Are you looking to get into the coaching industry? Want to know what it takes to become a coach? This is the episode for you. Joining Glenn Bill on the season 3 premiere of the Get Attitude Podcast is Jairek Robbins. Jairerk is a motivational speaker, the President of Success Magazine, and the author of Live It! Achieve Success by Living with Purpose. In this episode, he discusses what it takes to become a coach and the importance of coaching in our journey to success. Even coaches need coaches! Get insight on how you can get into the helping profession and the right attitude you need to thrive in the field by tuning in.

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Listen to the podcast here

 #1 – Jairek Robbins, Motivation speaker and President of Success Magazine

We are in season three. We have somebody in here that has the inner spirit and the passion that it takes to carry the light into other people’s lives. Let me introduce him very quickly. This gentleman is the President of SUCCESS Enterprises, which means he’s running SUCCESS Magazine. SUCCESS Magazine, you may or may not know, is the oldest periodical in the United States when it comes to personal development.

He has also been put in charge of building and creating SUCCESS Coaching. If you’re somebody that believes in the coaching industry, I’m telling you, this is a person you’re going to want to learn from. There’s also Achievers All-Access. I’m not sure what that is, but I’m sure he’ll tell us about it. This man created a course called The Complete Guide to Activating High Performance, which has over 7,300 members and is in 120 countries. I believe it’s been translated into 30 different languages. He has a book called Live It! Achieve Success by Living with Purpose. It’s my pleasure to introduce you to Mr. Jairek Robbins, President of SUCCESS Enterprises.

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Jairek, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here. 

That’s so good. We’re so honored to have you. We always like to start our show by having our guests tell us what your definition of attitude is. How do you describe attitude? I’d love to know who your first attitude coach was.

Attitude has a lot to do with biochemistry. If you look at how someone’s mind works and the attitude they’re choosing, a lot of it has to do with how they slept that night. Think of their best self, average self, or worst self. Let’s run a scenario real quickly. Let’s say they were captured as a prisoner of war. What are the ways they’re going to torture this person? They’ve been captured. They’re a prisoner of war and They’re going to torture this human. It’s a horrible situation to be in.

The first thing they’re going to do to them is the problem of sleep. They’re not going to let them sleep. This is psychological, mental, and emotional torture. They’re going to keep them up all night with blazing music and bright lights. They’re not going to let them sleep. Number two, they’re going to limit their calorie intake and starve them. They’re not going to give them any food or allow them to consume any calories. Number three, if they really want to mess this person up, they’re going to bind them and not allow them to move.

I don’t know if you’ve ever accidentally fallen asleep on your arm and woke up where you got the pins and needles. You’re like, “Oh.” That was 15, 20, or 30 minutes max. Imagine six days of having your arms tied together and then you try to move them. It’s not going to turn out well. For most of us, we call that hustling, grinding, or being a CEO. Those are all the terms we use nowadays to describe psychological, emotional, and physical torture we put upon ourselves during that time of depriving ourselves of the thing we need most.

I have a weird experience that when you observe people that you torture, their attitude tends to get pretty soft. It tends to get down, negative, and overwhelmed. I don’t think it has to do with keeping a positive attitude at that moment. It helps when you do, but if you look at biochemistry, what if we fed the person? What if we got them enough sleep consistently? What if we got them moving at least 30 minutes a day, out in nature for 15 minutes, and get sunlight for 15 minutes? What’s interesting is if you measure their biochemistry, all of a sudden, their chemistry creates their attitude. The attitude tends to be pretty happy. You get these delighted, happy, and excited people.

Life is good and things are amazing because they slept well, ate well, and moved. They got some nature and some sunshine. Maybe they meditated and journaled something they were grateful for. All of a sudden, these are happy, healthy, strong, and resilient people with great attitudes. I look at biochemistry to determine how we create the right biochemistry. Meaning, what are the behaviors we need to put in place that will create the chemistry necessary to produce the attitude we want?

That’s a good and deep answer. Jason and I have to admit it’s a very unique answer when it comes to attitudes. Many people go right to the brain and you went right to the biochemistry. Let me ask you this. Do you get into bad moods?

Yeah.

How do you get out of your bad mood? Why do you think most people get in bad moods? You might’ve touched on that, but what’s the mind hack? What’s the behavior or biochemistry hack to shift your state when it comes to attitude?

For people looking for secrets and hacks, I would urge them to look for habits and routines instead. If you look for what is the habit or routine or take it one chunk back, the ritual that maintains the biochemistry that leads to a powerful, positive attitude, we would look at the rituals, habits, and routines this person goes through.

I would say, “Can we do some research? Can we talk to people like Dr. Huberman at Stanford Research Neuroscience and say, “Doc, is there anything proven by science that we can regularly do that causes a human being to be more mentally and emotionally resilient? They’re better focused. They have better cognition, memory, and the ability to make executive functional decisions of your brain. Is there anything?” There have been a lot of years of science. I hope they’ve discovered something. He would laugh and go, “Of course. Let me show you.”

