Podcast Transcript

INTRO
ANNOUNCER: Are you ready for an open discussion with the best of the best and the best of what's next? Welcome to The Tony DUrso Show. Join in on a great conversation today with some of the world's great influencers as they showcase great advice and techniques that made them the game changers they are today. Now here's Tony DUrso.
TONY: Welcome. I'm your host, Tony DUrso. I interview elite entrepreneurs and I thank you for joining us. This show is dedicated to helping you turn your vision into reality, and we are the number one show on the Voice America network. Today we're going to talk about developing the "I CAN" mindset with Jack Canfield and Miriam Laundry.
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Today's show is about developing the "I CAN" mindset with Jack Canfield and Miriam Laundry. Let's see what we can learn today. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary recap of what we went over, so stay tuned for that.
Author Jack Canfield is an award-winning speaker and an internationally recognized leader in personal development and peak performance strategies. As the co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, he's taught millions of individuals his formulas for success. Miriam Laundry wrote the first draft of I Can Believe in Myself on the flight home from a transformational retreat taught by Jack Canfield. Here we go.
Hi Jack and Miriam. Welcome to The Tony DUrso Show. So good to have you on with us today.
JACK: Glad to be with you. Thanks for the opportunity.
MIRIAM: Hi Tony.
TONY: Hi Miriam. Guys, I love your new book titled I Can Believe in Myself, which is aimed at our younger generation, our kids. It's got a powerful message and it would have helped me a lot when I went to school. Just wanted you to know, it is that powerful and I hope every single person in our audience gets a copy. Yeah, guys, it's that good. This is a great book. We're going to talk about it and perhaps let's give everything the proper focus. Let's start with your journey to success and kind of how everything began. Let's start with you, Jack. How did it all start for you? What's your backstory?
INTERVIEW – PART 1 (JACK'S BACKSTORY)
JACK: Well, I grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia. My father got out of World War II. I'm 76 years old, believe it or not, and my mom and him didn't get along that well. He was a little violent when he drank. They got divorced when I was six. I grew up and was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to go to Harvard. I played football. I think that's why they let me in. I graduated from the half of the class that made the top half possible, I always like to say, but basically my senior year I took an elective class. It was called Social Relations 10. It was really a group where people got together and talked about their feelings, talked about their goals in life and it was new to me. I was totally in my head up until then, and I started knowing I had a heart, I had vision, I had goals, so I started to get interested in the whole human development movement.
And from there, I went to the University of Chicago, where I know you lived for a while. I taught in a high school there. I went to graduate school at the university there, and what really transformed it all for me was I was teaching in this all-black school and about halfway through the first semester, I realized my kids weren't all that motivated to learn and they didn't believe they could learn. Their self-esteem was really low.
There was a guy in Chicago by the name of W. Clement Stone who was worth $600 million. He had a foundation called the W. Clement and Jesse V. Stone Foundation, and they were running courses on achievement motivation. How do you motivate people to achieve more? I went and took that class. I started applying those principles in my classroom and my kids started doing really well. And pretty soon all the other teachers were coming to me and saying, "What are you doing with your kids?" And I started teaching them. And the principal said, "I want you to start teaching this self-esteem development work to the other teachers." And it became system-wide. Then I became a consultant all over the Midwest working with the Stone Foundation.
And then I went back to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, studied psychological education, became a psychotherapist for a few years actually, but always interested in how do you help people be more successful and have their lives be more fulfilling and be happier. And so that was really the beginning of all this for me. And then you know they say the rest of the story—Old Paul Harvey used to say. Someone once asked me, he said that story you told about the puppies, is that in the book anywhere? And I said no, and the next week someone said the story about the Girl Scout who sold 3,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies, is that in the book anywhere? And I say no, and that's what led to Chicken Soup for the Soul.
And so I split all these stories I was telling, because I realized students respond to the stories. Teachers are responding to stories, inspiring stories. And so that led to Chicken Soup for the Soul, which led to 225 books, 500 million copies sold. And I wrote one more piece. I wrote a book called The Success Principles, and then I started running a workshop on it. Miriam who's here took that workshop. And it was a result of that that we decided to write a book together. So that's my backstory. I'll let Miriam tell you hers.
INTERVIEW – PART 2 (MIRIAM'S BACKSTORY)
MIRIAM: Well, for me, I'll take you back to that moment where I was sitting at Jack Canfield's seminar. This is back in 2012. About six, eight weeks prior to that, I had just given birth to my son, my fourth child, and the day after that, we lost my 17-year-old niece to suicide. It was a time that I was full of emotions and I was not doing well—baby blues and the grieving—and my husband suggested that I go see Jack Canfield, to the seminar, so I went. I left the eight-week-old baby and went and the one thing that kept coming up for me was that word "can't." Jack took us through an exercise on how to let go of the word "can't" and it just brought me back to my childhood and hearing that word "can't" so much.
