Total Mind Control
What if you could have complete control of every thought, every emotion, and every stray neuron?
What if you could use your brain to re-create your life and business into the life and business of your dreams?
Good News: You Can.
Better News: I’ll show you how in this episode of Ed Talks.
Here are some Time Stamps from the show…
0:25 – The Mental Game of Life and Business – How to Control Your Thoughts, Dominate in Business, and Throw Things With Your Mind (Like Darth Vader Used to Do)
3:55 – Purposeful Intake – The Secret to Controlling Every Thought, Every Stray Neuron, and Even Every Dream.
6:00 – The Simple Secret (
12:40 – The Mindfulness Myth. The Major Malfunction in the Mindfulness Movement…and How to Avoid this Myth and Master Your Mind.
21:00 – Do It Now: A Simple 10-Minute Exercise Designed to Train You to Total Mind Control.
Go check it out.
The YouTube
The Podcast is above and here
Download the Transcript here.
Welcome to the Mental Game of Life and Business
What if you could have complete control of every thought, every emotion, every stray neuron and even every dream? What if you could create a reality in your mind and then see it lived out in your life and business?
Hi. My name’s Ed Rush. I’m a former F/A-18 fighter pilot. Five time number one bestselling author, and I’m the host of Ed Talks. This episode, we’re starting a new series called The Mental Game of Life and Business.
By the time you’re done with this episode, you’re going to not only know how to control the way that you’re thinking, but you’re also going to know how it’s controlled you in the past, and
I’m going to give you a simple strategy on how to begin to train your mind so that it will obey your every command. You can be in charge. Instead of your emotions. Instead of some random thought that somebody put there weeks and weeks ago, you in charge of everything.
I just got done watching this Netflix series about a month ago. It’s the series on Formula One. I don’t know if you like car racing or not. I was actually not a big car racing fan until I watched this series.But there’s about eight episodes and it shows you, it begins to document the lives of these people that race cars about 200 miles an hour.
Having flown airplanes five times as fast as that, I know what it’s like to go fast. Having flown airplanes like that around corners, I know what it’s like to make fast decisions. But it was great for me to see a reminder of what it’s like to live that kind of live on the edge.
These drivers are about 18 to 30 years old. And as they’re doing these interviews … and by the way, again, I don’t know if you like racing or not, but it’s worth at least going to Netflix. I think the series is called “Drive to Survive”. And all I want you to do is look into their eyes.
Because I can tell you that they chronicled the lives of several different racers and one of the episodes is about a racer to whom everything is just falling apart. His name is Romain Grosjean. He’s a French Formula One racer and he started making mistakes. They didn’t say this in the series, but you could see his mental game beginning to break down.
You could see the moment that he went from, I need to win this race to thinking, “Gosh, I hope I don’t lose this race.” And in that moment, it changes everything for somebody.
Think about that for a moment. Your mind is set on a target and your mind works just like a missile coming off of an F/A-18. Your mind is set on a target.
I’m going to win this race. I got to win this race. I want to win this race. And all of a sudden your mind shifts to another target that goes, “Man, I hope I don’t lose. And I hope I don’t crash. And I hope I don’t do something stupid.”
And in that series I could look into that young man’s eyes and go, “It’s over for him, man.” Unless he gets somebody like me or somebody who could train him on the mental game, it’s over.
But there’s another racer in that series. He happens to be one of my new favorite guys now that I’m watching Formula One and his name is Max Verstappen. Max is in his early 20s. He’s a Dutch racer. He races for Red Bull which is kind of one of the underdogs in the top of the field.
The moment you look in his eyes you go, “That’s a guy who’s hungry for a win.” You can see his mind working and you can see his mind working on the win. And as I watch that series I thought, “That’s who I’m going to be more like.” I’m going to start thinking more like that. I’m going to start focusing more like that.
Purposeful Intake:
The Secret to Controlling Every Thought
Our mental game series over the next few episodes is designed for you to take complete control over your mind. About three or four years ago I made a goal that every thought, every single thing that came into my mind was going to be there on purpose.
Do you know how hard that is? I mean they’re sitting down. I sit in my office right here and sometimes I’ll just read or pray or meditate or just read my Bible or a book and then all of a sudden you’re reading and you’re like, “Oh, man, I forgot the socks are in the dryer.” Like the random thoughts that go through your head on any given day.
