

I don’t have to hold on to all these silly goals that everybody says I should have. I should kind of listen to my inner voice and do what’s most important to me. All these people are delusional and doing the best that they can but just because they are ahead of me in this way, that doesn’t mean they’re right as to my life.”

So there was this big freedom that came with this realization or what this seeing of how the human mind lives in delusion most of the time.

Frank: Oh wow! It sounds like a quote from one of my favorite books is really applicable here. It’s not about feeling better, it’s about getting better at feeling.

Rob: Yeah. Dude, that’s perfect! That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

When you see through that illusion of the treadmill of time, there’s this sense of, “I’m not there yet.” “I’m not what I’m supposed to be.” “I’m not enough.” And because I’m not enough, I don’t have enough. My house isn’t enough. My friends aren’t enough. My looks aren’t enough, etc.

This is a very low level in psychology. We’ve studied this. This is kind of the Freudian model of psychology. And the last 100 plus years of marketing are based on exploiting that, right? We go after women, “You’re not beautiful enough. You’re too fat. You need make up. You need all this stuff.” The whole industries have been born at like kind of drilling at that mind of “I’m not enough. I don’t have enough. This isn’t enough.” That lack mentality.

That’s a very scary place because if that were true, it’s incredibly motivating, right? It’s like, “Oh, that sucks. I got to go. I got to go.” We get moving but where are we moving to? That’s an illusion that there’s nowhere else other than here.

So instead of this illusionary there that we’re supposed to get to, which doesn’t exist, there’s no such thing as there. There’s only here. How do we actually get here whole, healthy, happy, arrived. So instead of being on this illusionary treadmill of time where we’re just running, where the goal just keeps getting bigger no matter what I turn it into, how do I actually fall into this deep appreciation of [izzness 00:21:01].

And then from their act, in a way, that I actually call it still in motion. You’re bringing this really connected stillness into your doing. So that your doing is present, it’s thoughtful, it’s whole, right? Instead of based out of lack.

Frank: Yes.

Rob: That lack mentality, you know, Maslow started to move into this idea that we’re not just motivated by these lack things. That once we actually get some of those handled, we have this self-actualization drive. And so I think a lot of marketing needs to move toward self-actualization. I think a lot of talking to

people if we want to feel more authentic and not kind of going that cheap way of like hacking at people’s fears and limits and all that stuff, we can talk about actualizing. Being in your purpose, being toward what really matters to you.

And we can calm the whole limbic system of the world down so that we’re not so full of lunacy and quick reactions and hateful rhetoric and all the stuff that’s going on in our planet. We can actually wake up into being actualized, into being whole and happy and arrived.

Frank: Alright. Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about codifying the shift and the biology and neurology of behavior. I know that that was something that you were really excited to talk about and I’m really excited to hear about it.

Rob: Good. Yeah. Let’s go into that. If we think about being alive, like what does that mean? And in one sentence, for sure, being alive is being able to react to the world, okay? So being happy and alive is a more complex thing than that and we’ll hold on to that idea for a second. But literally like life is different than a rock because I will react to stimulus, right, and a rock doesn’t. A rock will just sit there if you hit it with a hammer, I won’t. That’s one difference. We’re different than mice because we have this whole kind of extra modeling thing that’s going on in our brain, okay?

When we think about the biology of behavior or the biology of feeling good, getting good results, doing all that stuff, our brain is -- We’re not only reacting to reality, right? Like if somebody throws a baseball in my head, I hopefully react to that and deal with it appropriately, right? But unlike mice, our brain is doing a ton of modeling. It’s dealing with memories. It’s modeling the future. It’s got all these different things going on. So our brain is actually creating part of our reality.

If we’re not managing that, we can literally go insane. Insanity looks very normal. I think it’s fair to say that our normal human experience of what’s going on in the Western world, what’s going on in the Middle East right now, normal actually looks like insane. It looks like out of balance with our planet, it looks hateful in the way that it behaves, it looks -- in some cases suicide bombers, that kind of stuff. It’s truly insanity but it’s normal. It’s actually like the average kind of consciousness. It’s that lack based consciousness level that we’re dealing with.

So this neurology, like what’s going on in the brain. It’s really important to -- If we want to think about how we want to be. Do we want to be full of anxiety and fear and worry? Or do we want to be kind of confident and at ease and having our brain like firing really happily? What’s going on when we’re anxious and depressed in our biology versus what’s going on in our biology when we’re confident and when we’re at ease and when we’re happy, right?

