Master your Inner Game – Interview with Peter Sage

Ep #535 – Master your Inner Game – Interview with Peter Sage

Peter is an international serial entrepreneur and subject matter expert in human behavior and self mastery. His unique way of looking at the world has earned him the distinguished Brand Laureate Award for extraordinary individuals alongside previous winners who include Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs and Christiano Ronaldo. Peter is a 6x TEDx speaker whose multiple #1 bestselling books have sold over 150,000 copies in several languages. He has founded multiple 8-figure companies and raised over $1M for various charities.

• The value of keeping your number of tries high
• Emotional maturity and intelligence
• Emotional maturity is a choice
• Own your emotions or your emotions will own you
• It’s OK not being liked
• • How to avoid getting stuck in G.O.O.P.
  • Staring in the movie of your life
  • Giving from ‘empty’ or from ‘overflow’
  • $10 Million of self love
• Life is a growth centric experience
• • The gym of life
  • Resisting the workout?
  • Here for the gold medal?
  • In business, your failure is your capital
  • Quality of life is proportionate to the amount of discomfort you can live with
• Outer world follows inner world
• • Reality is subject to influence
  • Egocentric or world centric?
• 4 modes of spiral dynamics
• Power moves to those who have a willingness to serve

To find out more about our guest:

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Full Transcript Below

 

Rod: Okay, I don’t normally do this guys but I want to pre-frame this interview that’s coming because it’s not along the lines of the interviews that I normally do and if you turn it off you are making a big mistake because frankly, I believe the things that we’re talking about here are probably the most important things we can talk about on a show like this. So I hope you enjoy this wide-ranging interview with my friend, Peter Sage. Welcome to another edition of “How to Build Lifetime Cash Flow through Real Estate Investing”. I’m Rod Khleif and I’m thrilled you’re here. And I’m super excited for the guest that we have on today. His name is Peter Sage and I was on Peter’s podcast not long ago but Peter is an extraordinary individual. So, he has been awarded the distinguished brand Laureate Awards from Asian Pacific brands and to give you an idea how big a deal that is, other people that have won that include Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, Hillary Clinton, Tiger Woods. You know, and he was also named one of the greatest leaders and entrepreneurs by inspiring leadership, and people that won that award were sir Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. So, you know, Peter also is a, you know, former Tony Robbins guy like me. Spent a lot of time following Tony Robbins around the planet like I did and also a very accomplished athlete. I could keep going here but we’ll stop there and let him tell you his story. Welcome to the show brother.

Peter: Hey, good to be here Rod. And yeah, excited. It’s always good to get on with you and get some energy going.

Rod: Right, right. So, you know, maybe you could take a minute and tell us your story. It’s very, very interesting with ups and some serious downs and let’s start there my friend.

Peter: Yeah. All part of the fun. I mean, what one thing I like to remind people of especially when they hear a bio that people kind of frame as fairly stellar sometimes, its a– Yeah, I’m just a guy. Yeah, as you’ll relate to this Rod, you know, we’re just normal guys. We may have done some extraordinary things and had some extraordinary luck and some paths that we’ve been guided to go down, but yeah, I’m just a normal guy and if as soon as you put somebody on a pedestal, you minimize your own self by default. So, I want to remind people of that one. I dropped out of school at 16. I’ve got no formal qualifications and I started my first business on flea markets selling toys out the back of my car when I was 17. And yeah, since then, done a lot, seen a lot, made a lot, lost a lot. Yeah, had a lot of fun. I think I’ve been 26 international companies since that time, 32 years ago. I’ve been unemployed now for over three decades. And yeah, it’s an incredible ride. And yeah, I’ve probably failed more times than I’ve won but I like to keep my average number of tries high. And that’s really where I mean, of headed. A passion for personal growth as you said. I worked alongside Tony for 15 years and learned a huge amount as I’ve had some other mentors. But yeah, for all of that, you know, some of the businesses have failed majestically, some have worked, some should have stayed ideas when I was drunk and pretty much everything in between. So yeah, the highs and lows and vicissitudes of life but hopefully, I can pull something out of that and share with your listeners and viewers to help save some of the mistakes and the pitfalls that I’ve gone through and give them some tidbits on how to help them.

Rod: No. I love it, I love it. And a lot of, oh gosh, things resonating with me when we talk about failures and, you know, and majestic seminars as they were. I have the same background in that regard. But before we started recording, was looking for topics and we fell on emotional maturity which, you know, is it relates to emotional intelligence which is frankly, one of the key, you know, one of the key precursors to success in anything including relationships and certainly business. So, let’s expand on that topic Peter. Why don’t you take it away and tell us how you view emotional maturity? How you get there and maybe give us some tools?