Just wild stories or dreams or whatever it is. And I set out to make my goal that every thought that was in my mind was there on purpose. Let me tell you, that is a big challenge. Because in our lives we have frustration, regret and discouragement.
All these things that come our way and we have life situations that happen to us and money problems, and business issues, and relationship issues, and kids get sick and, oh my goodness, life is hard. But what if you could focus so well that every thought was there because you put it there?
We’re going to start talking about what it takes to dominate mentally so that you can dominate everywhere else. But before we do that, I want to take you back to a study that was done in Australia by a hospice nurse named Bronnie Ware. Bronnie Ware sat at the bedside of over a thousand patients in the hospice and asked them a simple question.
As they were dying, she said, “What are your biggest regrets?” And the number one thing on the list, you wouldn’t even believe this. I’ve asked people all over the world. I said, “What do you think the number one thing is?”
Most people go, “I work too much. I didn’t spend enough time with my family.” You know what the biggest regret was? “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
How to Follow the Passion and
Avoid the Greatest Regret of All Times
Think about that for a minute. How sad is that? Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people passing away with the thought, “I wish I was true to myself. I wish I lived up to my expectations, not the expectations of others.”
I heard that statistic about four or five years ago and in that moment I realized I was done. I was done living up to the expectations of parents or spouses or friends. I was going to find out what was it that God wanted me to do on planet Earth and then I was going to do it. Like a Formula One racer with that passion. With that zeal.
And to do that, you have to dominate the mental game because let me tell you, there’s enemies everywhere.
There’s people trying to get your attention. There’s media trying to get your attention. There are things that are trying to distract you and draw you away from your mission.
One of the ways that this has been taught in the past is by using the term mindfulness.
But the problem with mindfulness, which is the reason why I call it the mindfulness myth, the problem with mindfulness is the people teaching mindfulness don’t tell you what to have your mind full of! I mean, listen, you can have your mind full of all of the wrong things, and you could be mindful and it won’t work.
Like if you ever watched a movie that had a lot of violence in it? My wife and I don’t watch a lot of movies that have violence in them. I’ll tell you why. Because when you go to bed that night, the stuff that’s going through your head, that’s pretty violent stuff.
Like right now, I’m in the middle of a series. Jack Reacher. I don’t know if you’ve watched that movie. I’m reading some books written by Lee Child just to get some inner fire going, actually. There’s purposeful intake. I’m going to talk about that a little later on in this series. But enough of that. You start becoming an action figure inside of the book, right?
Mindfulness is important but more important is what your mind is full of.
I’m going to get into a moment down to what it takes to train your mind. But before I do that, let me just start with some basic. Something you already know. It is important for us to lay the foundation for this. There are essentially two component parts to the mind.
There’s a lot more than two, but two for the factor of this conversation will be the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. And those two work in tandem and sometimes trade tasks in between each other.
Now as you know, the conscious mind is capable of doing one task really well consciously at a time. So for example right now I’m looking at you right now, in the eye, into the camera and I’m focusing on the words that I’m saying.
At some point later tonight I’m going to have dinner. At some point later tonight I’m going to take a walk with my wife and my kids, but I didn’t start thinking about that until I just said it now because my conscious mind is focused on you.
The subconscious mind is an amazing piece of gear just like the conscious mind is and it’s able to process 10, 20, 30, 100, who knows, things simultaneously. It’s working on things in the background.
For example, I have an event that’s coming up in my business. And I started thinking about that just this week. It’s about four months away, which is typically when I start thinking about the content and the promotion for the event. I’ve got a mastermind group.
We’re meeting up in a Colorado and then next year we’re going to Hawaii and my team is working on the details on that.
All of those things are happening now in my subconscious mind and I can guarantee you that tomorrow when I wake up in the morning, I’m going to have some new ideas and some fresh revelation coming out of my subconscious mind on those things that my mind is working on while I’m talking to you and focusing on you with my conscious mind. And that’s how the conscious and subconscious work.
You’ll have somebody who will go, “I’m just a really good multitasker.” I will tell you that they’re right and wrong. What they mean is I’m really good at doing things simultaneously. What they don’t mean is that they can do simultaneous tasks really, really well with their conscious mind.
For example, I’ll give you an example. All of you, as you’re listening to me, you probably have learned how to drive a car. If you haven’t that’s coming soon. I can tell you that when I get into my car and I shift into drive, I don’t think about shifting into drive. I don’t think reverse, neutral, drive. I don’t think about it. I just shift into drive, right?