I come from an immigrant family, living in Toronto with two parents from Bolivia and that word always came up. I spent a week there learning from Jack, hearing about all these great principles, and I just kept thinking, why didn't I learn this when I was younger? This is all amazing, great, but where would my life be had I learned this when I was younger? So, on the flight home, as I was reflecting on what I was going to teach my kids when I got back, what I was going to tell them about the conference, I thought, well, that's what I got to talk to them about. How to flip that word "can't" into "CAN."
It was a long flight from Arizona to Toronto, so I thought, okay, I can't just go home and dump this information on them. I need to entertain them, to tell it to them in a story. So that's when I wrote the first draft to I Can Believe in Myself, and I self-published the book from there. It took me a year.
I continued going back to Jack's courses. It helped so much with the book, and then I approached him when I wrote The Big, Bad Bully maybe five years ago. And that was our first book that came out a year ago. And now our publishing company has picked up I Can Believe in Myself. It's been completely redone, brand new illustrations. Jack has added to the story and has added exercises at the end of the story. So that's my backstory. That's how this whole journey as an author started for me.
TONY: So, is it from the workshop you did with Jack Canfield that brought about the vision to write the books, the Bully book and now the I Can book?
MIRIAM: Absolutely. I wrote it on the flight home from that conference.
TONY: And by the way for the audience, as I've probably said before, it is a good read. It's a fast read, but it's powerful. And it kind of reminds me a little bit, if anyone in the audience has read or heard about the book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull came to my mind. It's very different in a way, but it is so inspiring that when you're done, you just want to read it again. And it's that kind of book. I guarantee every single person—it can change something in your life and some of those around you. Check out that book. It's really good. We're going to talk more about that.
Jack, did we go over what brought about the vision for writing? I got that you were so good on writing, on your stories and is it because people were asking you for stories—"Hey, where's your Girl Scout story? Where's this story?" Is that what brought about this? Was that the impetus or the embryo for your books?
INTERVIEW – PART 3 (THE POWER OF STORIES)
JACK: Yeah, what happened was I wrote a book in 1976 called 100 Ways to Enhance Self-Concept in the Classroom, and that was a result of my experience teaching in Chicago and then teaching teachers how to develop self-esteem and eventually turned it into a book, and I didn't write much after that for a while. Then I started teaching and I would always notice if I told a story, whether it was my story or a story about W. Clement Stone or a story about Muhammad Ali or a story about a Girl Scout I mentioned who sold more Girl Scout cookies than anyone. She actually was in the Guinness Book of World Records for having sold the most Girl Scout cookies. And I would tell these stories to inspire people to believe that anything's possible. It doesn't matter where you start, how you started. You can overcome any obstacle and achieve success.
And what I realized is the stories velcroed the principles to the brain. You know, I can give you a concept. Like when I taught history, my kids would look out the window and they wouldn't be there. If I told a story about an escaped slave during the Civil War who became later the Secretary of State I think, what happened is they were paying attention. They were on the edge of their seat. So, I started using stories all the time and it never occurred to me to put all the stories in one book, but there was like a month, Tony, where everyone would just go, "That story about... Is that in the book, is that in the book? My daughter needs to hear that story. My sales team needs to hear this story. My wife needs to read that story."
So, I'm flying back on the plane. I guess all of these great inspirations happen on the plane, like Miriam. I was flying from Boston back to LA, where I lived at the time, and it was like those old commercials where the guy slapped himself on the head and says, "I should have had a V8." I'm going like, wow, I should put these stories in a book. So I made a list of all the stories I knew. There was about 70 of them and I thought, well, that's enough for a book. I had the Girl Scout story, the puppy story, the Tony Robbins story, whatever it was. And I made a commitment that I would write two stories a week, one Monday through Wednesday and the other one Thursday through Friday. I let them sit for a week and then I would edit them the following weekend. And over the course of a year, I'd have a book. Two stories a week times 50 weeks, and that's really how it happened.
SPONSOR BREAK – STEREO AFTER-PARTY
TONY: This is The Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about developing the I CAN mindset with Jack Canfield and Miriam Laundry. But first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.
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ANNOUNCER: You're listening to The Tony DUrso Show with special VIP guests. Now back to Tony and his guests.
INTERVIEW – PART 4 (CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL PARTNERSHIP)
TONY: All right, we're back on The Tony DUrso Show where you could learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Today's show is developing the I CAN mindset with Jack Canfield and Miriam Laundry. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Also, there's a special announcement at the very, very end of the show about my live after-party show. Check that out for more details.
Jack is the author and co-author of more than 150 books, including 66 bestsellers, with more than 100 million copies in print in 47 languages around the world. His bestselling book, The Success Principles, has been hailed as the new self-improvement classic. All right. And now back to the chat with Jack and Miriam.
