One Tactic That Will Revolutionize Every Part of Your Life with Hal Elrod

#1 rated Keynote Speaker and #1 Bestselling Author – Hal Elrod

Hal has had a complete 180 degree turn around. From depressed and broke to one of the happiest people I know and a millionaire. Hal has had an amazing sucess story – from a horrific car accident and suicidal to living a life of abundance – from ONE key tactic. He calls it the miracle morning, and it has changed thousands of peoples lives. Do not miss the important 6 pieces in the miracle morning!

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod
• The Five Minute Journal By Alex Ikonn and UJ Ramdas
• Unleash the Power Within Tony Robbins

Go to HalElrod.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript: Download

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and I am super excited to have my good friend Hal Elrod on the show. He is the bestselling author of "The Miracle Morning" and we just spent about 30 minutes talking about UFC and we could almost not start this because we were so excited about that. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Hal.

Hal: Thanks for having me Jaime. Yeah, the UFC talk, you and I just went from being friends to being besties. We are besties now, you are going to take me to jujitsu class, I love it.

Jaime: It will be perfect. Not many people understand my level of excitement for UFC and you do and therefore we have connected on a much deeper level.

Hal: Yeah, one day you and I will be in a support group together for our obsession with UFC but, whatever, until then we'll enjoy it!

Jaime: Exactly, for now we'll be okay. So let's talk about your book and your business. I love the idea of the book but I also love how many people and how many of my friends have been bringing it up and talking about it. So tell us the whole point of "The Miracle Morning."

Hal: I'll see if I have a copy here. In case you wanted to know what it looks like, this is the beautiful cover. Yes, that's me on the cover. So the promise of "The Miracle Morning" is that if you want to take your life to the next level, if you want to become a millionaire, whatever the results are that you want in your life, you first have to take yourself to the next level because it only happens in that order. If you want to take your success to the next level, first you have to take yourself to the next level, yet most people, yes, we're learning, we're growing, we're reading, we're doing it a little bit, but most people's personal development routine is pretty mediocre and therefore their path to success is really limited and hindered by their level of persona development. "The Miracle Morning" was born from a Jim Rohn quote when I was at my lowest point - I was depressed, I was $50,000 in credit card debt, $300,000 in home debt, losing my house to the bank. I was in the worst shape of my life and I went for a run and I heard a Jim Rohn quote that changed everything for me and it did it faster than I ever thought possible. You've probably heard this quote before - in fact the funny part is that I had heard it before, probably a dozen times, but as you know, sometimes we have to hear something over and over and over again before we go "Oh, got it!
 So here's the quote - "Your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development because success is something you attract by the person you become." So I was on this run, I'm depressed, I'm suicidal, I'm just a mess and it hits me - "Wait a minute, I'm not dedicating time every day to my personal development at the level that I need to become the person that I need to be to attract the level of success that I want." The way that I quantify it, if we're measuring success on a scale of 1 to 10, what level do we all want?

Jaime: 10!

Hal: Yes, 10. Nobody's like "I don't want to be too successful, 6 is good. I don't want people to judge me." No, we all want level 10 success, but here's what I realized when I heard that quote - I'm at a level 2. My level of personal development, and let me define that for you - I define personal development as your physical, mental and emotional vitality as well as your knowledge. So my level of personal development was a 2 or a 3 and I believe this is the disconnect for 95% of our society. This is who we are and we wonder why this isn't what we have in our lives. I realized that I had to dedicate time every day to becoming a level 10 person so that level 10 success would meet me head on. I'll wrap this up with two things that I realized - number one, when am I going to do this? I Googled "what do successful people do every day," and I kept coming across "they're early risers, they have a morning success ritual," on and on and on, but I wasn't a morning person - and if you're watching this and you're like "I'm not a morning person," this will change your life, and if you're like "I am a morning person but I wake up early and I check e-mail and I watch the news," that was the next component - if I'm going to wake up early, what do I do during that time to really accelerate my personal development at a level that most people never even imagine? I created this routine, it didn't have a name, it wasn't called "The Miracle Morning", it wasn't going to be a book, it was my own last ditch efforts to turn my life around. Within two months I more than double my income - I had been earning $5,000 a month at the time, which is not a bad income, but it is when your expenses are $8,000 a month, so I was going in the hole every month and I more than doubled my income in two months, went from being in the worst shape of my life, having not exercised in six months, to training for a 52 mile ultra-marathon, which I did five months later, and my depression - and this was the biggest thing for me, because if you're in a mental or emotional funk, you can't think clearly, you can't make the right decisions, you can't take the right actions - and here's the beauty of it, it didn't take two months for my depression to go away, it was literally gone the next morning. At 6am, when I went through this routine, I felt like a level 10 person; my clarity, my energy and my motivation was all on a whole other level and it was only 6am and my life is still a mess but I feel amazing. My theory was that this could be the one thing that changes everything. If I start every single day this way, I'm ready to crush the day, as opposed to fear and all of the things that were taking up my consciousness. So that become "The Miracle Morning." Two months later the results were so profound that I taught my coaching clients and now over 100,000 people around the world do the Miracle Morning every day and they swear by it. it gives results like losing weight, being happier, increasing their income, starting a business, writing a book - it's pretty much universal for anything that you want to accomplish, that you've wanted to accomplish for a long time but you haven't quite gotten there. This can get you there faster than you ever thought possible.