But the first time I learned to drive, back when I was 15 years old, I was sitting in this old Honda Accord in a parking lot with my dad and I didn’t realize until recently how terrifying that experience is for a dad. But I was sitting in the parking lot with this Honda Accord and he’s like, “All right.” We shifted places and he’s like, “All right. Go ahead and shift it into drive.”
And I’m like, reverse. Neutral. Drive. One, two, three. You have to think about it! Because if you’ve never driven before, shifting into drive is a conscious mind experience.
But for most of you, as you’re watching me, now shifting into drive in your car has become a subconscious mind experience. In other words, you’ve trained it to competence in your subconscious mind.
When I was flying F/A-18s, the stick on the F/A-18 had about seven switches. One, two, three, four. And then about three or four with your thumb and then the throttles had about eight. One, two, three, four. One for each of your fingers and then your thumb had another four.
And as I was learning to fly the F/A-18 I had to consciously think about the switches that I was moving all over the … Targeting computers and radios and all of those things.
But when I was a senior flight instructor, I would be leading 14, 30, 40 planes down range going about 600 miles an hour against an enemy, or simulated enemy, that was coming at us at about 600 miles an hour. That’s 1,200 miles an hour worth of closure. That’s 20 miles a minute. That means if you start 100 miles away, five minutes later you’re all together.
During that time of leading all those airplanes, I’d talk on one, two, sometimes three radios. Navigate. Make sure that everybody was in their place. Used my radar. Used my forward-looking infrared.
Listen and talk and make all the tactics and defend from enemy missiles and come in and do all that dog fighting and keep track of all those airplanes as I was dog fighting in the air. And a lot of that was happening in my subconscious mind because I had trained to be able to do those things really well.
I wasn’t thinking about the positioning of my hand. I wasn’t thinking about the positioning of my airplane. It was just moving wherever my brain wanted it to go. Because I had trained it into my subconscious mind.
Know Where Your Thoughts Are and
Make Them Work More Efficiently by Setting Rules
And so as we talk about dominating or controlling your thoughts, one of the first things to take note of is where the thought sits right now. Is it a conscious mind processing thought? Or is it a subconscious mind thought? Is it the kind of thing that’s happening in the background because you trained it to be there? Now, we’re going to get to the meat of the matter.
We’ve talked about mindfulness but I mentioned the mindfulness myth, like the mind full of something. But I’m going to talk about the present because when mindful … people talk about mindfulness, they talk about the now. Right?
They talk about living here in the now. Problem is, they’re like, “You need to be focused right now.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but I got a flight reservation to make for next week. I can’t just wait until the next week and then hope that there’s a seat to Denver. I got to make a reservation now!”
Then there were sometimes when I was leveraging off of an experience or something in the past and I realized, I need the past too. There’s stories there. There’s experiences. There’s people I’ve met. There’s people I wish I didn’t meet, you know?
And so if I was just to get rid of the past, then that person would come back who has betrayed me or hurt me or did something in my business that was not a good thing or sent some angry e-mail and I wouldn’t remember that.
I’m like, “Well mindfulness is great, living in the present is great, but you need some past too.” Okay. So I realized you need the present. You need to be in the present, like I’m here with you right now, like you’re here with me. But you need to be in the past sometimes too and you need to be in the future.
I started to make some rules about what I was going to do in the past, in the present, in the future. Let me tell what most people do in the past. Most people live with some sense of regret, shame, frustration, discouragement or disappointment in the past.
The most of the experience for the majority of people when they glance into the past there are a bunch of negative things that they’re bringing forward.
But in the present, in your mind, all the negative things aren’t helping and they’re bringing you regret, shame, worry, discouragement. That’s not helpful. Right? That’s not helpful for your emotions. Now, looking into the future what do most people do when they look into the future? Most people see an unknown.
Gigantic question mark that sits out into the future and because of that, they begin to worry. You’ve heard the verse. If you’re … I don’t even know if you read the Bible, but if you don’t, you probably heard it before too, it says, “Look, don’t worry about tomorrow.
Tomorrow has enough worries of its own.” In other words, by the time you get to tomorrow, you can think about tomorrow. But for now, focus on today. Focus on the issues of today.
And so most people in the future spend time worrying. Most people in the past spend time in regret. No wonder the mindfulness people want you to live in the present. So what’s the solution? Because you do need the past, and you need to future. The solution is to create some rules.