Peter: Sure. I mean, I think everybody understands that we’re living in a very unprecedented time right now. And if you go back over 2020 and certainly into 2021, that there are people that are being crushed and there are people that are absolutely crushing it. And the difference through all of that observation you will find yourself, it’s not intelligence. We know that. Yeah, it’s not street smarts, it’s not motivation, it’s not, you know, where you grow up, what your parents did, none of that. That the key is yeah, obviously mindset. A mindset is directly linked to your level of consciousness which is linked to your level of emotional maturity. Now, what most people tend to forget is that biological maturity obviously is not up for debate. We don’t get to choose whether that unfolds or not. You know, you and I probably look a little different now as we did 30 years ago. They’re probably going to look at a little different 30 years from now and I don’t care how many vitamins we take, how many creams we put on, we’re going to age. That’s part of the rule set when it comes to the physical world but emotional maturity is a choice which is why physical and emotional maturity are not correlated. In other words, I’m sure we’ve had experiences of seeing a lot of emotional teenagers running around in some very adult bodies. And if you do not change your level of emotional maturity, I can pretty much guarantee that nothing in your life will really change. You will have variety on how you experience the same levels of emotion, states, finance, etc. but you are never going to go through that glass ceiling if you like unless you work on the person in the mirror. And if you don’t know how to own your emotions and you have them on you then I’m sorry. You’re a walking remote control for everybody else to play with, to push your buttons. And so, yeah, for me it is a key and I’ve looked at this for a long time. Human behavior is really the area of expertise that I’ve gone into for the last, you know, majority of my three decades in personal growth which is an area most people don’t tend to focus on. They tend to focus on the tactics, you know, the what to do, the how to do it. Very few people are looking at who’s the person that’s meant to be doing it. And yeah, how do we work on that? So there’s probably in the time we’ve got there. I would say there’s three probably the biggest keys that I would share with your audience that’ll give them the most benefit to get some instant practical benefit because as I’m sure you’re aware, if you don’t get the person in the mirror, right? Nothing else counts.

Rod: Yeah.

Peter: So.

Rod: Completely agree. And that person in the mirror looking to improve in every area of their life every year as well. So, and in emotional maturity, I think I have to agree with you. I wasn’t sure what you meant by the definition but now I get it and it’s without question the most important piece. So, let’s hear it.

Peter: Hundred percent. Well, I think that the first step out of the three, that one of the most important days in the human being’s life is when they finally become okay not being liked. And yeah, we should really teach this in schools because so many people right now are becoming these giant adaptation machines. Yeah, they are running around looking for somewhere else to reattach their umbilical cord seeking approval, validation, recognition, acceptance, and essentially trying to avoid its opposite, rejection, judgment, etc. And as a result of that, we lose the very thing that makes us who we are which is a level of authenticity. And the biggest thing that stops that is what I call this sticky nasty substance that most people spend their life swimming in called “GOOP”. The “Good Opinion of Other People”. And when you realize how destructive GOOP is, you will realize that most people have spent their entire life adapting to what they perceive to be the approval strategies of others. And I say perceive because they don’t even know what they are, right?

Rod: You know what’s really funny? Is I just cross my arms which is a massive defensive move, body language wise, because this is resonating with me so but I just caught myself. My arms are freaking crossed right now. This is so funny. I’m sorry I interrupted but please continue.

Peter: Keep it real.

Rod: This is resonating. Okay.

Peter: So, one of the things I share about getting out of group because it is the first step. Yeah, if you are still running around as I say being a giant adaptation machine, this chameleon. If they don’t like me this way, I’ll be that way. If they don’t like me that way, I’ll try– or if you take it too extreme, the marks of pattern which unfortunately is more common in women due to their predisposition for nurturing. Yeah, it’s like I’ll give, and give, and give, and give, and give, and the subtext is if I keep giving, no one will reject me. And therefore we burn out, we give until we’re empty, and then we wonder why we, you know, the world continues to beat us up. So, when it comes to getting out of GOOP, I like to share a metaphor. It’s very powerful and if people really take this to heart they can have a real breakthrough here. And that is that we all star in a movie and it’s the movie of our life. Yes, you are a movie star. You are starring in the movie of your life. Now, I know that you’re the star of the movie of your life because you’re the only person that’s in every single scene of the movie of your life which means that by definition, everybody else in your movie plays only one of two roles. At best, they’re a supporting cast. We have a handful spouse, kid, brother, best friend, boss, co-worker, whatever. The vast majority 99.9% plus of people who appear in your movie are nothing more than film extras in your movie. Now, what is the definition of a film extra? Pretty simple. It’s somebody you’re not thinking about when they’re not in your scene. Now, we walk around, here’s where it gets interesting, because we walk around obviously as the star of our own movie. Knowing that we’re the star of our movie and because of that, we make the fundamental mistake of thinking because we see ourselves as the star of our movie, we think everybody else sees us as the star of our movie. Challenges, they’re in a different movie. They’re starring in their own movie which means by definition, obviously we play one of two roles in everybody else’s movie. Maybe at best, a handful in your lifetime supporting cast depending on the acts you’re in. Vast, vast majority of people in your movie see you as nothing more than a film extra in theirs which means they’re not even thinking about you when you’re not in their scene. Now, a way to encapsulate the awareness here and if people are listening, tattoo this on the inside of your eyelids, this will get you out of GOOP if you allow it to. If you own the awareness. The reality is that most people don’t care enough about you to bother to give an opinion let alone reject you. Why? Because they’re too busy being worried about what they think you’re thinking of them.

