June 27, 2024 • 35 mins
In this episode, we welcome Michael Mojo back for a second round to show you how to up your game, the dangers of receiving an unprepared financial inheritance, and the value of emotional and mental stability. Using vivid analogies, he explains how focusing on the right things can transform your life and drive you toward success. Michael also shares his personal journey of overcoming negativity and how he learned to appreciate the small things, which ultimately led to a significant mindset shift. He emphasizes the importance of aligning your life with your values and how this alignment fuels productivity and can also lead to better results over the long term. Tune in to learn actionable tools and frameworks that can help you balance your emotions, drive your ambitions, tap into your entrepreneurial potential and breakthrough any barriers that may be holding you back from acheiving the things that matter most.
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Episode Transcript
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Music.
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Welcome to The Wheel to Win, where emerging entrepreneurs come to learn the
best tips, strategies, and techniques to unlock their potential and become more successful.
Music.
I'm your host, Steve Scarni, and each week I will bring on the most incredible
guests who are going to share their own unique stories, knowledge,
wisdom, and insights about how they've been able to close the gap between failure and success,
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and then go on to live a life of greatness.
Here at The Will To Win, we are dedicated to educating and inspiring you to
be able to maximize your potential and make what seems impossible, totally possible.
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Michael Mojo, welcome to The Will To Win, talking about how to master your mindset.
And he smiled and he said, thank you.
Wow. So my point is that you are rewarded proportionally to the level that you're playing the game at.
If you think that you're going to get to level 12 when you can't even handle
the stress at level 1 or level 2, then you're never going to get there.
Now, some people skip grades.
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So if I – for instance, if you inherited a million dollars off of parents who
don't develop your skills to manage your finances and don't understand the pressures
of however they've developed the money.
So let's say that they have a big business. Let's say the business has $100
million in revenue or $100 million. It's worth $100 million. They die.
Business gets sold off. That $100 million lands in your bank account.
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Yet at the same time, mommy and daddy have protected you from having to deal
with financial pressure and financial stress.
And every time you got yourself in trouble, they get you out of it and they
babysit you like the little baby that you are.
Then all of a sudden, now you've got $100 million. Yeah.
That's like walking into the gym and seeing someone lift 200 kilos on a squat
and just getting under the bar and going, I reckon I can lift that.
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And you pick it up and all of a sudden, bang, now your spine's crushed,
your legs are broken, everything like that. You just got absolutely destroyed.
You want to watch parents destroy their kids? Watch them give away their inheritance
and never train them on how to look after their finances or how to manage their money.
So you want to make sure that you're bringing your kids up to the level of the
game that you're playing. Now, if you have a look at great people who have done
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that well, Gina Reinhart in in Australia.
People say, oh, she inherited billions of dollars. She inherited whatever it
was. I can't remember, but let's say it's $3 billion.
She inherited it with $3 billion and ended up growing it to become the richest
woman on the planet at one stage.
I think she's the richest self-made woman on the planet because there are a
lot of people who have inherited money and then just given it all away or lost it.
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But she essentially got that money and then and became self-made because she
made way more than what her dad ever did, way more. James Packer's the same.
Kerry Packer's son, he inherited a heap of money. He's still a billionaire.
He's kept all the money. The Murdochs, they've got a lot of money.
There are a lot of people out there who have done a great job at training their
kids to be able to handle that amount of stress and pressure because that child,
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if they're at a level 300 financially, that kid better be at a level 300.
They better be able to handle level 300 problems or if not, it's going to destroy them.
So coming back to the imbalances, like how do you handle your emotions and things
like that, there's a whole bunch of different tools.
So first of all, different levels require different tools.
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So one of the key things that I teach people straight away is,
Whatever you're focusing on is whatever you're going to consistently bring into your life.
Now, a lot of speakers have spoken about this, but what does that mean?
What that means is if you wake up in the morning like most people do and they
focus on their stress, their worries, and their fears, and they go,
I've got to get out of work.
Well, got to means that you're trapped because I don't get out of bed because
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I have to get out of bed. I get out of bed because I love getting out of bed.
I get out of bed because I got shit to do that I enjoy doing.
So I love getting out of bed.
I love sleep, but to be honest, if I could just never sleep and just keep working,
I would work because this is what I love to do. But work is fun.
I enjoy it. This here now isn't work. This here is just me having fun and playing games.
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So how cool is that? So when you set your life up, in fact, now I wasn't there.
It took me a long, long time to realize this. I actually only learned it about
12 months ago because our business had grown.
We got to a level, I had a bunch of staffing problems, and then I got in the
habit of complaining every day.
I'd wake up, this is broken, this is fucked, got to deal with staff, this is bullshit.
I just got into that negative state. Every morning I would wake up,
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I would think about that. Every night when I go to bed, I'd think about that.
Then what I realized was that I was focusing on the things that I didn't want,
which is why I kept getting more of what I didn't want.
The moment that I put my feet on the floor and realized in the morning,
I remember the day. I woke up, I rolled over, and I was thinking,
this is bullshit. I'm sick of being stuck.
I put my feet on the carpet, and I rubbed my feet on the carpet.
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Now, myself and my wife built, well, we bought this beautiful house a couple
of years ago and she did this big renovation like this room here.
We bought this house. It was built in the 80s. It's a nice house on the lake here in Adelaide.
And the house when we bought it was still in the 1980s. It had green carpet and stuff.
My wife did a full reno in six weeks, put in the bookshelf, everything like
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that because this is what I love.
So I put my feet on the carpet. It's this nice, soft carpet.
And I felt the carpet and something inside my head clicked in that moment. And I was like.
I'm in the house that I dreamt about as a kid. That's fucking cool.
And then I looked across and there's my wife lying there asleep,
like half of their mouth open and drool coming out.
And I'm like, she's been with me through thick and thin, through some of the
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toughest situations financially in business. She was with me when I had nothing.
I left the personal training industry and went into the personal development
industry and I ended up with nothing.
And I was making really good money in that industry, but I left because I knew
that that's what I was pulled to do and that's where I felt I needed to be.
So I left that industry and everyone said that I was stupid and crazy, but she stayed with me.
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So I looked at her and I was like, man, I have the most amazing person in my life.
And I was like, where did I go so wrong by waking up and stressing and worrying
about all these things that don't matter?
When I could just like my feet on this carpet, my feet feel good.
I'm looking at her, life's good. Yet I'm stressed about all this other shit.
And that was the moment I realized the importance of making sure that your focus
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is where you want it to be.
And when I say where you want it to be, you need to go to the future on the
visions and the missions.
And so before I go to bed every night, I focus on the future and feeling and living it.
So I have to have the feeling. And then in the morning when I wake up,
I will not get out of bed until I've felt my future.
When I feel my future again, I get out of bed and I start my day because I already
know that that's the direction that I'm working towards.
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So that there alone is just one tool. Then there's a bunch of mental and emotional
balancing tools that I use as well.
What I realized many years ago, and this is how I came across Dr.
John Demartini, I was doing a speaking gig in Mexico with him in a leadership retreat.
I was telling him about this mental and emotional balancing tool that I was
trying to create because I was studying yin-yang philosophy from ancient Chinese philosophy.
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I said, I believe that the brain is yin and yang.
It has to balance itself back out because if you look at everything in nature,
it goes back to its most stable form.
He said, how are you going with it? And I told him, I'm like,
I'm stuck on the science behind it.
The philosophy is there, but the science isn't. And he said,
come and do my events. So I jumped in. I started learning from him.
And he became a mentor and then he became a close friend. And,
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you know, now some of my work is in some of his work.
So he references my work as I reference his. Yeah.
And so one of the tools that I teach is how to create mental and emotional stability,
because nothing can grow unless it's stable.
You can build a house, but eventually it's going to fall down if it's unstable.
You've got to build that foundation. And even if we look at physics and chemistry,
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everything in physics is going back to its most stable format as far as we can gather.
And in chemistry as well, if you look at the outer shell of electrons,
and I won't get too sciencey, but essentially they have to stabilize.
That's how you have compounds accreted and so on. I won't get too much into it.