JACK: And then what happened was I was probably two-thirds of the way through the book and Mark Victor Hansen, my co-author on all the Chicken Soup books was having breakfast with me at a hotel. And he said, "What are you working on?" I said, "I'm doing this book of stories." I told him what it was about. He says, "I want to write it with you." And I said, "Mark, that's like telling James Michener after he's written three-quarters of the book Hawaii, that you want to finish the book with him. Why would I do that?" He said, "Well, number one, half the stories you tell you stole from me," which wasn't true. And then he said, "And I'm a much better marketer and sales person than you are. I think we'd be a great partnership and I'll get some more stories. We'll have 101."
And that's how the book came to be and turned out it was a great marriage made in heaven. I said we had 240 titles in the series before I sold the company to a group in New York, and they have sold many more since then, but it literally changed my life. It's an amazing experience.
TONY: Jack, what would you say is the purpose or the motivation behind writing these books?
JACK: Well, for me, my life purpose statement, Tony, is I want to inspire and empower people to live their highest vision in a context of love and joy. So I'm not only stating having you do what I want you to do, but what is your heart telling you you want to do? And so that was what I was wanting to do with my students when I taught high school, when I taught at the university level, when I was a psychotherapist, when I run my workshops now, and I think the books that we've written are part of that purpose. To inspire people is to give them stories of overcoming, stories of I CAN, stories of not being bullied, but also to empower people and that's where my workshops come in.
Teaching tools of success, because inspiration without tools creates frustration, or it creates revolution because people want to get something, but they don't have the tools to actually create it. And then the other thing that happens is if you have a lot of tools, but you're not inspired, you end up using those tools often to do things that are not for the highest good of all concerned. And so those two together, that's my purpose. And I think all the books I've ever written have been for that purpose, to inspire people or to empower them. And so, I now have close to 300 books in print. It's really amazing when you think about it.
TONY: It is. Kudos to you. It's quite an accomplishment. Miriam, what's your motivation behind all of this?
MIRIAM: Well, it started off with my children. I have four children. They range from 8 years old up to 17. The oldest was 9 when I wrote the first draft of that book. And it's always been about how can I—I'm going to use those same words cause that's what comes up for me all the time. How can I inspire them? How can I empower them to live their best life? It started off with my children, then other children. Losing my niece at a young age, that did a number on me. And I just kept thinking about all these children. What if they learned these things when they're young? The word "can," you know, that came from that. I just kept thinking what if she would have known that tomorrow was a new day and she could overcome that day? Like just one day at a time. My inspiration is children, and I do that through my books. And then also by helping other aspiring children's book authors put out their books so that we can reach even more children.
INTERVIEW – PART 5 (WHY WRITE FOR CHILDREN)
TONY: We're talking about developing the I CAN mindset with Jack Canfield and Miriam Laundry, and you can get the book at Amazon and the exact title is—pay attention everyone—title is, I Can Believe in Myself by Jack Canfield and Miriam Laundry, and you can get it at Amazon books. I highly recommend it. It is so great. In fact, I guarantee that if you get the book, you're going to love it, and I would love to hear back from everyone because I enjoyed it so much. It was really good.
Now we're going to get a little bit more into the book and we're going to talk about this and discuss this a little bit more. Jack, after so many books for adults, why did you write a book for children?
JACK: Well, I think two reasons. One is Miriam asked me to, but more importantly, I think was the fact that at that time I had a grandson. It was the first grandson I had, first grandchild. My 43-year-old son waited quite a while to do that and his name's Ozzie. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and he's a sweet little kid. And I realized I wanted him to understand these principles and it wasn't like I'm going to have him take one of my seminars when he's five years old, six years old, seven years old, but children's books. And I used to read tons of children's books to him. And I thought, wouldn't it be great to have some books that have the principles I teach in them that he could read with me or with his father, with his mother. And so that was another big motivator for me.
And I think always, having been an educator for so many years, realizing that it all starts when you're young. When I was at the University of Massachusetts in the School of Education, we used to say if it's done on time, it's called education. If it's done late, it's called therapy, but it's the same principles. We're learning how to take responsibility for ourselves, how to set goals, how to have values, how to ask for what we want, how to say no, how to have boundaries, how to have positive thinking, how to have a positive mindset like we're talking about today. And so I think it starts young.
And unfortunately, a lot of parents are what I call "psychologically ignorant," and a lot of adults are too. You know, we don't have classes in our schools called life skills, called mental skills, called mindfulness, called all the things that we now as adults, people will go and spend $200 on a weekend workshop to learn. I think these things should be taught in school. I would create a course called self-science, just like we have the natural sciences, mathematical sciences, social sciences. When's the last time you heard someone got divorced because they didn't know the five capitals of South America or something, but they got divorced because they don't know how to communicate. They don't know how to ask for what they want. They don't know how to share their upsets without getting angry. There are so many things that we need to know.
And so all the books that Miriam and I have written and are working on still are those kinds of books for kids, so they learn that when they're young.
TONY: Miriam, Jack says that it's your fault that he started writing books for children because you asked him. Why did you decide to write books for children?