Rod: Yeah.

Peter: Case closed.

Rod: Yeah. Now, this is resonating which is why it’s so funny I caught myself getting defensive because, you know, if anyone of you that’s listening, that’s ever heard my story, the question I asked myself for decades was how can I show them I’m good enough? Which of course presupposed that I wasn’t. And so, I was caught up in what you call GOOP. No question. Given a crap what other people think and, you know, that when you can become free from the opinion of others that’s the ultimate freedom. So that’s step one. I love that buddy. You articulated that so well and some great analogies and acronyms there to define it and I love the fact that the reality is that people just don’t care that much about anyone but themselves. That’s the reality and it took decades for me to get that memo personally and I know, you know, there’s people listening that still don’t have that memo. And I also want to circle back to something you said about, you know, the whole martyr thing with women. And because they’re nurturers, and they want to support, and they want to help, but that they get caught in a trap and they feel like that’s going to give them that– would you expand on that actually? I don’t know how you want to define that. That’s how they become accepted and they feel like that’s how they’re going to get love.

Peter: It’s validation.

Rod: It’s validation. Okay, got it. Yeah.

Peter: To prove they’re good enough and the challenge, you can only get from two places. You can give from empty or a depleting level of love.

Rod: Right.

Peter: Or you can give from your overflow. And I had a beautiful story one time. I’ll relate because it really serves a purpose and the fact that, you know, I want to imagine that let’s say, you and I have certainly been there that we made the wrong business decision, something went wrong, we’re bankrupt, we’re zero, we’re more in the hole. In fact, we’re homeless, we’re walking down the street.

Rod: Yes.

Peter: And we’ve got our last $2.

Rod: Yes.

Peter: Looking at it and like thinking, are we ever going to see money again? Whereas my future, all that uncertainty, and we go in and we’re walking down the street. We think it’s getting cold. We’ll go sit in the public libraries. It’s warm and we go, and we find a little quiet corner, and we stick this $2 on the table, and we think, what’s my life come to? And just as we’re contemplating that, all of a sudden somebody comes through the door. It’s one of these weird-looking street people with the freshly hair and the goofy moldy teeth and like, you know, sort of weird. And they look at you and they look at the $2, and they run in, they snatch the $2, and they run out. Oh my god, I mean, how do you feel? It was your last $2. Now, hold that thought. We’ll rewind. You’re walking down the street, same $2, same scenario. You walk past a news agent. You think, you know something, what have I got to lose? You buy a lottery ticket. You win $10 million. Life-changing, like unbelievable. You’ve never seen that much money. You actually go and take the money in cash. And now, you go back to the library, you’ve got these two suitcases, you’re feeling like, what is my life going to turn into now? And you take out the money and you stick it on the table, $10 million. And this street person, frizzly hair, moldy teeth, pops his hair and looks at this pile of cash on the table. Runs in, snatches $2, and runs away. Now, how do you feel? If he needs it that much maybe I should have gave him $10. Now, the challenge is most people are walking through life with their last $2 of self-love. And as soon as somebody makes a comment, as soon as somebody appears to withdrawal, as soon as somebody says something, it’s like snatching that $2 off the table, and now you feel like crap. As soon as you’re able to give yourself $10 million of self-love, people can say things, people can let you understand that they’re just having a tough time. They’re just trying to deal with their own homeless situation or lack of whatever it is. And focusing on understanding and working from giving from your overflow rather than trying to give, Oh, let me give one of my last $2 to this person. So, hopefully they’ll love me. Of course, it doesn’t come back and now we feel more depleted. We’re never going to get to our overflow from there. You can give because it’s who you are. It’s what you do. When you’re coming from overflow because you’ve given to yourself first or you can desperately try to do things for others in the hope that they won’t reject you, and they’ll accept you, and somehow you’ll get more rewarded shall never happen.

Rod: But, can I give a twist to that?

Peter: Please do.

Rod: Would you agree that if you want love, give love?

Peter: Most people don’t know how to love themselves in order to be able to feel the love to give.

Rod: Okay, fair enough, fair enough. You know, I try to tell people if you want something, give it. You want happiness, give happiness. Smile at people. If you want love, give love. You want money, frankly give up your time or give money. But yeah, you’re right. It is sad. The people that don’t have that love bank account filled up very, very difficult to really associate with what I suggested there. Well, so what’s number two? That was awesome. What’s number two?