Jaime: I love this. I want to ask you what it encapsulates so that people can start doing it sooner rather than later. You sent me this book a year or more ago when I was in Maine. I remember getting it and being like "That's awesome but I am not a morning person, I will never do this."

Hal: That's very common.

Jaime: Exactly. Then you start going through it and I started to ask the millionaires about it after I read the book - "Is this real? Do people really get up this early?" and a lot of them do! I was like "Darn it! I don't want to get up early." Now I get up around 6:30am or so, whereas before I was getting up quite a bit later.

Hal: Nice, good for you!

Jaime: When I used to work for somebody else I got up at 9am because I worked from home and I would get up and walk to my desk and sit down. Anyway, tell us why this is so profound - what is in "The Miracle Morning" that makes it so jazzed? It's not just "wake up early and then you'll feel great."

Hal: You just said something really important - that you used to wait until the last possible minute to wake up, and that's what most people do - they don't wake up when they want to wake up, they wake up when they have to wake up, when they have to be somewhere, do something or answer to someone else. If you think about the energy that you're starting your day with, or lack of energy, and the message you're sending to the universe and that you're sending to your subconscious when the alarm goes off, to me that's life's first gift, the first opportunity, saying "Hey, you want an extraordinary life? Here you go - you've got time before the rest of your day starts to do anything you want to do, to become anything you want to become," but most of us go "No, no, no. I know I say I want an extraordinary life, but not as badly as I want to just lie here for nine more minutes unconscious." It's crazy - if you want an extraordinary life, get up and become the person that you need to be every single day before the day starts to create that life. Don't do it at the end of the day when hopefully you have enough energy left over, hopefully you'll find the time, hopefully you're not already worn out, mentally fatigued, emotionally fatigued, physically fatigued, etc. So the first premise of "The Miracle Morning" is about waking up in the morning, first and foremost, with the discipline to do everything you want to do with your life. Do you know the comedian Demetrius Martin?

Jaime: No, I don't, but now I need to look him up.

Hal: Demetrius Martin is great. He has this really funny bit and I put the quote in "The Miracle Morning" book. He says "Hitting the snooze button in the morning doesn't even make sense. It's like you're saying "I hate waking up in the morning so I do it over and over and over again"." Right?

Jaime: No kidding! You're right.

Hal: When you think about that, when you start the day, it's like T. Harv Eker said, how you do anything is how you do everything - if you start the day by hitting the snooze button you're starting the day with a lack of self-discipline. If you don't have the discipline to get your ass out of bed in the morning, what makes you think you're going to have the discipline to do all the other things you want? But when you do the opposite, "It would be easy to keep sleeping but I committed to get up," now you are, just with that one decision, becoming the person that you need to be with the discipline that you need to do everything else you want. Physically, financially, mentally, emotionally, every area of your life hinges on that; that's the linchpin of your day, that first moment. Any thoughts or questions? Then I can go more into what "The Miracle Morning" practices are.

Jaime: It's funny, I have my own morning routine. I went to "Unleash the Power Within" with Tony Robbins and he talks about this too. I love going to things like that and have it confirm a lot of the things that I'm doing - I do a gratitude journal every day - and I was trying to compare how it worked. So tell me, so that everybody listening can compare if they have a routine, what's a typical millionaire morning? Millionaire morning? Well, that's kind of true!

Hal: "The Miracle Morning Millionaire" is a future book in the series. I'll be back on the show for sure.

Jaime: Just for me. It will be perfect!

Hal: You could co-author that - we've got to talk.

Jaime: We'll talk for sure.

Hal: We'll do a UFC book together and the millionaire book together.

Jaime: We are such good friends, I love this!

Hal: Totally.

Jaime: So tell us about some typical morning routines so that people can compare and see how theirs are stacking up.

Hal: The premise of "The Miracle Morning", when I started I thought "Okay, I'm going to wake up early. What am I going to do during that time?" I did some Google research and I Googled "best personal development practices", "what do successful people do every day?", all of these things, and at first I was very disappointed because I didn't find anything new. Meditation? Who meditates? I'm not a meditator - I want results. Then I found this article - "Fortune 500 CEOs that meditate" and I found out that Oprah Winfrey hired the company Transcendental Meditation to train her entire company, then I found out Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam records, swears by meditation, he even has an entire book on it, and I'm like "Okay, maybe there's something to it. Maybe just because I know about it and I've heard about it and it's not the new thing," so that was one. Then affirmations, I came across affirmations, and I don't know about you but remember that Saturday Night Live character, Stuart Smalley from like ten years ago?

Jaime: Oh, yes.

Hal: He would look in the mirror and say "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and, God-darn it, people like me," and so I thought affirmations were a joke but one of my friends, Matt, and I wrote about this in the book, he's very successful - we talked about the million dollar net worth, he has a million dollar net worth that he hit around 30 - and he used to do affirmations. I used to rent a room from him and I would hear him yelling in the shower every morning and I would go in there and say "Hey, Matt, were you calling me, buddy?" and he was like "No, no, just doing my affirmations," and I would listen and he would go "I am the voice!" like Tony Robbins, "I will lead, not follow!" and I'm like "What a weirdo." Finally, it hit me one day when I was learning about affirmations, I was like " Wait, Matt did affirmations," and Matt owned five homes and I rented one room in one of those homes. Maybe there's something to these affirmations, right? So the six practices were meditation, affirmations, visualizations, exercise, reading and journaling, and as I'm reading all of these articles on Entrepreneur and Huffington Post I got this list of six that I kept cross referencing and at first I almost dismissed them. I was looking for the magic bullet, the magic pill, and these were all old, as old as dirt.