But essentially, if you have out of show electrons that are missing,
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it grabs something else in order to create more stability in that out of show.
If not, it becomes highly volatile or it can break.
That's what made me try to figure that out. But they're just some of the key
principles around keeping mentally and emotionally balanced.
But there's a time and a place for everything.
If I need absolute drive, I'm going to use negative emotions.
And part of the issue that I have with a lot of my industry,
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the personal development industry, the psychology industry, the psychiatry industry.
Social sciences, is all these people preach this positive shit of like,
you've got to be positive all the time. You've got to be happy. You don't.
Confucius said that the chasing of happiness or the seeking of happiness is
what creates unhappiness.
And so when we're unhappy, we want more happiness. But when we're happy,
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we fear unhappiness again. It creates these volatile cycles inside of our own mind.
Confucius said that thousands of years ago.
But people listen to these other idiots who sell an idea or a concept that's
never been proven to be true.
There are times that I have positive thinking or empowering thinking.
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There are times that are disempowering.
If you're positive all the time, what happens when you get yourself- People
get themselves into bad situations because they don't think about what could
go wrong, the disadvantages, what they could lose if they do what they do.
We want to look at that. When I'm making a business decision,
my team comes to me. I'm not optimistic.
They go, oh, I think this will work. I go, oh, yeah, great. It'll work.
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Awesome. I just lost 20,000 bucks. I sit there and I go, okay,
cool. What could go wrong? What are all the problems? We look at all the negatives.
Then from there, we look at the positives as well. We balance it out.
We make an intelligent executive decision.
You can't do that if you're out of balance. People who are always positive and
always optimistic tend to make stupid decisions.
People who are negative avoid making decisions because they always think that
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it's going to turn out the worst. Now, there's a time and a place for negative thinking.
Sometimes if I'm I'm at the gym and I can't be bothered. I'm like,
get in there. Stop being a fat shit. And I'll give myself a bit of slack.
And it creates that adrenaline and that pain. I'm like, right,
I'm going to the gym. And now I've just got motivated. And then when I'm in
there, I'm like, hey, oh yeah, let's train.
And all of a sudden I can switch my thinking.
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I think that the key to greatness is being able to use your thinking to maneuver
in a direction that you're trying to grow into.
So use your negative thinking, use your positive thinking, then balance shit out.
Right? But if you stay stuck in positive for too long, problem.
Stuck in negative for too long, problem.
If you're neutral for too long, problem, right? Because if you're neutral and
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you're balanced too much, you lose all your drive and ambition.
But what it does is it creates a groundedness. So if you're overthinking stuff
all the time, you want to be more grounded.
But then you want to use your mission and your success map to drive you.
But after a while, you'll either become positive in your thinking or negative
in your thinking, depending on the results you're getting.
And so then you've got to go back and balance it out. So you need the right
tools to get you to where you want to get to.
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It's the same as a car. People who are stupid put their foot on the accelerator, gas it.
And then when the first corner comes up, they just keep their foot on the gas
thinking that they're getting somewhere fast. and they just run off the track and crash the car.
They're most of the hyperactive people I work with. They come to me,
they're like, man, I'm growing my business and I'm trying to push staff and
staff can't keep up and they're all fucking useless.
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And I'm like, let me guess, you keep crashing. How do you know?
Maybe you need to slow down, my friend, and use the brake. Nah,
man, we've got to grow. We've got to go.
Cool then, just keep using the accelerator. See how you go. And then there's
the other people who sit on the start line, their foot's on the brake and everyone
else just keeps driving past me like, why do I keep losing?
But they're most comfortable sitting still doing nothing because it's safe.
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Or they think that it's safe, but everyone else keeps passing them by.
To be a good, effective racer in life, you need to know how to accelerate.
You need to know how to brake.
You need to know how to put your foot flat and you need to know when to keep
the accelerator on, but just slowly feather it.
Because you can still accelerate, but you might have to accelerate a little
bit slower. You're still getting somewhere, but there's a time where you just
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need to accelerate slowly and just chip away at things. And then there's other
times where you get on that straight again and everything's clear and you just
put your foot down and you gun it.
But then as you come up to the first corner, you've got to hard brake,
hard brake, hard brake, slow everything down.
And then you turn into the corner, you see the direction that you want to go
in and you're like, right, accelerate again.
So good drivers, good business owners, good business leaders,
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good leaders in their family, good people with influence, and even just the
general public, they need to know how to use their own mind the same as a car.
You need to know when to slow down, when to speed up, when to brake, when to accelerate.
Sometimes you want to just put your foot flat to the floor, but the conditions
don't say that it's right to put your foot flat to the floor.
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If you're in rain and it's raining heavily and you don't have the right tires
on, doing that is a silly idea because you're going to crash.
People do that in life. They're in bad economic environment and they're like,
no, we want to grow. We want to grow when what they should be doing is consolidating
and slowing down and so they crash.
Life's like that as well. We go through times of growth, time for consolidation,
time for shedding away some of the things that don't help us or give us an advantage
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anymore. And then we just keep moving.
So you'll know as you go through your own growth stages, sometimes you lose
friends. Sometimes you lose communication with family.
We have to lose things in order to gain things in life as well.
And so part of your own growth and part of business growth as well well,
is that you grow, you consolidate, you shed, and then you grow into the next stage.
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And that's just a cycle of growth. If you have a look at nature,
that happens all the time.
But most humans are like, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow,
grow, grow, grow. That's like accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.
And then they wonder why they crash, they burn out.
It's ineffective. So I hope that answers the question.
There's no one tool, but there's a bunch of frameworks and ideas and thoughts
that I've hopefully given your audience as well, where they can just think through
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things a little bit differently as well.
And and you know hopefully helps them absolutely it's
been very helpful and we'll come
to the final question of the
podcast episode and you talk about
performance and we've obviously talked about winning but how do you i mean you
work your ass off like you were just but you you go go go but you also have
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balance like you you always bring it back to balance so you have that yin yang mindset That's it.
How do people keep that energy? How do entrepreneurs like myself,
people who are still trying to establish their business and grow in advance,
how do you keep that energy consistent?
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Yeah. There's a few different things that I can give for that question,
and I could probably go on for hours on that one question alone.
But I remember a quote years ago, and someone said, the only way you know where
a boundary is is when you cross it.
Now you're you only know your own boundaries when you
cross those boundaries so a lot of people in
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this day and age worry way too much about balance and they're like i meet these
business owners and they're like oh man i want more balance i want more work-life
balance and i'm like i don't even know what that means and they're like well
you know i just want more work-life balance and and they use it because societies
condition them for this silly idea that i've never even thought about out.
Now, our idea of balance really comes down to our values.
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And this is why having a clear success map is important.
Now, when I look at my life, my highest value is teaching, coaching, and learning.
So I spend most of my day teaching, coaching people, and I do more than the average person.
So on an average day, I could spend 10 to 15 hours teaching,
coaching, and learning. Today, that's all I've done.
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I haven't even hit my gym session yet.
But that's a lower value. you. So I've worked, I've been in meetings since this
morning with clients. I then had meetings with my team.
I then had meetings with people overseas. I then worked with a coach that I'm working with.
And then I've had other clients this afternoon, like I've hardly stopped. So I,
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That's my balance because it's my highest value. My second highest value is
high-level leadership and communication.
I like being around people who are driven and want to grow and who are also
leaders in their own right. I like hanging around parents who lead their kids.
I like hanging out with other business owners who want to lead a team of people.
I want to hang around even my team. My team, I have my own leaders in my own team.
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My wife is the head of operations in the company. me. I love spending time with
her because she's a growth-driven leader.
So I like hanging around those types of people. But guess what?
The thing is I learn from them, but also most of my clients are those types of people.
So not only do I teach, coach, and learn from those people, I also get paid
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to teach, coach, and learn those types of people.
So now I have this big cycle of I learn, I coach, and even when I make money,
I still learn, teach, and coach. So I get to do what I love.
Then I go down to my third highest value, which is business and wealth creation.
So I keep building this business bigger and bigger every year,
and we keep making more and more money. And the more money we make,
the more I get to teach, coach, and learn.