MIRIAM: Well, for me, it's because that's my life. With four children, that's truly my life and I'm so glad that I did. I'm so glad that I did. When I started writing, like I said, my girls were pretty young. Now they're teenagers. One is going off to university next year, and I see what their lives are like. And I can go back to... it was those teachings, the things that I was telling them, the stories I was reading to them.
I was sharing with Jack earlier that he has a coaching program where you get on once a week and he teaches about it. And my daughter, first of all, she saw it on Instagram that I was sharing I was going to do this. And she came to me and she said, "That thing you were talking about, can I join you?" And I said, "Of course." So as Jack is teaching, she sits on the chair, on the couch in my office with her book, and she's taking notes. She's 15, so I really believe that teaching her when she was about seven, eight years old about goal setting, about mindset, that's helped her now at 15 want to learn more and work on herself.
JACK: Share the story, Miriam, of why you came to write The Big, Bad Bully, because that came from observing your daughter.
MIRIAM: Yes. Yeah. That was my first daughter. I saw my daughter was standing in front of a full-length mirror one day. She was about 11, 12 and she was saying things like—I was in the room with her—"Mommy, why are my legs so short? Why is my hair so frizzy? Why do I have so many pimples?" And you know, as a mom, I was just saying things like, "Oh, you're being silly. Your hair is beautiful. You don't have to worry about that." But she just kept going on. And it wasn't until I went up to her and I said, "Stop it. You're bullying yourself." And she just stopped talking. It was a concept that she understood—bullying somebody else—but she had to really think about the fact that she was actually bullying herself. And that was one of those moments when I got goosebumps. After our conversation, I went up to my room and I started writing. I thought, this is a way to talk to them in a way that they understand.
INTERVIEW – PART 6 (BUILDING SELF-ESTEEM)
TONY: What a concept. I love it, and Miriam, raising kids... By the way, I come from a family of six boys. There were six of us, and I know my parents went crazy raising us, all boys. Kids have, or seem to have a self-esteem issue, depends on certain factors. What can parents do to help their children with this?
MIRIAM: It's all about spending time with them and talking to them about these issues. And I'm going to borrow an example or a thing that Jack has taught me in the past is to make children feel like they're lovable and they're capable. So, making them feel like they're doing a good job, and just attempting to do things right. It's the whole can/can't, just going for things, practicing until you get it done.
And he suggests that we put two photographs in our children's bedrooms, which I have done since I heard you say this, Jack. One is a photograph of them doing something that they feel good about. Maybe it's a sport or an instrument that they're playing, something that they're learning so that they feel like they're accomplishing something, they're going for something. And the other one is to put a family photo of them with the parents and siblings so that they grow up feeling loved and feeling capable. So that's something that I do for my kids. And of course, finding good books, making sure that they're watching good shows on TV or on YouTube. They're always—right now, it's a completely different thing with kids, but just making sure that they're watching positive things because it's what they're listening to. It's what they're learning.
TONY: Those are smart points, Jack, that you gave her about how to build up self-esteem so easily with just some family photos, and what an accomplishment that the child has done. It's very smart.
JACK: There's a couple of other things, Tony, too, that people can do. And if you're listening to this and you're an adult, and even if you don't have kids, what I want you to get is that all these principles apply to you, no matter what age you are. Just acknowledging your own successes every day. One of the things I teach people is to do something we call the mirror exercise, where every night you talk to yourself in the mirror for about a minute and a half. You start by saying your name. "Jack, I want to acknowledge you for the following things today," and you'd look at your successes, any accomplishments, any temptations you overcame and any disciplines you kept.
So, it might sound something like "Jack, I want to acknowledge you for being on Tony's show and being a really good guest. I want to acknowledge you for writing a new chapter in your book today. I want to acknowledge you for planning a workshop that you're going to do with Catherine next week. I want to acknowledge you for staying on your diet. You lost a pound yesterday, and I think you're going to lose another pound today. I want to acknowledge you for not eating that cake that your wife offered you. She should know better; you're on a diet, and you didn't stay up and play Words with Friends until 12 in the morning and you went to bed at a reasonable time." If you do that every day, you start to affirm your successes.
SPONSOR BREAK – SKOUTS HONOR
TONY: This is The Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about developing the I CAN mindset with Jack Canfield and Miriam Laundry. But first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.
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ANNOUNCER: You're listening to The Tony DUrso Show with special VIP guests. Now back to Tony and his guests.
INTERVIEW – PART 7 (VICTORY LOGS & DINNER TABLE CONVERSATIONS)
TONY: All right, we're back on The Tony DUrso Show where you could learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Today's show is developing the I CAN mindset with Jack Canfield and Miriam Laundry. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Also, there's a special announcement at the very, very end of the show about my live after-party show. Check that out for more details.
On May 7th, 2014, Miriam set the Guinness World Record for "The Largest Online Book Discussion in a 24-Hour Period." And now back to the chat with Jack and Miriam.