I met Dr. Huberman because he was in San Francisco. We got invited to a private event at a church right near Dolores Park that a friend of ours bought. He invited the best and brightest of all the different types of friends he had. I met the PayPal guy there and people who were weird, crazy, and excited. Weird is a nurturing, kind word to use about them. They know they’re kooky, but they’re creating these amazing concoctions that have the brain function at the highest capacity.

There was this amazing dude nicknamed The Iceman that showed up. He threw us all in a baby swimming pool filled with ice cubes. This guy named Wim Hof put us in an ice bath for three minutes. He sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow on his ukulele while we were in there, freezing our faces off. He sang to us and we learned how to breathe, do an ice bath, and how to access a different part of our body.

The fun part was Dr. Huberman stood up prior to doing it, put something up on the screen, and said, “Let me show you what we’re about to activate in your biochemistry. We’re about to activate something called Superhuman Performance. We’re going to do some breathing techniques that are going to purposefully stress your body enough, fire off your adrenal cells, and cause your body to access all the benefits of fight or flight without any of the negative consequences or side effects.”

I was like, “You could do that? How?” He’s like, “Lie down on the mat. Let me show you.” Wim stood up and he’s like, “Breathe in. Breathe out. I don’t care how you get it, whether it’s in your nose or mouth. Get it in and get it out.” He took me on a breath journey where I felt like my brain was in outer space somewhere halfway through the breathing process. He then threw me in this ice bath for three minutes.

What they’ve done at Stanford Neuroscience is measure all the blood levels. They can show you how the chemistry of your body is changing second by second as you’re doing this stuff. It makes you more mentally and emotionally resilient. It activates you. When you get out of the ice bath, you feel like you can run through a brick wall. You talked about when I get a bad attitude or when I feel out of my game, what I do, the first thing is breath work. I breathe myself back into a solid state and place.

I have a friend named Dr. Leah Lagos. She’s based in New York City. She works with hedge fund managers, NFL athletes, NFL coaches, Olympic athletes, and pro golfers. All these people go to her. She’s a biofeedback specialist that works on breath training. If you go to her, she has a $15,000 regimen you work with her on. It takes 10 weeks to do it, and it requires 20 minutes of training in the morning and 20 minutes of training at night. You do this regimen and it measures all your biochemistry, which is your heart rate, sweat cells, and all the stuff going on. As you’re doing it, by week seven, it recalibrates your entire nervous system to calm.

I told my dad this. I told other athletes and friends this, and they’re like, “I can’t be walking around on mellow yellow all the time. I’m an intense human. I played in the NFL. I need to go.” I was like, “It doesn’t take away your ability to go. It gives you a second option. It gives you the ability that when the event occurs, you can decide if you’re all-in, over intense, or if you pull back, you get to allow it to occur without it affecting you.”

I had a client I trained on this for over a year. He’s a business owner in Louisiana. When I first started with him, he lost his temper that fast. A bad attitude would be an instant reaction. When someone messes up, he’ll throw something. He’s like, “What are you doing? What’s wrong with you? I told you twelve times not to do that.” He was that kind of guy.

A year later, he texts me one of the coolest texts I’ve ever gotten as a coach. He said, “My wife and daughter have gone to a family’s house to make sure that they’re safe as the hurricane approaches in New Orleans. I have $60,000 of inventory possibly going to be lost in the next 24 hours. Maybe I’ll lose my home. I hope I’ll physically be safe, but I’ve got to tell you. I’ve never felt so calm and ready in my entire life. Thank you for the work we’ve done this last year. I don’t know if I’d be able to handle it this well without it.”

You have this gift of coaching. We have a lot of NFL players that have been on the show. I’m a football guy. I’ve coached football for 25 years. We had a gentleman, Gene Zannetti, who started Wrestling Mindset. We talked about Wim Hof’s breathing. GAPers, make sure you look that up.

If you hear it three times and you don’t do anything about it, life will send you a whisper. If you pay attention, that’s all you need. If you don’t pay attention to the whisper, life is going to huck a brick at you, and it will hurt when it hits you. Something big, hard, and painful will happen in your life and you’ll go, “I should’ve paid attention earlier.” If you don’t get the lesson with the brick, life is going to burn your house down to get you to get this lesson. If this is the third time you’re hearing about Wim Hof and you haven’t taken action, watch your head and beware that you don’t get smacked with a burned-out house or a brick to the head. Take action. Do something with Wim.

To let everybody know, we are on Spotify, and we’re one of the very few vodcasts there. I want to talk about this passion for coaching. Was it natural for you? Was there a day when you woke up and said, “I want to be a coach?” Why don’t people go to coaches and why do people go to coaches?

I don’t know if it was necessarily natural. I train a lot of coaches and I hear the things they say, “Everyone asks me for advice. I love humans. I love listening to them.” I’ll give you some fun ones first. My first actual job was security at Blockbuster Video. I’m 6’4” and 225 pounds. I was 5’9” and 225 pounds going into high school. I was a big kid. I could see over the shelves because I was big enough.