Jaime: The same old, same old. This is no secret sauce. These are no secrets, come on!

Hal: No secret sauce! Then I had a couple of realizations - highly successful people swear by any one of these and I don't do any of them consistently. Maybe I should suck it up and do them. Then I go "Let me see - which of these is the best? Which of these will have the biggest bang for my buck?" So I'm going back through, reading the articles, and then I go "Wait a minute - what if I did all six every single morning, for ten minutes each?" and this was the day before my first untitled Miracle Morning. I woke up the next morning and I didn't know how to do any of them - I had to Google how to meditate. I was sitting there, clearing my mind, and then I was like "Oh, I had a thought! Dang it, I suck at meditating!" But I just meditated. So I went through and did all six practices and that brings us right into the story where I was like "Wow, I feel amazing and I can do these every day." So these are now called the life SAVERS. Thanks to my beautiful wife - you women are much smarter than us men, I'll go on record saying that -

Jaime: Quote on my Facebook page, thank you.

Hal: You can quote it - Tweet it, I'll admit, women are much smarter than men, and make sure you tag my wife in that because she'll appreciate that. But one day I was writing the book and I had these six practices and there was no rhyme or reason and my wife goes "Sweetheart, why don't you see if you can turn it into an acronym so that it all flows?" and I'm like "You're so brilliant!" So the acronym is SAVERS. They're called the life SAVERS, the six practices, the S is for silence, that opens it up for meditation or prayer. Some people might want to focus on prayer. I do a little bit of both. A is for affirmations, V is for visualizations, E is for exercise, R is for reading and the final S is for scribing. Scribing is a fancy word for writing and/or journaling. Now it brings it beyond journaling so it could be writing down your goals, writing out new affirmations or writing in your journal. I use the Five Minute Journal - weren't you just hanging out with UJ?

Jaime: I use the Five Minute Journal also and, yes, I was hanging out with him this weekend.

Hal: Here's the funniest part - this is how you can know my testimonial for the Five Minute Journal is real. This is the Miracle Morning journal. I always tell everyone this is a good journal but it's not as good as the Five Minute Journal. I don't make any money on the Five Minute Journal, although that needs to change - UJ, I promote your journal over mine, give me a cut, come on, something! Anyway, so those are the six practices of the Miracle Morning. I'll say them again - silence, affirmation, visualization, exercise, reading and scribing. It is scalable - there is a chapter in "The Miracle Morning" called the six minute Miracle Morning. It sounds like a gimmick - it's not. Just one day I didn't have time to do the Miracle Morning and I thought "What if I did a six minute version? Would that work?" I sat there and did a minute of silence and I felt calm and centered, I felt at peace. I pulled out my affirmations - these are actually my affirmations from 2011, I just found them the other day, it's kind of cool to go through them and realize I failed to meet every single goal I set that year. The number one goal - publish "The Miracle Morning" and it was a year later that it finally happened. Anyway, so the affirmations, it only takes a minute to read them, so I basically did one minute of each of the practices and it took me one tenth of the time - normally I would do an hour; I did six minutes - but I got 80% of the benefit. I still felt empowered and inspired. I read a page out of a book, I learned a new idea, I wrote down a few things I was grateful for - it literally took me 60 seconds for each practice but it was profound. So it's totally scalable - you can do the life SAVERS for 10 minutes each, you could do 20 minutes of exercise and only five minutes of meditation, you can adjust it in any way that you want, it can be 30 minutes, 6 minutes, etc. SO it's totally customizable for any entrepreneur, for any person.

Jaime: I love that too, because when you mentioned how long it is, most people will go "Oh my goodness, where do I find the time?" That's the whole point - you get up earlier, you set aside the time. That's really important because these things are critical and as you're going through these things, like visualization, that's something that we don't set enough time aside for but it makes a huge difference - it's come up over and over and over again in my interviews - but I'll ask my audience, how many of you actually do it at all?

Hal: Can I give an advanced tip on visualization?

Jaime: Yes please.

Hal: So, first of all, visualization was made popular by the movie "The Secret". I have a vision board - it's background, I don't even see it anymore, which is true for most people - you don't even see it anymore. So here's the deal with visualization - I believe that visualization is taught, I won't say wrong, but whatever a synonym for wrong is, by most gurus. They teach you to visualize this long-term picture like what you ideally want - see the house, see the car, see the marriage, see the check. It's great, but I believe it's only half of the equation and it's the least important half. So here's the deal - research has shown that when you visualize the end result and you see it as real, to the point where you believe it, it can actually be counter-intuitive because now, all of a sudden, you lose that sense of urgency to make it happen because you trick yourself into thinking it's as good as done. I see it every day - "It's going to happen, I know it. I'm going to go back to watching TV." When I was visualizing "The Miracle Morning" I had the cover designed two years before the book came out so that I knew what it was going to look like and what I would do is I would spend half of the visualization seeing what the gurus have taught us for years - I would see someone reading the book and I would see their face lighting up, like "Wow, what great ideas! Wow, wow, wow!" Then I would see them showing it to a friend and going "You have to read this book," so I would see that and it would inspire me - I wanted that vision to be a reality. Here's where the rubber meets the road, though - that was not the most important part. That got my excited but then I brought my visualization into today and I saw myself doing whatever action or activity was necessary to produce the vision and I would see myself almost out of my body, watching myself at my laptop, typing a million miles an hour with the same expression on my face that the reader had on theirs, going "Wow, the ideas are flowing, this is amazing, this is going to change lives," and it was not my vision of the long term result that was years away but my vision of what I needed to do today that got me to open my eyes, open my laptop and confidently type the words that would create the book. So I think that's the most important part of visualization - it's not the long term vison that's important, because when you see it, you start to believe it, and that's important, but you get yourself into action by visualizing whatever it is you need to do today - making the cold calls, writing the book, going to the gym, lacing up your running shoes - whatever the action is, see yourself doing it with a smile on your face, enjoying the process so that it's so compelling that you want to get up and do whatever it is that you're envisioning.