Here are the rules I created about the past, the present, and the future.
First of all, in the past, I am allowing two things forward in my filter. Number one is wisdom. Number two is pattern recognition. Let me explain what both of those things are. I’m 46 years old. What that means is I’ve had some experiences in life. I made some mistakes. I did some things right. I learned how to do some things well.
I learned how to help people really, really well. So I can look in a business owner in the eye and give them really, really good advice because I know their challenges, and their fears and their concerns, and I know how to solve them because I’ve solved a lot.
That’s wisdom. That’s experience coming forward. I’m going to bring that stuff forward. I’m going to tell my coaching members, the people I’m working with, about the person I worked with last year and their challenges and how they overcame using the strategy and how they can use the same strategy to overcome those things, too.
That’s wisdom experience coming forward. But the second thing I’m going to bring forward is pattern recognition. Now this is the subconscious mind’s role in bringing forward the past. Your subconscious is amazing at pattern recognition. It’s phenomenal.
In fact, if you had to do this job, it would drive you crazy. Let me give you an example of how good the subconscious mind is.
For example, if you’re walking through an airport. I went through two airports yesterday. I was there for awhile. Flight was delayed. By the way, I don’t worry about flight delays, so it doesn’t get me upset at all. It’s just life. Got to live in the present. Mindfulness, right? So, I was walking through the airport.
This didn’t happen yesterday but it’s happened to me before where I was walking through the airport and all of a sudden over in the gate, wasn’t even my gate, I recognized somebody. There’s a hundred people sitting there.
I mean, the average flight is 130-150 passengers. So you’re walking by gate, gate, gate, gate. And all of a sudden boom, you recognize somebody like a needle in a haystack. You know how that happens?
Your conscious mind is thinking about whatever your conscious mind is thinking of and your subconscious is processing this. Watch this. As you go through the airport, your subconscious is going, don’t know him, don’t know her, don’t know him, don’t know her, don’t know her. Know him! That’s your subconscious.
Can you imagine if that was happening conscious processing, if your mind was actually doing that and you were thinking about? It would drive you crazy. It would really, really, really mess up whatever you were listening to at the time.
I’m bringing forward he pattern recognition. It’s the ability of my subconscious mind to begin to recognize patterns and to start to give me signals as those patterns go. Let’s look at another example…
Have you ever been talking to somebody and as you’re talking to that person they give you the willies? You meet them and you’re like … “Something’s wrong with that guy.” And he seems totally normal, and he talks totally normal and whatever he’s talking about you’re like, “Well, that sounds kind of interesting.”
But something is weird. Something’s off. That’s your subconscious mind. Your subconscious has seen that before. It’s recognizing patterns. Maybe it’s the way the person’s eyes move, or they shuffle their hands or whatever. It makes them look evil. Whatever it is, your subconscious is telling you something.
Your subconscious through pattern recognition can recognize authenticity too. There’s times when I meet somebody and I’m like, “That’s the real deal right there. That’s the real deal.” Right? That’s pattern recognition. So I’m bringing forward from the past wisdom or experience, whichever one you want to call it, and I’m bringing forward pattern recognition.
I’m leaving behind regret, shame, discouragement, fear, doubt, frustration, dismay. Any of those other bad words, they’re all going to stay there. I’m going to bring forward two things. That’s what’s allowed to come through the filter of the past into the future though.
Remember I said most people worry. You have three things that you’re allowed to do now. This is my new rule and there’s really two, but I like it because it rhymes. So it goes like this, dream, scheme, and plan. Right? Dream, scheme and plan.
The first thing I want you to be able to do in the future is a dream. I want you to think about amazing and big things. I want you to think about how you can change the world.
Listen, we’re starting a movement. You know this if you watched Ed Talks episode one, two and three. We’re going to try to change America and then change the world.
We’re taking the movement to the streets. We’re going to try to disrupt Washington. We’re going to try to break the pattern of corruption and start a completely new party that’s based on four principles and those four principles are about unselfish leadership.
If you missed it, go all the way back to episode number one, Horse Manure Leadership, and watch from the beginning. It’ll totally blow you away.
Now, as a part of that, we’re dreaming. We’re scheming. We’re making plans, you know what I’m saying? We’re doing those things into the future. We’re not worried. We’re not upset. We’re just making the plans and dreaming.