This strengthening of different neuronal bundles, if we think about kind of how the brain does this stuff, right? Neurons react to what’s going on out in the world. There are sensory neurons in your hand, there’s neurons in your eyes, there’s neurons in your brain that are -- they’re basically the cells of your nervous system.

Well, as those things are firing, they’re also kind of inspiring things to give off hormones and whatnot, right? So, it’s like your neurons are dealing with this moment right now but your body has the hormones of however you’ve been behaving for the past many hours and maybe even many days, right?

So if you don’t have a lot of sleep, if you’ve eaten a lot of sugar, if you’ve been triggered and you’re anxious because somebody is attacking you verbally or physically or something like that, your system, the biology in your body, hormonally and otherwise, can get really out of balanced. And so when I work with people to get optimal states and optimal behaviors and optimal outcomes, it’s really important that we take into account how these whole systems work, right?

In the last podcast that I was on, when Andy and I were talking, we talked a lot about the subconscious. The subconscious gets turned into being humanized quite a bit. We talk about it as if it has intentions and it’s got kind of a way of being and all that stuff. And that’s useful in one sense. But for this talk, let’s just imagine that the subconscious is anything that’s kind of happening outside of your awareness, right? It’s literally sub -- your conscious. It’s just happening there.

So a lot of what happens in your limbic system, the parts that fire that make you feel emotions, that make your state change, much of that can be happening kind of out of your conscious awareness, right? We see something that triggers a memory, that makes me kind of go down a rabbit hole of thinking in a certain way, and that’s firing all these different neurons, right?

Not only what I saw fires neurons but the thinking that I do after fires other neurons. That can light up different parts of the limbic system which kick off different kinds of -- cause different hormones to go through the body which cause whatever, right? Cause either anxiety or any of these things.

So, figuring out how this whole system works and re-patterning thing so that the neuronal bundles in our brain that actually cause better behavior, more balanced, more happiness becomes much more important. This happens by becoming self-aware and editing. Most importantly, that extra part of our brain that mice don’t have which is how are we thinking, right? How are we actually bringing thought and managing our own thought.

So if you actually go back to help what my big breakthrough was and how I became self-aware in new way, this quality of self-awareness allows us to

manage our state and our being and ultimately our whole physical biology to a much greater degree than we really ever thought possible.

Frank: Dude.

Rob: And were learning more about this through neuroscience all the time and it’s just expanding and all the stuff is really, really powerful.

And last little thought then I’ll be quiet for a second. It’s really important to manage this thinking but it’s also really important to make sure that we have things like vitamin D that we’re not putting tons of caffeine and sugar and alcohol and drugs and other addictive kind of things because they set up certain cravings in the system that become harder to escape, right?

So, a lot of the addictive behaviors that we do, and I don’t mean the heroin and the crack and the series addictions like that, I mean addiction to our own thinking, addiction to Facebook, addiction to -- These more acceptably social or socially acceptable addictions that almost all of our culture is suffering from in one way or another.

So anyway, I’ll pause there. Does that make sense or does that just sound like lunacy?

Frank: No, it makes sense. I’m curious, do my neurons follow my biology or does my biology follow my neurons? Like what’s the interplay between those two things?

Rob: So your neurons are your biology to a great degree. So your neurons are the cells that are in your nervous system that are not only reacting to sensory stuff out in the world but they’re also firing in the brain to do communicative type things. They end up chaining together and things that get pattern and habituate to get stronger and easier to re-fire, those are where things that are at first like driving a car is difficult in the beginning.

That can become more and more unconscious to where we can literally be kind of eating and talking on the phone and still driving without getting in accidents -- although that’s not recommended. Those things can happen and they get easier over time because certain pathways in the brain start to strengthen and start to do these things.

One of the reasons that this is important, if you are somebody who’s depressed -- and I’m not a doctor. I love to talk like I am but let’s be honest, I’m not educated in these things, other than in the way that I’ve studied it myself. The pathways of depression through an addiction into a certain kind of thought, the thought of an ex that broke your heart, it triggers a certain biology in you.

Seeing somebody cheat on you fires a certain reaction in your limbic system, changes hormones in your body, changes your future to a great degree, right,

because you saw something. But just remembering it can do a lot of that as well. There’s not that much difference all the time between imagining things and actually experiencing them. So the management of how we’re imagining, the management of how we’re thinking, where we’re placing our mind.