Jaime: So why do you think visioning works? I ask this question all the time and I've tried to do research on it but I want your take on it. We've heard a lot of people saying that it's important but I completely understand when you say that the visioning ten years out is a little bit self-removed. Don't get me wrong, I still think it's important to bring that stuff up, and I also like likening it to being grateful for what you already have, and that's what part of your morning is too, there's definitely less of a gap when getting a new car doesn't really give you the feeling that you thought it was going to later down the road. But tell me what you think was really working behind the scenes in visualization? You can make it up if you don't know!

Hal: I'm not scientific but I'll give you my real world experience. There are two things - number one is that when you have goals or dreams in your head, if somebody asks you you're like "I kind of know," I believe that a lot of ideas that we have in our heads, the goals, the dreams, if you imagine them like a little seed or a ball of energy, whatever visual is better for you, but imagine it as a seed or a ball of energy and here's the thing - they are cloaked in fear, they are cloaked in insecurities. So these dreams and desires that we have are cloaked in fears, insecurities, a self-concept that's based on our past that's never done the things that are floating around in our heard and when you actually visualize what that seed will look like when it grows to maturity, then all of a sudden you have now taken the fear off of it, the insecurity that it's cloaked in, you've kind of broken free from that because now you've grown the seed and you've seen what it looks like when it's real and now it becomes real to you, it goes from being this little teeny seed that's a desire that bounces around in your head that you never really manifest because that fear is keeping it trapped inside and visualization, to me, it peels back the fear and it lets the seed blossom and then you see it and now you can take action to make it happen.

Jaime: I love that analogy, I think it's awesome. When I asked you that question I had no idea what you were going to come up with and I agree with that 1,000%.

Hal: That's good because I just made it up!

Jaime: Good job making stuff up! I concur. It's been in my past too. You've heard the quote "what you focus on expands," and so as you're going through and figuring out those things that you're focusing on, because what we have a tendency to do and probably what you were doing when you were in that depressed state is focusing on all the crap.

Hal: Oh yeah.

Jaime: So what sort of tips, besides, of course, doing the morning routines do you have for people as they're going through? What happens if, in the middle of the day, you start getting back into the funk? Because I assume that still happens even if you're doing the morning.

Hal: It definitely can but here's what I've found - for me, when I tell people that my depression, and I would say I was borderline suicidal, meaning I never would have done it because I know what it would have done to my family but I didn't want to live. Every day I just wanted to hide and I didn't want to face my reality. What I found was that I did the Miracle Morning the first day - and, again, there was no name, it was "personal development" in my schedule, I called it the Miracle Morning when I doubled my income. I was like "Dude, this is the Miracle Morning! This is the single factor that's responsible for this turnaround." What happened, though, was this - when I say my depression was gone in 24 hours, I wouldn't say that it was gone, I would say it was at a minimum. It went from being an 8.5 or a 9 out of 10 to like a 2. Here's what would happen - throughout the day, I would have another client cancel. I was a coach at that time, I had built a six-figure coaching business, the economy crashed, all of my coaching clients were in sales, they all lost their income and they just trickled down. So throughout the day I would have another client cancel. Now, before, that would just devastate me and it would drive me deeper into the depression and it would last, because I would go to bed thinking about it and I would wake up thinking about. I would just be in this fear, this worry, this scarcity mindset. What the Miracle Morning did was it gave me a reset button every single day so, if I did have another client cancel, instead of going to bed worrying about that and dreading the morning where I had to face my miserable reality, it was like every night I got to go to bed optimistic, like a kid before Christmas, because I wasn't waking up to my problems, I was waking up to my Miracle Morning and no one could take that away from me. I did it before any of my clients called, I did it before I checked e-mail, I did it before I had contact with any other human being. I was by myself, the rest of the world was asleep and I was doing that. So what I found was, yeah, you can solve a bad day but it prevents a bad day from turning into a bad week, into a bad month, into a bad life. It's like every single day you're starting at a level 10. So, yes, things could happen that could bring you down to a level 7 or a level 6 but then you hit the rest button and you start the morning at a level 10 and it's all about your inner world - your outer world isn't going to change overnight but your inner world can change overnight and that's it, because your outer world is a reflection of that inner world, as so many experts have taught us.

Jaime: I love that and I want to get into your story specifically because I know we haven't talked about that at all but before we do that I want to ask you this, this is my own personal question - I am addicted to my iPhone.

Hal: Do we have the same iPhone case? Is there a wallet on the back? You've got to get the case that you can put your credit card and your IDs in, it's amazing.

Jaime: I have a purse, sir, so I don't need that.