JACK: The President of the Levi Strauss Company who makes Levi jeans, he actually was a person I wrote about in one of my books. He kept what he called a "victory log." Every day before he went home from work, he wrote down his victories for the day. He was afraid; he couldn't always talk to his Board of Directors. That made him very nervous, but he said, "If I would read my victory log before I would go talk to the Board and see all these things I've accomplished over the last several weeks or month, I didn't worry about it because I felt good about myself." So that's just one little kind of exercise you can do.
And the other thing we teach is to have what we call dinner talk conversation, dinner table conversations. The Kennedy family, every night at dinner, Papa Joe Kennedy would ask Jack and Bobby and all the other people a question. Two questions, actually. One, "What did you learn today?" Or he might ask, "What did you accomplish today?" Then he also asked "What's something you did for someone else today?" So you think about these kids every day were learning I get validation by doing things, by learning things, and by making a difference in the lives of others. They all got into lives of service, public service. And so again, just those little daily inputs like little shots of mental vitamin pills, if you will, begin to build up the self-esteem and self-confidence over time. And so those are just a couple of other ideas that we teach people.
TONY: And Jack, you began in education. What advice do you have for parents and teachers who are educating kids at home and they're struggling to help them find motivation or focus, and especially for the parents who hear a lot of "I can'ts"? What advice do you have for them aside from reading this great book here?
JACK: I was going to say kiddingly vodka, but no, I'm just teasing. Basically, what I think is that you have to realize kids are stressed out right now. And when we talk about I can't—Miriam and I were talking about this yesterday—kids are living in a world of "I can't." I can't see my grandparents. I can't play with my friends. I can't go to school. I can't make noise when Dad's on his Zoom call with his business associates. I can't play with the dog because it'll bark, whatever. So the reality is that we need to, first of all, be sensitive to that and we need to spend time with them, encouraging them and supporting and acknowledge them for what they did do.
One of the things we know for sure is if somebody does 10 things right and one thing wrong, most parents focus on the one thing they did wrong instead of acknowledging them for the 10 things they did right. So anything that approximates the behavior you want, acknowledge that, reinforce that, and you're going to get more of it.
Miriam and I were talking yesterday too, about the importance of making sure the kids have no distractions. That their cell phones are not there; you don't have the internet on in the background; they are not listening to music, that they're really focused on their task. Have some water nearby, maybe a snack nearby so their blood sugar stays up, and encourage them to get up and move every once in a while. You know, this isn't our thing. Kids today, all of us—you, me and Miriam—we're sitting in front of our computers doing Zoom calls all day long. Not the healthiest thing for our body. One of my friends said you either become a hunk, a chunk or a drunk during the pandemic, and so a lot of us have become chunks. Some people are drunks, few people work out every day because they have more time. They become the hunk. But I think the idea is we have to move and I think giving time for children. They're not going to have recess. They're not seeing their friends at school, so those kinds of things I think are important as well.
TONY: Wonderful points. Miriam, anything to add to that?
MIRIAM: You know, I'll speak on the side of the parents. We just started online learning this week. Our province is in a lockdown, and my husband and I talked at the beginning of the week. I have a lot of interviews this week and a lot of work, so he was going to take care of my eight-year-old mainly. The other ones are doing things on their own. But I noticed how stressed my husband was getting all the things ready. And of course, he shows up right at the time that it's supposed to start, so he's stressed, then my child's stressed. And so right after he did that, we had a little conversation—tomorrow let's get on half an hour early. Let's make sure everything is working so that our son is not stressed when he gets on and he's thinking that he's late and he's done something wrong. They know when we're stressed.
So, giving yourself ample time to get things organized, to get things ready like Jack was saying. Give them a little space to know that this is their area, their pencil, everything that they need, their water.
Another thing that I do with my son when I just see him and he starts, "Oh, I don't want to do this" or "I can't," I try and break his pattern. I'll just say, "Let me see how fast you can do five jumping jacks." He's only eight, so he'll go like really fast. "Did you time me?" "Yeah, I did. Okay, great. You did a great job." It's just when I see him getting into that state. He just needs to break out of it, but that's all it is. And then he goes back to "Sure, I can do this." So that's my advice as a parent.
INTERVIEW – PART 8 (THREE STEPS TO SUCCESS)
TONY: Good parental advice there and for the audience, we've been talking a lot about "I can't" and "I can," and as we all know, it's no secret this past year 2020, so many "I can'ts," and we talked a bit about them, and this is for kids, for adults, for solopreneurs, small business owners. This is just too much. This book has a great message of sense of empowerment, Miriam. How does this book break through that and kind of open things up for us?
MIRIAM: Yeah. It's all about believing in yourself and starting to use the word "CAN." The thing is that when we say "I can't" do something, we stop ourselves. That word is so limiting. It stops us from even trying. So if a child, instead of saying "I can't," starts thinking, okay, I can do that. I teach three steps to success to children. When I go to schools and I talk the story, I teach them if there's something that you want to do, maybe it's ride a bike without training wheels, or maybe it's to do a cartwheel or to get an A on your math test, you can follow three simple steps to get there.