Plans are things like making a flight on United to Denver or whatever flight that you need to take. It’s starting to plan for the next episode of Ed Talks, like I’m doing after this one. That’s what I mean about looking into the future. All the while you’re sitting in the present, sitting with a word called contentedness.
Whatever happened in the past, whatever happened in the future, you’re going to do as my good friend Paul once said, he said, “I learned the secret, learned the secret of being content in all things.”
Just sitting there and being content in what you have. So taking from the past, I can bring forward wisdom, pattern recognition. Into the future, I can send for a dream, and scheme and plan. Now, let’s wrap up this episode with a little exercise.
10 Mins a Day to Increase Your Mindfulness
with This Quick Exercise
Inside my book called The 21 Day Miracle, which by the way, you should have. If you don’t, go to Amazon, find it, or just go to edrushbook.com. That’s like the easiest website to go to www.EdRushBook.com and when you go there, you’re going to get a bunch of free stuff too.
I don’t make money off of books. I share a message off of books. I have made some money, but it’s not my goal. It’s not like the core of my business.
My point is, it’s going to really help you. Now this book is about the way you use your mind, but if you flip forward which you’re not allowed to do. You got to read the beginning of the book. I start the challenges in the book by starting with the mind.
And my challenge in the book is very simple. I’m going to give you a brief overview. But I want you to get the book and I want you to read it.
If you flip to the page 63, you’ll find a chapter called 21-Day Mind Mastery Miracle. It’s 10 minutes a day. That’s it. The first week, all you’re doing with your 10 minutes a day, you’re not even meditating. You’re actually simply being aware of things.
Because the first step in being mindful of good things, okay, the first step is being aware. The first step is watching the pattern of your thoughts. For example, where do you tend to go? Where does your mind tend to go?
If it was me I was watching, if I’m looking in the past, my mind often will go to some of the things I mentioned. If I look into the future, it might go to some of the things I mentioned. But I made some new rules and I’m watching how my mind begins to start obeying those rules. What is the thing that my mind keeps bringing back to me? All I’m going to do is awareness.
For about seven days I’m going to spend 10 minutes a day just absolute quiet. That means phone is off. TV is off. No interruptions. It’s just 10 minutes, right? Sit there. Close your eyes. You can leave your eyes open if you want to. And just watch your thoughts.
After seven days you got another 14 days. This is the challenge that’s inside the book. 21 Day Miracles. So it’s 21 days, all the challenges. Inside the book it’s another 14 days and those 14 days, what you’re simply doing is identifying certain thoughts you don’t want to be there and replacing them with another. And the formula on how to do that is in the book. It’s very simply.
It’s just a sentence or two to take one thought out and to put the other thought in. That’s how you begin to control your mind. This was part one of The Mental Game of Life and Business.
In this part, I talked most about the past, the present, and the future and about mindfulness. About how to use your mind to dominate and to create the kind of things that you want.
In the next episode, I’m going to talk to you about the difference between thinking and acting in a fighter jet and the difference between doing that in business or perhaps in a sport like golf. Because it’s wildly different. It’s wildly different. There’s something, believe it or not, that makes business, life, careers, little sports like golf, way harder, way harder mentally than flying a fighter jet.
So in the second episode of this series, The Mental Game of Life and Business was actually the eighth episode of Ed Talks. Don’t get confused with that. You’ll just set it. I’m going to talk to you about the difference between those two things and how to reconcile time and how to use time to your advantage which is huge. In the meantime, there’s a couple things you need to do.
Number one, hit the button that say subscribe. The second thing, why don’t you tell somebody about this? This stuff’s good, man. All right? So just send it to somebody and be like, “Hey, I was thinking about you John. Because I love you man. And I want to help you out.” Because your friend will benefit too. All right?
This is what I believe, and I’ll talk to you soon.
About The Author
Ed Rush is a world-renown speaker, a five-time #1 bestselling author, and a highly successful business consultant who was featured on CBS, Fox, ABC, and NBC. He has spent a significant amount of time in the cockpit of an F-18 fighter jet, so he knows the value of strategy and the power of focus. He has effectively taken the principles that he learned flying faster than the speed of sound, and translated them into good business. His clients range from small startups to multinational organizations, and include CEOs, founders, political leaders, sports teams, national universities, Hollywood stars, and even a contestant on Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. To buy any of Ed's books, visit his bookstore right now or hire Ed to speak at your next event.