Hal: Because you don't have this case! You wouldn't have to carry around your big old purse.

Jaime: That actually is a good idea.

Hal: I never bring my wallet anywhere anymore. So where are we going with the iPhone?

Jaime: I'm addicted. Everyone's like "Don't start off with this in the morning," although I don't have anything negative on my phone, I don't read the news and I don't even check e-mail all that much, but I want to see what texts I have, where people are always sweet, but I've been told it's not so great so I'm like "Let me try?" and I've tried and I still can't so what do you suggest for people that are bought in, they know this sounds like a really good idea but it's really hard to get yourself out of the normal tactics and the urges that you usually have.

Hal: One of the last chapters in "The Miracle Morning" is called "Customizing the Miracle Morning to Achieve Your Highest Goals and Dreams" so you could have a Miracle Morning that starts with checking your iPhone - in fact mine starts with checking my iPhone.

Jaime: It does? So we're good!

Hal: I do. I actually have a buffer time scheduled. I wake up at 3:30 in the morning, seven days a week - and, by the way, if you're watching, don't let that scare you. Basically, the Miracle Morning is whenever you wake up now just simply schedule your alarm for 30-60 minutes earlier. That's it. 30 minutes earlier, you wake up, you don't even have to do all of the SAVERS, you can exercise for 15 minutes, read for 15 minutes and that's a Miracle Morning - waking up before you have to be up and developing that discipline and then working on yourself. That's the Miracle Morning in its essence; it can be simple. For me, for the five minute journal, I use the five minute journal app, I use a meditation app, I read my Kindle on my iPhone and my affirmations are on my phone, so my Miracle Morning is largely on my iPhone. I don't do visualization on the phone, or exercise, so I do four out of the six life SAVERS on my phone. When I say I get up at 3:30 in the morning - when I started the Miracle Morning it was 5am because I was waking up at 6am because I had to so I thought I would try it at 5am and this is what happened, and this is very common, I hear this all the time from people who tell me that they're not a morning person but they'll try it and, first and foremost, they say the first day they do it, it feels like Christmas morning or their birthday morning or a vacation morning where they're actually excited to get up and they do it and it feels amazing. Then what happens is I often hear "I did it for a week and it's so good that I want more of it - an hour goes by too fast. I love it! But what am I going to do? Get up at 4am? Dude, I'm going to get up at 4am!" So I started getting up at 4am and that was five years ago and I've never looked at. Then what happens is that I'm kind of OCD about some stuff and so I didn't like that I would wake up at 4am and I would brush my teeth and drink a glass of water and go and make my tea or my coffee and then I was starting the Miracle Morning at 4:17am. I was like "I should have started at 4am on the dot!" so I backed up my wake up time to 3:45am so that I had 15 minutes to get ready so that I could start at 4am on the dot. But then sometimes I was starting at 4:02am so 15 minutes wasn't quite enough so now I get up at 3:30am, and 3:30-4am has become my relaxation time, like somebody would have at 11pm at night, so at 3:45am I'll make my coffee or tea and drink water and then I have 15 minutes to mess around on my iPhone or watch UFC Tonight from the night before. I swear to God, I watch my UFC stuff in the morning before my Miracle Morning, and then at 4am I put everything away and I usually do my meditation first, that doesn't require a phone, or I have my app for it or whatever. I don't know if that answers your question but, yes, you can check your phone and it's totally customizable - whenever you wake up now, you've just got to back up half an hour.

Jaime: I love that, although it makes me ask the question, when UFC goes until midnight do you still wake up at 3:30 in the morning?

Hal: I like to get 5.5-6 hours? sleep so I adjust my bedtime accordingly. In fact I'm going to be in Austin, Texas and you and I are going to UFC Live. We've got to work it out so that we're sitting together.

Jaime: We'll take a picture and post it on Facebook.

Hal: That would be amazing. So it doesn't start until 9pm or 6pm. The main card starts at 9pm so I'll be at the event until midnight so I'm going to get up at 7am the next day or whatever.

Jaime: Okay, so you tweak it.

Hal: If I have a date night with my wife or something I'll adjust it. If I get to bed an hour later I will move my Miracle Morning back an hour.

Jaime: Okay, good, so you're not superhuman and going to bed at midnight and waking up at 3:30am?

Hal: No.

Jaime: Okay, beautiful. Now let's get into your story a little bit, because people don't understand what you were going through and the success and failure that you had in the past. You talked about it a little bit but tell us your story.

Hal: You're talking about the accident and all of that?

Jaime: Yes.