A good friend of mine, Nathan Otto, who’s brilliant and who’s been on my podcast -- it’s going to be coming out soon -- talks about attention as our most valuable resource without question. If you can place your attention somewhere and leave it in a significant way, that’s almost the most important thing in your whole life. If you can’t, you’re scattered. You’re bouncing all over the place. You’re here, you’re there, you’re everywhere.

Most people are walking through life completely reactionary; reactionary to their own belief systems, reactionary to their own thought, reactionary to the world around them. That’s the ultimate kind of form of victimhood, right? They haven’t grabbed on to control any of the parts of it that they can control. They haven’t worked at all to start managing their mind.

Frank: Wow! So I want to kind of recap something and I want to make sure that I’m not putting words in your mouth but it sounds like depression is essentially an addiction to a certain pattern of thought. Does that sound right?

Rob: For sure. But it can be that. It can be that. It also, absolutely, it can be a chemical imbalance, right? Your serotonin can be way out of balanced. You could be genetically not giving off enough serotonin etc. We’re learning more about depression all the time.

So I don’t want to wrap that up and say, “Here’s what’s depression is.” I think that that would be silly and really immature to pretend that we even entirely know what depression is. But we know that there are studies where people can go in and start a gratitude practice and have that change the outcome of the group of people that did that more so than chemical drugs, right?

Now, chemical drugs can be incredibly effective in that. So I’m not saying nobody should do serotonin re-inhibitor uptake blah, blah, blahs, right? Those are really important to get the chemistry of the brain right. But what I’m trying to say here is that our thinking influences that too. Our thinking actually influences the chemistry of the body as well.

Because the more that we get stuck in repetitive thinking or anything like that, we’re firing neurons that are affecting the limbic system, that are affecting the glands that give out the hormones that create all the feelings in our body and all the different experiences that we have.

And so if I take somebody who’s depressed and change their focus, they feel different in the moment, right? Because if they’re focusing on dark and gloomy and all that stuff, and we change where their focus is, that affects their whole reality because where you focus is a portion of your reality, right? So if we change that, it affects the whole reality.

Now that doesn’t mean if they’re unable to have a serotonin balance in their brain that they wouldn’t still feel depressed but we control that to a much greater degree than we realize. Does that make sense?

Frank: Yeah, it does.

Now I feel curious about something like addiction to alcohol or cigarettes. Talk to me about that in terms of changing my focus. Like if I wake up in the morning and I say, “I don’t want to have a drink of alcohol or I don’t want to smoke a cigarette” and I focus on something else, how do I create that to be like a sustainable change for me?

Rob: Yeah. I have so much to say about that. I’m sitting here and kind of going where should I start? First off, let’s be clear that drinking alcohol changes your state and that may not always be a bad thing, right? I don’t choose to do that anymore but some people do and they do it just fine.

Our state management of our body, and I guess what I’m trying to say there is that when I was -- before I stopped drinking in my life, I was using alcohol to not go insane as an example. I was using it to allow myself to get out and go to work because I had such kind of panic and shame stuff and all that that I couldn’t even function. So I was actually kind of using it as a medication, right?

Now I’m not recommending people use it as a medication, in fact, we’re probably -- in almost all cases -- better off of alcohol than on it. But what I’m saying is that there’s a chemical cocktail going on in your brain and when you drink alcohol, it changes the chemical cocktail. If you think a thought, it can change the chemical cocktail too, right? So that’s kind of where we’re at.

So changing your state and managing your state can be done through chemical stuff like depression medication, or a drink of alcohol, or smoking a joint, or taking some molly or whatever, because you’re going to be changing the chemistry of your brain.

What I’m here to tell you is that the more that you remove some of that addictive stuff, not only addictive thinking but addictive chemicals, you can start to [unclear 00:34:46] a more balanced biology of your brain so that you can feel much more natural happiness, much more balanced. Things like alcohol tend to put us out of balanced because they start to make us crave more of that thing, right? So that craving --

If you think about it, addiction is on one level and enlightenment is on the other end of the scale. And what I mean by that is addiction itself -- I don’t mean the focus of the addiction like the alcohol or whatever, but addiction itself is suffering, right? It is a state of I’m not okay unless I get something. I need to get the heroin, I need to get the alcohol, I need to be on Facebook, I need to be somewhere else. It’s literally in the moment of it a suffering state.