On a Friday night, the kids decided not to steal a DVD when I was present. Theft went down 70% within the first 30 days of me working there. Apparently, having me walk around on Fridays and Saturdays caused kids to make better decisions. That was my first real job. Fast forward, I took a job at our family’s nonprofit. I love nonprofit work. The ultimate and best work in the world is the work that’s dedicated to helping and serving others. We helped the homeless and youth leadership. We helped feed people around the world, plant trees, and fund facilities where they take care of kids in Cambodia. They help all over the world in that nonprofit. I worked there for the first few years, and I loved it.

I loved helping people, making a difference, and the work we did. The only part I didn’t completely love was the paycheck that came with it. I was like, “We do such great work in the world. Why don’t we get great pay for it?” People were like, “That’s not why you do this work.” I was like, “Let’s come up with a better story. Why don’t we get paid well and help people?”

I remember one time I walked across the courtyard in the company. I walked to go see my friend Charlotte. She was in charge of the coaching department. I walked in and we were talking. I asked her, “What do these people do?” She said, “They’re coaches.” I was like, “Like a football coach?” She was like, “No, not football coach, but kind of.” I said, “What do they do?” She goes, “They help people.” My ears perked up. I was like, “Help people? That’s cool. Go on. Tell me more.” She was like, “They help people have better health, bigger business, and better relationships to make progress in their lives.”

Everything inside of me was like, “Really? They help people. I like helping people.” I was eighteen at that time, and I was like, “I have a weird question. How much do they make?” She’s like, “Here’s the earning potential of the coach.” I was like, “You can help people and get paid. This is my zone. Can I do this?” She looked at me and she was like, “Sure you can, champ.” I was like, “Seriously. Can I do this? Can I migrate to this office over here and do this?” She smiled. I think she was being nice and said, “Sure.” I was like, “What do I have to do?”

It’s an unregulated industry. About anyone can slap, “I’m a coach.” I have teachers. I went and got a degree in Psychology. I have professors who have Doctorates in psychology or marriage and family therapists who become coaches because they want to help people and earn a significant income. I was like, “That’s an interesting move.”

You can make more money than being a doctor in that field.

You can make more money than being in a nonprofit, a doctor, or a nurse. I was like, “This is one of the higher earning potential positions in the helping profession.” The number one thing I do to weed people out of this profession when I train them personally is ask them, “What do you care about other than yourselves?” If this person doesn’t care about anything other than themselves, they don’t have space in their own mind and emotions to be a coach.

Coaching requires caring for other humans, their life, business, family, and everything. If you don’t have the capacity to care for them, you don’t have the capacity to coach them. Those who do have the capacity to care, then we look at what it takes to be a great coach. Charlotte, for me back then, required me to go through 250 hours of training before she allowed me to start coaching at eighteen years old. I am so grateful for her because I know a lot of people who went online and took a weekend course or didn’t even take the course. They read a book and call themselves a coach. Bless them. I hope they help people but go get some training.

That piece of finding a legitimate training organization that will get you properly prepared to make sure you serve is like saying, “I watched a YouTube video on how to remove a wisdom tooth so I’m going to go try it.” That is a horrible idea. They’re like, “I watched a YouTube video on how to do a heart surgery or brain surgery.” Are you kidding me? Go get the right training and practice. Become an apprentice.

This is a missing thing in society. Apprenticeship has evaporated. Find a master you can train with for 3, 5, or 10 years and master the art of the craft before you go do it on your own. I did that for six years. I coached under my father’s company, and then I spent another few years selling for them. I spent about eight years honing and mastering a craft prior to going out on my own and doing my own coaching. I recommend that apprenticeship to everyone.

It’s ultimately the fastest way to mastery. Self-study isn’t going to do it. When I talk about carrying the light and jerks coming on, the word caring is the light that shines within you. That’s the light that you are pushing out there to all the coaches in the SUCCESS Coaching program. GAPers, maybe you’re sitting there going, “I want to get from where I am to where I want to be. I want to get from who I am to who I want to become.” Maybe hiring a success coach will help you bridge the gap in your life.

More importantly, some of you I know are going, “Maybe I need to become a coach.” How would somebody get into SUCCESS Coaching program as a subject? How would somebody get into SUCCESS Coaching as somebody that goes, “I’m tired of being a teacher and making $28,000 a year I need to be a damn coach?” Give us that information.

I would tell you as long as you care. I draw four concentric circles inside of themselves, like four circles going outwards. I would make the middle the smallest circle. Color it whatever you want. I color it purple. Draw a line to it and write, “Self.” The next circle up, make it blue. In that blue, draw a line to it and say, “Others that can benefit me.” Draw a line up and go to the next circle. Let’s make it green. Green is, “I care about all other humans whether they benefit me or not.” On the final one, let’s make it turquoise. We can say, “I care about all humans, the Earth, planet, trees, rocks, stars, the universe, and everything else.,” which is awesome. I love those people.