Peter: Thank you. Welcome. So yeah, second key to emotional maturity. Now, we talk about the day we first, you know, become okay not being liked. The second is a real seminal moment in a human being’s life where they wake up to the reality that life is not a comfort centric experience. It is a growth centric experience. And all of a sudden now, you realized that, yeah, the only way we grow, go to nature, go to the human body. “The strongest trees grown the strongest winds not the best soil.” You go to the gym, how do you grow in the gym? By pushing yourself past what you think you’re capable of doing so the body gets the message as part of its programming to return with the better version of itself. So, if you were born into the gym of life and you didn’t know you were an athlete. Imagine showing up to the gym. You got this, yeah, psychotic person called a personal trainer that’s trying to make me do press-ups until I throw up. Run on the treadmill until I faint and do all this stuff. I’m like, what’s your attitude going to be towards the workout? You’re going to resist it. You’re going to have to if you’ve got to do it, you’re going to tick the box just enough to lift it, just enough weight to show that you’ve done it, to get the hell out of there. Hey, it’s because you have no idea of why you’re there. Now, if you know you’re an athlete, you know you’re here for the gold medal. If the gym shut, you’ll find a different way to train. Now, if the personal trainer is not making you throw up in 30 minutes, you want your money back. And looking at life from two different vantage points, people that live from a comfort centric experience see life from the perspective of the muscle fiber. Yeah, you’re on that last burning rep and it’s screaming, it’s sending messages to the brain, what the hell are you doing? Send pain. Send pain. Tell them to stop. You’re breaking me down. We’re getting destroyed down here. But if you take the perspective of the athlete, you’re proud that you can bust out that personal best and not lift your arms for the next 20 minutes because you understand that you’re there to challenge yourself. See, we’re not born, right? To avoid challenges. That is the psychosis of this 21st, the 20th and 21st century. Yeah, comfort centric commercial. Buy this to make your life better kind of programming mentality that robs you of your ability to become stronger yet steel is forged in a furnace not an ice tray. And when we realize that our challenges are our best friends, like in business, your failure is your capital. But to someone who’s never been through that, they don’t see that. But you can turn, go to the great Napoleon Hill, “Every adversity carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.”

Rod: Yep.

Peter: The challenge is, so many people are moaning at the adversity. They don’t water the seed.

Rod: Yeah. No, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. And guys, just– I didn’t mention this in his bio but Peter’s ran in the Marathon des Sables, if I’m pronouncing that correctly. I recognize the toughest foot race in the world done numerous marathons, hundreds of skydives. He’s a championship marksman. The guy pushes himself, a qualified open water diver, championship level rowing, you know, so on and on and on. And, you know, when you don’t want to be in comfort and you push yourself out of comfort, you know that’s when you build the life of your dreams. You’ve heard me say it, that magnificent life of your dreams is just on the other side of comfort. You know, Tony Robbins says, “The quality of your life is in direct proportion the amount of discomfort you can live with.” And so, you know, this is not just him spouting stuff here. He lives this. Well, that’s awesome brother. What’s number three?

Peter: Number three is where we recognize that even though we perceive, we live in a physical matter reality, “Outer world follows inner world.”

Rod: “Outer world follows inner world.” Okay, please elaborate.

Peter: Not the other way around. Most people live under the illusion that there is a separate out there, out there which according to Einstein, you know, isn’t there. You know, we create and project through our consciousness what we perceive to be the outer world. Just like for example, if you, myself, and yeah, let’s say a third person, let’s say Tony. We’re playing a computer game and it was a virtual game, and we met in the game, and you were over in, where are you right now, in Florida?

Rod: I’m in Florida. Yes sir.

Peter: Florida– Tony’s in Florida as well. I say he’s over in San Diego. His old place or Fiji and yeah, I’m here in Tenerife, Canary Islands, West Coast of Africa and we would meet in the game. Now, on my screen I would see you and Tony but that’s not what you would see. You would see Tony and me.

Rod: Right.

Peter: What tony would see would be you and me. See, we all have our own data stream, our own feed, that is giving us our version of that game. Welcome to third dimensional virtual reality. So, when you realize that the outer world is constantly adjusting and responding to your attitudes, your thoughts, your state of mind, this has been now demonstrated in every decent quantum physics and science lab on the planet starting with Princeton at the upper labs. You know, where Einstein spent the last third of his life teaching. It’s not shabby about science. We know that the outer world is influenced. Reality is subject to influence. And the way that I look back tying it back to levels of consciousness, is that, imagine that you– and pulling in the movie metaphor here. That your movie, you’re not happy with right now because it seems like it’s a drama. It’s a soap opera. There’s always something going wrong. There’s always drama everywhere. You solve drama at the dinner table. You go fill up with gas. There’s drama at the freaking gas station. You’re in a drama. And what you’re trying to do is fix the movie from scene to scene.

Rod: Right.

Peter: You’re trying to solve the drama each scene that it pops up but it keeps popping up.

Rod: Right.

