You’re listening to the Transform Your Life from the Inside Out podcast. This is a throwback episode to episode number 89, which was titled Your Weaknesses Aren’t Trapping You, Your Indoctrination and Habits Are. I’m going to summarize this and keep it really simple because this is what the entire episode is about. But I’m going to start the whole introduction like this and keep it really simple and let this soak in. You don’t get what you want in life. You get your habits. You don’t get what you want in life, you get your habits. And if you want more in life, you first have to create the habit of being the person who does the things to have what you want. So so many of you focus on what you want and you never get it because you’re focusing, so to speak, you’ve got your cart before the horse and it doesn’t work that way. So if you’d like to learn more about how to get what you want in life because remember, you don’t get what you want, you get your habits and you wanna learn more about your habits, enjoy the episode. 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 rah-rah 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. Okay, so your weaknesses aren’t trapping you, your indoctrination and habits are. Full transparency here. For any of you that are content creators, online trainers, marketers, you know, you probably like may have a content calendar. And this is just part of my content calendar, the Wednesday episode, and they correspond to videos. And when I read this headline, I’m like, okay, what am I gonna do with it to make it interesting and to give people takeaways? And I wanna go two different places with this because I want to talk about what we call your, or you may call your weaknesses and we’ll look at that and then your indoctrination and habits. So a question for you, how many times have you tried to change before and failed? And then you’ve said something and you’ve made it mean something about yourself, like, you know what, I’m so weak. I have no willpower. I just can’t trust myself. I’m not going to do what I see I’m going to do anyway, and etc. Does any of that ring a bell to you? And if it does, like for most of you, especially people that diet, which diets don’t work, a whole different episode, but people that diet will say things like, “You know what? I’m just so weak. I have no willpower.” And really, everything which you’ve heard before, you’ve heard me say that everything comes down to habits, plain and simple, is 95% of what you do on a daily basis is brain-based, reptilian brain-based habits, plain and simple. But what people do is they personalize the habit, meaning they make the habit about themselves. And they’ll say things like, “You know what? I can’t stick to my diet. Therefore, I am a weak person.” Well, if you’re not sticking to your diet, that’s simply a brain-based habit, reptilian brain-based habit. And I keep throwing the word reptilian in there so that we’re on the same page because your prefrontal cortex, your thinking part of the brain, is not responsible for your habits. The oldest part of your brain, the reptilian part of the brain, is. But the takeaway is that you personalize. Be very clear. Any time that you attribute some kind of label to yourself based upon not being able to change a habit, you have then personalized that habit. I’ll talk more about that in just a little bit. As well, I have created a few other episodes on habits, so I’m not going to go back over the mechanics of habits here. If you scroll, I’m not sure where you’re listening, whether it be, I think it’s called Stitcher or iTunes. One of the first episodes on iTunes, one of the top are the first five episodes is on habits. And what I said in that early episode on habits, listen very carefully here, is that you, you are not your habits. Let that sink in. You can even say, “I am not my habits.” I mean, habits come from, you know, your habits come from the reptilian part of the brain, but you’re not the habit. It’s just something that your brain does for you. And I want you to notice above what I was talking about when I was saying that, you know, most likely you personalize your habits. You’re making your habits about you. And here’s something very simple that I want you to get is that your habits are not about you. Habits are simply habits, plain and simple. And let that sink in as well. So in the headline, we talk a little bit about where the headline is about indoctrination and habits and there are other episodes. But let me give you an example here so that you stop personalizing your habits and making them about you. Because many times when you personalize a habit and you make it about you, you see it as if you’re some kind of failure. For example, as I said a little earlier, when you say things like, I have no willpower, which by the way is a whole different podcast, but you’ll say things like, “I’m so weak,” or “I can’t follow through.” You’re personalizing a habit, and then you’re making it a weakness of yours. Now, let me give you an example here. When I said, and I’ve said it, I think a couple of times, habits are just habits. Habits come from the oldest part of the brain called the reptilian part of the brain. That’s in one of the earlier episodes, as I said, go back and listen to that episode. And let me give you an example, a metaphor here about an alarm clock. If you set your alarm clock for six AM and your alarm clock goes off, which it will, you know, at six AM, are you personalizing the alarm clock for doing what it’s programmed to do to go off at six AM? Are you personalizing it and saying things like, oh my gosh, that alarm clock hates me. That alarm clock sucks. What a mean alarm clock. I mean that alarm clock is out to get me. No, you’re not. See, the reason why is that an alarm clock just does what an alarm clock does. And the same thing with your habits. Your habits are just