Hal: There are a few different parts of the story. When I was 20 years old I was in sales and I started selling Cut Co knives and never, ever, ever in my wildest dreams did I think I would be a knife sales person but ten days into the job I had broken the all-time company record which meant that I had sold more Cut Co knives than any of the 500,000 sales reps that had come before me. There was one guy on the east coast in a different division or region that I think had more than me but I broke some record and I was like "Maybe I'm not meant to be a radio DJ," because I was a radio DJ at that time, I was DJ-ing on the radio and selling Cut Co knives. I got the Cut Co job and I made more money in my first ten days than I would make in six months as a radio DJ and I was like "Alright, screw the radio thing," so I'm a full time sales person and a year and a half later I had been giving speeches at all of the conferences because as a top performer they were always like "Hey, give a message, teach people, motivate them, yadda, yadda, yadda," so I would do that. One night after I gave a speech I was driving home in my brand new Ford Mustang at 20 years old - that was the dream car; I had just bought this brand new Mustang - and a drunk driver in a full size Chevy truck, much bigger than my little Mustang, got onto the freeway not on an on-ramp like he should have but he actually got on the off-ramp for the traffic going in my direction. I don't remember the headlights coming at me - I have brain damage from that whole experience - but I was hit head-on at 70mph by this drunk driver in his full size truck, and both of us were doing 70mph so it was a 140mph impact. The airbag exploded, I don't remember exactly what happened but I was sent into oncoming traffic and the worst was yet to come - my car spun sideways and the car behind me, two car lengths back, at 70mph, crashed into my door, if you can imagine a car going 70mph into your door. It was absolutely devastating. That's the car - it looks like half a car - and that's me in a coma. I actually died, I bled to death, I broke eleven bones and they pulled me out of the car an hour later. I was trapped in the car, my femur broke in half, my pelvis broken in three places, my arm broken, my eye socket broken and I bled to death. I was clinically dead for six minutes, in a coma for six days and then when I came out of the coma the doctor said I would never walk again and that I had permanent brain damage. My wife will vouch for the brain damage, that's still very apparent, but I can stand, I can walk - in fact I did that 52 mile ultra-marathon partly because I hate running and the doctor said I would never walk again so if I can do that I can do anything, it's just an example. So that was my first rock bottom in my life and I came out of the coma six days later and it's like anything in life - we choose how we respond to our adversity. I had some great mentors at Cut Co that really empowered me to accept the things that I couldn't change and focus on the things I could change. Granted, that was a small environment of no sales and rude customers, not breaking all your bones, but the principle is the same and I realized that I couldn't change it so the only intelligent option was to accept it fully, be grateful for what I have, focus on where I want to go and what I need to do to get there - and three weeks after the doctor said I would never walk again they came back with routine x-rays and talked to my mom and dad and me and they say "Hal, Mark and Julie, Mr and Mrs Elrod, we don't know how to explain it but your body is healing at an incredible rate and we're going to let you take your first step tomorrow in therapy." It was the scariest step I ever took but the next day I took my first step. I left the hospital, went back to work, went on to become one of the top sales representative again that year. In fact, if you want I can tell you how that year ended which was the Tony Robbins event that we just talked about.

Jaime: Yes, let's talk about that.

Hal: So I get out of the hospital and I find out that there is a Cut Co sales competition going on - it had just started. It was a two week competition and I was talking to my friend Jeremy who was working and he was like "I gotta go, I'm working, I want to be one of the top performers at the event," and I get off the phone and I'm like "What if I found a way to sell Cut Co right now and I went to the conference and I took one of the top ten trophies?" It seemed crazy - I was in pain, I was tired, I was walking like a snail with a cane, I had severed a nerve in my left arm so I couldn't move it, I couldn't lift it, I was just like a little crab. By the way - if you have friends like I do and you're walking around like this all the time, they're like "Hey, Hal, what's up buddy?" just making fun and teasing. So anyway, long story short, I end up taking the fourth place trophy at the conference. My mom and dad had to drive me to my appointments. Did I use the sympathy card a little? Okay, sure, of course.

Jaime: Use what you've got, right?

Hal: Yeah, use what you've got. I was like "I'm barely even healed, ma'am, could you buy some knives? I just died!" I got a very slow start to the year, though. I ended up not working for a long time, I'm rehabilitating, going to therapy a lot, I don't have a car because of my brain damage - I physically and mentally am not allowed to drive - and with four months left in the year I get my car back, I get my driver's license back and I decide that I want to have my best year of Cut Co ever, even though I only have 3 months to break my 12 month best year ever. I just go for it and I start breaking all of these records, it was just crazy. The goal was to sell $100,000 of Cut Co and I was at $20,000 when I set that goal, from that earlier time, so I had $80,000 to go and I had 3 months to do it. In two months I sold $50,000 which was a company record and now I'm $30,000 away. However, I had a Tony Robbins UPW book, which you just went to, right? It's a four day event. Now, I live in California and it was in Florida so it was going to be a day of travel there, a day of travel back and four days there, so six days, and it was the first week in December, the last month of this huge goal that I had set and I was so inspired to do it, I was coming back from behind, and I was like "Should I cancel the Tony event or should I go to it?" and I decided to go. I was like "I'm going to go," an abundance mindset, "I'm going to go to the event and somehow find a way to do it." I go to the event, I focus every ounce of my energy at the event on breaking this record and coming back and having this amazing December and every break I'm making calls, scheduling sales appointments for when I get  back home. In fact I have a confession - I skipped half of the health day to just phone, I just had to phone. I go home and I have three weeks left to sell $30,000 and no one had ever done that before. I become the first rep in the company's 50 year history to have three $10,000 weeks in a row and break the all-time record and I end up hitting the goal - I sell $105,000 for the year. Tony Robbins was a huge part of that but I think it just taught me that I don't care who you are, I don't care what you've been through, I don't care what excuses you have, this wasn't even a "me" thing, it was a human thing, it was evidence that if you are a human being you are capable of overcoming and accomplishing so much more than you've ever even imagined for yourself and, to me, that's what it represented. It wasn't about me, it was about the greater good. It was about what human beings can do when we really put our minds to something and that's what happened for me.

