Life Direction with Stu Massengill, Trainer for Tony Robbins | The 5 AM Miracle with Jeff Sanders
[Applause] where are you heading right now do you have a clear direction for your life my guest this week is a cancer survivor a national trainer for tony robbins and host of a podcast all about ensuring that you will end up where you want to go this is the 5 am miracle episode number 353 life direction with stu massengild good morning i am jeff sanders and this is the podcast dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast my guest today is a national trainer for tony robbins and hosts a podcast called finding direction where he interviews people who live passionate and fulfilling lives and learns tactics from them about how to find one’s direction in life he’s also a cancer survivor and has learned how to beat the odds to thrive cancer-free while traveling the world teaching corporations and influential people how to master the skills they need to succeed in business and in life stu mason gill welcome to the show thank you man i appreciate you having me out so let’s just jump right in with your story of battling cancer this is always one i think that people can relate to in a lot of different ways and i want to kind of walk through that to begin the conversation with a lot to tackle today but let’s just start there and kind of lean into uh the rest of your life story from there yeah so for me i was uh i’m 27 years old now i was diagnosed with testicular cancer three days before my 24th birthday and basically to give like a a pre-frame i was uh basically on this big kick in my life where i was like i’m gonna go travel the world i’m gonna find myself right yada yada that whole adventure and uh finally get to new zealand the place i’d wanted to go literally my entire life my entire existence for some odd reason i wanted to go there and three days into being there i basically realized something wasn’t right with my body um basically if you’re a guy listening to this just make sure to check yourself down there that’s the best way i would explain it um it’s definitely important because testicular cancer is actually a pretty a pretty common thing in in younger men um but yeah i saw that and you know realized that something wasn’t good i had a skydiving appointment the next morning so i went and went skydiving of course um and then after that went to the doctor went to the hospital and that’s when they were like all right next plane you know get on it go home you’re gonna have to have some surgeries and some treatment done and yeah that’s kind of when that whole thing started and for me the whole journey of cancer um you know if anybody’s facing it or anybody’s you know going through it knows someone that’s going through it one of the most interesting parts for me was it didn’t affect my mental state in a crazy way i’m like obsessed with personal development but the biggest thing that affected me was how it affected others around me and so you know one one specific example i have is you know i went to the doctor when i got back to california and you know they told me officially that i had testicular cancer and i remember i was walking into my living room i was like back with my family and my brother gets up out of this chair turns around looks at me and just has this look on his face of like you have cancer and for me what the words i heard from him was like you might die and i’m such a massive believer that the seeds that are planted in our mind really do grow so the biggest thing i had to do for my family and you know anybody that’s going through something like this is i just had to tell them like don’t treat me any differently don’t treat me like i have something that i could die from like this is just something we’re gonna go through it’s gonna add to my story of my life um but let’s not freak out and like get all crazy and so yeah you know long story short i had a couple surgeries um you know recovery and all that was probably six months to a year it wasn’t super crazy um and i would say the biggest thing i learned from it just so we don’t go too far down a rabbit hole is just like the importance of vulnerability when creating connections with other humans because i was sort of trying to in my life figure out how do i create more connection with humans i kind of felt like i lost how to have friendship from another experience i had in my life and i just realized through all this cancer stuff that if you can be vulnerable and open with people um sometimes we want to put up this shell and we want to put up this you know whatever um but it’s when we’re really vulnerable that that’s when we really actually create connection with people and so um yeah like i said we could go down a rabbit hole here but i’ll leave it at that another yeah that’s a great way to kind of yeah find a silver lining and all of that in the sense that i think you’re definitely right that the more open we can be with others and share our stories that the more that people connect and that’s partly why i have a podcast and trying to get people to you know to relate to others in different ways i think you have obviously a great personal story with that um i think it’s interesting you mentioned that others were affected even more than you were which i think is an interesting example because i think a lot of our personal experiences can be that way where we internalize it differently than others on the outside who probably assume the worst i mean have you recovered well now to the sense that you’re you’re beyond cancer or where are you today yeah so i’m beyond cancer today i’m all healthy you know i had a couple years of follow-up um and and i’m all good today and it is interesting what you said like you know i try to put myself in the place sometimes if i had a friend that you know was like i got testicular cancer i think my natural instinct