Peter: What you don’t realize is that the scriptwriters are writing drama. I don’t care what your label for the scriptwriters are. Yeah, if you’re a biologist, you’ll call it evolution. If you’re a scientist, you’ll call it a quantum physicist, you call it the field. If you’re religious, you’ll call it God. If you– I don’t care. If you’re spiritual, you’ll call it divine. I don’t care what your label is. The truth of the capital “T” is we don’t know the truth. And as soon as we learn to live in the space of that question, we can unhook from judgment and start to build models that will give us practical benefit recognizing that from our perspective they are just a model at our level of understanding. But imagine you’ve got a 10 story office block. On each floor, you have a series of script riders that are writing a different genre. The lower floors are riding drama, soap opera, horror show. You move up, you get more into the rom-com, chick fling. You go up, it’s more of an action comedy, then you get to the adventure, then you get the inspiring movies on the top floor. Now, what most people are doing is that they are complaining at the movie from the floor they’re on and they’re trying to grab hold of the pen of the scriptwriters and force them to stop writing drama and start writing comedy. Well, not going to happen. It’s not their job. Your job is to go into the elevator and press up. Your job is to raise your own game, to raise your consciousness as–

Rod: So, give us some practical tools for doing that because that metaphor is very simplistic. Help us out here.

Peter: I’ll make it even more simple, more love less fear.

Rod: Okay.

Peter: If you want the binary equation of life. Now, in other words, are you still running off egocentric patterns? Are you worried about what other people think? Are you trying to set goals so you can get something in order to prove something or avoid some fear or whatever it may be? Is it self-centric? Is it egocentric? Or are you crossing that level of emotional maturity by raising your consciousness to a point where you are more ethnocentric? Or ultimately as attorney would say, world-centric, spirit century. It’s a continuum. Yeah, do you pick the litter up in the park because somebody’s watching or do you do it because it’s who you are?

Rod: Right.

Peter: Are you more likely to raise the significance of other people or seek to get their approval by trying to raise your own significance?

Rod: Right.

Peter: These are the factors based upon levels of consciousness and how you press up in the elevator. Yeah, are you coming from a place of authentically trying to be more kind, less judgmental, more humble? Or you’re running around with a chip on your shoulder trying to prove everybody wrong because in order for you to feel good about yourself, you’re so externally validated. You need agreement from others to feel good about your own decisions.

Rod: Yep.

Peter: And if they don’t agree then you’re going to prove them wrong.

Rod: That was me. Yeah no, and I know that a lot of you listening hopefully this resonating with you guys. You know, Tony does this incredible exercise at his Date With Destiny Program where he gets these different colored hats for different levels of consciousness. And red is the power god which is obviously the egocentric person. There’s, you know, and this is the– I don’t know who the writer was that came up with these levels of consciousness.

Peter: Spiral dynamics…

Rod: Spiral dynamics. That’s it. Yeah, incredible. Incredible exercise to see people that feel like they are that person wear those hats and then they interact with each other. It’s one of the most fascinating parts of the program in my view but now that’s really good stuff Peter. So guys, if you want to check out Peter’s stuff, he’s at “petersage.com” and, you know, this is really been like crack cocaine for me because I love this stuff. And so, you know, and that’s why, you know, Peter and I both spent so much time in that self-development, self-actualization environment, because it’s, you know, it’s what we love. And, you know, so we’ve talked about emotional maturity. And guys, there’s no plateau with this. This is something in my– I mean, this is I think a continual evolution and like the top of the hierarchy in that example that I was giving up that Tony uses is that, is it spirit-centric or world-centric? The top one.

Peter: Yeah, spirit-centric.

Rod: Spirit centric where you just pretty much– could you describe it? You’ll do a better job because you’re talking about this more that I do.

Peter: Sure. I’ll break it into four levels to make it easy for people. This is the model that I use just to try to make it simple.

Rod: Perfect.

Peter: Because Einstein said, “You can’t solve a problem at the same level of consciousness that created the problem.” Now, it sounds smart. He was smart but what does it mean?

Rod: Right.

Peter: Yeah, because if your left brain you think consciousness is a byproduct of brain function which it isn’t. Will never be proven. Your brain doesn’t produce consciousness any more than a television produces programs. Yeah, or a radio writes music. So, on the esoteric side, on the other side of the spectrum, extreme right brain, you’ve got this, you know, hold hands, come by ours, into the divine and all that. And people can’t really get a grasp on this for, you know, how does it pay their mortgage next week? So, bring it into a simplistic model that I can share in two minutes that’ll really allow people to grasp the journey through this and I call it my four levels model. The lowest level of consciousness what I call “to me” and it’s the victim mentality. It’s like, I would have the one, you know, the life I want, the wife I want, the car I want, the body I want, but everything happens to me.

Rod: Right. Okay.