On the exact opposite end of that spectrum is enlightenment. So somebody who’s enlightened, every breath is a pleasure. Every step on the ground is a beautiful thing. They’re completely present. They’re completely awake, right? Don’t take either end of that as absolutes where somewhere, in any moment, kind of expressing on that continuum.

I think it’s a useful goal for people to try to reduce the addiction in their life because addiction generally doesn’t solve anything as a rule. It would generally tend toward -- Sugar makes you feel better in the moment but it slams back into bad blood sugar and depression and feeling bad in the moment to where, what, I need more sugar again to feel better.

If we start to take sugar out of our diet, our whole system starts to balance and in that balance state, it’s much easier to kind of walk an enlightened expression of life. Does that make sense?

Frank: Yeah, it does.

Rob: Yeah.

Frank: So masking symptoms essentially with [unclear 00:36:33].

Rob: You’re totally masking symptoms and sometimes you need medication, whatever that looks like, right? Sometimes it’s just a crisis and it’s like I need to feel better. I think sometimes we do need to disconnect and do whatever. Let’s not get all uptight about that but when you see that it’s getting habituated in becoming a problem, that’s an issue.

Let me go back to what your original question was. It’s like how do we easily kind of move away from that. People talk about, “It takes 30 days to make a habit.” That’s not true. It doesn’t take 30 days to make a heroin habit. It depends on your life with the habit because if you’re a genuinely happy person, heroin won’t be as much of a turn on for you, but if you’re horribly suffering, heroin’s a really attractive thing.

Heroin’s an immediate addiction. A lot of people came back from the Vietnam War addicted to heroin. As soon as they got back to their happy lives here, just wasn’t a part of their life and they dropped it without a problem. Some people came back to miserable lives here and heroin remained their focus because they were still suffering. In that suffering, they needed some type of effects.

My point is if you’re really addicted to something, the breaking of it in the beginning feels like that suffering, right, because the state of addiction without the substance is one of suffering. So it’s almost as if you have to endure that suffering long enough to get back into balance so that you can feel better in a balanced state without the substance, right?

When I work with people to start breaking that, we do a bunch of different things and we pattern in new ideas, and we pattern in new ways of being so that that becomes more natural and easy and the subconscious kind of chooses it more easily, right? But the reality is that usually it takes a certain level of pain to where we have to break up with the crutch and choose a different path.

That’s why people in addiction circles talk about the bottom. “Have you hit bottom yet?” and things like that. And in a much lesser level, in our life of like sugar, or coffee, or things like that that we can tell are very, very addictive, they don’t have as dramatic of bottom so they’re not as easy to get away from because there’s no real consequence to doing it. So what do we do? We just keep going to the medicine and we just keep getting the coffee every morning and we keep doing the stuff. Does that make sense?

Frank: Yeah. So there comes a point in transformation where you essentially have to feel these uncomfortable things before you can get on the upswing.

Rob: Yeah. There are easier ways than not to feel those uncomfortable things but you definitely -- The easiest way is through what I call Identity Shifting, right? I think our self concept has a certain way about it and a certain bunch of behaviors in it that are almost subsets of this self-concept or what we call our identity in any moment.

If you take somebody, and the example that I’ve used many times is taking somebody who’s really, really heavy addicted to food and sugar, has an identity of I’m a big fat loser and I’ll never get out of this. You shift them into a real, genuine identity of “I’m an athlete.” What comes with that can be almost an aversion to sugar. It can almost become kind of beneath you. It’s like, “Well, I don’t do that anymore. I’m an athlete.” Right?

And even if that doesn’t happen, the athlete still has all these other behaviors that are in it. An athlete is active. An athlete cares about how they feed them self. An athlete doesn’t go off the deep end if they eat a piece of cake, etc. Right?

There are deep ways that we can play with the psyche to make that switch to the new way of being much easier but I think it’s generally fair to say that there is certainly chemically in the brain and other ways. There can be cravings that are left over as you’re trying to move away from an old behavior that’s been habituated.

Frank: Yeah. So let’s go down that path a little of kind of instant versus delayed gratification and use the example of write someone who’s a little bit overweight. They might, like, logically know that they want to lose weight and they know the logical steps to do that. But then when they feel frustrated or challenged, they revert back to what’s going on.

