Understand Your Emotions & Take Control Of Your Life - John Assaraf - #143

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh yes, hello friends. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is none other than John Assaraf. Started in The Secret, he is literally one of the leading mindset and behavior experts on the planet. He's been on Larry King Live, Anderson Cooper, LNG Generous Show, and now he's on Modern Wisdom. Oh, would you look at that? We go through how you can overcome your fears, what fear actually does to the brain, anxiety, all of the different emotions and how they operate. Some practices that you can take away today that will affect the way that your body responds when you perceive a threat, how we can take control of our life by controlling our thoughts and our actions. It was so good. John, you're a legend, man. Thank you so much for coming on. And now please welcome the wise and wonderful John Assaraf.
How are you, man?

**John Assaraf** (1:10)
In the building, here I am, doing great. We're separated by sea, but we're all connected, right?

**Chris Williamson** (1:17)
That's absolutely true. I'm super, super excited to speak to you today. So-

**John Assaraf** (1:22)
Thank you.

**Chris Williamson** (1:22)
People might have seen you on The Secret, or know you as best-selling author, or endlessly successful entrepreneur with multiple projects and stuff like that. Do you think that you were naturally gifted to be successful in this many domains? Is this kind of what you thought you were going to end up doing when you were younger?

**John Assaraf** (1:42)
No. I was voted most likely to fail in life by my grade 11 students, and my basketball team that I excelled in basketball when I was a kid, every time I was going to be a jock, an athlete of some sort. They used to say, he's brilliant on the basketball court, but he's dumber than a doorknob in the classroom.
I never thought I would be doing what I do today. I never believed that I could. I thought I was way too dumb. I was hungry, but I just felt like I wasn't as smart as the other kids.
I grew up in a family with hard working parents who wanted to put food on the table for their kids. We lived in moderate, moderate, moderate means. I had a bedroom with my brother, my sister had a bedroom. We had an apartment. There was always arguments and fights around the lack of money. My father was a gambler and an alcoholic, I believe. He hasn't drank in probably 50 years, but so a lot of struggles. And then I didn't have the environment that really fostered me even thinking about achieving success until I had one chance encounter with one man when I was 19 years old who asked me one question and the answer to that question changed my life. But up until the age of 19, I thought I was gonna work in a factory, making minimum wage, living in an average place, was struggling for money, struggling to make a great life for myself. The only great life that I ever had in my imagination was from watching television.

**Chris Williamson** (3:35)
I suppose when you don't have that role model, there's a lot of people now who might not have that close to them. Especially I think the generational gap that has occurred within the last 50 years is really different. When you think about the sort of opportunities that became available to you and are now available to the people that are listening at a young age.

**John Assaraf** (3:55)
Unbelievable.

**Chris Williamson** (3:56)
Worlds apart, right? Sometimes we might get a little bit resentful of our parents. I know that you've mentioned in previous interviews that you had a little bit of resentment towards not being given the tools necessarily to do what you wanted to do. But from a much more compassionate side, it's a total different operating system now, right? Like the rules that control the old world don't really... It's a lot harder for our parents to think about how to apply those to what's going on now.

**John Assaraf** (4:25)
Yeah, you know, I remember... I used to live in this neighborhood. And in between the neighborhood that I lived in and the other affluent neighborhood, there was a community center. And so some of the kids in my neighborhood, you know, couldn't afford to be members of the community center, even though it wasn't very expensive. And then there were other kids on the other side of the street that their parents had a little bit more money, nicer cars, nicer homes. And I used to meet these kids at the community center, and I used to go over to their house. And I remember, you know, it used to feel like I wish my, you know, specifically my father, because back in those days, moms were mostly stay at home, took care of the kids, and maybe they worked, which my mother did. But I used to remember feeling like I wish my father was as smart as his father or her father. And I wish that we were able to go on vacations and to, you know, buy nice clothes instead of, you know, the ratty jeans and the ratty coats, you know, that I always felt were less than the other kids. And what I realized as I got older was, you know, my parents just did the best they could. My father went to grade like three or four. You know, my mother also grade three or four. Then they went to work at 15, 16 years old to try and make ends meet during the war. You know, so they didn't have an education. They didn't have a chance to do anything other than survive. And they didn't know that they could do more. They just believed they were born in this environment, that they were victims of that environment, that they had to make ends meet and struggle, and there was scarcity, and that the rich people, they either did it illegally, or they had these belief systems that were just disempowering them, and they didn't know that they were disempowered.