You’re listening to the Transform Your Life from the Inside Out podcast. This is a throwback episode to episode number 75, and that episode is titled, “Why Changing Your Mindset Never Works.” You know, the truth is this, most people don’t even understand mindset. They don’t understand that your mindset literally is both conscious and subconscious, conscious and non-conscious. And many people think, now if you change your mindset, which by the way is all conscious, so right now as you’re listening to me, that you’re conscious mind listening to me, we think if we change our conscious thinking that everything will change. That is not true. To create what you want to create in life, you have to change your literal subconscious mindset, your subconscious paradigm, because your subconscious paradigm determines what your conscious mindset will be. So if you’re an angry person or you’re a fearful person or whatever it might be and that affects your mindset, we try to work on that particular mindset, but yet that comes from the subconscious mind. So in this episode, I talk about why we have to go beyond shifting our mindset, and what we’ve got to do is look at our subconscious identity. We have to shift the identity because when that shifts, everything shifts automatically. Enjoy the episode because this is a vital one.
Hi, I’m Jim Fortin, and you’re about to start transforming your life from the inside out with this podcast. I’m widely considered the leader in subconscious transformation, and I’ve coached super achievers all around the world for over 25 years. Here, you’re going to find no raw, raw motivation and no hype because this podcast is a combination of brain science, transformational psychology, and ancient wisdom all rolled into one to take your life to levels you’ve never thought possible. If you’re wanting a lot more in life, to feel better, to heal, to have peace of mind, to feel powerful and alive, and to bring more abundance and prosperity into your life, then this podcast is for you because you’re going to start learning how to master your mind and evolve your consciousness. And when you do that, anything you want then becomes possible for you. I’m glad you’re here.
Before I get started with this episode, Why Changing Your Mindset Never Works, I want to extend a sincere heartfelt thank you to every one of you. I talked to one of my project managers today. And as I don’t know how long you’ve been listening to the podcast, but we only started last spring. And as of today, we have hit over 500,000 downloads. And that’s because of you and you sharing the podcast with your friends and family. And candidly also, it’s because another content works and it helps many of you. I constantly get emails from you guys, the support team, everything goes to support and the support team just forwards words to me. The emails when you guys are like, “Hey, I had this breakthrough,” etc. And we get them every day. So thank you so much for allowing me to, as I’ve said before, live my Dharma and allowing me to serve you guys.
I do want to share a thought here that’s not in this episode. It’s not about this episode, but it’s about alignment. And a lot of people look at me and they’re like, “Jim, you shifted gears from persuasion and then influenced a couple of years ago. Even though you’ve been teaching transformation for many, many years, you’ve started focusing only on transformation and your business just exploded. I mean, it’s in the stratosphere. You know, when you look at statistics, I mean, we’ll do a million downloads or a very first year of having the podcast and that’s like in the stratosphere. It just doesn’t happen for most people. And people ask me, you know, Jim, what are you doing? You’re breaking, you know, you even though I’ve got a marketing team and I’ve been in marketing for a lot of years, really advanced marketing, online marketing, people will say things like, you know, you break every internet marketing rule there is and you’re still bringing in multiple seven figures per year. What are you doing? How is this happening?”
Well, let me share with you my perspective before we go into the topic this week and my perspective and my knowing is that I’m aligned. Now, full transparency many years ago, a friend of mine said, he said to me, he goes, you know, Jim, have you ever considered that maybe you should stop teaching persuasion and influence? And maybe you should start only doing transformation work. And back then, I’m like, no, no, no, I’ve done persuasion and influence for a lot of years. I’m really good at it. People pay me great money. I built the business, etc., etc., all this, all this, you know, jargon coming out of my head. And literally, when I look back, he was correct. I should have left. Well, you never could have should have because whatever happened is what happened back then. But once I stopped in, you know, stepped into the transformational work full time, I became what I call aligned. And when you, when you get aligned, it’s kind of like the floodgates just open for you. It’s like the universe just actually says, okay, we’re going to put a tailwind behind you. You’re finally doing what you’re supposed to be doing. We’re going to put a tailwind behind you and let’s go.