I guess what I’m saying is how do I kind of navigate that path of instant versus delayed gratification where I see what I want long-term but in the moment to moment it feels really hard for me to execute to get there.

Rob: Yeah. So I think this is one of the most important teachings that people can get and I think it’s a useful frame whether this is true in every example, I’m not as interested in that. But just to over simplify this, let’s think about it.

Instant gratification is fun in the moment and it’s almost always never really good for you long-term. Delayed gratification is obviously less fun in the moments what the words mean, right? It’s less fun in the moment. But it’s better for you long-term. It’s almost as if you’re serving kind of a future version of yourself in some way. But any significant, successful happy person has, to some degree, mastered delayed gratification in the most important areas of their life. Let’s just go through this.

Instant gratification is like a ton of sugar. Right now I’m a huge fan of that. Love it. So much fun. But if I do instant gratification all the time of sugar, I end up really heavy. My endocrine system will be totally out of balanced. I’ll be depressed and unhappy. I’ll be dependent on sugar. I’ll be fat and unattractive and lethargic and won’t sleep well, my joints will hurt. It’s bad, right? Sugar is a horrible thing in our culture. It’s in all these foods now. It’s a real problem. Instant gratification though is like sugar. It’s tasty. Give me more.

Delayed gratification is like eating broccoli, right? It’s not as fun in the moment at all. It’s like broccoli doesn’t beat sugar. But broccoli, over time, if that’s consistently -- and by broccoli I mean just more vegetables, eating well, all that -- I actually will be way happier if I get on the broccoli train without a doubt. I’ll be lean, I’ll have energy, I’ll feel good, I’ll probably feel sexy in my body, I’ll be better in bed, da-da-da-da. Like it’s just better, okay?

How about like instant gratification of spending all the money you make? Super fun in the moment, let’s go to Vegas, whatever; blow this cash. But what’s that lead to? It leads to really no wealth. It leads to paycheck to paycheck. It’s not a good way to live long-term whereas saving is delaying gratification. I’m not going to blow this now. I’m going to honor the habit of wealth building, etc. Okay? Instant gratification, laying on the couch, eating Cheetos and watching TV versus going to the gym and working out, right?

In all of those cases, there’s a version inside of us that’s really attracted to the instant gratification thing and then there’s a version inside of us that totally wishes that we could be in control enough to say no to that and do the long-term gratification stuff so that we can live a better life and go through growth and do all that stuff, right?

Frank: Yup.

Rob: It’s really important. I’ve realized that happiness is kind of what we really want and these different ways of gratifying us, they [unclear 00:43:37] us in almost a delusional way. The instant gratification feels like it’s got happiness and it’s such a hit. It’s what all drug addiction is about. It’s what all lesser addictions are about. It’s this “I just want to be on Facebook right now. I’m not going to work right now. We put that offer an hour ago on Facebook, right?” It’s instantly gratifying in some way. But it has this subtler, longer, like ugh to it, right? It’s like I can’t follow through. I procrastinate. I suck. It starts to affect my self-esteem. It starts to affect my self-imagine in a lot of ways.

What I want to point out here and I think the overarching message of this whole talk is that we’re talking about self awareness in an [unclear 00:44:12] way, okay? Meditation leads to happiness and fulfillment and we know that. For thousands of years certain cultures have learned that, they seem very happy, they do all this. But what I want people to get is that meditation actually strengthens this ability to delay gratification. So if we can see that learning delayed gratification in my life is a big deal, the tool that will help you do that within like a matter of days if you begin is this quality of sitting down to work with a mindfulness practice. Now why is that? Right?

Well, instant gratification, all these little impulses, they get habituated. We start to -- the neurons that fire, make them more and more attractive to do more and more easily. Well, when we sit in meditation -- I’ll break it down.

There’s essentially two different ways you can kind of experience meditation. One way would be lots of gaps and thought, lots of presence, probably a lot of feeling of joy, right? That’s what we’re shooting for to have “good meditation session” okay? But what most people, especially starting out experience in meditation, is a whole lot of thought that they’re kind of wrestling with, right?

What I want to share with people is that if you have a “bad meditation session” like you can’t get to presence at all but you’re at least genuinely working with your thought. So every time you notice you’re thinking, you bring your attention back to your breath, right? And then you stay there for a breath or two and you notice you’re thinking again. You go “Wow! That’s a thought. Let me break up with that. Come back to my breath.”