not knowing what i know today would be like holy crap like you know like just the word cancer you think like the person might die um you know so it’s kind of interesting to look at it in that perspective but i think that was the biggest thing for me is just having the people around me be like hey jill don’t freak out we’re going to get through this stay positive um and i know you know obviously you’re big in the personal development world as well so you know that was massively helpful yeah and speaking of that personal development world i want to shift gears here probably a pretty dramatic way and go to tony robbins i know there’s another topic i wanted to hit today for sure and this is one where you know you have been working as a national trainer with tony robbins um how did that come about how did you make that connection i’m very personally curious about that but and also like how does that work in your world today working with tony yeah totally so i’ll give a quick story basically seven years ago i was in a network marketing company and i was introduced to you know tony robbins all these personal development people and i’d gone to tony’s upw event it’s like his unleash the power event um you know it’s like three and a half days 50 hours fully immersive you walk on fire like all all the works and uh it massively impacted the quality of my life and it was interesting that every time i had a major shift in my life it was always going to a tony robbins event like even when i had cancer i went to one of tony’s event and i kind of got the realization that brought me back to finding peace with that situation and then i was trying to figure out my life in another point i went to another tony robbins event and i figured it out and so you know tony had impacted my life so much that you know to to make a long story short i was taught this concept of modeling and if you want to be successful you find someone who has what you want and if you model them you can compress decades into years or even months and so for me that was tony and so the way i got connected with tony to get technical into that is i am a massive massive massive believer that you can open any door of opportunity that you want through very good communication and networking and so i knew i wanted to work with tony and so i had a friend that had a friend that had a friend whose friend just happened to be the person that i now work with in the role that i do with tony and so for me it was just sort of getting connected through people and then once i got connected with them it was just a matter of like all right what are the skills you have how can you add value because i think that’s the biggest thing at the end of the day is like how how much value are you adding and i’d say you know that kind of tails into one of the biggest things that i have learned from tony working with him is he says in order to be successful in business you need to add more value than anybody else like add more valuable than anyone else that is in your marketplace and if you do that and you massively massively over deliver that’s when you can start to create this raving fan culture and really build you know for some of us a legacy or build the company out that we want but it’s really looking at how can i add more value than anybody else and just over deliver on everything yeah that’s a great great lesson to learn there for sure i know a lot of people that they want certain things in life you don’t know how to pursue it i think it’s it’s interesting that you just went almost directly after it to say how do i make this connection you know a friend of a friend of a friend or whatever it takes like let’s just wiggle my way into there because that’s what i want and i’m going to find a way to make it happen even that kind of sense of just the proactive nature of saying you know i have identified something in my life that i think would be beneficial let me just lean into that even that simple example i think is a powerful one to get you to where you are and speaking of that what do you what’s your current role with tony and how does that work for you in terms of your day-to-day yeah um so pre obviously we’re in corona world now so things have changed a bit because we are in the business of live events um usually our smallest events are you know 10 000 people and so obviously because of the pandemic that has significantly changed and so um pre corona you know i would travel 340 days a year with tony and basically go into companies you know fortune 500 or smaller companies and basically train on tony’s content now you know tony goes out to an event with 10 000 people normally you know they pay millions of dollars and you know you got to be uh pretty incredible to like lock him down for an event and so basically what i do there’s myself there’s six of us total national trainers uh we basically go in when it’s not that large of a venue and we basically train on tony’s content and so the event i mentioned before upw it’s 50 hours of you know full immersion we basically take that event and we comprise it into um you know about 90 minute sessions that we do with people and so that’s some of the big work that we do is really going in and you know one thing that we’ve seen is a lot of the times in life whether it’s a business you’re you’re building or or physical activity or exercise or whatever most of the time we as humans we know what we need to do but we don’t do it right and that’s not like an every time thing but a lot of the times we have things in our life we want to pursue and we really know how to do it but we don’t do what we know and the truth is it’s not a lack of knowledge it’s not a lack of wisdom or resources right it’s that there’s underlying things that are really the root of what’s stopping us to take action and so one of the biggest things we go in is we help people