The first thing is to say, "I can do it" and believe that you can do it. Now does it mean that you're going to be able to do it the first time? Some kids are able to get on their bike and just ride and that's fine, but most kids need extra time. So then the second thing I suggest is looking for somebody that knows how to do what they want to do and ask them for help. And then step three is to practice and practice until you can get it done.
I share with kids the story of my daughter. When she was in kindergarten, she went to do a cartwheel and she fell down and she got up and she said, "I can't do a cartwheel," and that was it. She didn't try for years. When the book came out, she was in Grade 2. I read the story to her class and she came to me and she said, "Mommy, I can do a cartwheel. Watch!" And she went to do it, but she fell. And what was different this time is that she got up and she said to me, "I can do a cartwheel" and she went to do it again. She kept falling, but she kept practicing. And then one night we had our babysitter come over and she asked her for help, so the babysitter gave her some tips on what to do with her hands, how to put her legs, and she was learning. And then the step three, she practiced and practiced, and about two weeks later, she finally landed her cartwheel. It's just those three simple steps. She was so proud of herself and she was able to do it. So that's the one thing I keep reminding children. You may not be able to do it right away, but it's an attitude. It's what you tell yourself.
JACK: Just to jump in and talk about if you're an adult listening to this as well for yourself, Napoleon Hill used to say, "If you can conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it." Conceiving it simply means I want to do a cartwheel or I want to start a business, or I want to become a millionaire. I want to write a book and then to choose to believe it is really just a choice. And that's one of the things we really want people to get, whether adult or child. A belief is a choice. You choose to believe it or not. Now, a lot of times we have external events that seem to indicate that we should choose to believe something. We're not confident. Research shows that by the age of eight, most kids have decided if they're intelligent, if they're athletic, if they can do math, if people like them, if they're lovable. All these things happen pretty quickly based on things where maybe they got shamed at school by a teacher, by a parent, whatever.
But if you can conceive it and then choose to believe it. And then I love what Tony Robbins says—success leaves clues. Everyone has left clues who has been successful. There are books. There are courses. There are webinars. There's YouTube videos. There's Masterclasses. There are TED talks. There's TEDx talks. There's shows like yours with guests that give people clues. And so basically, it's just a matter of having the mindset that even though I can't do it now, I can learn how to do it.
Self-esteem is the knowledge that I have the competence to learn what I need to know. It's not that I'm born with that talent, but I can develop it. I can actually develop it. And that's the difference between what they call a fixed mindset—it says, if I can't do it once, I'll probably never do it—versus I couldn't do it, but I'm going to learn how to do it and making that commitment.
INTERVIEW – PART 9 (ACTIVITIES IN THE BOOK)
TONY: Thank you, Jack. There are some activities at the end of the book that parents and educators can do with their children to reinforce the messages in the books. It's not just a story of "I can"; there are actual practices. Jack, can you describe one or two of them and why they work?
JACK: Well, some of them are singular events, like we have one called the "I can't" funeral, where you literally have yourself and your children write down a list of all the things you think you can't do. "I can't spell, I can't do a cartwheel. I can't get my friend Bobby to like me. I can't keep my room clean. I can't memorize mathematical formulas," whatever it might be. And then what we do is we gather all those together. It's a great family exercise, by the way. It is great if you do with your kids as well. "I can't get through the morning without a cup of coffee. I can't tie my shoes"—a lot of kids will say.
Once we get all those down, then what we have in the book is part of the story in the book is the protagonist of the book takes all of her "can'ts" and runs them through a shredder, so you can do that. You can have a class or a family running it through a paper shredder. You can put it in a container and light it like in a fireplace and burn them all up. You can bury them in a funeral in the backyard and bury them. And then we have a little eulogy which goes like this. It says "Boys and girls, or it could be every family. Please join your hands and bow your heads. We gather here today to honor the memory of 'I can't.' While he was with us here on earth, he touched the lives of everyone, some more than others. His name has been spoken in every public building, schools, city halls, state capitals, and even in the White House. We have now provided 'I can't' with a final resting place. He is survived by his brothers and his sisters, 'I can,' 'I will' and 'I'm going to right away.' They're not as well-known as their famous relative, and are certainly not as strong and powerful yet, but perhaps someday with your help, they will make an even bigger mark on the world."
Rituals are very powerful. Why do we have marriage rituals and funerals and so forth? And so that's just one tool. Another tool is to what we call "I can" affirmations, where you take all the things you wrote "I can't," and now you write an affirmation "I can." "I can tie my shoes. I can play the drums. I can catch a ball. I can start a business. I can balance my checkbook," adults, whatever it might be. And then what we ask you to do is many things. You can put them all on three by five cards, put them on your mirror. You can put them on postage. You can have them on your screensaver, and then you want to read those every morning and then close your eyes and visualize doing the thing that you want to do.