The act of doing that, breaking up with a thought and coming back to your breath is literally like doing a rep for your brain that is literally going -- My instant gratification here, the quality of instant gratification is to follow that thought. It’s easier, it’s attractive. I’m thinking of some hot chick and I want to kind of daydream about it. It’s just easier. It takes no effort.

But if we sit for five minutes and we’re practicing a meditation habit for five minutes and in that moment we just go “Oh wait, I remember. I’m supposed to delay the gratification of that thought and come back to my breath.” What we find is that -- and we know this from neurology that’s going on, there had

been test on this -- it’s actually strengthening the neurons in the brain that lead to being able to delay gratification across the whole rest of your life, right?

So we become more okay in the moment without instant gratification. We become less suffering in the moment so that when that hit of like “Buy this shirt” comes up, we can take a moment and go, “You know, I don’t need to buy that shirt. That’s really not aligned with my goals.” And you’ll start to see across your life that you’ll be defaulting to that more mature, delayed gratification way of being.

So all of this is to say that I think we have this history of knowing that meditation can lead to happiness and fulfillment, but in a huge sense it also lead to success. Human beings that I talk to still have this -- Lets not mistake it, right? Happiness is really what we’re after but many of us believe that happens comes from success. Success, to some degree, is important. We need to be able to pay our rent and do all that stuff.

But what I’m trying to “sell people” is to begin working with their mind because it will lead to success also. It will create the kind of person in you where you can go, “You know what, I do need to do my taxes” and it just becomes easier. The neurons in your brain start to wind up so that you’re not as reactionary, so that you’re not as impulse driven. So that you can actually break up and have this slower, more considered part of your brain functioning more of your day.

That is so important because without that we literally look like lunatics just basically following whatever the shiny ball is, right?” Oh, this guy is talking to me on Facebook,” or “Oh, maybe I should journal now,” or “Oh, what should I do know? Is it this new thing?” I literally talk to people that are all over their place in their life like that.

The fastest shortcut away from that to becoming the mature, able-centered person with good habits, doing all the stuff you really want to do, is to begin working with your mind. Change the awareness of how your thoughts are affecting you and play in that.

Frank: So going back to the idea that attention is the most important resource you can manage, a mindfulness or a meditation practice is allowing you to hone the power of your attention.

Rob: 100%. Yeah.

The other simple one, and I always like to kind of share this whenever. I created this 3G3 practice which is really just manifesting gratitude in your life. There’s tons of studies on how if you just consider something to be grateful for and actually invite your body to like light your limbic system make you feel grateful for it, that that leads to all kinds of levels of happiness in your life, it kind of habituates.

And this is back to that creating the neuronal bundles, right? Moving away from neurons that are firing to create anxiety and fearing your life and actually having them habituate going in different pathway and literally firing more gratitude and happiness in your life, right?

So the 3G3 practice is simply this. It’s three conscious breaths just sitting down for a few minutes to take three conscious breaths to just center yourself. And then think of three things that you’re grateful for, and they could be super simple like the sunrise, your mom, something that happened yesterday, whatever.

For each one of those, just kind of feel them in your body as much as you can. It’s really important move to bring it from just a thought about it to actually letting the limbic system kind of fire and actually feeling it. The limbic system’s where we kind of feel our emotions.

I could think of, “Oh, I’m grateful for my mom.” But if I actually spend a second thinking about my mom and allowing myself to feel that emotion, I’ve let it kind of sink deeper into my brain. It’s an important distinction.

And then the last three in the 3G3 practice is just three conscious breaths kind of letting yourself soak in that gratitude, right? You could literally do this in a minute, or three minutes, or something like that.

If you did that every morning, it would literally change your life. That’s not even just a pure mindfulness practice, that’s just using your own focus and ability to manifest gratitude. What are you going to do when we talk about the biology and the neurology of happiness and behavior and all that? You’re literally, through your thoughts, just rewiring your brain so that instead of reactive, crazy, whatever is going to happen to you in your day, you’re patterning in gratitude.

Because of that, you’re digging a groove in your brain so that that record can play more and more easily. What you’ll find is you’ll just start to be randomly grateful during your day -- which is really a lot of the way that I walk around in my life now.

Almost constantly there’s this sense of just like wonder and happiness and like, wow, I’m this neat, like I’m just really loving this. When things get quiet or I’m walking on my car alone, I’m just kind of in this sense of like, “Man, this is really special and this is really fun.” That’s because that groove is very, very deep in my brain.