Peter: It’s the quintessential victim and there’s no aspiration other than complaining, moaning, and hiding behind a story as to why they can’t get the life they want. Now, that is never rewarded in life. Yeah, life does not reward the role of victim at any level. Nature will certainly take you out of the knees if you continue to run down that rabbit hole. So a lot of people hopefully grow out of that and move to the next level which is the level of “by me”. “By me” is like, you know, something waiting for my ship to come in isn’t working. Thinking life owes me a living is, you know, I’m getting hungry. So if I am going to get the life I want, the car I want, the body I want, the wife I want, whatever it is. It’s going to happen “by me”. And you go from the victim mode to the achiever mode.

Rod: Got it.

Peter: And you hustle. You start getting hold of the props on set in your movie and you start making stuff happen. Now, it’s pretty exhausting. We’ve both been there. You’re trying to force the world and you’re grabbing the world by its throat and it’s, you know, it does what anyone else would do if you grab it by throat it tends to resist. You can make some strong inroads but it’ll usually bounce back because you’re trying to control.

Rod: Yeah.

Peter: The next level is where we really start to realize how the world follows inner world. And that is the level of “through me”. That’s where life starts to flow “through you”. Things start happening effortlessly. You have synchronicities. You’re– yeah, things show up that you couldn’t have planned. There’s a lot of non-linear. Left field stuff just like falls into place without you having to run around demanding. And then the highest level is–

Rod: Hold on, hold on, hold on.

Peter: Yeah.

Rod: Before you move from there, so how does someone get from “by me” to “through me”?

Peter: I will get on to that shortly.

Rod: Oh, you will. Forgive me.

Peter: You just set the floor levels out…

Rod: All right. Fair enough. Thank you.

Peter: And the fourth level is what I call “as me”. That’s essentially where there are all the spiritual masters arrived at and taught from. It’s essentially a level of oneness if you want to call it that.

Rod: Love it.

Peter: So, what do you have to do to go from “victim mode to me” to “achieve mode by me”? What have you got to give up? What do you got to replace it with? Simple key. First thing you’ve got to give up is blame. Blame doesn’t work in any part of life. Sorry, deal with it. I don’t care if you’re stationary at the traffic lights and somebody hit you at the back. I don’t know when you started first out. When is the first night hanging out with Tony at the events Rod?

Rod: Me, 20 years ago. Yeah.

Peter: 199..?

Rod: About ’99, 2000. I’m bad with dates. I mean, you know, how bad my memory is but way back then–

Peter: Have you ever been in Hawaii?

Rod: Yes, I was in Hawaii for 9/11. Yeah, and the year before.

Peter: I was there.

Rod: Yeah, you were there too.

Peter: We’re at Art Berg.

Rod: Of course, I remember Art Berg. Yeah, he put him on stage. Art Berg is the guy that became a paraplegic on his way. I think to go to get married or something. Yeah, to his wedding, wrote a book that the impossible is just a little harder or something like that?

Peter: Well, “The difficult takes time, the impossible just takes a bit longer.”

Rod: Yeah, beautiful soul. I remember this, just I got a sidetrack for a second. I remember this guy on stage in his wheelchair, he came and spoke to the group there and the joy, and spark, and energy, and light in his eyes because I was pretty up front when he was there. It was just extraordinary for a man in his circumstances. Anyway, please elaborate on that.

Peter: Yeah. Well, but Art Berg was not even driving. His friend was driving the car.

Rod: That’s right.

Peter: Coming back from Vegas for his wedding and his friend fell asleep, flipped the car, Art woke up a quadriplegic.

Rod: Right.

Peter: And took total responsibility for his life which allowed him the joy that he had.

Rod: Yeah.

Peter: And if he can do that, I don’t think we’ve got an excuse but giving up blame and replacing it with personal responsibility is the key out of “to me” and into “by me”.

Rod: One hundred percent ownership. Love it. I love it. Okay.

Peter: So to get out of “by me” to “through me” which is where most people come to me. My sweet spot is getting people out of “by me”. “By me” is exhausting. Yeah, you see a lot of the guys out there. Your Grant Cardone’s, your Dan Peña’s, your GaryVee’s. They’re basically teaching people how to get from, “to me” to “by me”, same as Tony, or how to get “low by me” to “high by me”.

Rod: Okay.

Peter: And, I own a different part of the market. My clients come to me because they’re tired of running around the track trying to catch a rabbit they can’t catch, not because they’re not a good enough greyhound but by design, the game is rigged, so they’ll never catch it. And if you’re trying to catch the rabbit of fulfillment by running on the track of achievement, it’s never gonna work. And that’s the illusion “by me”. I just lost one of my business mentors a couple of months ago. Passed away, he’s mid 60s. Sold his last business for 3.6 billion in cash. I’ve known him 15 years, never known he earned less than a million dollars a day. One of the most miserable, unhappy, overweight, unhealthy people I’ve ever met. Buy a cup of coffee. I mean, genius of business and we had some good times together, and yeah, I’m not saying anything I wouldn’t say to his face if he were here, but, you know, that’s a lesson on what I don’t want to do.