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The more I connect with high-level leaders and bring them into our community
and help them as well, because they need the tools that I have to become better
leaders and better business owners and more effective in their family.
So the money then becomes an amplifier of the stuff that I'm already doing.
Money essentially is an amplifier.
If you're living a shit life and you have money, your money is just going to
create more of a shit life and all of your habits will show that and demonstrate it.
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That's why if you don't change you, you never change your life.
But people try to change their life and think that it's going to change the
way that they feel and it never does.
So that's my third highest value. And then my fourth highest value is physical
appearance and physical fitness.
So I like going to the gym. I like exercising. I like training.
And so I just set my life up around my four values.
And it took me a while to do that. But these days, I very rarely go outside
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of it. Someone will come to me and they go, oh, we need you to do X,
Y, and Z. And I go, I'm not doing that.
And they go, well, you have to. And I'm like, nah, you're mistaking me. I'm definitely not.
That's not how I operate. And sometimes I have unrealistic clients.
I sometimes pick up a client who is just unrealistic and they want me to be
something that I'm not. And I just go, look, here's your money back.
I'm not your guy. Go somewhere else.
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Now, they lose out on working with one of the best coaches in the world because
they're unadaptable and they don't accept me for being me.
That's silly. dilly. Now, if you're any type of leader, if you don't accept
people for the way that they are, and then work on growing their skill sets,
which make them more of themselves, then you're setting yourself up for failure.
Because you can't turn a lion into a fish.
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But most people, they hire a person and then try to turn them into something
they're not, instead of looking at their skills and saying, where are they consistent?
Where are they effective?
What makes them them? And then working on developing those skill sets and pushing
them up and putting them in the right roles.
Or if not, letting them go and letting them go to a business where they're going
to be appreciated and valued for the skills that they have, right?
So these are things that keep people non-effective.
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I don't know. I can't even remember what the question is because I just sort
of stole it and went crazy. It's so good. It's all about your energy and energy balance.
I think you've answered it quite well. So just coming back to it because I want
to round off the question for you. I hate to leave people just hanging.
When it comes to that, your lifestyle balance, there is no such thing as work-life balance.
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If you have a low value on career or a low value on work or a low value on business.
So your work-life balance is going to be crap. Now, you can work an eight hour
day, but if you have a low value on work or career or something like that,
or something that's going to expand you within that career,
you're probably going to be working an eight hour day if you need money to pay bills.
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And during that eight hour day, you're probably going to do about three hours
worth of work and you're going to spend most of your day avoiding working because
it's not what you want to do.
And unfortunately, there are plenty of government departments,
there are plenty of councils who get free money.
Now, anytime that people get given money without doing something,
so giving something for nothing, they'll waste it.
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And so when a government wastes money and they go, oh, we don't have enough
money, what do they do? They just raise taxes.
Nothing off their skin. They don't give a shit. So then we give them more money
and then they just go and waste it again because there's no accountability on their behalf.
But then what they can do is they can give that to other the non-productive members.
So everybody knows that there are plenty of people in the council or council workers.
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Not all of them. Some of them are very good, but most of them get frustrated
because they want to work and they want to be productive, but they're around
people who get paid really, really well to do nothing. So essentially,
they're being rewarded.
And I watch them. I watch dudes who are around the council area.
I'll walk past and I go for a walk. An hour later, they're still sitting in
their truck just on their phones. And I'm like, hang on, the lawnmower's on the back.
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What's going on here, lads? Now, people go, yeah, but they're probably taking
their lunch break. Believe me, they ain't taking their lunch break.
That's a common pattern of behavior.
Because if you're driven, your lunch break is like 10 minutes or you work at
your desk while you're still working if you're driven. So what my point is, is that,
even your values dictate what you call work-life balance.
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Part of the reason why I outperform most people in our society,
both financially and in business and things like that, isn't because there's
some secret skill. It's just because I live my values. I like working.
And so if the average person, let's take someone, for instance,
who works an eight-hour day, if they are eight hours productive, but I love working.
So as I said, I'm doing 7 until 8. So 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. tonight.
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Actually, I'm going to work after this anyway. So I'll probably work till 10
or 10.30. If we look at that day, now, if I do that every week,
let's say the average working week is 38 hours.
Let's round it up to 40. If I work 80 hours and I'm more productive and I'm
more effective and I'm more efficient because I'm more engaged in what I do,
my productivity isn't just double because I'm working double the amount of time.
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I might create six or seven times the amount of produce at the end of that week
because I'm just more effective.
So if you add that up over a 10-year period, they might be 40 years behind where I'm at.
Now, they're not 40 years behind in actual years, but they're 40 years behind in work.
And that's why a lot of people lose the game and they're non-productive.
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So what we want to have a look at, and there's nothing wrong with that.
It's just that you have to realize
that part of the reason why I drive a McLaren is because of my values.
It's not because it makes you less valuable. It's just because my life and my
lifestyle is tailored in a way that makes me love work and push really,
really hard to grow a business and things like that.
But that doesn't take away from the fact that someone who has a high value of
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family, they're probably the most amazing mom and amazing dad,
which I probably would not be if I had kids. I would not be as good as what they are.
My sister is an amazing mom. Her family is her highest value.
She is one of the most epic human beings when it comes to managing kids.
When the kids get upset, the way that she deals with them both firmly but fairly is phenomenal.
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Whereas I watch my brother-in-law, he gets upset quick.
Now, he's got a higher value on experiences and travel and hanging out with
his friends and socializing and things like that.
So when the kids get upset, he has a very short patience.
My sister, she's very patient with them and she just knows how to communicate.
Now, she's never done communication training for kids, but she just gets it.
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Now, she's a way better mom than someone who has a low value of kids.
That doesn't mean that they can't be a mom. It's just that they're going to
be different. Now, their balance is going to be different.
My sister wants to spend as much time with her family and her kids as she can.
Now, she also has a high value of career.
So she will spend as much time as she can with the kids and she's super productive and present with them.
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But when she's working, she's a machine. And then she goes home.
And so that's her lifestyle balance.
Not the same as my lifestyle balance, not the same as your lifestyle balance,
not the same as my mom has a completely different lifestyle balance to that
as well, and so does my dad.
Lifestyle balance is a way that works for you. Then we have mental and emotional balance as well.
This is why that success map is so important because without that,
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you don't know what your actual balance looks like and you'll probably burn
out, you'll be stressed out, you'll be frustrated, you'll be overwhelmed.
All of those things, those negative emotions and experiences that you're having
are essentially a red light on your dashboard telling you that there's something wrong.
And the worst thing that happens is now people go to the doctors,
they get medicated and all that stuff to shut that shit down.
(24:35):
But that's like getting a bit of sticky tape and putting across the red light
on your dashboard to tell you that you got low oil.
The emotion's there for a reason to say, hey, there's something going on here
that has to shift. We've got to do something differently. We've got to change.
So what we want to do, and I think I got onto this this before,
actually. I got off track. By our thought processes, I went into genetics.
(24:55):
When a child is born, and I'll swing it all back and I'll wrap it up for you. Perfect.
When we're born, the sperm and the egg, when they come together,
are essentially exchanging information.
The only thing that evolves through the universe, according to physics at this
current time, is information.
Even energy contains information, so light contains information.
(25:16):
Information is the thing that evolves. Now, if we look at the passing on of
genes as passing on information, our parents are essentially passing on information
about the environment and also about themselves.
They're passing on all these bits of information about what are my fears,
what am I scared of, what am I worried about?
If you look at evolutionary psychology, you'll see that there's this idea or this theory,
(25:41):
and I guess it's a scientific theory as well, where we're a lot more genetically
like our parents or our grandparents than what we think.
And so yes, we can grow and we can evolve, but our genetics heavily influence us.
They influence our psychology. They influence our fears. They influence our
worry. They influence our anxiety. They influence a whole bunch of things.
(26:02):
So then when we're born into the world, we come into the world with these perceptions
that have already been gifted to us from our parents and their own imbalances.
Now, what I don't want is they were given the same thing, and they've been working
hard their whole entire life to try to better themselves than what their parents were.
