Welcome to the “Inner Circle Podcast”, the place where patriot entrepreneurs create, build, and play. Each episode will help you move forward to the place where we all want to be, a place of total creative freedom, personal freedom, and financial freedom.
My name is Mike Fallat and I am your host. I’ve started a bunch of businesses, helped to write a couple of hundred books, and interviewed lots of millionaires. I will be your guide as we enter the Inner Circle.
Mike: This episode will help you become a better shadow-boxer, yes, a shadow-boxer in everything that you do. It will show you why repetition is a key to entering the inner circle, so let's get right into it.
I want to start this podcast off with a story about a man named Gene Tunney, who is a famous boxer from the ’20s. Go back and look at his life. This is one of the guys who coined the term “shadow-boxing”. He only lost one time to a guy from Pittsburgh actually, but he became one of the greatest boxers ever. He did it by shadow-boxing. [01:10.1]
He talked about how he fought Jack Dempsey in his mind thousands and thousands and thousands of times in the mirror, in his living room, before he actually fought him. In 1926, 1927, they got together for the heavyweight title and Gene Tunney destroyed Jack Dempsey. It was one of the greatest fights of the century and it was one of the greatest upsets, and it was also one of the greatest turnouts. Over 120,000 people showed up for it.
To put things into perspective, Floyd Mayweather and Pacquiao, 16,000 people showed up for it at the Arena. Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor, 13,000 at that Arena. This is 120,000. The all-time record is 135,000. It goes to show you, this was a big deal and he did it by shadow-boxing. People picked up on what he was doing and that's why it's so popular to this day. [02:03.4]
But shadow-boxing in your life, maybe you're not a fighter, maybe you're not someone who's going to go out there and you're not even in sports, whatever, but shadow boxing in business is a thing, on camera, on your podcast, with your writing. This is something, if you practice over and over and over, it becomes natural, so whenever it matters, when you're in the real fight, whenever you're on the big stage, there's no thinking. It's just acting.
Repetition increases your auto-mechanism to activate, okay? That means less required thinking is involved, which makes you more natural. The more natural you are, the more attractive you are to the audience, to your clients, to the opposite sex. You're smoother. It just seems easier. It's more fun. It's less choppy. You're in the moment. You're in your flow state. You respond better. You respond faster. Everything good comes from practicing. Repetition. [03:05.5]
Science is incredible on why this works and I'm going to get into that right now. It's called myelination. I don't know if you've ever heard this term. I don't think I’ve ever learned about it in school, but we sometimes refer to our brains as gray matter, because from the outside, the brain looks mostly gray.
That's what the color of our neuron cell bodies appears as, but there is a lot of white matter that fills up nearly 50 percent of our brains. That white stuff is called myelin, which is a fatty tissue that covers much of the long axons that extend out of the neurons.
Scientists have found out, and, hopefully, this is a good scientist because you know there are a lot of bad scientists out there—I made a post the other day that says 97 percent of all scientists agree with whoever is funding them, especially now. Maybe not back in the day, but it's a sick, sick system now—but scientists, hopefully, the good ones have found out that myelination increases the speed and strength of nerve impulses by forcing the electrical charge to jump across that myelin sheath to the next open spot on the axon. [04:14.8]
I'm going to put it in my terms here. Hopefully, this is right. There are two different dots and there's a pathway. Myelination, if it's a very weak connection, it takes a lot for the energy or for the information to travel from one side to the other. The stronger the myelination, the stronger the connection, the faster it goes without thinking. It requires thinking to get from one side to the next. That thinking is that energy, that electrical charge to go from one synapse to the other or one axon to the other axon, I guess. This connection can be strengthened, okay, and you will probably see as you get older, it becomes harder to get accustomed to new habits or new ideas and new systems. [05:08.0]
There's science behind the reason that that makes sense, too, because the science shows that kids develop myelination much faster without work. The older you get, it's not impossible. It's just harder. It's more painful. It's more difficult for people to learn new skills because the myelination just takes way longer.