Jaime: I think that's amazing. It's so inspiring to hear you go through so much. Most of us complain about the smallest little thing. Like I burned my foot at the fire walk with Tony Robbins and now I'm listening to you talk about how you were incapacitated forever. Now I'm grateful to just have a foot, it's not a big deal. Being able to come back from that is huge, and not only come back from that but sell even more than you ever had before is insane. I do have a question though, especially as I just came back from Tony Robbins - what was the thing that made it accelerate for you? Because you were already kicking butt before you went, you were already the type of guy who pushes and overachieves and tries to hit these insane goals anyway, then you go to this event and crush what is even possible again and again. What was it? What was that thing that made the difference?

Hal: For me, I call it the Miracle Equation and it will eventually be a book. I have a couple of books - both of them were written out a sense of responsibility to pay something forward. I never, ever thought I would be an author, ever. I think I'm the worst writer and I have brain damage - where was I going with that?

Jaime: You can use that excuse for everything! "I have brain damage."

Hal: People in the hospital asked me "So are you getting a $1 million settlement for this?" and I was like "No, the guy wasn't insured, but I will use the brain damage excuse for the rest of my life." That's my settlement, that's what it got. It's not pretty, it's not glamorous, but I'll use it.

Jaime: So what's the difference? The miracle equation?

Hal: The miracle equation, right. It sounds so simple it's easy to dismiss. It sounds too easy. There are two components - and I didn't realize this until I did this but I looked back and I put two and two together about how I broke these records. I realized that there were two things in place and then I started looking at other high achievers in professional sports and other things and I realized "Oh, this is the same equation, these are the same two things that they use, whether they know it or not." For those three weeks I was scared to death, thinking "What are the odds? No one has ever done this before. I don't know if I'm going to do it," not to mention that if you're in direct sales, scheduling appointments leading up to Christmas is the hardest, no one will see you, so that's another thing I had against me. So I thought "f this is going to happen it will require unwavering faith." That's the first part of the miracle equation, it's kind of esoteric so what I mean by that is what I call speaking your goals into existence. If people are not on track for their goal the first thing they lose is the faith that it's possible and they start speaking accordingly - "Oh, man, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it. I thought that I could but I'm not on track and it's not happening the way that I thought," and on and on and on. I realized that unwavering faith meant a decision that nothing will come out of my mouth other than "I'm going to sell $30,000 in three weeks no matter what." I call that the miracle mantra - "I'm going to [blank] in [blank] time, no matter what. There is no other option." That was the first thing, because most people give up the faith that it's possible and as soon as you give up the faith that your goal or your dream is impossible it becomes impossible. The second component is extraordinary effort. Again, it doesn't sound fancy, but here's the thing - most people, when you're working towards a goal or dream and you're not on track, you give up the faith that it's possible and, as soon as you give up the faith that it's possible, the effort required to make it possible goes right out the window because you think "What's the point in trying if I'm not on track?" So I realized that there are days where I'm going to have a bad day, where I have no sales or I might be halfway through the time period towards the goal and not halfway there, maybe I'm only 25% there. I thought the only way this is going to happen in miraculous fashion is if I maintain unwavering faith every single day, every moment. It doesn't mean that I'm not going to have doubts but it means that when I have doubts instead of speaking on those doubts I'm going to counteract them, I'm going to push them aside and go "No, no, no - I'm going to sell $30,000 in three weeks no matter what. There is no other option." When I went to an appointment and I had a no-sale I just said the miracle mantra again and then, no matter how I feel, I'm going to put forward extraordinary effort, I'm going to do everything humanly possible every moment of every day to achieve my goal. It happened with every goal I've ever achieved, every record I've ever broken - my faith was always tested and your effort is always tested because you never feel like doing it all of the time and every single time I broke a record it was like going into my last day or the last week of the year or the last appointment and I wasn't on track and I had to muster than unwavering faith, put forth extraordinary effort and somehow just some kind of crazy coincidental miracle happened and it worked and it worked over and over and over. Think about professional athletes - you know that Reggie Miller game? I haven't looked this up in a long time but Reggie Miller was playing for the Pacers and I don't remember the details but I remember this - they were down by like 7 points with 13 seconds left and most human beings would give up the faith that it's possible - "Dude, we're down by 13, there's only one play left," and therefore they would not put forth the effort. You see athletes, when it looks like the game is over and they've lost, they put forth half-assed effort. So they give up the faith and they don't put forth extraordinary effort. Well, during this game, Reggie Miller was committed - "I'm going to give it everything I have until the end to win," and it was something like he steals the end bound pass and shoots up a three, taking less than one second off the clock, and hits it. Then they end bound it again and he steals the ball, throws up a three and he hits it and then he gets fouled, or whatever it was, and he ends up winning the game or putting them into overtime with 7 seconds left to score 13 points. I'm probably butchering the point total but the point is that the only way that you can truly achieve your full potential is unwavering faith and extraordinary effort and that's what I did during those three weeks and every record that I ever set was done with those two components.

Jaime: I love how similar they are to the components that I've found from other millionaires. I've done a round of nine other interviews today and I talk about having a no excuses approach and I say "No matter what," and the second piece is continuous forward motion.

Hal: Really?

Jaime: It's so similar to yours.

Hal: Okay, so there's the third book that we're going to co-author.

Jaime: Apparently we have the same brain and mine isn't even damaged - or maybe it is.

Hal: You probably did some stuff in your 20s.

Jaime: Which is hilarious because no I didn't. I didn't even start drinking wine until I was 28.