habits, and they are not about you. So I want to go a different direction here, but before I do, your takeaway is, is do not personalize your habits and then make them some negative characteristic or quality about yourself, which I had just alluded to, meaning, you know, whatever habit you have, you don’t want to go back into, “I am a weak person,” or “I just have no willpower,” or “I can’t do it,” or “I always fail,” because you’re simply just personalizing the brain, the reptilian part of the brain, and what it does. Okay, another direction here. So the headline of this episode is your weaknesses aren’t trapping you, your indoctrination and habits are. And we just talked a little bit about habits and I referred you over to the episode on habits and I think I might even have two or three episodes on habits. But what about indoctrination? Consider that every one of you have heard the word before and I know people listen all over the world and you have some, you know, word for it in your language indoctrination. And what I tell people is this, is that you’re never at the mercy of your circumstances. So many of us live our life by circumstances. And I’m sure you’ve heard me say before that is if you, you know, if you say I don’t have enough time, enough energy, and enough money, you’re working by circumstance. And anytime you work by circumstance, you repeat your circumstances. But I tell people, you’re never at the mercy of your circumstances. You are at the mercy of your interpretations. And then we have to look at, well, where do your interpretations come from? Let me give you a quick example that I’ve used before in this podcast. And I find it to be a very appropriate, very salient, and just very, you know what, when you hear the example, you get it. It makes perfect sense. Now I’m sure that all over the world there’s some variation of this, but here in the United States, we as children are marched out, generally speaking, I think probably nine out of ten kids. We are marched out and we are taught to say in kindergarten or first grade, the Pledge of Allegiance. When I was a kid, in a small Texas town, they would take us outside in the morning, the morning bell, and all the kids would line up and we would actually put our hands over our heart, look at the flag, and say I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Now, when I was five years old, what I want to point out is that when I was marched outside and I did this, I was being indoctrinated with nationalism and patriotism. But being a five-year-old, I never said, “Hey, hey, you know, hey guys, what’s going on here? Are you guys indoctrinating me?” I never said that. I just did what I was led to do at five years old. So my point is, and I’ll dig a little deeper here, is that I was indoctrinated with the Pledge of Allegiance. And I said it for many, many, many years. And just to be transparent here, I do not consider myself a nationalist. I mean, I’m like of her Thomas Paine, I’m a citizen of the world. I mean, I could as easily live in Switzerland or New Zealand or anywhere in the world. The only reason I’m an American is I happened to be dropped off on this part of the planet when I was born. By the way, completely lay off topic. Do you know where the Pledge of Allegiance came from? And if I ask a thousand people, I bet you a thousand people would not know. The Pledge of Allegiance, now you patriotic Americans, brace yourself. The Pledge of Allegiance was created back in the 1880s, I believe. I’m not sure the exact year, but I’m sure of the story. The Pledge of Allegiance was created by a flag company in the United States. They wanted to sell more flags, so what they did is they created this marketing campaign where people would say the Pledge of Allegiance, therefore, what they wanted is people to buy more flags. Now, believe me, don’t believe me, but you know what? Go to Mr. Google, look it up, and you will find that to be true. Okay, back to the topic of the week. You, like me, whether you are Russian or Japanese or Australian or Canadian or American or South African, whatever it is, wherever you were born and dropped off on the planet, you’ve been indoctrinated your entire lifetime. You’ve been indoctrinated about what it is to be part of your nationality and this episode is not about, for example, you’re also indoctrinated with whatever religion you are and the episode is not about that. But let me give you an example. I used to live in New York City and forgive me, no disrespect intended, but the, I think it’s Orthodox Jew, that the men wear like all black and all white, very simple, no buttons, nothing fancy, and the little boys have curls, and I think, you know, the top of their head, the hair is cut really short. Forgive me if I do not get the denomination correctly. But I, you know, I remember watching this little boy one time, and he was with his dad, and we were in Lower Manhattan, near Wall Street, and we were in a store, and they were just chatting back and forth in line in front of me. And my whole point here is this. As I looked at that little boy, my thought was, you know what, if he were born in Texas where I was born, guess what? He’d probably be a Baptist because that’s how I was indoctrinated in South Texas. But you know what? Given the parents that he has and being born where he was born, I bet you, I bet you at seven years old, he’s never said, “Hey, Dad, you know, I really thought about this Jewish stuff. You know, Jewish stuff. It just, it doesn’t work for me, Dad. I think I’m going to convert and I think I’m going to be Catholic.” No, it doesn’t happen. Why? Because we’re indoctrinated and then what we do is we don’t ever question the indoctrination. So where I really want to go in this episode is not about religion or nationality or patriotism or any of that, but what have you been indoctrinated with that has kept you weak and kept you