And your job is to do the same so that you're in a better spot for your kids.
And then your kids will do the same thing out of evolution. That's the game.
(26:23):
So now, when we come out into the world, our eyes, our smell,
our touch, our hearing, everything like that becomes aware of this external
world, this external reality, which then we have to navigate.
When we take in that information, it goes into our brain, and our brain creates
perceptions or meanings behind what everything means in the outside world.
(26:45):
And so when a child's learning, a child is learning what the outside world means,
and they're attaching meanings to things.
Then from those meanings, they create beliefs and they create stories.
Stories are essentially a bunch of beliefs and meanings.
Now what happens is in our own psyche, we have these beliefs and meanings and
essentially stories that we've partially taken on epigenetically because we're
(27:09):
probably going to be more responsive to fear.
If we're more responsive to fear, our perceptions then pick up fear more.
Then we go, oh, well, when I go outside, there's people. That scares me.
Now, we might have some sort of social anxiety disorder.
That's not saying that you actually have social anxiety. It's just saying that
you're more receptive to potentially being like that.
Our job now is to resolve that and figure that out through our life.
(27:31):
Now, that person lives life. When they have those thought processes and those
perceptions, our brain doesn't really do too much.
Our nervous system regulates our movement and our flow of movement,
but it doesn't actually get us to move.
The muscular contraction and things like that that cause us to move normally
happen through chemical changes in the body first.
When we look at that, our brain essentially says there's something going on
(27:56):
outside that I think could put us at threat. That's a perception.
Our brain then signals certain things through neuropeptides and neurohormones
or neurochemicals, which then change hormones in our body and neuropeptides.
That then floods through our cells. Our cells then interact with those chemicals,
which then now start to change the way we operate and the way we move.
(28:16):
But it also changes the way we feel. So my studies on emotions...
Essentially, emotions are driven from thoughts. Thoughts drive emotions.
Emotions drive behaviors.
Behaviors reinforce thoughts and perceptions. Then now we have a chain of causal
chain, which keep people looping.
Now, you will stay in that same pattern of behavior, which then people eventually
(28:38):
call your identity, or they will call your persona.
You'll even think that you're that way, which is your personality,
how you feel about yourself. self.
So what happens is after a while, you say, oh, but I've just got anxiety.
You don't got anxiety. That's how you label yourself.
That's your personality now. Your identity has become attached to someone with anxiety.
(29:02):
But your mask that you wear on the outside might not be that.
It might change. That's called our persona.
But that's all created from the chemical changes is based on our perceptions
that we feel through our feelings.
We feel our emotions, but they're essentially out of balance chemicals.
All of them are telling us to change.
(29:22):
If we change and we evolve beyond that by using our mindset and our thoughts,
also by changing our behaviors,
and potentially, it's hard to change your emotions without either changing the
thought or the behaviors, but both of those two things can reinforce the emotion.
I'll give you an example.
If I eat shitty food and keep thinking in a negative way, it's probably going to drive anxiety.
(29:45):
But if I want to change my anxiety, and I change my diet, and I change my exercise,
and I change the way I use my body, and I change my thoughts,
I'm probably going to eliminate anxiety.
Now, will you have times where you're anxious? Yeah.
Because it's a warning signal that there's something going on in the external world that's not right.
So do I have anxiety just before I get on stage to speak? Yeah,
if it's a big group of people and I'm pushing myself all the time.
(30:08):
Do I let it define me? I know that it's there because it makes me hyper-aware and hyper-focused.
Now, if I got on stage and I wasn't hyper-aware and hyper-focused with that
level of anxiety, I know that I'm not dialed in. So I know I'm dialed in by having it.
So anyway, I hope that clarifies the causal chain of emotions,
but also as well, it helps to clarify about when we use our emotions through
(30:30):
positive, negative, and how we need to navigate the world.
Because our job in this world is to take one problem, evolve it and dissolve
it, and then move to the next problem.
And the same thing happens in our psyche. The same thing happens with our emotions.
The same thing happens with our behaviors.
And eventually, we want to end life moving that needle as far forward in the
evolutionary chain as we can.
(30:51):
Now, if you've got kids and you do that, some of your kids will end up with
those bad with those negative gaps that you've had.
Now, if you're a smart individual who's a smart adult who understands human
behavior, you don't want to... I meet parents all the time, they say things
like, I just don't want my kids to go through what I've been through.
That's a really bad way of thinking as a parent. Because what can happen is
(31:13):
if you have never dealt with those things properly, you'll become empathetic.
And when you become empathetic, you try to save your own kids.
And when you save your own kids, you take away their ability to learn through
their own pain and their own problems and their own adversities.
So they become weak and codependent. And we're in a society now where parents
for generations have tried to take away pain and struggle and sacrifice and shit from their kids.
And now there's kids who call words violence.
(31:37):
If you misgender them, it's violence.
I played footy all the time. People are like, you're a girl.
And I'm like, yeah, whatever.
Whatever the fuck that means. I don't care. I just kick the ball and keep playing.
It doesn't matter. Now, if you misgender somebody, It's violence.
That shit is hectic, but that happens from an oversupported generation of kids
whose parents tried to protect them because the truth is that the parents...
(32:00):
Aren't doing their own mental and emotional work and realizing the part of the
thing that have made them a great person, a great individual is going through those adversities.
And so for me, as a child, I got bullied a lot. I had bright red hair and freckles and I was chubby.
Part of the reason why I'm successful now is because I had bright red hair,
I had freckles, I was fat and I was bullied.
I wouldn't be where I am today without those bullies.
(32:23):
Now, I got asked on a podcast ages ago, they said, what would you say if you
went back and saw the bullies. And I said, thank you.
Because the truth is they made me the man I am today. I can take a lot of adversity
and I can take a lot of shit off people because I had to learn how to deal with it at a young age.
Now, I don't really care what people think of me. I realized that my value comes
from within, not from other people.
(32:43):
So anyway, that's what happens when you heal from your own past and you learn
how to balance that shit out is that you realize that even if your kids get bullied,
there is a lesson and learning in there and you help them navigate it from the
learnings that you have, which then makes them stronger versus trying to take
away the bully from them and trying to protect them and save them,
which then makes them weak and codependent.
Because the truth is we're in a world of people who are always going to bully
(33:05):
you no matter what you do.
And there's always going to be adversity. There's always going to be challenge.
There's always going to be some form, unless we all end up with the same skin
color, the same look, the same everything, which then there's no uniqueness.
There's no individuality.
There's always going to be someone who's going to judge us for looking differently
or acting differently or speaking differently or something like that.
The thing is, do you You appreciate that part of yourself.
(33:27):
But for some people, that massively triggers them because there's part of themselves
that feels like less of an individual because they have different skin color. But that's them.
I hope that helps. I hope that helps someone out there anyway. Absolutely.
You've answered the questions incredibly well, and I'm just blown away with
what you've shared today.
There's a lot of things I've learned that I wasn't aware of or I didn't understand
(33:49):
them to the extent that you've explained them today.
So thank you so much, Michael.
Appreciate you giving up your time. to be on the Will to Win podcast and share
your knowledge, wisdom, and expertise.
And yeah, before we finish up, feel free to share how people can stay connected
with you and find out more about you. You type in Michael Mojo online.
(34:14):
I'm sure my website will come up. So my website is michaelmojo.com.
If you go and search for me on any social media platform, if you just look up
Michael Mojo, you'll find me on there.
My Instagram page, which is where I'm highly active and I spend
a lot of time speaking into the community and stuff like that on there is michaelmojo
underscore success so you'll find me on instagram
or michaelmojo underscore big button success and the
(34:36):
other ones as well i think are just either michaelmojo or michaelmojo
double zero something like that you'll find me like people will find me if they
want to find me that's it yeah you just gotta look for the mojo that's all you
need to do 100 look if you start if you send me a message and then you start
getting message about cryptocurrency foreign exchange or anywhere where you've
got to give your credit card details online,
(34:57):
it's definitely not me. You've definitely got the wrong page.
Thank you for listening to the Will to Win. I hope today's episode was overflowing with.
Music.
Music.