If I look at that, the very first question I would ask you is, “What is your current level of caring?” If you’re not at least level 2, 3, or 4, work on your caring before you come and check out coaching. Maybe hire a coach and ask them, “How do I care more about other people and life than myself?” I know people love the concept of self-care. It’s important. Do your meditation and workout, but if all you care about is yourself, you do not have the ability to coach or lead another human being.

If you’re able to care about at least others in your family or community, or you care about your country, the globe, all humans, or some level of caring beyond just yourself, then you can go to Coaching.Success.com. There’s a whole write-up on there of how you can learn about what our coaches can do for you, how they can help you grow your business, build a deeper and more connected community in your life, and become the healthiest, happiest, and strongest.

Our main website is Success.com. You might want to check out Coaching.Success.com. For people who want to become a coach and you do care, there’s a little tab right there that says Certification. Four times a year, we bring about a small group of people together and show them all the tools on how to guide other people to success. If you want to become a certified SUCCESS Coach, check that out. Our September class for 2022 is completely sold out. We sold it out at a big event we did. Our December one for 2022 should have some spots open if you want to grab some.

With that, there are two benefits of doing it. First, as you learn the tools for coaching, I always recommend you use all of them on your very first client, which will be yourself. Learn and use the tool. Once you’ve used it, you see your life get better. You see your relationships get deeper, more profound, and connected. You see your business grow because of it. You can then say, “I’ve learned it. I’ve lived it. I’ve done it. Now, let me help other people through coaching do the same.”

I know I was talking earlier about how I help people grow their businesses and investments. A deal came through for multifamily we’re looking to invest in. I’ll be a partner with this group in $1 billion of multifamily once I connect the dots on here. It’s not my $1 billion that’s in it if you know how investing works. It’s my portion that I’ve co-invested with them, but I can say psychologically, “I’m a partner in a $1 billion real estate investment right now.” I can show other people at least how to get started.

The company and group that we co-invest with has $9 billion under management and is growing. I might not be able to teach them how to do everything that group has done, but I could at least show them how to build the money mindset. I can at least show them how to build the money machine to generate enough capital each year to be able to co-invest with big partners. I can at least show them the principles of how to choose a good partner to make sure that they’re not going to lose their money on something stupid.

I could at least show them the beginning of the process to get them off and running if they want to grow their investments or grow their funds in that way because I’ve done it. I’ve got the mindset right. I’ve earned money and have the privilege of bank wiring large amounts of money to the right people and letting them multiply it for me.

Let me ask you this. I have two questions. 1) What’s your favorite thing to coach? 2) What is the most profound success you’ve had coaching somebody? Who was it and what was that all about? What is your favorite thing to coach?

I love coaching small business owners, to be honest. It took me the last 15, 13, or 14 years of my life to figure out how to be really savvy and good at business. Over thirteen years of practice of dialing it in, figuring it out, and hiring all the coaches for myself, I have two coaches for business. I’m in it. I do this stuff, I believe in it, and I etiam. I always have multiple coaches active with me. I’m always applying this stuff, looking for blind spots, and trying to be better.

After thirteen years of doing that, I finally got to a place where my coach, who has been buying and selling businesses for 40-plus years and is in his 70s, sold his portfolio for $100 million cash and got an 11X multiple on a $10 million a year EBITDA. I was like, “This guy crushed it. I like those numbers.” He was earning $10 million a year. He is only working four months out of the year and golfing and traveling the rest of the year. I was like, “He dialed this stuff in.”

It got to a point where he gave me the nod after apprenticing with him for years. He was like, “You can teach this. You know what you’re doing. Go help someone do it.” I was like, “Are you sure?” He was like, “Yeah. It’s time to fly. Get out of the nest. Go.” I started leading other people through it. We grew the business in New Orleans. We grew his business by 50% during the pandemic, his profitability by 171%, and his net profit by 195% by moving two different levers very slightly. We’re able to produce the result for others and it’s a heck of a lot of fun for me.

I have a business accelerator. We run the small businesses and show them how to do that. The most profound effect did not come from my one-on-one coaching. It came from the book that I wrote. I wrote that book about the ten years stage of my life in my twenties when I was trying to figure out how to cast my vision, live my ideal day, focus on the most important parts of my life and catch traction, and get up and running and turn the vision into reality. I captured that ten-year chunk of my life in that book.

I might write another one when I finish my 30s, do about business, and how to do all that, but that one was about living life to the fullest in my 20s. That book circulated around the world and became a bestseller. One day, I received a handwritten letter from an airman who’d been deployed. In the letter, she wrote, “Dear Mr. Robbins, I was deployed overseas. I’ve come home with horrific PTSD. Every day for the past week, I’ve had my firearm in my mouth, wanting to pull the trigger and not wanting to have to do this any longer. Someone gave me a copy of your book. I read the first two chapters, and I wanted to say thank you because it reminded me of the reason why I want to keep on living.”

Did you reach back out to her? Did you guys ever have a conversation?

I did. I went and visited her on base to say, “Thank you. It’s a pleasure to meet you. If there’s anything I can do to support you, let me know.”