down and kept you without things in life that you want. And specifically, what have you been indoctrinated with about health and money and your thoughts about health and money? Many years ago, when I was a hypnotist and people would come to me, predominantly women, for weight loss. And this one woman, I was chatting with her one day before we did her formal hypnosis session. And I said, “Tell me things that you heard in your house. Things you can remember when you were 5, 6, 7, 8 years old. Tell me what you heard in your house about weight.” And I’m thinking here as I go through this, because again, these are not canned episodes. But I think I also asked her, I said, “Have you been overweight your entire life?” Okay, here we go, yeah. I said, “Have you been overweight your entire life?” She said, “Yes, since a little girl.” And then I said, “Tell me what you heard about weight.” And she said things like, “We’re Italian. That’s what we do. We eat. It’s healthy to eat. We love pasta.” And several other things that she said, but the whole point was, is that she was indoctrinated with her belief systems about what weight was. And I said many years ago, it’s not 100% because we have genetics, but I said many years ago is that we learn to be unhealthy and we learn to be overweight. And I don’t know, it was 10 years ago or so, I think it was Time Magazine and the cover was, the title was something like, “Obesity is socially contagious,” meaning people learn it through indoctrination. We learn every bit of this through indoctrination. And I know that when you hear the word indoctrination, many times we think that people are being strapped in a chair and they’re forced to watch something or maybe some kind of political indoctrination or whatever. But plain and simple, indoctrination is you just going through your life and it’s things that you hear over and over and over from your social environment, your friends, your family, your religion, whatever, and things that you say to yourself. You know, when you talk to yourself, which we do, and I’ve never read any consistent evidence on how many thoughts we have per day, but I know it’s multiple thousands. And when you’re talking to yourself all day long, “I’m not good at math. I’m not good at math. Money is so hard to come by. I’m always struggling. Why can’t I lose this weight? Women always use the F word. I’m so fat. I’m so fat. I’m so fat. I’m so fat.” Well, quite literally, what you’re doing is you’re indoctrinating yourself. You’re indoctrinating yourself with your self-talk because all this indoctrination over and over and over and over and over and over again, plain and simple, is programming your subconscious mind. So then what we do, as I said in kind of the title of this episode, is that we’re indoctrinated to be a certain way, which means we’re programmed to be a certain way. And then we evaluate that way analytically as being weak, like, “I’m just not a good money manager. Money comes, money goes. I just cannot manage my money well.” Well, that’s nonsense. Well, maybe that happens, but it’s nonsensical to think that way because you learned that somewhere in your life. Okay, so back to habits really quickly. Habits are also a form of physical and mental indoctrination. The mental indoctrination, as I just alluded to, is something that you say over and over and over and over. And then what happens when you say it over and over and over and over, it becomes a habit. And then you, all of us, we operate within the context of whatever our habits are. For the most part, you will never operate outside your habits. And if you’ve mentally indoctrinated yourself that it’s hard to heal, or money’s hard to come by, or I can never make enough money, or whatever it is you hear in the world, and you know, I’m thinking here, scientists say that obesity, and I think it was obesity is socially contagious. So is poverty. So is living without money. It is socially contagious. This is why we have fourth generations of families, you know, living on public assistance because great-great-grandfather was poor and he passed it on to the grandfather who passed it on to the dad who passed it on to you. And four generations later, we still have people that actually, they have no money. Why? Because they’ve learned that people like us don’t have money or we can’t make money or we’ll never get out of the projects or we’ll never get out of this or never get out of that. Everything in your life is socially contagious. I once had somebody ask me many years ago, they being a hypnotist, and I don’t do hypnosis sessions anymore. But somebody said to me, they said, “You know, Jim, is it hard to get people into hypnosis?” And I said, “No, that’s the easy part. The hard part is getting people out of hypnosis.” And what I mean by that is whatever you’ve been conditioned with as a kid, I know you’ve heard me say this before that Aristotle said, and a German psychologist said something similar, is I think Aristotle said, “Show me a child or give me a child till the age of eight, and I’ll show you the man.” And a German psychologist back in the ‘40s actually kind of ripped off Aristotle, I believe, and said something like, “Give me a child till the age of eight, and I will own him for a lifetime.” Now, well, that’s explained in one of the early episodes. It’s one of the first 10 episodes on subconscious reprogramming. But when you understand that the world around you and adults and people around you that, you know, in your formative years, they’ve indoctrinated you. And if you’re not getting what you want, it doesn’t make you weak, which is what many people do is because they personalize whatever habit it is or whatever thought, and it’s simply a reflection of what you’ve learned very early in life. The same thing physically, the indoctrination over and over. And you know what you’re taught about health and wellness. You