Rod: Right.

Peter: But to get out of “by me” and get to “through me”, some people aren’t going to like it, because the first thing you’ve got to give up is the need for control. Notice I didn’t say control itself, the need for control, because most people are trying to control what they can’t control anyway.

Rod: Wow. That’s a real eye opener for me. I got to tell you personally, because yeah, I talked about what had just happened in the last couple of weeks and one of the biggest issues, as a result of all that, was my need for control and my lack of it. So, I’m still in the “by me”. Please, please continue. Wow, that’s really eye-opening.

Peter: What are you going to replace it with?

Rod: What?

Peter: Trust in something bigger than you. Again, I don’t care your language. I don’t care your metaphor. And I don’t care if it’s your rendition of Master Yoda. If there’s something that is more intelligent than us, that’s responsible for me not having to set my iPhone alarm for 4 a.m. to remind me to beat my heart, then there’s an intelligence that drives this. Again, without getting into the threat–

Rod: Yeah. It can be religion, it can be any spirituality, it can just be spirituality, it can be anything. I love it, love it. Okay.

Peter: The travesty of humanity, Rod, is that we’ve typically gone to war and killed each other over whose label is right.

Rod: Right.

Peter: For that intelligence.

Rod: Even in the recent past, I mean, it’s this, in the last 20 years and or less, people have done it. So, it’s–

Peter: Yeah, still today. So, if you are focused on something that is bigger than you, you’re able to give up the need for control because you trust in something, you have faith in something, and faith, I’m not a huge believer in because faith is the flip side of the coin of doubt. But it’s the same coin. If your doubts are bigger than your faith, you will not proceed. If your faith is bigger than your doubt, you will. And that is a dynamic flux. You see that all the time at the start of the firewalk.

Rod: Yeah. Tony does these firewalks at his first event. That’s what he’s talking about, where you walk across fire as a metaphor for being able to pretty much do anything.

Peter: Yeah. I probably put ten thousand people over the coals as a trainer and yeah, you see the difference between doubt and faith versus knowing.

Rod: Right.

Peter: See, when you know if I was, you know, take my iPod things here. If I was to let go of that, I don’t believe they’re gonna hit the desk. I don’t have faith they will, I know.

Rod: Right.

Peter: It’s like a complete absence of doubts.

Rod: He held it, for those of you listening. He just held something up and dropped it. We just know the gravity’s going to take it and drop it. Okay.

Peter: So, yeah. Just something bigger than you. Therefore, you’re getting out of that egocentric, Darwinian survival of the fittest mentality, where you think you’re alone, and you start becoming part of something bigger. You become a servant to your mission, your purpose, to be able to add value to what it is and sing your song, give your gift, and focus on there, and that’s, things will start lining up, and Tony has another phrasal quote here which is beautiful, he says, “Power moves to those in direct proportion to their willingness to serve.”

Rod: Yeah.

Peter: And you’ll demonstrate that just by your own life anytime you decide to believe it and act it.

Rod: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. I say that to people when I interview them for my coaching program and I ask them, you know, What’s the “why” that’s going to get you to take action? And when I hear something that’s outside of them, I tell them, success is inevitable for you because “power moves to those who serve”. Tony’s quote. Yeah. So, love it. So, how do you get from “through me” to “as me”, my friend?

Peter: Well, I’ll be talking theoretically here, not experientially, because it’s not a place I’m at. And again, just to frame that, you know, where you mentioned earlier about, you know, trying to move forward, I believe that as you said, this doesn’t end until your last breath. We’re in what I call, Earth School. You know, we are in a classroom to learn how to grow up, to learn how to love more, and let go of fear in every more challenging circumstances. That’s part of our movie script. And, if we’re low consciousness, those lessons are gonna be hard and painful to get our attention off of ourselves, and when we raise our conscience, the lessons tend to be a little more, they’re advanced but they’re not as painful. It’s like, if you take a marine and goes through boot camp, he’s being kicked out of bed at three in the morning for a 10 mile run. He’s having to polish his boots ’til he can see his, color of his eyes, in them. So, it’s a lot of BS around that. You go to special forces, you take a green beret. That’s not happening. You second name yourself. That’s not happening. They’re expected to look after their own fitness. They’re expecting, there’s none of that BS going on. They’re learning more advanced stuff, and it’s kind of the same with consciousness. You raise your consciousness to small special forces level, you’re not going to get the painful idiot lessons that have to slap you around at three in the morning to get your attention off yourself. So, to move from “through me” to “as me”, one of the first things we need to give up is the illusion of separateness.

Rod: The illusion of separateness?

Peter: The illusion of separateness.

Rod: Got it. Yeah.