Frank: Alright.

In The Foundation, Dane and Andy and the entire program is very big on modeling, right? Not reinventing the wheel but seeing what others have done before you, modeling what they have done, and then eventually putting your

own twist on it. I want to model the Rob Scott daily method of meditation and mindfulness.

So I want to know things like when do you do it and what do you do. That way people can start to think about how they can shift their day to incorporate some of these practices.

Rob: Yeah, for sure.

It’s funny because the mindfulness is kind of with me. So modeling me -- I think that you need to model what I did before, okay? Right. Let me share a little bit about my day.

I’ve been lucky enough that I basically start work -- around 11 is what I’m shooting for. Before that, I make sure that I just have like my morning, my time. The practices that you want to work on are the three big areas of your life: your mentality, your emotions, and your physicality. These are literally -- there’s three kind of parts of your brain through evolution.

There’s this triune brain idea from Dr. Paul MacLean who came up with that a long time ago. We have this brain stem which is the sort of physical part, we have this limbic system which is the emotional part of the brain, and then we have the pre-frontal cortex and the other parts that are more of the mental and the modeling part of the brain.

So, to honor the mental part of your life, like the practice that you need to do is sit in meditation, right? Do a gratitude practice, do an open set. I have something else that I teach people that you’ve shared which is this patterning practice as well to kind of model how we want to be and what’s going on there. So all of that is this kind of mental thing.

Obviously reading, those kinds of things, being a lifelong learner. All of that’s going to develop your mental kind of space. But the awareness practice is the most important there. So taking time to be grateful, taking time to be just with your physical sensation of your breath or your body and realizing what thought is and what thought is not. People think that we think all the time, I would disagree with that. Your brain may be doing stuff and being active as long as you’re alive but thinking is very different than sensing.

I can move my attention from thinking and modeling and time and all that stuff and I can move it into what is the sensation of my breath. If people think about having sex with somebody, if you’re thinking that whole time and concern. Do they like this? What’s going on? All that, you’re really not present to what’s going on in the same way. You’re often the model somewhere.

Frank: Yup.

Rob: Right? So invite yourself not only when you’re having sex with somebody but in the rest of your life to be sensual, to be in your senses in some way. So a meditation practice totally helps with that, starts to grow that delayed gratification muscles, starts to grow the gratitude muscle, those kinds of things.

Some type of meditation. It could be as simple as a five-minute a day thing. A big goal of mine is to share meditation with a billion people the next five years.

The physical side. We got to move in to work out, stretching, and eating well. I go to the gym almost every day, work on strength, work on stretching, trying to feed myself really well especially in the beginning of the day just to get nutrients in. Take vitamins, do all that stuff. So honor the physical part of your body.

And then the emotional part. I think my favorite for that is the gratitude practice that I shared, right? So manifesting some form of happiness or gratitude in your life emotionally. If that sucks and you’re not done with that, listen to comedy every day.

I actually gave my girlfriend who’s [Rene Hagel 00:54:51]. I adore her. She’s amazing. I used to give her almost homework of like, you know, listen to a half hour of comedy every day just because I want to laugh more and I want to her to laugh more.

So as we’re patterning these things, that habit of putting laughter in your life changes your neurology. It literally changes your hormones, it changes the whole game.

And then I work three days a week hard on my business and do calls and sales calls and all that stuff. I love what I do so much that I actually work a ton of other days too but it doesn’t feel like work in the same way because I’m open in my calendar on Mondays and Fridays and on the weekends. And so if I want to take a five-day weekend every weekend, I can do that. I’m really happy and lucky that that’s been what I’ve been able to manifest.

But I’ve got this kind of intense Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday from 11 to whatever, five or seven, whatever’s going on, to be working with people and be on calls and do things like this and all that.

Frank: Right on.

I’m curious. I want to clarify for everybody. So you said you kind of start work at 11.

Rob: Yeah.

Frank: That doesn’t mean that you wait until 11 o’clock to do some of these things like exercise and read and meditate. You’re doing that stuff before 11, right?

Rob: Sorry, those are my personal … Yeah, those are my personal habits. Like that’s me time. For me, like going to the gym, because there’s like a hot tub there and there’s a pool. I like lifting weights and I like doing yoga and those kinds of things, that’s almost like going to a retreat for me every morning.