Specifically then, what was it that triggered the change in her? Was it something you said? What was it in the book? What was the antidote or story that she said, “What the hell have I been thinking?”

It was helping her recast her vision. She was so caught in the PTSD that she was unable to see forward of how life might be. In those first two chapters, I focused on people doing a very simple process called Identifying and Designing Their Ideal Day. On one perfect day, where would you be? How would you feel? Who would be with you? What would you do? We then multiply it.

Everything between chapters 2 through 10 is how to turn the vision into reality. The final chapter is how to extend the vision for ten years into the future and say, “If you could turn one perfect day into reality, let’s multiply that day by 10 years and create a 10-year vision of your perfect day stacked up. What would life look like when that happens?”

That sounds like an awesome book. It’s Live It! Achieve Success by Living with Purpose by the one and only Jairek Robbins. It sounds like you’re not even 40 yet.

I’m not. I only turned 38 in 2022.

Knowledge through the Decades is going to be short with this guy. One thing we do as a technique on our show that I don’t think anybody else is doing is we do this thing called Knowledge Through The Decades as we’re finishing up.

I only have three.

I know. That’s what I’m saying. This is going to be perfect. It will allow me to follow up and expand because, considering your position, what you’ve done and accomplished, you obviously have a lot to say. You’ve dropped some unbelievably great nuggets for our GAPers in this episode and we can’t thank you enough.

What this process is, I ask you about the stages of your life from 0 to 30. We can maybe go to 38 if you want. What’s the attitude lesson that is out there for people to learn? You probably don’t remember being born, but my guess is you’ve studied birth and what being reborn is. What I want to know is, what’s the attitude lesson of a newborn baby or of being born, in your opinion?

If I could split that into three chunks, it might be helpful. Let’s say 0 to 10 or 0 to 13.

I’m going to ask you about your attitude lesson at 10, 20, and 30.

That’s perfect. We’ll do 0 to 10.

It could also just be zero. When you think about being born, what’s the attitude lesson of being born? Do you have children?

I do. I have a two-year-old.

Do you remember when that baby was born? What the attitude lesson was when that baby came out or when you came out? That’s what we’re getting at.

I have a weird attitude lesson as a father. We had a home birth and the doctor signed in the legal contract that the father must catch the baby. He was on his way out. There was a brief moment where he was in the middle of coming out but not completely sliding out yet. The doctor said, “Go ahead and pull your son out.” I looked at him. I had both hands ready to catch.

I played baseball, and I was like, “I’m hands up. I’m ready. I’m fielding this thing. It’s coming up fast. I’m going to get him.” He said, “Go ahead and pull your son out.” I looked at the doctor and went, “You said catch, not pull.” He goes, “Help mom out, dad. Pull your son out.” I said, “Pull? I could hurt him.” He goes, “You’re not going to hurt him. He’ll be warm, wet, and slippery. Pull him out. Let’s go.” I had the experience. I have a picture that I had the ability to pull my son out and hold him. His little arms were straight up and I was holding him the moment he arrived. It was a beautiful experience.

I came out via C-section because I was entering the world upside down when I came through. I was supposed to be at home and water birth. My midwife blacked out because she didn’t know what to do when I was coming out feet first. I got rushed to the hospital, pulled out via C-section, and put in an incubator. They forgot to plug the incubator in for some reason, and my father was holding me for the first many hours of my life. Without him physically wrapping his hands around me, I would not have made it. His hands kept me warm as I survived my first many hours of life there.

Looking back on what I know about that, our ability to support each other and set up the right foundation from the beginning is a major attitude lesson. With young people, how do we help support them in building the right foundation? How do we help provide a space for them to figure out what they need to learn to get their legs underneath them?

When my son was learning to walk, part of our opportunity was how we set up the environment around him that gave him the ability to stand up and fall over and learn resilience and effort without him being harmed in the process. The attitude at zero is, can you set up an environment to give someone the opportunity to make enough mistakes that they learn how to get their feet underneath themselves?

That is awesome. It can apply as kids grow too. I want you to think back to being ten years old. You’re in 3rd or 4th grade. I’d love to know what happened to you at ten. Was there a story, a teacher, or a bully? What was the attitude lesson for Jairek Robbins at ten years old?

I had trouble in school. I don’t know if I was or am dyslexic, but I had trouble reading. I had trouble comprehending in third grade. I remember they made me wear special glasses with little pin holes in them and use a ruler to read line by line because I couldn’t get my eyes and brain to do it right. I remember my fourth-grade teacher, who was my best friend’s mom, recommended that I get put in special ed because I wasn’t comprehending the information quickly enough. I remember those things as I was growing up through 3rd or 4th grade.

What’s most important at that level and chunk of life is learning how to create social bonds. All of us will have different skillsets, strengths, and weaknesses, but if we can learn how to create a community and social bonds, then my weakness is someone else’s strength and their strength is my weakness. If we can learn how to work together, we can accomplish anything we want to accomplish. It starts with the ability to build a powerful and proper social bond. I might not have been good at reading, but the kid next to me might have aced at reading. They might not have been able to handle the bully, but I was big enough that bullies tend not to mess around. We could pair up together. All of a sudden, we got a great relationship working there.