look at what are the things that are actually stopping you from taking action for some people just to give a couple examples it could be you know a fear of failure or fear of success or some people you know it’s procrastination or feeling like they have no time um there’s some of these things that are the underlying things that actually stop people from executing and so our goal when we work with people is you know how do we cut that off so you actually start taking the actions that you need to to get the results you really want in your life yeah i think that’s a really powerful lesson there i mean just the idea of fear by itself i think is probably one of the biggest things that i’ve seen i’m working with my clients is that that’s that’s the thing it’s not a lack of knowledge is no longer the excuse because we have so much knowledge today it’s just unbelievable and so yeah what i’ve seen i am personally and with others i’ve worked with it’s like that the fear aspect is always the one that holds people back the most i mean for you personally how what do you do when you have those moments like do you have like a mantra you say to yourself or you have like an action step to take like how do you personally like get over the fear aspect there yeah i love that so the first thing i would say is if you’re listening to this and you have some fear that has shown up then i’ll kind of walk you through this and this is how i do it with myself the first thing that i would say you want to ask yourself is why is that fear showing up and if we go back to caveman era let’s say the reason that fear shows up is it’s to protect us as a human being right back in the day fear rose up it was like cybertuse uh tiger whatever is coming to eat you like you gotta you gotta act on this fear so that you can survive but now in the world that we’re in today fear fear shows up in different ways and so the first thing you want to acknowledge is why is that fear showing up well it’s showing up because my mind is saying let me protect us right because the goal of our brain is survival right so first you got to acknowledge all right my brain’s trying to protect me to survive right we don’t like being uncomfortable so if this is pushing you to be uncomfortable there’s that fear that rises up and now the second thing that i think is extraordinarily powerful is you really do want to acknowledge and think this fear for showing up because it’s it’s got us as humans to where we are today so a simple exercise you could do when fear shows up they say you know i acknowledge that this is fear and i thank this fear for being here but i must do this anyway because and then you just go on a ramp right you just go i must do this because x y z because it’s going to impact life because it’s going to help people because it’s going to allow me to live the life i truly want it’s going to allow me to provide for my kids whatever that list is for you and then you really start to build up the reasons why you must do this rather than why you let fear take advantage of it and so that’s one of the things i do and another simple one is sometimes we look at everything and we go you know what if this goes wrong what if i fail what if i you know don’t succeed but maybe you shift it and you look at a different perspective and you go what if it goes right and maybe you look at it in that frame of mind right what if things go right what are all the incredible things that could happen so i think those are two two little things that i do when fear shows up and i think for people that have fear shown up those are some things that you can implement immediately i love that idea of why i must do this and that’s an interesting framework to even put your mind through because i think that for a lot of us that’s you know when the fear shows up it’s all of those reasons why i can’t and why i shouldn’t and and to to reframe that too i i must do this this is happening and here’s why i mean that this is similar to the way that i work through i mean the goals that i do is i write down a huge checklist of all the action steps i want to take and feel like even just that simple exercise makes it more real and tangible to say here are things i can actively do to put myself in that position to make action happen i think even that simplicity of it it’s really powerful it’s amazing how simple we are as a human beings like reframe something and then all of a sudden we’re excited about it yeah exactly and sometimes you know when fear shows up we get into this such like this emotional sort of place and we can’t think straight and you know we like fear sort of just cripples us in a sense and so you know if you if you ask your brain a question you’re going to get an answer right sometimes we ask ourselves oh why am i not good at this and your your brain always gives you a question an answer for the question tony says the quality of our life is determined by the quality of our questions so as you dive into this fear right and you go i acknowledge you but why must i do this your brain’s going to get out of that emotional sort of crippled state and it’s going to provide you with answers on why you must do this and then that’s that can help you get some more of that clarity so one thing i know that you are are passionate about as well is just cultivating a healthy mindset and that’s one thing that i have been focused on a lot especially in the last few months with corona is that i think it’s very easy for us to fall into unhealthy traps in our mind consuming too much news or negativity or whatever the case may be how do you find yourself in a place where you can maybe you’re not blocking everything but a place where you can like healthily you know process what’s going on yeah uh for me one of my mentors he said stu if you’re watching the news all the time and the news starts watching you you’re you’re