Jack Canfield is 81 years old. Hearing him talk, you would assume he couldn’t possibly be over 50. He’s got a voice full of wisdom and lived experience, and rightly so – he has sold over 600 million books, and written over 200. I’m naturally so curious about what we can learn from people like that, who grew up with very little, but somehow ended up achieving something so incredible and big. I find it fascinating to deconstruct their mindset and the things they credit their success to – it’s often how I’ve learned some of the most valuable things I ended up implementing in my own life.
I spent quite a few hours recently diving into Jack’s interviews as well as the documentary about his life, and ended up making something like six pages of notes in my journal… So, here are some of the most valuable and practical things I learned, for anyone dreaming big – no matter what the dream is.
The first thing that strikes me about Jack Canfield’s wisdom is that he credits a huge part of his success to things that today, many people dismiss as belonging to ‘TikTok manifestation girlies’. The concept of manifestation gets a bad rap, often dismissed as woo-woo or too spiritual; but what I’ve always found fascinating, is that the principles taught under manifestation are the same ones credited by some of the most successful, impressive, and ultimately fulfilled people of all time.
In a one-and-a-half hour conversation with Jack Canfield on Tim Ferriss’ podcast, the practices of visualisation and affirmations came up multiple times, again and again. To dismiss them as woo-woo would be doing the world a big disservice; because any quick look at academic research papers will show you the direct correlation between visualisation and measurable increases in performance. Athletes who have a practice of regularly visualising themselves performing really well, are also the ones who do. This is one of the first things I learned at 18 when I read Carol Dweck’s book Mindset, and realized how much I hadn’t been taught, that seemed crucial to know. And it is.
Jack Canfield credits his success partly to 3 things: “Mindset, skill set, and ready, set, go”. The first: being aware of how much your mindset tangibly affects your life. The second: building your actual skill set. And the third, my favourite: Teaching yourself to take action instead of waiting. To just do the thing, again and again, while everyone else is overthinking it. To give yourself the gift of actually acting towards bringing the things you want to life, going from 0 to 1.
In neuroscience, it’s no secret that limiting beliefs are a very real obstacle to people achieving the things they want. Limiting beliefs are usually formed during incidents we can rarely remember, often between the ages of 3-8 years old, and they teach us to go about life assuming that certain things aren’t safe: taking up space, for example, or asking for things, or relying too much on others. These will directly impact how we go on to live. If you deeply assume that asking for things isn’t safe to do, you will let countless opportunities in life pass you by and be fearful of taking action. Most people aren’t aware of their limiting beliefs, so they never actively work on them for enough time. And in order to rewire your brain, you need to be actively and intentionally trying to shift those behaviours. ...