Who was your best friend at ten? What was his or her name? 

Eric. I don’t remember his last name. He lived in Monrovia, California. We used to go to his house. He taught me how to play this game. I don’t even know the name of the game, but it’s the game where there are these little black and white chips.

Othello.

He taught me how to play that, so we’d go to his house and play that. I was so jealous because his parents had him taking piano lessons every day. I’d have to wait while he finished the piano lesson before we’d get to play Othello together. I thought it was so cool that he learned piano at that age. We played Othello, and it was pretty fun.

Friends at ten are something. Was there a teacher when you were at 9, 10, or 11 that made a profound impact on you? If so, what was his or her name, and what was the impact?

The teacher I remember was the one who was with me after school every day with those glasses on and a ruler trying to teach me how to read. She was probably 60-something years old. Bless her heart because I was probably not the easiest student. I’d get upset and frustrated because it wasn’t clicking. It was not landing. I became a super learner later in life, but at that stage, it wasn’t my gift.

It sounds like she gave you a lot of compassion and patience.

She had a lot of patience in dealing with me and how I was behaving back then.

I want you to fast forward. You’re twenty years old. It’s almost legal to drink, depending on what state you’re in. I’d love to know if you remember your twentieth birthday. What were you doing? You’re coaching people at this point or very close to coaching. What was the attitude lesson you took from being twenty?

I was dialed in at twenty. I was going to bed at 10:00 PM and waking up at 5:00 AM. My roommates in college hated me because my alarm would go off at 5:45 AM. I’d go for a run and come back at 6:00 AM, 6:30 AM, or 6:45 AM. I was making vegetable juice with a juicer in the kitchen of our apartment, and all my roommates were like, “What is wrong with you? We’re trying to sleep.” I was up at 5:00 AM or 5:30, going for my run and doing my mindset activities. I was time-chunking every day. I was dialed into performance.

I was going to school all day. In between my classes, I was sprinting home, doing my coaching calls, studying a little bit, grabbing a snack, and going right back to class. I knew how long it took me minute by minute to do my grocery shopping at Sprouts Market in Pacific Beach. I knew exactly how long it took me to get my laundry done. I had everything measured, tracked, and completely dialed in for every moment of every day of the week.

That is not an answer we get with most people in their twenties, but nonetheless pretty fantastic. I’m trying to think where to go with that one. What college did you go to?

The University of San Diego.

Do you still go visit there? Do you support the University of San Diego?

I do support them. It is fun seeing people having that educational opportunity. That school is very special. It’s a small private school on the hill overlooking the ocean. I remember when my dad came to visit for the first time. He looked around and was like, “Is this a school or a country club? What the shit is this place?”

Are you the gauchos? Is that the University of San Diego?

No. We were the Toreros. It’s a very small Catholic private school. I’m not Catholic, but I went there. One of my favorite classes I took was a required class for everybody to graduate. At a Catholic school taught by a Buddhist monk, it was a class on the major World Religions. Part of the course is we had to go sit in many other religious ceremonies to experience what it’s like in their practice. It was one of the coolest experiences because I got to go sit in on a temple, mass, meditation, and all these different practices. It was beautiful to see how so many different people practice getting to a similar place in so many different ways.

I’m with you. I did the same thing. I went to Catholic schools, but when you started studying other religions, that opened up the whole world.

In that period of life, I also did a Semester at Sea. It was a cruise ship where you take your classes on-board for the university. We went all the way around the world. We did 10 countries in 110 days. That was fun for psychology because I got to study collectivist communities where people are very similar and try not to stand out. We got to go into Japan and China and be like, “It’s true. It does work this way.”

I took a class on Human Sexuality. It’s how people flirt with each other in different countries, interact, and communicate when it comes to mating, connecting, and building intimate relationships. It’s very different in Japan where people put up a photograph of the rice cooker as their profile picture versus when you go to South Africa and meet people and connect. It’s a different way. I was like, “This is amazing.” It’s neat to take the book and make it into reality in front of you where you get to see it in motion.

I saw in your history that you had done some volunteering in Uganda. We’ve had on our show the CEO of Feed My Starving Children. We’ve had a lot of groups that dealt with starvation that are third-world country generated. I’d love it if you could encapsulate the memory. What did you learn? How old were you when you were there? What did you learn? What was the attitude lesson about spending time and doing what you did down there? Share with us a little bit about that.

It was right after Semester at Sea. I was probably twenty years old or somewhere right in there. Maybe 20 or 21. I took a trip around the world and came back to San Diego. USD is a very affluent school, so after seeing how the majority of humans live in the world, I came home listening to friends talk about UGG boots, TV shows, and lattes. I was like, “Why are we wasting our thoughts on this crap? I need to go help people that are hungry.” I packed up all my stuff and was like, “I got to go.”