Yet so many people, they’re not aligned because they’re working in the external 3D world, meaning they’re just everyday life. And so many people are trying to hustle and make money and do things. And that’s just not the way that I work. Where I work from, which is my alignment, is how many lives can I change? How many people’s lives can I affect? And what I tell people is that so many people spend their entire lifetime looking for their purpose. And what I want to share with you is your purpose is not outside of you. Your purpose is inside of you and your purpose on this planet is to align yourself. And that is to align your lower self, meaning the identity you call yourself and the physical body, to align your lower self with your higher self, and I promise you when you’re fully aligned with your lower and your higher selves magic will happen. So again, thank you so much. I mean, I just I’m so honored. Thank you so much for allowing me to serve.
Alright this week’s episode why changing your mindset never works. You know, I’m just I’m just exhaling here because you’ve heard it a thousand times and even more than that, like 10,000 times in your lifetime. And your parents might have told you as a kid or your coaches or your teachers, you know, you’ve got to have the right mindset and you’ve got to change your mindset. You hear that all the time, you’ve got to change your mindset. And you see all the memes and all the videos and all the motivational speakers and all the personalities and all a lot of talking heads on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and social media, and they’re all telling you, “Change your mindset. Change your mindset.”
What was interesting is several years back, there was this person who was a group. Back when I used to be part of groups on Facebook, and this person said in the room, she said, it was for real estate agents, which I was not, but I used to coach a lot of agents. And she said in her post, “If you want to be a successful agent, you have to change your mindset.” And she was preaching it. And I clicked her profile and just did a little, you know, investigation of her, not, and I don’t mean literally investigation, just kind of, you know, looking at her profile and stuff like that. Apparently from the outside looking in, she was not a very successful agent. So, what I’m guessing is that she buys into the cultural myth that you have to change your mindset or perhaps even somebody that day or whatever told her and is fresh on her mind that if she wanted to be successful, that she had to change your mindset. Regardless, we live in a world that has a serious lack of understanding about us human beings and how we work.
So you’re going to hear me say some things in this episode you might have heard me say before. I want to say it in a different way and I want to bring some points home to you. Not only that, if you’re new here, and it’s not because I’m saying so, it’s because I hear it so much. I mean, I constantly, if you ask me what I hear more than anything else about feedback on the podcast is many, many times, I think what I hear more than anything is people saying, you know what? I started from episode number one and I went all the way through and it just makes so much sense and it builds on itself. Well, that wasn’t the intention when we started, but that’s how it’s working. So what I’m sharing with you right now, I don’t know when you started listening, but I strongly urge you based upon the experiences of thousands and thousands and thousands of people that have listened and downloaded is go back to the very first episode and start there.
I also want to say this. It would probably serve you well. Every one of you, and I say this with humbleness, because I’ll bring it back to me, is even if you’ve listened to all the episodes, go back and start again. And then again. Why? Because repetition is the mother of all learning. And even myself, you know, my mentors and my coaches and stuff, I keep our coaching calls and I go back and I listen and I listen listen. And I listen because many times what happens is our brain filters out, literally if I say one thing you’re interested in, you actually start focusing on that and you filter out everything else that I say. And then you’ll listen to it again later and say, whoa, I must have been asleep because I missed a lot of what he said. That’s why I say go back to the very beginning. And if you’ve already done that, then listen to the episodes multiple times because my goal with this episode was not to just be information, but to be transformation for you.
Okay. So why changing your mindset never works? So what I want to share with you is we’ve all been taught that. And again, it sets screened out as every single day with memes and the personalities and everything else. But changing or trying to change your mindset is a broken strategy. And when I say strategy, I mean just sequence of steps that gets you from point A to point B. It is a broken strategy and I’m going to share with you in just a bit why it’s a broken strategy and actually it keeps you trapped. So as I’ve said many times in the title you know when the title is why changing your mindset never works is you might have heard me say that before in other episodes because I don’t know how many episodes you’ve listened to but hopefully I can actually give you a perspective in this episode that finally at least brings it together and ties it to why changing your mindset never works and you get it and you start shifting your behavior and you shift it in a way and you focus on things that you know that are going to get you the outcomes that you want.