Myelination doesn't mean it's all good stuff. You could actually develop a lot of bad habits. As kids, you could take in a lot of bad things and it’s developing this strength of “when this happens, do this.” It's not going to lead to desired results. It's just that you're soaking in the wrong information, so you could be learning how to play an instrument the wrong way. You could be learning how to educate others the wrong way. You could be learning bad information and it becomes just part of your DNA. [06:02.6]
You might hear some buzzing and all kinds of landscaping around me right now, so if you do hear it, I apologize. There's nothing I can do. I've done this intro three or four times because it just gets so noisy. Hopefully, you can hear it—and that's part of myelination also because I noticed on my third or fourth time, I’ve got a little bit smoother, a little bit better by even saying the intro. This works on a small scale and on a big scale. This can happen in your sales skills and this can happen in your speaking skills on a podcast or on stage with your clients. It doesn't matter. Practice makes perfect they say, right? That's because the stronger myelination, the better you're going to be at whatever you're seeking or whatever you're doing.
If you play hockey and I used to play hockey, the more you practice, obviously the more comfortable you get. You know how to hold the stick. You know how to hold your body whenever these certain players get in this position. You're not thinking anymore. You’re just responding. You're just acting—and that can happen in everything that you do. [07:10.2]
A lot of myelination happens naturally, much of it during childhood. Kids are like the myelin-generating machines, soaking up information about the world and themselves. As we get older, we continue to generate more myelin, right, because we're all learning new stuff daily, but it happens at a much slower rate and requires a lot more effort.
Another strong point in favor of myelin’s performance-enhancing abilities that happens when it's missing, demyelination is a known factor in multiple sclerosis and certain other diseases which cause a loss of dexterity, blurry vision, loss of bowel control, and general weakness and fatigue. This suggests that myelin is an important factor in allowing us to make the most of our brain and bodily functions. This means if you start to not put yourself or learn anything, there is actually a decline in it. [08:03.0]
That is crazy. That is insane. I never even thought that. I thought once you had it all in your system, you're good. No, you need to keep pushing. You need to keep developing. This is going to keep you sharp, but it also keeps your cognitive abilities all there.
Understanding the role of myelin means that not only understanding why quantity of practice is important to improving your skills, but also the quality of the practice. I want to explain this. You could learn the wrong things over and over and your myelin develops, but if you get on a podcast and you just wing it and you don't care about the sound quality and you don't care about the words you're using, and you're not analyzing how you can do it better, that's poor quality. Your myelination will not develop as fast or as strong or in the right direction.
Anybody can just wing it. You go to the gym, you could wing it, right? You don't have to put a lot of effort into it and you're just not going to get as strong as fast. When you go up on stage and you speak to someone, you could not care about what you're saying. You could not care about the results. [09:10.0]
If you don't make it a little harder on yourself, the desired results will not be there. You're kind of robbing yourself of success. Quantity of doing it over and over and over, but doing it at a high level, I tell people all the time, if you're going to get good at something, you’d better care about the results. You can't just do it. You just can't write stuff. You’d better put it down, care about it, and then move on.
Tony Robbins always says that perfection is the goal, I guess, of everybody, right? They're going to say, I want to be perfect. I want to be the best at it possible, and if I am not the best at it, I'm not going to put the book out there. I'm not going to speak on stage. I want to be the best. But he says perfection is unattainable and everybody knows this. Instinctively, deep down inside, they know it's impossible to be perfect, so what they have is a standard issue. [10:00.8]
They don't have a perfection issue. They have a standard issue. They're almost saying, You know what? My standards are so high that this is going to be an easy bar to get to and say, you know what, this isn't for me because I want to be perfect and, obviously, since I want to be perfect, I’d better not even start and I’d better be perfect before I start.