Hal: That's funny.

Jaime: I know, I was weird. I drink wine now.

Hal: You and my wife can hang out now then. You've got to come and visit Temecula - we live in the wine country of Southern California.

Jaime: Oh, do you really?

Hal: Yeah.

Jaime: We'll talk after because I don't know if she's coming out to Austin anyway and we're going to end u talking for too long. I love what you're saying, I think those are things that people won't commit to and as soon as we lose that trust in whatever system - David Allen talks about this too - you're like "Oh, never mind." It's in health and everything that you can - you can apply it to anything. I can't wait for your next book to come out or help you with the next book. I have to ask the one last question that I ask everyone, and I'm going to say that that's probably "Buy the book and implement the Miracle Morning," but what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Hal: I do like your "Buy the "Miracle Morning"." I do like that. But I'll just say this - I'm sure you're very familiar with Eben Pagan?

Jaime: Yes.

Hal: Eben Pagan was interviewed by Tony Robbins a couple of years ago and I've listened to the interview dozens of times, I love it, it's on my CD in my car. If you don't know who Eben Pagan is, by the way, he does like $25 million a year, he's a solo-preneur, he's amazing, a brilliant guy. At the end of the interview, Tony says "Eben, learning from you is like drinking from a fire hose - you've given us so much," it was like a 90minute interview, "If you could take everything that you've taught, or even that you haven't taught it yet, and just give us one thing that we could do to take our business or lives to the next level, what would it be?" and I was very encouraged when Eben Pagan said "Create a morning success ritual." He said how you start your day sets your mindset and the context for the rest of your day. Nothing you can do is more important than having a morning success ritual. So my advice to an entrepreneur, if you want to become a millionaire or for anything that you want to do, is to go to your alarm clock right now, I don?t care if you get up at 5am, you go and move it to 4:30am or even 4am if you want but, baby steps, start 30 minutes earlier and make sure that you wake up and do some version of the Miracle Morning. It could be, like I said, 15 minutes of exercise and 15 minutes of reading or 10 minutes of meditation, 10 minutes of affirmations and 10 minutes of exercise. Whatever it is, do some component. The neat thing about a morning ritual is that you can filter whatever your number one goal is, whatever the most important thing you want to accomplish is, through all six of the life SAVERS - you meditate on that goal, your affirmations revolve around that goal, your visualization revolves around that goal, when you?re exercising you?re asking yourself success seeking questions about that goal, the book you?re reading is about that goal and when you?re journaling, you?re scribing, you?re putting down on paper, you?re planning, you?re prioritizing about that goal. So if you want to accelerate your path to becoming a millionaire or running a marathon or writing a bestselling book, whatever it is, make it so that your day starts not checking e-mail, not checking Facebook, not watching the news, but filtering your number one goal through your success ritual so that you ensure that every single day you move closer to whatever it is that is most important to your future.

Jaime: I love that and what?s so funny is that it?s exactly what Tony Robbins was just saying this past weekend too.

Hal: I taught him that.

Jaime: That?s what I?m thinking - Eben Pagan, you, all you guys are telling him that this is really important and he incorporated it into "Unleash the Power Within". I don?t know if it was there a long time ago but it?s definitely there now, with at least 10 minutes to half an hour of morning ritual, so it?s amazing to see it filter into everything that people are doing so I highly recommends everyone that?s listening to either change your calendar time or first buy the book and then change your calendar time so that you have that one action that you can do this week. We really, really appreciate you coming on and explaining how important this is to people, because a lot of times we don?t think that it?s that big of a deal - you wake up in the morning, you brush your teeth, you eat food, have your coffee, you walk around like a zombie and that?s the way everything happens and it?s not the way it has to be so I really appreciate you a) writing the book and b) coming on the show to talk about it. Thank you so much, Hal.

Hal: Thank you, Jaime. Thanks for having me and the conversation shall continue.

Jaime: For sure. Tell us where we can find you, your book and all of that fun stuff online.

Hal: The best place to get the book is on Amazon.com. MiracleMorningBook.com just takes you to Amazon so go to Amazon. Read the reviews, by the way - don?t take my word for it. We?re almost at 500 reviews - it?s like 494, it?s crazy.

Jaime: So buy the book and leave a review. Sorry, go ahead.

Hal: Oh yeah, leave a review! Let me invite everybody to the Miracle Morning community - we have a Facebook group, I don?t know if you?re a member?

Jaime: No, I didn't even know about it.

Hal: You're going to be blown away. You have never seen an online community that is this interactive and this supportive. It's insane. So the Miracle Morning community on Facebook - we have 6,700 members now, I think, and it's just all organic, I don't add anyone, they're just from all over the world, it's wild, so if you want support on your journey of the Miracle Morning or just in general it's a group of likeminded people, entrepreneurs, etc. and if you want to learn about me specifically, HalElrod.com is the place to do that. Thank you for listening, thank you for watching, I really appreciate everybody listening and watching and, Jaime, thanks for having me, it really means a lot.

Jaime: Awesome, and I cannot wait to see you and root for people beating each other up in just a few weeks. I can't wait to see it. Thanks for coming on, Hal.

Hal: Awesome. Thanks, guys.

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Tags: business success, Focus, Hal Elrod, journal, millionaire interview, Mindset, miracle morning, productivity, success story, Visioning

Categories: All, Best Life, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Goals, Millionaire Interviews, Productivity, Visioning

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