watching too much news so um i try not to dive into the news too much you know i i stay relevant and you know updated as far as like social media stuff like that that’s kind of my biggest outlet um but i would say one of the things i’ve really done to i know you’re you know big in productivity and obviously in corona there’s this this kind of weird place we fall into where our workplace is now our home space and it’s also our family space and everything kind of blends together um and i know for some of the people on this that are listening to this podcast they’re achievers and so i like to think of myself as an achiever and one of the biggest game changers that i’ve had that’s increased the quality of my life the quality of my production in the last you know i would say 30 days with all this corona stuff is tapping into something that i’m starting to call micro wins being basically what that is is you know as an achiever sometimes we are so focused we’re so driven we’re so hungry for the thing that we want to accomplish like it doesn’t like it doesn’t matter if we have to spend freaking 18 hours five days a week we’re freaking achievers we’re going to make it happen and so one of the things that i’ve started to pick up with these micro wins is i think we all have those days where maybe our day didn’t go quite as we wanted or maybe we had this big meeting that didn’t go just as ideal as we wanted to or maybe we had this you know something in our life that didn’t go as amazing and we have all these other things in our day that we crushed it on whether it was a big crush or a little crush and as an achiever sometimes we get caught up in like oh like you know i didn’t do as well at that or i could have done better at this or that didn’t go perfect right sometimes we get caught up in this perfectionism thing but what i’ve started to implement into my day is at the end of the day no matter how well my day went i look at what are three things today that i just dominated that i crushed that i could celebrate as a win whether that’s you know oh my god i had an incredible conversation with my girlfriend today or it could be you know i got outside and i exercised or it could be like man i closed a major deal today but it’s celebrating what is a couple micro wins or big wins because another thing tony teaches clearly i work with tony i’m basically just regurgitating his stuff but is that failure cannot breed success and as an achiever sometimes we get so caught into i need to do this the right way the perfect way i need to execute at the level 10 and if we don’t do it exactly how we want even though we may have still done some really good work we sometimes get caught up in this you know looking at the failure looking at the one wrong rather than the nine rights and so my philosophy that i’ve started to change to is this concept 20 teachers again which is success breeds success so it’s like at the end of every single day look at what are a couple micro wins what are a couple things that i could just be so amped and stoked and celebrate today because then when you go tomorrow now that success whether big or small allows you to breed more success yeah i think that’s so important to focus on the positive like that i know that’s it’s such a and you mentioned the idea of being a perfectionist i think that that speaks so many volumes to high achievers because we want to be the a plus students and that was my story growing up is that i felt that need to be that kind of perfect student which then and you know once i was an adult and trying to pursue a career in other bigger things that followed with me to my own detriment and i think it holds me back in a lot of ways because then you’re afraid to take risks which then makes things very difficult you’re trying to pursue big goals i love the idea of microwaves i think it’s really powerful to really just keep yourself focused on on what’s going on that’s well that’s good in your life and speaking of that one thing i know that i’ve done a lot of in the last by 10 years or so is lean on i mean tony robbins is a good example of this of personal growth materials of books of speakers of podcasts of you know just kind of trying to flood my mind with positivity do you have certain habits or books you lean on or things that you try to do to keep that positivity kind of flowing into your your brain all the time yeah i would say the biggest practice that i have and you know some people talk about these things like non-negotiables for me one of the practices i have you know every single day obviously you know i’m not perfect i miss some days but what i try to do every single day is this practice called priming and if you’re not familiar with it just go on youtube type in tony robbins priming but it’s a simple exercise in the morning and it takes 10 minutes right so for some of us achievers maybe you need to hear this is that if you don’t have 10 minutes maybe you don’t have a life right if you don’t have 10 minutes you can take for yourself to like ground yourself then you need 20 right and so the simple exercise you do a couple breathing exercises and then you really dive into you know eyes closed you dive into what are three things that you could be really grateful for today and when you dive into that part of it is you want to have at least one thing you’re grateful for that’s just something really small because as achievers again sometimes we get caught up in i need to do this and then i’ll celebrate her i need to do this massive thing and then i’ll be happy but the reality is if we can’t find happiness or fulfillment in the little things we’re in trouble and so that’s one of the parts of the three gratitude is what is something really small you could be happy about maybe it’s oh my god look at the grass in the front yard how incredible is that that grass grows out of the ground right and