Now, let’s look at the behavior. How many times have you said to yourself about some aspect of your life? And by the way, anytime we… I’ll come back to what I was saying there, anytime we actually say that we want to change our mindset, what we’re really saying is that you want to change a habit. So the conversational loop that I just started prior to my last comment is how many times have you actually said, “I want to change my mindset,” meaning I want to, let’s say for example, a big one, and this is 80% of the American population is overweight. And let’s say for example, that you say that you want to go on a diet. And you do this on a Friday. And so Saturday, you’re eating all the, you know, the Cheetos and the Fritos and the, you know, the Ho-Hos and the Ding Dongs and the ice cream and everything. And then Sunday, you’re cleaning out your cupboards and your freezer and refrigerator and everything else. And then you’re kind of like, oh, exhale. And Monday, I’m going to start my diet. And you’re all excited about your diet. Now, notice what you’ve done. You are in the process, this whole process is a process of changing your mindset.
Now, you’ve heard me use this very same example before. Monday, you’re doing pretty good, feeling good that you’re “changing your life.” Tuesday, you’re doing pretty good. Wednesday, you’re maybe starting to teeter a little bit. You got a lunch and you see the nachos or smell the pizza or the cheeseburgers or whatever. And then, you know what? Thursday, you’re starting to teeter a little bit and then Friday, you’re like, you know, I’ve been really good past week. They’ll pass, you know, since Monday, I’m going to reward myself and I’m going to have nachos today. And then guess what? By Monday, you’re right back to your old behaviors again. So what happened? I mean, literally, you just air quote changed your mindset less than a week ago, and you’re right back to your old behaviors again.
Well, here’s why changing your mindset doesn’t work. When we say mindset, what we’re really saying is thought processes or thinking. So when you say, for example, that you’re going to go on a diet or stop eating sugar or eating Diet Coke or go to the gym or, you know, get a healthy mindset or whatever, what’s happening here is when we look at the brain, we’ve talked before many times. I’m sure if you’ve listened for any time, you’ve heard me talk about the reptilian part of the brain, the oldest part of the brain, the limbic system, which is the emotional part of the brain, and the prefrontal cortex, which is the largest part of the brain, and the thinking part of the brain. Any time that you say you want to change your mindset, notice that doesn’t come from the limbic system. It doesn’t come from the reptilian part of the brain, which is the oldest part of the brain, which is fight or flight. It comes from the prefrontal cortex, which is the thinking part of the brain because you think that you want to change your mindset.
Now, back to what I said earlier, anytime that you say you want to change your mindset, you’re saying that you really want to change a habit. Well, habit comes not from the prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of the brain. Now many of us think we want to change our habits, but habits come from the oldest part of the brain, which is the reptilian part of the brain. So what I would urge you to do if you have not yet, and even if you have, go back and I believe it’s episode number five on habits. In that episode, I’m pretty sure that I say, because it’s a foundation of a lot of things that I do in my coaching programs. And I say it and people get it and they’re like, mm-hmm, yep, uh-huh, I got it, that makes sense. But they really don’t get it, but they think that they got it, is everything that you have. Everything that you don’t have.
Now let’s break this down even further. Let’s just make this, you know, crazy simple. Everything you have, which is your car. Now, to what degree do you have a car? Do you have a Ferrari or do you have a beat up old 1972 Chevy? Your house, your money, your body, your relationships, everything that you have, or everything that you think that you want, which is prefrontal cortex, which you don’t have it yet, is all habit. Let that soak in. Everything you have and you don’t have is a reflection of your habits. And if you don’t have something, it’s because you do not have the habits, you know, which will create that something that you prefrontal cortex think that you want. That’s why you change your mindset to get something that you think that you want, but you don’t have the habits in the first place to be able to create it.
So, as I said in episode number five, it’s not about changing your mindset because look at your life. Seriously. And I’m laughing because I see myself in years gone by and all this as well. But look at your own life. Seriously. How many times? I mean, let’s say you want to make money and you want to change your mindset about money. If you actually had a dollar for every time you said you would change your mindset about money, you would already be wealthy. But look at your life and how many times have you said, “I’m going to change my mindset. I’m going to change my mindset.” And then you fail. So getting the outcomes that you want is not about changing your mindset. It’s about what I call changing your brain set. And when I say brain set, simply what I mean is your reptilian, you know, brain-based habits.