(00:07):
Welcome to The Wheel to Win, where emerging entrepreneurs come to learn the
best tips, strategies, and techniques to unlock their potential and become more successful.
Music.
I'm your host, Steve Scarni, and each week I will bring on the most incredible
guests who are going to share their own unique stories, knowledge,
wisdom, and insights about how they've been able to close the gap between failure and success,
(00:30):
and then go on to live a life of greatness.
Here at The Will To Win, we are dedicated to educating and inspiring you to
be able to maximize your potential and make what seems impossible, totally possible.
(00:52):
Michael Mojo, welcome to The Will To Win, talking about how to master your mindset.
And he smiled and he said, thank you.
Wow. So my point is that you are rewarded proportionally to the level that you're playing the game at.
If you think that you're going to get to level 12 when you can't even handle
the stress at level 1 or level 2, then you're never going to get there.
Now, some people skip grades.
(01:14):
So if I – for instance, if you inherited a million dollars off of parents who
don't develop your skills to manage your finances and don't understand the pressures
of however they've developed the money.
So let's say that they have a big business. Let's say the business has $100
million in revenue or $100 million. It's worth $100 million. They die.
Business gets sold off. That $100 million lands in your bank account.
(01:37):
Yet at the same time, mommy and daddy have protected you from having to deal
with financial pressure and financial stress.
And every time you got yourself in trouble, they get you out of it and they
babysit you like the little baby that you are.
Then all of a sudden, now you've got $100 million. Yeah.
That's like walking into the gym and seeing someone lift 200 kilos on a squat
and just getting under the bar and going, I reckon I can lift that.
(01:57):
And you pick it up and all of a sudden, bang, now your spine's crushed,
your legs are broken, everything like that. You just got absolutely destroyed.
You want to watch parents destroy their kids? Watch them give away their inheritance
and never train them on how to look after their finances or how to manage their money.
So you want to make sure that you're bringing your kids up to the level of the
game that you're playing. Now, if you have a look at great people who have done
(02:20):
that well, Gina Reinhart in in Australia.
People say, oh, she inherited billions of dollars. She inherited whatever it
was. I can't remember, but let's say it's $3 billion.
She inherited it with $3 billion and ended up growing it to become the richest
woman on the planet at one stage.
I think she's the richest self-made woman on the planet because there are a
lot of people who have inherited money and then just given it all away or lost it.
(02:44):
But she essentially got that money and then and became self-made because she
made way more than what her dad ever did, way more. James Packer's the same.
Kerry Packer's son, he inherited a heap of money. He's still a billionaire.
He's kept all the money. The Murdochs, they've got a lot of money.
There are a lot of people out there who have done a great job at training their
kids to be able to handle that amount of stress and pressure because that child,
(03:06):
if they're at a level 300 financially, that kid better be at a level 300.
They better be able to handle level 300 problems or if not, it's going to destroy them.
So coming back to the imbalances, like how do you handle your emotions and things
like that, there's a whole bunch of different tools.
So first of all, different levels require different tools.
(03:28):
So one of the key things that I teach people straight away is,
Whatever you're focusing on is whatever you're going to consistently bring into your life.
Now, a lot of speakers have spoken about this, but what does that mean?
What that means is if you wake up in the morning like most people do and they
focus on their stress, their worries, and their fears, and they go,
I've got to get out of work.
Well, got to means that you're trapped because I don't get out of bed because
(03:51):
I have to get out of bed. I get out of bed because I love getting out of bed.
I get out of bed because I got shit to do that I enjoy doing.
So I love getting out of bed.
I love sleep, but to be honest, if I could just never sleep and just keep working,
I would work because this is what I love to do. But work is fun.
I enjoy it. This here now isn't work. This here is just me having fun and playing games.
(04:13):
So how cool is that? So when you set your life up, in fact, now I wasn't there.
It took me a long, long time to realize this. I actually only learned it about
12 months ago because our business had grown.
We got to a level, I had a bunch of staffing problems, and then I got in the
habit of complaining every day.
I'd wake up, this is broken, this is fucked, got to deal with staff, this is bullshit.
I just got into that negative state. Every morning I would wake up,
(04:34):
I would think about that. Every night when I go to bed, I'd think about that.
Then what I realized was that I was focusing on the things that I didn't want,
which is why I kept getting more of what I didn't want.
The moment that I put my feet on the floor and realized in the morning,
I remember the day. I woke up, I rolled over, and I was thinking,
this is bullshit. I'm sick of being stuck.
I put my feet on the carpet, and I rubbed my feet on the carpet.
(04:55):
Now, myself and my wife built, well, we bought this beautiful house a couple
of years ago and she did this big renovation like this room here.
We bought this house. It was built in the 80s. It's a nice house on the lake here in Adelaide.
And the house when we bought it was still in the 1980s. It had green carpet and stuff.
My wife did a full reno in six weeks, put in the bookshelf, everything like
(05:15):
that because this is what I love.
So I put my feet on the carpet. It's this nice, soft carpet.
And I felt the carpet and something inside my head clicked in that moment. And I was like.
I'm in the house that I dreamt about as a kid. That's fucking cool.
And then I looked across and there's my wife lying there asleep,
like half of their mouth open and drool coming out.
And I'm like, she's been with me through thick and thin, through some of the
(05:39):
toughest situations financially in business. She was with me when I had nothing.
I left the personal training industry and went into the personal development
industry and I ended up with nothing.
And I was making really good money in that industry, but I left because I knew
that that's what I was pulled to do and that's where I felt I needed to be.
So I left that industry and everyone said that I was stupid and crazy, but she stayed with me.
(06:00):
So I looked at her and I was like, man, I have the most amazing person in my life.
And I was like, where did I go so wrong by waking up and stressing and worrying
about all these things that don't matter?
When I could just like my feet on this carpet, my feet feel good.
I'm looking at her, life's good. Yet I'm stressed about all this other shit.
And that was the moment I realized the importance of making sure that your focus
(06:22):
is where you want it to be.
And when I say where you want it to be, you need to go to the future on the
visions and the missions.
And so before I go to bed every night, I focus on the future and feeling and living it.
So I have to have the feeling. And then in the morning when I wake up,
I will not get out of bed until I've felt my future.
When I feel my future again, I get out of bed and I start my day because I already
know that that's the direction that I'm working towards.
(06:44):
So that there alone is just one tool. Then there's a bunch of mental and emotional
balancing tools that I use as well.
What I realized many years ago, and this is how I came across Dr.
John Demartini, I was doing a speaking gig in Mexico with him in a leadership retreat.
I was telling him about this mental and emotional balancing tool that I was
trying to create because I was studying yin-yang philosophy from ancient Chinese philosophy.
(07:07):
I said, I believe that the brain is yin and yang.
It has to balance itself back out because if you look at everything in nature,
it goes back to its most stable form.
He said, how are you going with it? And I told him, I'm like,
I'm stuck on the science behind it.
The philosophy is there, but the science isn't. And he said,
come and do my events. So I jumped in. I started learning from him.
And he became a mentor and then he became a close friend. And,
(07:28):
you know, now some of my work is in some of his work.
So he references my work as I reference his. Yeah.
And so one of the tools that I teach is how to create mental and emotional stability,
because nothing can grow unless it's stable.
You can build a house, but eventually it's going to fall down if it's unstable.
You've got to build that foundation. And even if we look at physics and chemistry,
(07:50):
everything in physics is going back to its most stable format as far as we can gather.
And in chemistry as well, if you look at the outer shell of electrons,
and I won't get too sciencey, but essentially they have to stabilize.
That's how you have compounds accreted and so on. I won't get too much into it.
But essentially, if you have out of show electrons that are missing,
(08:11):
it grabs something else in order to create more stability in that out of show.
If not, it becomes highly volatile or it can break.
That's what made me try to figure that out. But they're just some of the key
principles around keeping mentally and emotionally balanced.
But there's a time and a place for everything.
If I need absolute drive, I'm going to use negative emotions.
And part of the issue that I have with a lot of my industry,
(08:32):
the personal development industry, the psychology industry, the psychiatry industry.
Social sciences, is all these people preach this positive shit of like,
you've got to be positive all the time. You've got to be happy. You don't.