I looked online and found it. It was called Student Partnership Worldwide at that time. It was an organization you could join to go live in a rural, underdeveloped region of the world and volunteer or help. You could help in the orphanages, rural farms, and medical skills. They had lists of things they needed help with. I like being outside, so I decided to help in the organic farming department.

I signed up and moved to Uganda. I got two weeks of training with the government on how to help under the current circumstances. The farmers get the best response from their land. A few years prior, someone from the UK and the US came over. They sold all the local farmers illegal pesticides that had been banned in both the US and the UK because they poisoned the land and produce and killed off the whole situation. They knowingly sold this to the farmers there to try to get it off their balance sheet. These farmers used it. It killed all the coffee plantations, which was a thriving business before, poisoned the land, and screwed up the whole local economy.

We were in there on behalf of the government, working with them to show them how to retail the land, reorganize their farms, get the poisons out and get it healthy, and use organic pesticides. There were people still living in mud huts at that time, so smoke inhalation was a big cause of ailment, disease, and breakdown of the lungs and body. We were teaching people how to build kitchen stoves with a chimney that goes out of the hut so that they can cook without breathing all the smoke. We showed them how to build kitchen gardens, barrel gardens, and do all kinds of stuff. We were out there to farm and show people exactly how to rebuild their farms, livelihoods, and business, hopefully.  

That’s real hands-on work. It certainly seems like it’s a metaphor for your life and what you’re doing. Maybe that could be your next book, like, “What I learned in Uganda.” The people and their spirit, what was the attitude lesson? I’m guessing they weren’t sad, defeated, or downtrodden. What was the emotional component of those people when you interacted with them? Did you feel like you were coaching them to stay positive or to look at things in a different way?

They were not trusting of us when we got there because the last group that went there and sold them a bunch of crap killed off all their land and business. We showed up, and they were like, “Why should we trust you? The last person screwed us.” I was like, “I don’t know, but we’re here to help. If we can help, let us, and we’ll show you what we can do.” We had to earn their trust. We had to show up and serve, not just try to show up and pretend like we were special in any way. We showed up in service and helped.

Something major that I learned there, and it was taught to us by the government there, is if you want to transform the village, educate and empower the women. I heard it a bunch of times in training, but the real experience was it took us probably 20 or 30 minutes to convince a 55 or 60-year-old male farmer to walk 25 feet down the road to come to learn something. It was like dragging a donkey. We were trying to convince this dude to come to do something that he didn’t want to do. He wasn’t entertained or engaged. He sat there and rolled his eyes. It was hard.

I remember we had a meeting set with a women’s group. When we arrived, there was a blanket set out. There were twenty women there. As we went around the group and got to know them, one of the women walked with four children, carrying all of her tools and 50 pounds of stuff with her for five miles that morning to be there at 5:00 AM to have the opportunity to learn for 1 hour.

I was like, “One of them is willing to do what it takes to make this happen and like a stubborn donkey. We’re trying to drag him down a dirt road that he doesn’t want to go down.” I saw the difference and I learned very powerfully. These women were dedicated to making their villages and families better. These guys were struggling to even be willing to listen. I learned there’s power. When you want to elevate the village, educate and empower the women.

GAPers, the question is, which one are you? Are you the woman carrying or the guy that’s planting his seed and not even watering it? That’s a profound story. Thank you for that. Let’s move to 30. We’ll go to 38, and I’ll get you out of here. I need to respect your time. Do you remember turning 30? What was your attitude lesson when you turned 30? What was going on in your life? What was the epiphany when you’re like, “I do remember being 30. This is something I went through and here’s what I learned?”

I met my wife ten years ago on this day of 2022. That would mean I was 28. I was two years away from 30. At 30, my wife and I were about to get engaged and within the space of planning a wedding. One of the coolest things I learned in that period of life was to create a bucket list for each stage of life. It’s to say, “As a single man before I met my wife, what is the bucket list of everything I want to accomplish, be, do, have, experience, develop, give, and be a part of? What is the bucket list of everything I want to create and experience in my life before I’m engaged?”

When we were dating, I said, “What’s the bucket list of everything I want to see, be, do, have, experience, create, develop, and be a part of before we get engaged?” We did it. When we got engaged, I said, “Before we get married, I’m in no rush here. What’s your bucket list? What’s my bucket list of everything we want to experience before we get married?”

When we first got married, I said, “Let’s write out our bucket list of everything we want to do before we become parents.” Now that we have one child, we’ve done the same. I was like, “What is our bucket list of everything we want to do, be, have, experience, create, develop, and design before we choose to have another kid or stay with one?”

That’s such a great answer. We got a lot of GAPers, including my son, that’s getting ready to walk down the aisle.

He better act fast. 

He doesn’t have a lot to do. This will probably air right around his wedding date, but I think that’s such a beautiful mindset and plan. It’s certainly a way to bridge the gap from who you are to who you want to become. Plan it, identify it, and write it down. Jairek, you’re 38. You’ve become the President of SUCCESS Enterprises, a huge operation. I’m sure you feel enormous responsibility.