Peter: We live in a fractal universe, we know that. And if you take the human body as an expression of that, if you take a red blood cell and a white blood cell, and they meet in the artery and supposing they could communicate, which they do, but let’s say they could communicate with the language. One says, Hey, white blood cell, how are you doing? Hey, red blood cell, what’s up? Now, both of them would have a sense of individuation about themselves as opposed to each other, correct? Born at different times, different colors, different jobs to do. One goes and takes out bacteria, the bloodstream dumps it in the lymph. The other one collects hemoglobin and from the lungs, delivers it to the heart. And, they’re going to die at different times. I mean, complete sense of intervention. Now, if you chunk up to a higher level of awareness where we are, we don’t throw a funeral every time a blood cell dies.

Rod: Right.

Peter: We see it as an innate part of something much bigger called a body. Now, what if, as a possibility, you and I were just individual blood cells in the universal body of consciousness? How would that–

Rod: Okay.

Peter: All at different times, different colors, different missions, different journeys around the body of, you know, universe. If I knew that you were part of the same, which is what every spiritual teacher is taught by the way.

Rod: Right.

Peter: Buddha taught it as truth from self-enlightenment to love. Jesus taught it love to self-enlightenment and truth. So, yeah, if you look at, give up the illusion of separateness, what have you got to replace it? But there’s only one thing, it’s unconditional love. Tying back to what we said about love, the reason most people don’t have unconditional love for themselves, let alone anybody else apart from a mother and her children, if she’s high on oxytocin.

Rod: Right.

Peter: Then, it’s because of our own history. How old was your earliest memory, Rod? Quick one.

Rod: Oh, I don’t remember what happened three weeks ago, so that’s not a good question for me.

Peter: But the average person’s earliest memory may be four, five, six.

Rod: Maybe six. Yeah, six.

Peter: Now, here’s where it goes wrong. So, you take a baby. When a baby’s born, it can’t do any wrong.

Rod: Right.

Peter: Yeah. It cries at three in the morning. It’s inconvenient. We don’t stop loving the baby. It’s what babies do.

Rod: Right.

Peter: Your partner hands it to you, you’re just going to work, you’ve got your suit on, so she hands the baby while she ties her shoelaces. The baby throws up on your suit. It’s inconvenient. You don’t stop loving the baby. It’s what babies do.

Rod: Right.

Peter: You don’t expect the baby to lie there three in the morning. So, you know, some, Mom and dad’s had a tough couple of nights. I’m hungry, but I’m gonna wait till seven. That doesn’t happen. Right? Now, when a baby gets about two years old, this is the nature of the terrible twos, by the way. I’ll wrap this up in an example I think most parents can relate to. If you’ve had 18 months, two years of knowing that you are the center of the universe, and everybody goes around you to look … but now, all of a sudden, there is a two-way communication. The mom and dad talk to you as soon as you know that there’s an understanding, they start imposing a model of the world that if you behave a certain way, the perception of the child is that love and approval is given and that if you don’t, the perception of the child irrelevant whether it’s true or not from the parents, you obviously love the kid still. The parents, the perception of the child is that love is not as forthcoming. So, the time we get to our earliest memory, six, you know, we’ve had two thirds of our lifetime conditioning that love has to be earned by good behavior, by being a certain way, by acting a certain way, by pleasing other people, by not doing things wrong, and we spend the rest of our life projecting that into our own relationships and life.

Rod: Yeah.

Peter: And if we learn that unconditional love is unconditional. See, most people don’t forgive because they think forgiving somebody is the same as condoning the behavior that they did. They don’t separate. There’s a difference between a person and a person’s behavior. And, yeah, we could get down on that rabbit hole on a whole other podcast.

Rod: Yeah, we’re bumping up against time here, but this is great stuff. I really, really have enjoyed this. But, yeah, we gotta call it here now, but Peter, what a joy. What a pleasure this has been and we’re gonna need to circle back at some point, have you on again, because I know there are other topics that you could just kill it with. And, you know, yeah. Listen, I appreciate having you on, my friend. This has been a lot of fun and we will definitely need to circle back again and pick another topic that, like this, to explore with you.

Peter: It’d be a pleasure. It really would. Anything I can do to add value to you or your tribe, yeah, I’m here to serve. I try to give as much value as I can in the time that I have. I’m usually a bit like you. Even in today’s world, I’m still traveling in Bulgaria last week, Mexico next week, then I’m in the States. I’m actually over in Florida in about three weeks, so–

Rod: Oh, listen. If you’re on the West Coast, for god’s sakes, you know, reach out so we can have a meal. I’d really enjoy it. Okay, buddy? Seriously.

Peter: I’d love that. Yeah, no. Keep doing what you’re doing Rod. You’re inspiring so many people. Your story is like, incredible. It proves that, you know, as we’ve started this off, everybody can do it. And yeah, it’s been a real pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Rod: Thank you, my friend.

Outro: Rod, I know a lot of our listeners are wanting to take their multifamily investing business to the next level. I know you’ve been hard at work helping our warrior students do just that using our ACT methodology which is Awareness, Close, and Transform. Can you explain to the listeners how they can get our help?