Confucius said that the chasing of happiness or the seeking of happiness is
what creates unhappiness.
And so when we're unhappy, we want more happiness. But when we're happy,
(08:54):
we fear unhappiness again. It creates these volatile cycles inside of our own mind.
Confucius said that thousands of years ago.
But people listen to these other idiots who sell an idea or a concept that's
never been proven to be true.
There are times that I have positive thinking or empowering thinking.
(09:15):
There are times that are disempowering.
If you're positive all the time, what happens when you get yourself- People
get themselves into bad situations because they don't think about what could
go wrong, the disadvantages, what they could lose if they do what they do.
We want to look at that. When I'm making a business decision,
my team comes to me. I'm not optimistic.
They go, oh, I think this will work. I go, oh, yeah, great. It'll work.
(09:37):
Awesome. I just lost 20,000 bucks. I sit there and I go, okay,
cool. What could go wrong? What are all the problems? We look at all the negatives.
Then from there, we look at the positives as well. We balance it out.
We make an intelligent executive decision.
You can't do that if you're out of balance. People who are always positive and
always optimistic tend to make stupid decisions.
People who are negative avoid making decisions because they always think that
(10:00):
it's going to turn out the worst. Now, there's a time and a place for negative thinking.
Sometimes if I'm I'm at the gym and I can't be bothered. I'm like,
get in there. Stop being a fat shit. And I'll give myself a bit of slack.
And it creates that adrenaline and that pain. I'm like, right,
I'm going to the gym. And now I've just got motivated. And then when I'm in
there, I'm like, hey, oh yeah, let's train.
And all of a sudden I can switch my thinking.
(10:21):
I think that the key to greatness is being able to use your thinking to maneuver
in a direction that you're trying to grow into.
So use your negative thinking, use your positive thinking, then balance shit out.
Right? But if you stay stuck in positive for too long, problem.
Stuck in negative for too long, problem.
If you're neutral for too long, problem, right? Because if you're neutral and
(10:41):
you're balanced too much, you lose all your drive and ambition.
But what it does is it creates a groundedness. So if you're overthinking stuff
all the time, you want to be more grounded.
But then you want to use your mission and your success map to drive you.
But after a while, you'll either become positive in your thinking or negative
in your thinking, depending on the results you're getting.
And so then you've got to go back and balance it out. So you need the right
tools to get you to where you want to get to.
(11:03):
It's the same as a car. People who are stupid put their foot on the accelerator, gas it.
And then when the first corner comes up, they just keep their foot on the gas
thinking that they're getting somewhere fast. and they just run off the track and crash the car.
They're most of the hyperactive people I work with. They come to me,
they're like, man, I'm growing my business and I'm trying to push staff and
staff can't keep up and they're all fucking useless.
(11:24):
And I'm like, let me guess, you keep crashing. How do you know?
Maybe you need to slow down, my friend, and use the brake. Nah,
man, we've got to grow. We've got to go.
Cool then, just keep using the accelerator. See how you go. And then there's
the other people who sit on the start line, their foot's on the brake and everyone
else just keeps driving past me like, why do I keep losing?
But they're most comfortable sitting still doing nothing because it's safe.
(11:45):
Or they think that it's safe, but everyone else keeps passing them by.
To be a good, effective racer in life, you need to know how to accelerate.
You need to know how to brake.
You need to know how to put your foot flat and you need to know when to keep
the accelerator on, but just slowly feather it.
Because you can still accelerate, but you might have to accelerate a little
bit slower. You're still getting somewhere, but there's a time where you just
(12:05):
need to accelerate slowly and just chip away at things. And then there's other
times where you get on that straight again and everything's clear and you just
put your foot down and you gun it.
But then as you come up to the first corner, you've got to hard brake,
hard brake, hard brake, slow everything down.
And then you turn into the corner, you see the direction that you want to go
in and you're like, right, accelerate again.
So good drivers, good business owners, good business leaders,
(12:28):
good leaders in their family, good people with influence, and even just the
general public, they need to know how to use their own mind the same as a car.
You need to know when to slow down, when to speed up, when to brake, when to accelerate.
Sometimes you want to just put your foot flat to the floor, but the conditions
don't say that it's right to put your foot flat to the floor.
(12:50):
If you're in rain and it's raining heavily and you don't have the right tires
on, doing that is a silly idea because you're going to crash.
People do that in life. They're in bad economic environment and they're like,
no, we want to grow. We want to grow when what they should be doing is consolidating
and slowing down and so they crash.
Life's like that as well. We go through times of growth, time for consolidation,
time for shedding away some of the things that don't help us or give us an advantage
(13:16):
anymore. And then we just keep moving.
So you'll know as you go through your own growth stages, sometimes you lose
friends. Sometimes you lose communication with family.
We have to lose things in order to gain things in life as well.
And so part of your own growth and part of business growth as well well,
is that you grow, you consolidate, you shed, and then you grow into the next stage.
(13:38):
And that's just a cycle of growth. If you have a look at nature,
that happens all the time.
But most humans are like, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow,
grow, grow, grow. That's like accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.
And then they wonder why they crash, they burn out.
It's ineffective. So I hope that answers the question.
There's no one tool, but there's a bunch of frameworks and ideas and thoughts
that I've hopefully given your audience as well, where they can just think through
(14:00):
things a little bit differently as well.
And and you know hopefully helps them absolutely it's
been very helpful and we'll come
to the final question of the
podcast episode and you talk about
performance and we've obviously talked about winning but how do you i mean you
work your ass off like you were just but you you go go go but you also have
(14:24):
balance like you you always bring it back to balance so you have that yin yang mindset That's it.
How do people keep that energy? How do entrepreneurs like myself,
people who are still trying to establish their business and grow in advance,
how do you keep that energy consistent?
(14:45):
Yeah. There's a few different things that I can give for that question,
and I could probably go on for hours on that one question alone.
But I remember a quote years ago, and someone said, the only way you know where
a boundary is is when you cross it.
Now you're you only know your own boundaries when you
cross those boundaries so a lot of people in
(15:06):
this day and age worry way too much about balance and they're like i meet these
business owners and they're like oh man i want more balance i want more work-life
balance and i'm like i don't even know what that means and they're like well
you know i just want more work-life balance and and they use it because societies
condition them for this silly idea that i've never even thought about out.
Now, our idea of balance really comes down to our values.
(15:29):
And this is why having a clear success map is important.
Now, when I look at my life, my highest value is teaching, coaching, and learning.
So I spend most of my day teaching, coaching people, and I do more than the average person.
So on an average day, I could spend 10 to 15 hours teaching,
coaching, and learning. Today, that's all I've done.
(15:50):
I haven't even hit my gym session yet.
But that's a lower value. you. So I've worked, I've been in meetings since this
morning with clients. I then had meetings with my team.
I then had meetings with people overseas. I then worked with a coach that I'm working with.
And then I've had other clients this afternoon, like I've hardly stopped. So I,
(16:10):
That's my balance because it's my highest value. My second highest value is
high-level leadership and communication.
I like being around people who are driven and want to grow and who are also
leaders in their own right. I like hanging around parents who lead their kids.
I like hanging out with other business owners who want to lead a team of people.
I want to hang around even my team. My team, I have my own leaders in my own team.
(16:33):
My wife is the head of operations in the company. me. I love spending time with
her because she's a growth-driven leader.
So I like hanging around those types of people. But guess what?
The thing is I learn from them, but also most of my clients are those types of people.
So not only do I teach, coach, and learn from those people, I also get paid
(16:54):
to teach, coach, and learn those types of people.
So now I have this big cycle of I learn, I coach, and even when I make money,
I still learn, teach, and coach. So I get to do what I love.
Then I go down to my third highest value, which is business and wealth creation.
So I keep building this business bigger and bigger every year,
and we keep making more and more money. And the more money we make,
the more I get to teach, coach, and learn.
(17:15):
The more I connect with high-level leaders and bring them into our community
and help them as well, because they need the tools that I have to become better
leaders and better business owners and more effective in their family.
So the money then becomes an amplifier of the stuff that I'm already doing.