Talk to our GAPers about this. You’re taking on a pretty big deal. You’re evolving this whole thing called SUCCESS Coaching. You’re going to be growing it. What’s the attitude lesson with those GAPers out there that are taking on an enormous responsibility, starting something new, and evolving? What’s the attitude you’re taking into this? I know you’re going to be successful in this interview. I know you’re going to take SUCCESS to where it needs to be. I’m so excited that you’re doing that, but what’s the mindset, training, or coaching for our people that are going to do something phenomenal in their life?

Before I stepped over to do this, I’ve properly built multiple businesses of our own. We were in a position where we didn’t need to do this. Doing this technically doesn’t make a whole lot of sense financially and time-wise for us. My first response was when they tried to bring me over, I said, “Thank you, but no. I’m busy. I’m focused. I love what I do. I’m good. I appreciate it. I’m happy to contribute, but I’m not going to come run it.” I had a mentor of mine say, “You better rethink that one. That one is worth doing.” I look at him like, “Seriously?”

I’ve optimized the hell out of my businesses. I was working 3 days a week, 4 hours a day. I had it completely dialed in. We have multimillion-dollar businesses. I was like, “I’m good. I live on an island in Puerto Rico. We live on the beach. We surf. I’m a dedicated father and husband. That has the majority of my time, effort, energy, and thought each day. Why would I mess this up?” He said, “I’m going to give you some old man wisdom and you can either take it or not take it. You will be able to help more people by doing this than not doing this.” He hit me in my sweet spot.

What’s interesting with that is it’s true. I looked at the trajectory of where I was headed. I looked at the impact I was making. I said, “If I choose to combine efforts with this organization, what kind of multiplier will it have on the positive benefit I can have in this society? By choosing collaboration, how will the positive difference multiply?” There’s no way I could look at that equation whereby not choosing it did it multiply any better than choosing it.

I went, “Darn it. I fully optimized the heck out of my lifestyle. I was solid financially and our businesses were pumping along, but I’m about to mess everything up to be able to multiply the powerful, positive difference we can make in people’s lives.” That was the 38-year-old lesson. Be willing to shake up the snow globe and mess up what was damn near perfection, in my opinion, to have the ability to serve others.

Maybe it was a blessing or there was a higher power working within you for the past couple of years to get you dialed in so you could do what you’re doing. If everything wasn’t perfect, you might have said, “There’s no way I can even do this.”

It is cool because our other businesses are up and running, and I have the capacity to come in and do this. You’re right. If it wasn’t dialed in, there was no way I could have done it. I’d been working with my mentor for eight years in 2022. If someone had caught me eight years ago, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t have the business chops to be able to do something like this if I’m honest. All the experience of living it, applying it, dialing in other businesses, and helping coach and dial in other people’s companies got me ready that I can handle a company like this. I know what it takes to dial it in. 

This has been so great. We’re with Jairek Robbins. He’s an author, speaker, and the President of SUCCESS Enterprises. We always like to take this opportunity to close the show for you to talk directly to our GAPers or to the person that’s sitting in a coffee shop, bar, beach, or laundromat that’s trying to bridge the gap. What I want you to do is talk to them or speak to them directly about your hope for them and their life. Is there any positive message of hope that you would like to give our readers?

When it comes to a positive message of hope, take some time to figure out what has to happen to be able to answer yes to the following three questions. What has to happen for you to feel that you can say yes to, “I am enough, I have enough, and I’m loved enough.” When we take time as humans to fill our own cups, we can say, “As a human being, I have enough to live the life I want to live. As a human being, I am loved enough. My cup is overflowing and I’m pouring love onto others all day long. As a human being, I’ve decided I am enough by being who I am each day. It’s not by what I do or what I accomplish, but by being a human being.”

Once you can check those three boxes, you see human beings elevate to a point where they want to help serve and care for others. If you see any peculiar behavior from people, it’s generally either they don’t feel like they have enough, they are enough, or they’re loved. If you can help them fill those cups instantly, you’ll get a better version of them.

That is so good. I want to thank you for bringing caring, carrying the torch forward, and bringing the light to the show. Jairek Robbibs, thank you so much for your time. We will be following Success.com. If you need a coach, go to the website and get your coach. If you want to start a career in coaching, go to Coaching.Success.com. Maybe you can become a partner with Jairek and what he is doing. Thanks so much. We will talk to you soon.

Thank you.

Important Links

• SUCCESS Magazine
• The Complete Guide to Activating High Performance
• Live It! Achieve Success by Living with Purpose
• Spotify – Get Attitude Podcast with Glenn Bill
• Coaching.Success.com
• Certification – SUCCESS Coaching
• Semester at Sea
• Glenn@GlennBill.com
• www.JasonAaron.pro 

About Jairek Robbins

He is a Best-Selling author. FastCompany calls him inspiring and says he’ll make your life less ordinary. Forbes says Jairek will teach you how to succeed. Deepak Chopra will advise you to go to Jairek to help create meaning and fulfillment in your life. Brian Tracy applauds Jairek’s ability to teach people how to develop meaning and purpose in life, and then to make a difference in the lives of others.