then on another end of it you want to celebrate and be grateful for a big accomplishment right we got to celebrate these things that we’re winning in our life whether it’s something you’re doing in your business or whatever so first part of it three things you’re grateful for the second part of the exercise which is the next you know three and a third minute is you feel the energy in your body right just feel healing energy or maybe feel like a white or a gold or a blue light coming into the top of your head going through your body and just healing your body and then you push that energy out to people around you in your life right so you give love give light to others that’s the second part of the exercise and the third the last three and a half minutes is visualizing three things you want to create in your life as if you are already there right so as if you’re you’re in your mind you are at that lake house that you’ve always wanted and you can see you know where’s the couch where is um your bed you know what’s going on where is what’s a coffee maker look like right and you fully just immerse yourself into what does that that place look like and for me that that is a practice that that i i implement every single day um that i would say is is the most bank for my buck it’s 10 minutes every day doesn’t take a lot of time but i come out about every single day just grounded ready to rock my day if i’ve had four hours of sleep i get energy from it so i can like go crank out but for me that that’s probably the biggest practice yeah that’s a powerful one i know that’s that that i’ve seen that before the video on youtube with tony doing that exercise and i’ve seen there’s a documentary on netflix i haven’t seen that one i’ll put that in the show notes page as well it was a great one from tony where he goes through part of that practice and i think that that the simplicity of that is really powerful too just the idea of taking 10 minutes to yeah prime yourself for your day there’s one aspect of it i want to ask you about which is the visualization because i know that one issue that i’ve had personally that others have had as well is when we visualize things that aren’t true yet like part of my brain feels like i’m lying to myself about what might be true like is there a way that you can i guess visualize the future that isn’t true yet in a way it doesn’t feel like that cognitive dissonance of like i’m not that good yet yeah so basically the first time you start to do this or let’s say you’re you know haven’t done this for long what i’ve picked up this is just my personal experience is as you start to go into that visualization your visualization is going to be cloudy in the beginning the reason being is because this isn’t a practice you’ve done and if we look from like a neuroscience instance you have neural pathways connections that are made in your brain that when you start to visualize your brain goes no idiot this you don’t have this this is not real stop trying to do this this is not something you have right because that’s your old literally neurological pathways that are in your brain now part of the reason this is called priming is because if you look into the human body and don’t quote me on these um but it’s basically like our cells our skin cells are replaced every two months our internal organs the cells from those are literally entirely new every six months the hair follicles that we have are new every month right and like i said don’t quote me on those specific numbers but basically what i’m getting at is our body is continually evolving the person you were a year ago is entirely different literally from a cell standpoint than the person you are today so as you get into this visualization thing and at first your brain goes nope not true stop doing this it’s cloudy it’s murky you can’t visualize it that’s why you do this as a daily practice because you do it for a week and then maybe you do it for two weeks and then maybe do it for a month and then by the time you continue to practice this you are literally from a scientific standpoint building new neurological pathways in your brain so that eventually you get to the point and you go into this visualization visualization experience and it’s it’s clearer than daylight right whatever you’re visualizing now there’s a second half of that right we say law of attraction and there’s a lot of of goda so it’s not just visualizing you have to actually leave this practice and like execute but i i think that um you know if you’re achiever you’re listening to this you know that it takes the work so yeah certainly that’s a really good point i love the just the the scientific angle of knowing that our bodies are changing i mean that’s that’s the kind of data point that someone like me can grab a hold of and say okay if i know that i’m literally changing then there is there’s a purpose behind this practice i think a lot of people when it comes to i know healthy habits or specific mantras or affirmations there’s this sense of like well this is kind of woo-woo this is weird this is you know i just feel like i’m wasting my time versus saying like i’m literally changing my brain i think that completely shifts kind of the reason behind why you would do an activity like this is because it literally changes your life i know that there’s another area of this that i want to discuss which is passion because this is an area of life where i have gone back and forth between like am i pursuing passions in my life of things i want to i care about or am i kind of creating my future and i say that because i talked to a guest in this podcast a few months ago who was trying to break down the difference between like are we creating our future or following like a path that’s preset and i want to hear like your take on that or maybe tony’s take on it as well of like if we’re stuck in a place