Frank: Got it.

Rob: I’ve played with this because I get up and I’m really creative in the morning and sometimes it’s fun to work or right or jump on. It doesn’t mean I’ll never do that, right? There are some days that I’ll do whatever’s necessary to do.

But for the most part I’d love to get as much sleep as I need which oddly enough I don’t need or usually get a ton of sleep. I just get whatever I need. I’m usually very early. And then I’m listening to something audible, I’m learning. I’m headed to the gym. I’m doing all that until 11.

So that whole time of like feeding myself well. I’ve got a place locally that does really good farm to table food stuff and some getting like a quinoa vegetable bowl every day, that kind of thing.

That whole morning practice of meditation, starting easy, I’ll go down and kind of do the dishes from the night before and like make sure the kitchen is all nice and all of this is really present, really embodied, really happy. I sit in meditation, I work out, I stretch, I eat. All of that is just without rush, right? I’ve realized that pace is really important.

One of the things that I’ve start to share with people is that most of the really important things in my business and around money, the big breakthroughs and all that stuff, they don’t take time. This quality of like, “I’ve got to work more.” That energy is that lack mindset. It’s that “I’m not there yet” mindset.

What comes out of that is often really low level anxious pretty crappy work. You’re just grinding and it’s not effective, it’s not exponential, it’s not expensive, it’s not huge. But if you rest, if you let your brain sleep, if you feed your brain well, if you get back in balance and away from addictions, what you’ll find is these phenomenal ideas will come up.

What I found, honestly like making a partnership with The Foundation took a moment. It made me see these guys and love who they were and say, “Look, if I can never help you out with anything, I’d love to do it.” And then they called back later. We had one conversation about it and it’s led to a lot of great stuff for everybody involved. That didn’t take any time or grinding or effort.

So making a great partnership doesn’t take time. Having a great idea for a blog post isn’t a time thing. Yes, you’ve then got to go right and put it out and

all that, but the big important stuff is almost in the ideas and that comes from having a system that’s balanced and growing on the mental side, on the emotional side, and on the physical side. If you can do that, then you walk around as if you’re arrived instead of late. By late I mean not there yet, right? That arrived version of you does better work.

Slowing down the pace to up the quality of what you’re doing and not be in such a rush to get anywhere allows you to do bigger, better work.

Frank: Oh man! Rob Scott everyone. Gosh! I’ve actually got like four pages of scribble notes here because I’ve really enjoyed what we’ve talked about.

So Rob, you were on a company called Fundamental Shift, right? I just want to make people aware of exactly how they can get in touch with you and where they can see more of your stuff. Where do I go if I want to see more Rob Scott?

Rob: Thank you, man.

Yeah, Fundamental Shift is the name of the company and, you know, that’s -- from my story, it may be clear where that comes from, right? There was this really profound fundamental shift and that’s ultimately what I’m trying to do for other people.

The best way to find me would be to go to robscott.com. I’ve got a blog there, I’ve got a ton of free stuff. Much of it you don’t even have to sign up for. Some of it, if you do sign up, you get free coaching course and other stuff. So I’d love to see people there and you can find out where I am on social and all that there as well.

Next year I’ve got -- Well, next year at this taping, right? So beginning of 2016 I’m going to be doing my next identity shifting mastermind which is a -- It’s a six to eight-week program that is really, really evolves people’s identities and takes them from -- that teaches them a how to think differently so that their entire life is completely up leveled. I teach that kind of codified way of being and getting different results and different behaviors. I’m super excited about that.

I’m going to launch another podcast coming out probably a little bit later this year but that will definitely be out by January of 2016 as well. I’m super excited. That’s going to be called The Rob Scott Show.

Frank: The Rob Scott Show. Alright, you guys heard it. Robscott.com, The Rob Scott Show. Coming in early 2016 which is when this podcast will be launching.

Rob: Beautiful.

Frank: So Rob, thank you so much for coming on. I think that -- Well, I know that I personally got a ton out of this and I know the audience is going to get a lot out of it as well so thank you.

Rob: Frank, this has been amazing. Thanks so much for your time.

Frank: Alright man. See you.

Rob: See you.

Closing: Thank you for joining us. We’ve taken this interview and created a custom action guide so you know exactly what action steps to take to grow your business. Just head over to thefoundationpodcast.com to download it for free. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.