I learned to play tennis by visualizing having a good backstroke. I learned to dive by imagining diving into the pool and going in with no splash like you see in the Olympics. I was a terrible, terrible speaker. Scared to death of people's judgment. And I remember one of the people at the Stone Foundation when I started teaching there telling me, "Close your eyes. Imagine giving a talk. Imagine everyone coming up and giving a standing ovation at the end, and then coming up and wanting your autograph." I remember giving a talk where I went into the men's room, went into a stall, closed the stall, sat down and did that visualization. Saw the standing ovation, then went out and gave a great talk because I visualized it. So that's another tool that parents and adults can use on anything they want to learn to do. Golfers do it, Olympic athletes do it. It really is a powerful, powerful tool.
TONY: Yes, it is. Miriam, anything to add to that?
MIRIAM: That was great. That was great. I'll tell you that. For me, when I started speaking at schools, I had the whole knees shaking and I had no experience with public speaking, but when I started speaking at schools, I would practice a bit of visualizing right before I got on stage or at the front of the gymnasium. And then when I get there, I just take a moment as I'm being introduced and kind of look up all four corners of the room. And I just do a quick little prayer meditation with my eyes open, just so that I'm grabbing everybody's attention, like I'm talking to everybody, but visualizing right before. That's what really, really helps me.
SPONSOR BREAK – INDEED
TONY: This is The Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about developing the I CAN mindset with Jack Canfield and Miriam Laundry. But first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.
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INTERVIEW – PART 10 (MULTICULTURALISM & ADVICE FOR WRITERS)
TONY: All right. We're back on The Tony DUrso Show where you could learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Today's show is developing the I CAN mindset with Jack Canfield and Miriam Laundry. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Also, there's a special announcement at the very, very end of the show about my live after-party show. Check that out for more details. And now back to the chat with Jack and Miriam.
You said the one thing about checking out the four corners, any other tips or suggestions you can give? We have a wide swath of members in our audience. A lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners, but just about everyone has kids, nieces, and nephews, so we'd love any tips and advice that you can give us on that.
MIRIAM: I'll share a couple that I've used for me. There's always speech time in schools and now it's not mandatory. They get to choose and I always encourage my kids to get up and do the speech. It doesn't matter how scared they are, because I really believe that learning to speak in front of a crowd when you're young really helps you later on like job interviews and any type of speaking. But what I suggest to them is always to practice a lot before getting in front of their classroom.
When I did a TEDx talk about three years ago, I told myself I need to give that same speech to six other groups so that when I get on that stage, I've practiced it so many times and given the same speech, it'll be a piece of cake and it totally was. So, I suggest to my kids, okay, let's call Grandma today, pre-COVID for her to come over and give your speech. Let's call your aunts, your uncle, your cousins. You know, just practice in front of people that they're comfortable with. And then you can get up in front of your class and do it.
TONY: Those are great points. And the characters in your book, by the way, they're multicultural. How important was that to you?
JACK: It was very important, I think, because we are multicultural. Miriam comes from Bolivia, is it? Yeah, and I taught in an all-black school. My grandson is half Japanese, so we wanted to have black, brown and Asian people in the book. And also, funnily enough, there's places where kids' names show up so we had some of our kids' names in the book as well, and my grandson's name, which makes it fun. But we have a pair of twins who are black boys and there's a Hispanic girl and an Asian girl, I think it is. And so, given that Black Lives Matter was happening this year and we're committed to multiculturalism anyway, part of self-esteem is knowing we're all part of this game together. Everybody belongs. Everybody's equal at some level.
So that was a big, big issue and we asked our illustrator to do that. We had to give her some feedback a couple of times about, "Are they black enough? Are they brown enough?" It was very interesting, but we have an illustrator in Italy who's really, really very good because we actually have a lot of wonderful illustrations. I know you're giving the little Italian sign there, but the reality is I think it really works, and kids need to see themselves in a book.
When I was teaching African-Americans back in 1968 I think it was, in Calumet High School on the South side of Chicago, there weren't very many books with black kids in them and if they were, they were stereotypes. Today that's changed a lot, but people if they don't see themselves in movies and on TV, they don't feel like they exist. And so that was really, really very important for us to do that. I don't know if you want to add anything, Miriam.
MIRIAM: It's exactly the same thing. I did not see any Hispanic children in books when I was growing up. And I think had I seen that, that would have really helped me along the way, because at home we spoke Spanish, we ate Spanish food and that was totally different going into school. And everybody has different... what they wear is different, what they eat is different. So had I seen that in children's books, I think I would have felt like I fit in more.
TONY: What advice do you have for aspiring writers? We have a lot of authors in our audience. We have people that want to write a book. We have some people that they're afraid to write their first book. It's that "I can't," but that's a separate topic, cause there's a great book that takes care of it called I Can Believe in Myself. So if you want to write a book and you're afraid to write a book, you should read this other book that will help you write your book. But aside from that, and trying to be a little silly here, let's talk about what advice do you have for aspiring writers?