Let’s see, you’ve heard me say before probably you don’t get what you want in life. You don’t get the mindset you think that you want. What you get is your habits. So here’s something huge for a lot of you guys and I’ve said it before and my whole intention with this episode is that you know what, if you didn’t get it when I said it before it didn’t sink in or you missed it is that you really, really times a hundred, like big Las Vegas lights, I mean it’s in front of your face, you really, what I want you to do is stop focusing on your thinking. I want which is what that’s contradictory to what you’ve been taught. I want you to stop focusing on your mindset and what you’re thinking and I want you to start focusing, now let me back up, I want you to stop thinking about the things that you want and I want you to start focusing, start focusing on the habits that will create the outcomes that you want.
Now, a little caveat there. Even your thinking can be habits. So I want you to start focusing on thinking because you’ve got to think to be able to change all this. But I want you to stop thinking about, I’m going to create the house and the Ferrari and the job and the million dollar business and all that and start thinking about what habits would I need to create the outcomes that I want. Something I want to share with you is this. And I’ve observed it in many, many people that I coach. One of my mentors has observed it in me and it applies to me. It applies to you. It applies to most human beings. First off is that we are the biggest liars to ourselves. We literally, seriously, we lie to ourselves so much about what’s possible for us or not possible for us.
But what I want to share with you is that your thinking can be seriously, seriously flawed. And what I mean by that is you probably get into a great deal of self-deception. The thing about that is that we actually think, “Oh, I can create that $1,000,000 a year income or whatever it is.” And truthfully, we’ve never gotten anywhere close. We’ve never made more than $79,000 a year. So in that moment, we’re in self-deception because we’re not even looking at, well, what habits what I need and what identity what I need to create the million. We’re simply focusing on the change, you know, change your mindset, et cetera, prefrontal cortex thinking, and we’re not even looking and then we get in the self-deception.
Now, here’s the unfortunate part as well, is once we get in the self-deception and we don’t create something because we think that we air quote, think we can do it, is now we feel bad about themselves, and people feel shame, and they feel bad, and they’re embarrassed, and everything else, and it’s a double whammy. So not only did you not get what you want, but then you feel bad about not getting what you thought that you wanted. So as you can see, or hopefully it’s becoming obvious to you, is that changing your mindset or working from that position is simply a broken strategy that can keep you trapped.
Let me give you something else here, some food for thought. If let’s say for example that I put you in a box and you’re literally trapped in the box and you’re like, “Hey, Jim, how do I get out of the box?” And I said, “Well, the only way to get out of the box is to read the instructions and the instructions are on the outside of the box.” Well, what’s obvious is you have to get out of the box to read the instructions to know how to get out of the box. Now, the reason I share that with you is that it’s an analogy in that Einstein said many years ago, he said, “A problem can never be solved at the level that it was created.”
So let’s look at the levels of your mindset here very quickly. I’m just giving this to you for food, for thought. Now, whatever you have in life right now is a reflection, obviously, of your habits and your habits. And when I say mindset, you’re unconscious identity, okay? So you have this identity that has gotten you what you want, or not what you want, sorry, but what you have right now. However, if you had a different identity, you would have different things, right? You would have more abundance in your life, more prosperity, health, wellness, everything else. But you don’t have it because it’s not a part of your subconscious identity. So the subconscious identity that is created for you exactly what you have is like being in the box is you can’t you can’t you know see how to get out of the box unless you get out of the box. The same thing you can’t change your identity from inside the identity. You have to step for thought. Now, whatever you have in life right now is a reflection, obviously, of your habits and your habits. And when I say mindset, you’re unconscious identity, okay? So you have this identity that has gotten you what you want, or not what you want, sorry, but what you have right now. However, if you had a different identity, you would have different things, right? You would have more abundance in your life, more prosperity, health, wellness, everything else. But you don’t have it because it’s not a part of your subconscious identity. So the subconscious identity that is created for you exactly what you have is like being in the box is you can’t you can’t you know see how to get out of the box unless you get out of the box. The same thing you can’t change your identity from inside the identity. You have to step outside of your identity to change your identity. You have to go to a higher level.