where we don’t know what our next big step should be like how do we break down what to do next because i feel like that’s a big struggle with high achievers as well as saying i have a thousand ideas which one do i pursue or i want to be successful what does that mean in my life um so you have anything on that that would help us kind of get the ball rolling in that direction yeah so my my advice my two cents on that we could go down a very large rabbit hole on this um but sometimes i think you know as an entrepreneur or someone that’s starting a business we get caught in this dilemma of oh i have so many things i want to do i don’t know which one but if we go back to what we’re talking about a little earlier in the podcast oftentimes we know what to do but we don’t do what we know and the reason is there’s these underlying beliefs that stop us from executing so i’m not saying this is the case for the person that’s listening to this and you know has all these different ideas but you want to ask yourself is there a sense of fear there that’s why you have 12 ideas and you haven’t actually executed maybe it’s a fear of rejection that if you put this out someone’s going to say that’s a freaking horrible idea you idiot or maybe it’s the fear of failure right that you’re going to put all this time effort energy and it’s not going to work out or maybe it’s the fear of success that what if you do build all of this and what if you truly can’t handle it what if you’re not good enough so the first thing i would say is just you know if you’re looking at different paths you want to take you want to ask yourself and get real on is there that sense of fear and can we use some of those tools we talked about earlier to really dive into this fear and not let it cripple us the second thing that i would say is most importantly if you have different things you are trying to figure out on what you want to do where you want to go even if this is a business you already have and you’re trying to figure out are we going to go x y or z two things you can do number one model right find someone who has what you want and reach out to them you will be incredibly incredibly incredibly blown away by the amount of people you reach out to and if you do it genuinely you do it from a place of love from a place of curiosity that will genuinely help you like if you have if you say hey i got this idea this thing i’m working on um can i get 10 minutes of x’s time right this person’s time who’s done what you want you’ll be pretty surprised at the amount of people that’ll do that now that’s one way you can do it right model a second way and i think this is just the most important part of all of this is you gotta execute right sometimes we get so caught up in um am i gonna like this am i gonna like that like an analogy one of my mentors once gave me is let’s say the things you’re debating pursuing are jars of jelly right so imagine you had four jars in front of you got grape strawberry orange and fruity tooty i don’t know whatever right so you have these four jars of jelly and maybe in your life these are four different areas of life that you’re looking to pursue right or four different potential businesses you want to pursue what happens sometimes to some of us is we get so caught up in looking at this jar of jelly looking if it looks good maybe open it seeing if it smells good maybe looking at the label seeing if you know if we think we would fit in or that we would really enjoy this but the reality is the only way you’re gonna actually know if you like that jelly is if you freaking take a spoon you take a freaking spoonful of it and you try it like think about when you found out you liked pizza you didn’t look at the pizza smell it analyze it you know uh cut it into 50 slices and see if that made it look better like the way you found out you liked peaches you freaking tried the pizza and you’re like holy crap this is delicious i like pizza so you know the biggest thing is look at these jars and then most importantly you gotta my belief is you have to get into this sense of experiential learning because whether you try something and you hate it or you try something and it lights you on fire every time you try something you’re gonna learn something and you’re going to gain more clarity on what it is that you actually want to do whether it’s with business whether it’s with your life whether it’s with even like a relationship or things outside of that but you have to get into this space of experiential learning trying things not being afraid to fail and and knowing that truthfully if you try these things it’s not even failure it’s failure if you quit and you give up but if you continue trying and moving forward it’s just learning right so anytime you fail maybe a helpful tip is just go oh i didn’t fail i just learned today i think i’m just hungry now i wanna have some jelly it’s a pizza but uh no that that’s great i think i love that idea of just digging into things i think that is that’s so true for so many areas of life where you just you don’t know until you try and you’re not gonna get the answer unless you’re actually playing the game and so i i love that idea of just being proactive enough to take the risk to say i’m just gonna get in there see what happens and then go from there um there’s one question i always ask my guests you actually hit upon it earlier um i asked about early morning habits and daily habits because i love the idea of you know a 5 am miracle waking up and starting your day with a bang and so i mean beyond maybe the the priming aspect of your morning like what other habits do you like to make sure you have to really begin your day the way you want to yeah my morning routine is uh massively important to me um it’s like my grounding space it’s like you know get ready and locked for my day um to to pre-frame that a little bit the