MIRIAM: You know, I want to share that principle that I shared—the three little tips for success. It's the same in anything that you do. The first thing is to believe that you can do it. Put yourself out there. I had so many fears about writing the first book and the biggest fear was about being seen. What are people going to say that I started writing a book? Who am I to write a book? I've never taken a writing course. So, I had to start with that. Okay, I'll take a couple of writing courses. I'll learn about it. I will read a lot of children's books and then just putting one foot in front of the other and just going for it, finding people that have already done what I wanted to do. So getting in a community with other authors, like-minded people, seminars like the ones that I attended with Jack, where people are thinking differently.
You are the five people you spend the most time with. We keep hearing that over and over, but it's so true. So I always put myself in a community that helps me grow. And that is my advice for aspiring authors also. Same thing. Find the people that have already done it. Get some help, put yourself in that container and then practice and practice until you get it done. You don't write a book with the first draft. I Can Believe in Myself, maybe we're up to maybe 25 with the new additions, 25 different drafts until it is what it is today, so you need to practice your skill.
JACK: Chicken Soup for the Soul was rewritten six times, the first book. I went through every story, rewrote it, rewrote it. We got feedback. 20 people gave us feedback on every story. This is what I tell all authors—ask for feedback. You know, most books get written with only two pieces of feedback. You write the book, Tony. Your wife tells you what she thinks about it. Maybe your cousin looks at it. And then some agent who looks at it maybe, and that's three or four people's opinion. But if you can get feedback from 20 people. With Chicken Soup, we would have black, brown, yellow, Christian, Jewish, agnostic, Muslim, people living in the suburbs, people living in the city, people living on the West coast, Midwest, et cetera, giving us feedback on each story, grading it on a scale of one to 10. And if it wasn't a 10, what would make it a 10? And that's what made that first book take off and was on the bestseller list for three years because the stories worked.
And I remember I went to Colorado and I went to a ski resort in the summer and spent three days just sitting in a hot tub at night and writing all day, and I read every story out loud. And if it didn't come trippingly off the tongue, that sentence, I would rewrite the sentence. And that was on the sixth edit. And that's what made the book so well. I remember the book, I think Jurassic Park was written 12 times before it became a book, then became a movie. And so even the best authors are constantly rewriting. So get words on paper, just I call it vomit copy. Just get words on paper. Let people respond to it, get feedback and then keep doing it until you get something that works.
OUTRO
TONY: I want to thank you guys so much. We talked about developing the "I can" mindset with Jack Canfield and Miriam Laundry. And the great book is I Can Believe in Myself and everybody get it at Amazon. It's just that simple—go to Amazon. I Can Believe in Myself by Jack Canfield and Miriam Laundry. Get the book. Buy a bunch of copies and give them out as presents. You'll understand what I'm saying when you read it, cause it's a very powerful message. Guys, thank you so much for sharing this. And please, we want to see more books and thanks for helping everyone.
Hey fellow entrepreneurs. Thanks for hanging out with me while I featured elite entrepreneurs who took their vision to reality. I'm sure this was as inspiring for you as it was for me to do this interview. We learned some amazing points on developing the I CAN mindset with Jack Canfield and Miriam Laundry.
Jack Canfield started his amazing road to success by wanting to get his high school students motivated to learn. They didn't believe they could, as they had very low self-esteem. He took a class himself on how to motivate people and how to get them to achieve more. Soon the students started doing well and it mushroomed as the school's principal wanted him to teach the other teachers. Therein began his road on how to help people become more successful.
Miriam went to Jack's seminar based on the suggestion from her husband to help her deal with her newborn baby, as well as a death in the family. Jack took the attendees through an exercise on how to let go of the word "can't." On the flight back, Miriam wrote a draft for the book I Can Believe in Myself.
We've all heard how important it is to tell stories, but how many of us do it? Jack says a story velcroes the principle information to the brain. He learned that from teaching students and to prevent them from looking out the window from boredom, telling stories held their attention. I'm impressed at how both Jack and Miriam wrote a draft for their book on a plane flight. You have a lot of time on a long flight to put something together. I remember that one weekend, my wife went away and I had two days to myself. So I sat down and wrote the draft for my first sales book, which later became Easy Sales Procedures. I think of how people would go to retreats to write. And it's the same principle of getting away from the normal routine and focusing on creating something very unique. It's a great way to accomplish something.
Jack has a great life purpose statement—to inspire and empower people to live their highest vision in a context of love and joy. That's powerful. I love how he followed that up with books and workshops because as he says, inspiration without tools creates frustration or revolution because people want to get something, but don't have the tools to get it. And the wisdom goes on and on. There's so much more I got out of this interview.
What did you get? I'd love to know how you use this information to help you in your business or career. Did this interview give you any ideas for your business? Did it stimulate you to take some new action? Please share and grab hold of your vision.
Decide you're either going to start something great or take it to the next level. You have to decide first. It always starts with a decision and you can get my Vision Map to help you along the process. The eBook is at TonyDUrso.com/Books. I created my empire in just a few years. That's all it took. I had the Vision Map as my guide. You can do it too. Let's help you move on your journey to success.
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