And I’ve shared with you guys before. Well, let me just I’m kind of fumbling here because I’m trying to put some thoughts together as we go. But where you’re working from right now is at the air quote top of your mindset. So you’re literally already at the top of your mindset. So again, you have to go to a higher level, okay? And how do we want, I’m fumbling tonight, but let me just keep on going here. And by the way, let me segue here for a second also. This is a great lesson for a lot of you guys, me fumbling around here with what I want to say. And the reason why is this is because I’m actually air quote, making mistakes. And so many people are afraid to put themselves out there because they’re afraid to make a mistake.
What I want to share with you is this is that, let me ask you, do you like perfect people? No, I don’t think any of us really like perfect people. So I could have had my editor edit this out and I left it in here mainly because that didn’t want to back up again. And secondly, maybe I could share an, you know, a thought with you is that just put yourself out there. You know, you want to be as professional as possible. But you know what? I’m not perfect. And I’m far from it. And obviously, but what I’m sharing with you is that people don’t like perfect people. And actually, this was a drawback that Kennedy had back in 1960. It just seemed that Richard Nixon was far less perfect than Kennedy, but Kennedy had the mystique of being too perfect, which actually hurt him to some degree. So anyway, I just use the example of me fumbling all over the place to share with you is that people don’t like perfect people and people do like it when people mess up. Why? Because it makes us all human and air quote normal.
All right, let’s go back to the topic this week. So I talk about going to a higher identity and how you do that I’m not going to go into it here. But everything, as you know, in one of the early episodes, episode number, it’s in the top five, the first five episodes, is everything is about identity and you are ruled by your identity. If you’re a smoker in your identity, you’re a smoker in your behavior. So let’s go to how to get outside the box. Easy, subconscious reprogramming. There’s an episode on that as well, one of the first five episodes. So I’m not going to go into subconscious reprogramming, but I did refer a book in the early episodes on subconscious reprogramming, and the book is titled How to Reprogram our Power of Your Subconscious Mind. Gosh, I’m making mistakes left and right. Our missteps left and right. The power of your subconscious mind.
I want to share with you the most powerful gift that you could ever learn from this podcast. And the most powerful thing that you could ever take is the full realization that you can change your life when you change your subconscious identity. I mean, that literally is a lifetime tool. You can learn it in the book that I just referred to you guys. But when you learn to reprogram your subconscious mind, anything that you want in life, and I do mean anything that you want can be yours and I want to share a an old an old process that I shared with people many years ago I’ve not shared it on this podcast and as much as I’m fumbling here I’m kind of like hmm what’s gonna happen next because the dogs are here and they’re like the dogs on a bark next or FedEx is gonna come or something but anyway a technique that I taught people many years ago is to write a a letter to yourself.
And, you know, I’m 54. And back when I remember when I was in high school and even college, I wrote, you know, letters to my folks and everything to my mom. And when you get a letter, you read a letter and a person tells you about something that’s already happened, meaning they’re conveying, yeah, hey, here’s, you know, the events of my life and the circumstances of my life. And you’re reading the letter as if everything’s already happened. And it pretty much is or, you know, has already happened because you’re reading about it in a letter. So what you could do is you could write a letter to yourself and in the letter, you write in the letter as if everything that you want to create in life or be has already happened.
Now, hopefully that’s clear. You want to write a letter to yourself and you want to write it as if everything in the letter has already happened to you. Make it simple, make it a half a page long and you could say, “You know what? In the but in the last 60 days, I’ve gone to my ideal weight. I’m going to use the word lost, even though a lot of people don’t use it with weight loss, but I’ve lost eight pounds. I made an additional $7,000, whatever it is.” So I want you to write a half-page letter to yourself and write it as if everything in the letter, many things you want to accomplish, has already happened to you. Then what I want you to do, ideally, is I want you to read it to yourself three times a day as if it were true. Now you can do it actually once a day as well or what I really recommend is in the morning when you wake up at night before you go to bed and at lunchtime reading it three times a day.