Money essentially is an amplifier.
If you're living a shit life and you have money, your money is just going to
create more of a shit life and all of your habits will show that and demonstrate it.
(17:39):
That's why if you don't change you, you never change your life.
But people try to change their life and think that it's going to change the
way that they feel and it never does.
So that's my third highest value. And then my fourth highest value is physical
appearance and physical fitness.
So I like going to the gym. I like exercising. I like training.
And so I just set my life up around my four values.
And it took me a while to do that. But these days, I very rarely go outside
(18:01):
of it. Someone will come to me and they go, oh, we need you to do X,
Y, and Z. And I go, I'm not doing that.
And they go, well, you have to. And I'm like, nah, you're mistaking me. I'm definitely not.
That's not how I operate. And sometimes I have unrealistic clients.
I sometimes pick up a client who is just unrealistic and they want me to be
something that I'm not. And I just go, look, here's your money back.
I'm not your guy. Go somewhere else.
(18:22):
Now, they lose out on working with one of the best coaches in the world because
they're unadaptable and they don't accept me for being me.
That's silly. dilly. Now, if you're any type of leader, if you don't accept
people for the way that they are, and then work on growing their skill sets,
which make them more of themselves, then you're setting yourself up for failure.
Because you can't turn a lion into a fish.
(18:43):
But most people, they hire a person and then try to turn them into something
they're not, instead of looking at their skills and saying, where are they consistent?
Where are they effective?
What makes them them? And then working on developing those skill sets and pushing
them up and putting them in the right roles.
Or if not, letting them go and letting them go to a business where they're going
to be appreciated and valued for the skills that they have, right?
So these are things that keep people non-effective.
(19:05):
I don't know. I can't even remember what the question is because I just sort
of stole it and went crazy. It's so good. It's all about your energy and energy balance.
I think you've answered it quite well. So just coming back to it because I want
to round off the question for you. I hate to leave people just hanging.
When it comes to that, your lifestyle balance, there is no such thing as work-life balance.
(19:26):
If you have a low value on career or a low value on work or a low value on business.
So your work-life balance is going to be crap. Now, you can work an eight hour
day, but if you have a low value on work or career or something like that,
or something that's going to expand you within that career,
you're probably going to be working an eight hour day if you need money to pay bills.
(19:48):
And during that eight hour day, you're probably going to do about three hours
worth of work and you're going to spend most of your day avoiding working because
it's not what you want to do.
And unfortunately, there are plenty of government departments,
there are plenty of councils who get free money.
Now, anytime that people get given money without doing something,
so giving something for nothing, they'll waste it.
(20:10):
And so when a government wastes money and they go, oh, we don't have enough
money, what do they do? They just raise taxes.
Nothing off their skin. They don't give a shit. So then we give them more money
and then they just go and waste it again because there's no accountability on their behalf.
But then what they can do is they can give that to other the non-productive members.
So everybody knows that there are plenty of people in the council or council workers.
(20:32):
Not all of them. Some of them are very good, but most of them get frustrated
because they want to work and they want to be productive, but they're around
people who get paid really, really well to do nothing. So essentially,
they're being rewarded.
And I watch them. I watch dudes who are around the council area.
I'll walk past and I go for a walk. An hour later, they're still sitting in
their truck just on their phones. And I'm like, hang on, the lawnmower's on the back.
(20:53):
What's going on here, lads? Now, people go, yeah, but they're probably taking
their lunch break. Believe me, they ain't taking their lunch break.
That's a common pattern of behavior.
Because if you're driven, your lunch break is like 10 minutes or you work at
your desk while you're still working if you're driven. So what my point is, is that,
even your values dictate what you call work-life balance.
(21:13):
Part of the reason why I outperform most people in our society,
both financially and in business and things like that, isn't because there's
some secret skill. It's just because I live my values. I like working.
And so if the average person, let's take someone, for instance,
who works an eight-hour day, if they are eight hours productive, but I love working.
So as I said, I'm doing 7 until 8. So 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. tonight.
(21:35):
Actually, I'm going to work after this anyway. So I'll probably work till 10
or 10.30. If we look at that day, now, if I do that every week,
let's say the average working week is 38 hours.
Let's round it up to 40. If I work 80 hours and I'm more productive and I'm
more effective and I'm more efficient because I'm more engaged in what I do,
my productivity isn't just double because I'm working double the amount of time.
(21:57):
I might create six or seven times the amount of produce at the end of that week
because I'm just more effective.
So if you add that up over a 10-year period, they might be 40 years behind where I'm at.
Now, they're not 40 years behind in actual years, but they're 40 years behind in work.
And that's why a lot of people lose the game and they're non-productive.
(22:20):
So what we want to have a look at, and there's nothing wrong with that.
It's just that you have to realize
that part of the reason why I drive a McLaren is because of my values.
It's not because it makes you less valuable. It's just because my life and my
lifestyle is tailored in a way that makes me love work and push really,
really hard to grow a business and things like that.
But that doesn't take away from the fact that someone who has a high value of
(22:42):
family, they're probably the most amazing mom and amazing dad,
which I probably would not be if I had kids. I would not be as good as what they are.
My sister is an amazing mom. Her family is her highest value.
She is one of the most epic human beings when it comes to managing kids.
When the kids get upset, the way that she deals with them both firmly but fairly is phenomenal.
(23:06):
Whereas I watch my brother-in-law, he gets upset quick.
Now, he's got a higher value on experiences and travel and hanging out with
his friends and socializing and things like that.
So when the kids get upset, he has a very short patience.
My sister, she's very patient with them and she just knows how to communicate.
Now, she's never done communication training for kids, but she just gets it.
(23:29):
Now, she's a way better mom than someone who has a low value of kids.
That doesn't mean that they can't be a mom. It's just that they're going to
be different. Now, their balance is going to be different.
My sister wants to spend as much time with her family and her kids as she can.
Now, she also has a high value of career.
So she will spend as much time as she can with the kids and she's super productive and present with them.
(23:51):
But when she's working, she's a machine. And then she goes home.
And so that's her lifestyle balance.
Not the same as my lifestyle balance, not the same as your lifestyle balance,
not the same as my mom has a completely different lifestyle balance to that
as well, and so does my dad.
Lifestyle balance is a way that works for you. Then we have mental and emotional balance as well.
This is why that success map is so important because without that,
(24:13):
you don't know what your actual balance looks like and you'll probably burn
out, you'll be stressed out, you'll be frustrated, you'll be overwhelmed.
All of those things, those negative emotions and experiences that you're having
are essentially a red light on your dashboard telling you that there's something wrong.
And the worst thing that happens is now people go to the doctors,
they get medicated and all that stuff to shut that shit down.
(24:35):
But that's like getting a bit of sticky tape and putting across the red light
on your dashboard to tell you that you got low oil.
The emotion's there for a reason to say, hey, there's something going on here
that has to shift. We've got to do something differently. We've got to change.
So what we want to do, and I think I got onto this this before,
actually. I got off track. By our thought processes, I went into genetics.
(24:55):
When a child is born, and I'll swing it all back and I'll wrap it up for you. Perfect.
When we're born, the sperm and the egg, when they come together,
are essentially exchanging information.
The only thing that evolves through the universe, according to physics at this
current time, is information.
Even energy contains information, so light contains information.
(25:16):
Information is the thing that evolves. Now, if we look at the passing on of
genes as passing on information, our parents are essentially passing on information
about the environment and also about themselves.
They're passing on all these bits of information about what are my fears,
what am I scared of, what am I worried about?
If you look at evolutionary psychology, you'll see that there's this idea or this theory,
(25:41):
and I guess it's a scientific theory as well, where we're a lot more genetically
like our parents or our grandparents than what we think.
And so yes, we can grow and we can evolve, but our genetics heavily influence us.
They influence our psychology. They influence our fears. They influence our
worry. They influence our anxiety. They influence a whole bunch of things.
(26:02):
So then when we're born into the world, we come into the world with these perceptions
that have already been gifted to us from our parents and their own imbalances.
Now, what I don't want is they were given the same thing, and they've been working
hard their whole entire life to try to better themselves than what their parents were.