night before i always write out my schedule so like i’m not waking up in the space of like what am i gonna do today where am i going to go the way my brain works i need to put my schedule on i do it in my notepad section of my phone every night before i go to bed it’s basically one of the last things i do i just write out the next morning the next day what’s my schedule and so when i wake up honestly probably every day it’s almost identical i wake up first 30 minutes i eat breakfast um usually like a bowl of oatmeal maybe avocado toast then the next hour i do a workout um whether it’s any type of workout i find a way to exercise somehow it could be a bike ride it could be doing uh lifting weights but exercise for an hour then after that i have you know 30 minutes or so to like shower get ready for the day and then that’s when i dive into the 30 minutes of priming and then another part of the priming is i practice gratitude so i do priming and then after that in my notebook that i have a gratitude notebook i write down five things that i’m grateful for that are currently in my life and then i write down five things that i am grateful for in my life that i don’t have in my life yet but i write them as if i did have them in my life if that makes sense and so the reason being is again this comes back to these neurological pathways in your brain from a scientific standpoint is when you start to i write these down and then i read them out loud two times right and feel them visualize them see them already happening and when you’re doing this again this is where your brain kicks in and goes no you idiot you’re not doing this like you don’t have a house in fiji you you dummy like that’s not true but as you start to do this over and over and affirm it and obviously still there the action is a must after you do all these um but it rebuilds those those pathways and so that’s that’s part of my practice is do the priming for 10 minutes and then for probably another 10 minutes i write down um five things i’m grateful for that i already have five things i’m grateful for as if i already had them that i don’t actually have um and then i read them aloud twice so that’s that’s my moon my morning routine it’s pretty on spot i’d say four out of five mornings a week i hit it and it’s it’s uh it’s definitely a must for me yeah one thing i’ve noticed over the years of doing this show is that whenever i see someone who is doing well and they have a solid morning routine it seems to be one that’s not only well thought out but it seems to be a longer routine than most people assume that it would be and i only say that because i know from my own myself as a personal experience the morning routines i have that are two or three hours long might seem excessive to a lot of people but also when you fill that time with all these like really powerful habits like it changes your entire life and i love the fact that you have the intentionality here of saying like these are the core things that matter and it might take a couple hours to get through but then you’ve got that foundation that’s just so solid for your day yeah big time and it’s like even if you one thing i’ve noticed and i’ve heard you talk about this on the podcast is like some of those days you’re like man i got five hours of sleep i’m tired i’m exhausted but what i’ve noticed is if i take an extra hour to sleep or even two hours and i don’t do like and so i don’t do my morning routine so i can get two more hours of sleep and not do the priming not do the exercise not do some of these other things um i genu generally am more tired when i got more sleep than if i said hey dude just get the heck out of bed and do the do the morning routine even if i have less sleep and i’ve done my morning routine usually i’m more dialed in for the day which is you know kind of seems backwards in a sense but yeah it’s counterintuitive but i think at the same time like if you if you have those activities built in to get you jazzed for the day i mean that there’s probably more energy from that than there would be from that extra hour of sleep or whatever the case may be yeah exactly powerful stu this has been awesome today i’ve really gotten a lot from you um obviously it’s fantastic they work for tony i’m jealous of a lot of the levels of that but it’s fantastic and where can our listeners you know learn more from you and how can they dig into what you’re doing yeah i would say um you know to the most common places one is just on social media instagram i’m just stu massengale it’s s-t-u-m-a-s-s-e-n-g-i-l-l um another place to massinggiel.
com and then that’s probably the best place to find me um for anybody that would want to look more into the tony stuff i you know do sessions for companies organizations team stuff like that so if that’s something you’d want to do um you could find my instagram probably just shoot me a dm so yeah and if i can help in any other way feel free to reach out i’m always a believer in in giving and adding value so you know happy to help in any way that i can okay excellent y’all have all those links our listeners this week in the show notes page including your website and social that’ll be great and uh stu once again thanks a lot it’s a lot of fun yeah awesome thanks so much for having me jeff it was a blast now for the action step this week be sure to add tony robbins priming habits to your morning routine now stu has been practicing this habit and finding great success with it it’s certainly worth a try for yourself there’s a link to a video about priming in the show notes this week at jeffsanders.
com353 and also check out stu’s podcast finding direction now once again that is jeffsanders.com 353 for the show notes page and that’s all i’ve got for you here on the podcast this week until next time you have the power to change your life and the fun begins bright and early