There’s a book and you can get it on, well you can get any book on Amazon I guess, but it’s a simple book taking maybe 15 minutes to read. It’s over a hundred years old. No one knows who wrote it and the book is titled It Works. And it’s akin to this example that I’m just sharing with you right now about writing a letter to yourself. And the reason that this process works is because there’s a part of your brain. There’s a part of your brain that does another difference between real and imagined. And the more that you imagine something to be true, the more the brain just acts like because it works on repetition, the more that you imagine something to be true, the more true it becomes of the brain and we start to believe it at a core identity level. So that’s one take away this episode that I’ve never shared in any other episode.
To recap again, is write a letter to yourself, make it a half a page in the letter, write it as if it’s already happened, meaning you’re telling a story. It’s already happened. Read it three times a day. Ideally, first thing when you wake up, last thing before bed, and at lunchtime if you can. Secondly, what I want to suggest as if you’re new here or not been around that long is go back and listen to the episode on habits. I believe it’s episode number five.
So, I fumbled around enough in this particular episode. So, the point of this episode is a couple of things. Number one is get out of your self-deception. Stop fooling yourself that, “Oh, I can just change my mindset and everything’s gonna like magic wand, everything’s going to just change for me.” I pretty much guarantee you that it’s not going to happen that way. And if you want proof of that, go back maybe some of your old journals or diaries or whatever and look at all the things that you wrote down that were akin to you changing your mindset that never happened. The reason that it never happened is because changing your mindset in the way that people try to change it, which is prefrontal cortex, does not work.
So what are your transformational takeaways? I think they’re pretty simple at this point is changing your mindset does not work. What you want to change, and you’ve got plenty of tools here at the podcast, is you want to change your identity and your habits. Those are two things. You change those, they do work. So stop trying to change your mindset and start working on your brain set. Well, this episode was, well, getting through this one was a challenge.
Okay. The next episode, I, I, and guys, as you well know, and you hear in the outro, if you have any questions and send them to support@gymforton.com, I do want to point out also that at some point, I’m going to just be transparent with you guys, these episodes can be a lot of work. You know, a lot of people, for example, that do podcasts, they have a guest. They just sit there in the chatter of somebody for 30 minutes an hour or whatever, send it to the editor. I don’t have that here. I have to create every one of these episodes. And I generally sit down, I think through. I don’t have any notes for the most part. I think through what I want to say. I’ll let it percolate for a day. But the reason I’m telling you this is these are a lot of work. And at some point, I’m going to want to shift the format. I’m thinking what I might do a little later, well, next year, is somebody said, “Hey, Jim, I’ve got questions about prior episodes. Would you be interested in doing a podcast having a guest?” And I’m thinking we might go that direction. I’m not committing to anything, but honestly, I’m looking at a way to cut down on my workload, and I think we might go that direction. And it would kind of be akin to the financial guide Dave Ramsey. All of his episodes are short. People just come on, they ask questions, and he coaches them through their finances.
So anyway, I don’t know why that popped in my mind, but I wanted to share that with you guys is that we might be changing the format, maybe in the first quarter or something, in the first half of 2020. Okay, so I got on that little tangent there because the team sends me a whole file of questions and I look through and I look for questions that I think are most relevant to the biggest amount of you. And the Vivek had a question, and for some reason it just pulled me. And it’s because it’s also not about the topic of the question, but it’s also about beliefs and indoctrination at an identity level. But Vivek’s question was, is how can I be rich and spiritual at the same time? And there’s so many places that I wanna go with that question, how can I be rich and spiritual at the same time? And a of you might get it. But I’m going to share with you that this is how we’re conditioned in this world. People believe that they can’t be rich or spiritual at the same time because they learned that from someone. And the exact opposite is true. You live in an abundant universe and the more spiritual that you are, the more wealth and abundance that you can bring into your life. But a bigger point, an overlying point here, is that Vivek is working from a paradigm that he learned in his life that doesn’t work for him. So I’m going to address some of that in the next episode.
Okay, thanks for listening. And again, we, we hit 500,000 downloads this week and I’m just, I’m honored, truly, truly blessed and just so grateful to be able to serve. So again, a big hug to you. Thank you so much. And I’ll catch you over on the next episode. Bye-bye.