And your job is to do the same so that you're in a better spot for your kids.
And then your kids will do the same thing out of evolution. That's the game.
(26:23):
So now, when we come out into the world, our eyes, our smell,
our touch, our hearing, everything like that becomes aware of this external
world, this external reality, which then we have to navigate.
When we take in that information, it goes into our brain, and our brain creates
perceptions or meanings behind what everything means in the outside world.
(26:45):
And so when a child's learning, a child is learning what the outside world means,
and they're attaching meanings to things.
Then from those meanings, they create beliefs and they create stories.
Stories are essentially a bunch of beliefs and meanings.
Now what happens is in our own psyche, we have these beliefs and meanings and
essentially stories that we've partially taken on epigenetically because we're
(27:09):
probably going to be more responsive to fear.
If we're more responsive to fear, our perceptions then pick up fear more.
Then we go, oh, well, when I go outside, there's people. That scares me.
Now, we might have some sort of social anxiety disorder.
That's not saying that you actually have social anxiety. It's just saying that
you're more receptive to potentially being like that.
Our job now is to resolve that and figure that out through our life.
(27:31):
Now, that person lives life. When they have those thought processes and those
perceptions, our brain doesn't really do too much.
Our nervous system regulates our movement and our flow of movement,
but it doesn't actually get us to move.
The muscular contraction and things like that that cause us to move normally
happen through chemical changes in the body first.
When we look at that, our brain essentially says there's something going on
(27:56):
outside that I think could put us at threat. That's a perception.
Our brain then signals certain things through neuropeptides and neurohormones
or neurochemicals, which then change hormones in our body and neuropeptides.
That then floods through our cells. Our cells then interact with those chemicals,
which then now start to change the way we operate and the way we move.
(28:16):
But it also changes the way we feel. So my studies on emotions...
Essentially, emotions are driven from thoughts. Thoughts drive emotions.
Emotions drive behaviors.
Behaviors reinforce thoughts and perceptions. Then now we have a chain of causal
chain, which keep people looping.
Now, you will stay in that same pattern of behavior, which then people eventually
(28:38):
call your identity, or they will call your persona.
You'll even think that you're that way, which is your personality,
how you feel about yourself. self.
So what happens is after a while, you say, oh, but I've just got anxiety.
You don't got anxiety. That's how you label yourself.
That's your personality now. Your identity has become attached to someone with anxiety.
(29:02):
But your mask that you wear on the outside might not be that.
It might change. That's called our persona.
But that's all created from the chemical changes is based on our perceptions
that we feel through our feelings.
We feel our emotions, but they're essentially out of balance chemicals.
All of them are telling us to change.
(29:22):
If we change and we evolve beyond that by using our mindset and our thoughts,
also by changing our behaviors,
and potentially, it's hard to change your emotions without either changing the
thought or the behaviors, but both of those two things can reinforce the emotion.
I'll give you an example.
If I eat shitty food and keep thinking in a negative way, it's probably going to drive anxiety.
(29:45):
But if I want to change my anxiety, and I change my diet, and I change my exercise,
and I change the way I use my body, and I change my thoughts,
I'm probably going to eliminate anxiety.
Now, will you have times where you're anxious? Yeah.
Because it's a warning signal that there's something going on in the external world that's not right.
So do I have anxiety just before I get on stage to speak? Yeah,
if it's a big group of people and I'm pushing myself all the time.
(30:08):
Do I let it define me? I know that it's there because it makes me hyper-aware and hyper-focused.
Now, if I got on stage and I wasn't hyper-aware and hyper-focused with that
level of anxiety, I know that I'm not dialed in. So I know I'm dialed in by having it.
So anyway, I hope that clarifies the causal chain of emotions,
but also as well, it helps to clarify about when we use our emotions through
(30:30):
positive, negative, and how we need to navigate the world.
Because our job in this world is to take one problem, evolve it and dissolve
it, and then move to the next problem.
And the same thing happens in our psyche. The same thing happens with our emotions.
The same thing happens with our behaviors.
And eventually, we want to end life moving that needle as far forward in the
evolutionary chain as we can.
(30:51):
Now, if you've got kids and you do that, some of your kids will end up with
those bad with those negative gaps that you've had.
Now, if you're a smart individual who's a smart adult who understands human
behavior, you don't want to... I meet parents all the time, they say things
like, I just don't want my kids to go through what I've been through.
That's a really bad way of thinking as a parent. Because what can happen is
(31:13):
if you have never dealt with those things properly, you'll become empathetic.
And when you become empathetic, you try to save your own kids.
And when you save your own kids, you take away their ability to learn through
their own pain and their own problems and their own adversities.
So they become weak and codependent. And we're in a society now where parents
for generations have tried to take away pain and struggle and sacrifice and shit from their kids.
And now there's kids who call words violence.
(31:37):
If you misgender them, it's violence.
I played footy all the time. People are like, you're a girl.
And I'm like, yeah, whatever.
Whatever the fuck that means. I don't care. I just kick the ball and keep playing.
It doesn't matter. Now, if you misgender somebody, It's violence.
That shit is hectic, but that happens from an oversupported generation of kids
whose parents tried to protect them because the truth is that the parents...
(32:00):
Aren't doing their own mental and emotional work and realizing the part of the
thing that have made them a great person, a great individual is going through those adversities.
And so for me, as a child, I got bullied a lot. I had bright red hair and freckles and I was chubby.
Part of the reason why I'm successful now is because I had bright red hair,
I had freckles, I was fat and I was bullied.
I wouldn't be where I am today without those bullies.
(32:23):
Now, I got asked on a podcast ages ago, they said, what would you say if you
went back and saw the bullies. And I said, thank you.
Because the truth is they made me the man I am today. I can take a lot of adversity
and I can take a lot of shit off people because I had to learn how to deal with it at a young age.
Now, I don't really care what people think of me. I realized that my value comes
from within, not from other people.
(32:43):
So anyway, that's what happens when you heal from your own past and you learn
how to balance that shit out is that you realize that even if your kids get bullied,
there is a lesson and learning in there and you help them navigate it from the
learnings that you have, which then makes them stronger versus trying to take
away the bully from them and trying to protect them and save them,
which then makes them weak and codependent.
Because the truth is we're in a world of people who are always going to bully
(33:05):
you no matter what you do.
And there's always going to be adversity. There's always going to be challenge.
There's always going to be some form, unless we all end up with the same skin
color, the same look, the same everything, which then there's no uniqueness.
There's no individuality.
There's always going to be someone who's going to judge us for looking differently
or acting differently or speaking differently or something like that.
The thing is, do you You appreciate that part of yourself.
(33:27):
But for some people, that massively triggers them because there's part of themselves
that feels like less of an individual because they have different skin color. But that's them.
I hope that helps. I hope that helps someone out there anyway. Absolutely.
You've answered the questions incredibly well, and I'm just blown away with
what you've shared today.
There's a lot of things I've learned that I wasn't aware of or I didn't understand
(33:49):
them to the extent that you've explained them today.
So thank you so much, Michael.
Appreciate you giving up your time. to be on the Will to Win podcast and share
your knowledge, wisdom, and expertise.
And yeah, before we finish up, feel free to share how people can stay connected
with you and find out more about you. You type in Michael Mojo online.
(34:14):
I'm sure my website will come up. So my website is michaelmojo.com.
If you go and search for me on any social media platform, if you just look up
Michael Mojo, you'll find me on there.
My Instagram page, which is where I'm highly active and I spend
a lot of time speaking into the community and stuff like that on there is michaelmojo
underscore success so you'll find me on instagram
or michaelmojo underscore big button success and the
(34:36):
other ones as well i think are just either michaelmojo or michaelmojo
double zero something like that you'll find me like people will find me if they
want to find me that's it yeah you just gotta look for the mojo that's all you
need to do 100 look if you start if you send me a message and then you start
getting message about cryptocurrency foreign exchange or anywhere where you've
got to give your credit card details online,
(34:57):
it's definitely not me. You've definitely got the wrong page.
Thank you for listening to the Will to Win. I hope today's episode was overflowing with.
Music.
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