know, I work from the, literally the Eastern perspective or the ancient wisdoms when it comes to healing. But here in the West, most people actually just, you’re told as a kid. And this is a whole different podcast, but you’re told as a kid, listen to what the doctor says, do what the doctor tells you to do, et cetera. And then doctors indoctrinate us with Western medicine about it’s gonna be hard to heal or take this pill for a lifetime or whatever. And we’re trapped in this world and then we make it mean something about us. So question that I have for you is I want you to think about the most successful person that you know. It doesn’t matter who it is. It can be somebody you know personally, somebody you don’t know, maybe somebody you admire and respect. And what I want you to observe here is that they were also indoctrinated because that’s what happens to us as human beings. So they were indoctrinated. But the question I want to ask you is, what do you think they were indoctrinated with when it comes to success and achievement and money and health and wellness. Now, I also want to point out it can be contextual, meaning they could grow up in a wealthy family and they’re indoctrinated with thoughts, very positive thoughts about wealth, but yet also they ate very poorly and they’re indoctrinated with actually thoughts about poor diet and, you know what, eat out of the box and all the chemicals and everything else. But I just want you to look around you, look at the world and everyone. There was a quote that I posted on Facebook one time, many years ago, and I said the quote was just popped in my head because you’ve heard before people say, “Oh, someone should drink the Kool-Aid.” Well, if you’re looking at somebody and you’re saying, “Oh, someone should drink the Kool-Aid,” well, you’re responding from the Kool-Aid that you drank that is different than the Kool-Aid that the other person drank. And what I posted on Facebook is that everyone drinks the Kool-Aid. It’s just a matter of what flavor Kool-Aid that you’re drinking. And that’s the indoctrination. So part of the, obviously, that the headline is about, you know, you’re not your weaknesses. But what I would ask you to do is, watch your thinking for a day, just quite literally, pay attention to your thoughts and even carry a little notebook. And the reason why is because you’re going to forget if you don’t have a little notebook. And write down how many comments you make about the world and how many value judgments about money and weight and all these things, and in particular, things that you don’t have in your life. And I guarantee you, you’re going to see patterns. But here’s the thing, you learned those patterns as a child, whether you, you know, you’re 50, 60, 40, whatever you are now, you’re literally operating, like Aristotle said, or whoever I said earlier, the German psychologist, give me a child till the age of eight, and I will own him for a lifetime. You’re operating from the indoctrination you had as a kid. Now, I no longer live in that indoctrination. My father always used to say, and I think the number one line was this, “We’re not rich. We are not rich. We’re not rich. We’re not rich.” And I heard that day in, day out, day in, day out, till my love for college. I mean, literally my father was just, I mean, he just, it’s like his head exploded with this phrase and it was just like exploded all over the house for a lifetime. But that’s indoctrination. So if you don’t have what you want, it’s time for new indoctrination. And I strongly suggest you go back to the episode on subconscious reprogramming, one of the earlier episodes here at the podcast. Let me say here also, this podcast is growing very, very quickly. And I want to say thank you, I’m very blessed for the opportunity to be able to create this for you. If you’re getting value here, please share the podcast with people that you know, friends, family. As you know, there’s no commercials on the podcast. My objective is simply to see how many of you that I can help in the world. If you’re new to the podcast, I have enough evidence and enough people saying this that I’m going to tell you, if you’re new here, go back to the very first episode and start from the beginning. Because every episode, I don’t think it builds on itself, but it’s like a jigsaw puzzle and that every episode is a piece of the puzzle. And every episode, I promise you, unless you’re dead, and I’m just joking, but every episode you will get something out of. You’ll get a tool, which is my objective, on every episode or a new way to look at life. Okay, so your takeaway this week is that you’re not weak. Stop personalizing your habits. You are not your habits. You’re also not at the mercy of your circumstances. You are at the mercy of your indoctrination. Now, let’s go a different direction there very quickly is that we recognize you’re at the mercy of your indoctrination. So why not choose to indoctrinate yourself with self-talk and habits that actually get you what you want, as opposed to taking you away from what you want in life. Okay, Monday, Shelley’s question. This is gonna resonate with a lot of you guys. Shelley’s question is, what do I do when things just never seem to go right in my life? Now, Shelley’s probably in a bit of victim mentality there, but I think a lot of you can relate to her question, what do I do when things just never seem to go right in life? I think a lot of you might be, or you’re in the belief system or in the thought that I just need a break, or I just never can get ahead. I can never get my head above water. It just never works out for me. I always have to struggle. Money is just so hard. If anything that I just said resonates with you, then as I say, whatever you do, make sure that you listen to the next episode. Okay, thanks for listening and do what you can to make it a great day today. Bye-bye.