The 5th Annual Brain-a-Thon is held by John Assaraf to help us in winning the game of money. Here are the lesson notes that I learned after watching the 9-hour event.
Each year, self-made millionaire and best-selling author John Assaraf holds an event called the Annual Brain-a-Thon. This event is a ‘telethon’ that aims to help us understand how to win the game of money by starting with building the right mindset. The event displays several experts in the field of neurology and brain science – and this year, even Larry King himself appeared as an interviewer.
The event lasted for nine hours. During those nine hours, we had the chance to listen to experts and doctors talk about how our brain works when it comes to money and success. John invited several ‘graduates’ of the program who were able to increase their income within one year. It’s an inspiring event where real people share their real success overcoming their own limiting beliefs.
I’ve watched the Brain-a-Thon myself, and here are the lesson notes about what I learned from the event. The event is a promotion for John’s training program called “Winning the Game of Money”. However, there is a lot of valuable information we can get from watching the free telethon.
Three Steps to Correct Our Mindset
John says that increasing our wealth begins by correcting our mindset. There is an exercise we can do that immediately puts our brain into the correct mode to build wealth. The exercise is as follows:
#1 Acknowledge where we are right now. It might be difficult to admit that we are in a bad situation. We may feel reluctant to admit that we are poor or made mistakes. But John says that acknowledging our situation – no matter how bad it is – is the first step towards creating positive change. If you are buried in debt, if you have zero money in your bank account, admit that it is true. That way, we can release the weight of hiding our mistakes and begin the process of correcting them.
#2 Breathe deep. When we think about our bad situation, stress can arise. But the stress we feel is not the stress that helps us work to find a solution. John says that we should breathe deeply and slowly, in order to slow down our thinking and start from a place of calm. Finding a place of calm is important before we start to take action to ensure that we are taking accurate steps.
#3 Visualize achieving our big goal. Once we are relaxed (or as relaxed as we can be), visualize achieving our big goal. The big goal can be a certain amount of income you want to reach, but it’s better to have a goal that is built on an image of how our world looks like once we achieve the goal. Numbers are only numbers and they don’t have an immediate impact. When we imagine a scene or scenario instead, we involve the people and places that are most important to us and stir our energy.
John says that by doing this exercise, we can improve our performance (productivity) and lower our stress levels. By acknowledging our situation and breathing deeply to calm down, we create a space. From that space, our brain can develop and reinforce new patterns that support us towards achieving our big goals.
Three Important Facts About Our Brain
There are three facts about the brain that are important to know. Knowing these three facts, combined with doing the exercise above, will help us to develop our brain. Our brain will become a useful tool that helps us to achieve our goals instead of getting in the way of it.
#1 Our brain is condition and trained differently. One of the (many) factors that separate successful people with people who aren’t successful is that our brains are different. Our brains are conditioned and trained differently than people who are successful (mostly because of schooling). That’s not to say that we are helpless and can’t do anything about it. Quite the contrary, we can choose to condition and train our brain in the same way that successful people do.
John asks us what is one big financial goal we want to achieve. If you’ve read my other posts, you’ll know that my goal is to get to a stable financial base. A stable base is where I can live a comfortable life without working to make money.
There is one question that John asks us that he was asked when he was young. This question had a profound effect on him that it changed his life: Are you interested or are you committed?
What’s the difference, you ask?
- If you’re interested, you only do what is easy and convenient, and find excuses to not do it
- If you’re committed, you do whatever it takes
If we are interested in increasing our wealth, we will only look at what easy actions we can do. But those easy actions may not bring us the results we want. Often times, the actions that can bring us results that we desire require a strong commitment to do. Not many people are strongly committed.
#2 Focus on why you can. If we are only interested and not committed, we will find excuses. These excuses include finding reasons why we can’t do a certain action. We think that it’s too late and the opportunity is already taken, or that we don’t really want that result anyway. But instead of thinking this way and getting stuck, focus on why we can do a certain action. We may be surprised at what resources we have that we didn’t realize before.
#3 Align our conscious and non-conscious mind. Our conscious mind is a goal-setting mechanism. Our non-conscious (or sub-conscious) mind is a goal-achieving mechanism. Just because we set a certain goal, doesn’t mean our brain completely agrees with it. We need to align both parts of our brain to get a fluent and low resistance performance. The way to align our conscious and sub-conscious minds is by using certain techniques and tools found inside of John’s program.
There is a lot of information in the 9-hour Brain-a-Thon event. I will update this page with new notes about what I’ve learned from watching the event. For a few more days, you can still watch the replay while it’s still available: click here to watch the Brain-a-Thon replay
Leave a Reply