Wrong. Myelination, the science behind this, shows that you will never, ever, ever be close to being perfect, unless you do a lot of repeating, a lot of shadow-boxing, a lot of doing it behind closed doors before the world ever sees you. Self-talk, running, working out, self-belief, all of this. Your writing. Everything comes back to this shadow-boxing. You could actually start shadow-boxing with yourself about how you're going to respond to someone. If you have negative comments on your Facebook wall or your Instagram or TikTok, how are you going to respond? You need this. [11:06.4]
People want this meteoric rise. It's impossible. And if you do have this meteoric rise, it's not impossible. There are some people out there who hit the lottery, right? There are some people who bang a producer in Hollywood and, all of a sudden, they're freaking in a movie. There's a meteoric rise that can happen you maybe don't want because maybe you're not ready for it.
If you like what you hear and you are a patriot entrepreneur, go to Mike’sInnerCircle.com. Remember, you are only as strong as your circle. We'll see you there.
There is this callus-building that you need to do. Calluses are actually a good thing. Sometimes people say, I go to the gym, I build these calluses on my hands and they hurt. I play guitar and you pick up these calluses on your fingers and it's painful. [12:01.5]
Of course, it's painful. You're putting yourself through something that's difficult and there's a resistance. That resistance is doing two great things for you. It shows you what you need to work on and it's also making you stronger for tomorrow. It's a guide. It's righting the ship. It's pushing you in the right direction. Resistance is good. Callus-building is good.
Callus-building on your skin is one thing, but callus-building in your ability to take rejection, your ability to screw up in front of people, your ability to lose out on sales, the more you do something the calluses just start to pop up and you don't feel the pain as much and you just feel natural at it.
Give you a quick little story. Going back to when I started to write, 2008–2009, I would write every day. I’d wake up at 5:00 in the morning and I would start to write. The reason I started to write was because I had this business. I was a big-shot entrepreneur, I thought, and I wanted to clarify who I was, where I was going and what we’d just accomplished. [13:03.8]
I didn't know the reason completely because all I really wanted to do was impress a girl who was in my LinkedIn feed, and we went to college together, so I wanted to impress her and I started to write about my business. I would be one of those guys that did the “…” things, like, hey, I would read a sentence and not know how to end it, not know how to finish it and not know how to transition, so I would do the “…”.
Over time, over weeks, over months, I started noticing I got really fast at it. My intros were better. My endings were better. My transitions throughout the paragraphs were better and it wasn't like I was doing it and noticing it right away. I was just faster at it, and I was still able to connect ideas in my brain and communicate and articulate myself way better. This happened in a couple of months. Give it two years, I was even way better. [13:56.5]
I stopped writing every day because then it was whenever we put out the book and I started doing other things and working with clients, then I started writing for clients, but I became better at it and this repetition, I think I was … What was it? 2008, so 13 years ago. I'm 37 right now. Thirteen years go by. I've become way better at writing, way better at speaking, way better at communicating myself on a consistent basis.
If you can do it over and over and over, you have to go back to the why of where you're going, you're not going to just do it and not know where you're going. You have to have this end goal in mind. I knew that one of the keys to me developing as a human being was becoming a better writer, becoming a better speaker, becoming a better articulator of a message. If I can do that, maybe I can do it for other people.
I started shadow-boxing when nobody else was reading. I know she never read any of these blogs. I knew it, but I was hoping she was going to read it, and the fact that I knew I was going to be judged by it was my way of shadow-boxing. Maybe someone is going to read this and what are they going to think about it? [15:13.5]
Regardless, I was getting so much benefit. This shadow-boxing on my computer, technically, allowed me to become more dangerous in society. I was able to be a better communicator and maybe that's another key piece to shadow-boxing. Sometimes you have to put yourself in situations where you're going to be judged. That judgment is good. When you do a video every day or a couple times a week, this is what I do with my YouTube channel, I know now what I need to do on my YouTube channel, but I did probably thousands or maybe it maybe 2,000 videos before I even knew what the hell I was doing or where I was going. You could see the transition from Video 1 to Video 1,500. The quality gets better. The speed of my message gets a little bit better. [16:07.2]
Now when we put out videos, I still think of it as shadow-boxing. Hopefully, someone watches this. I know that I'm getting better, though. I know that I'm getting more clear. I know that the end goal is presenting itself. I know opportunities are going to come my way. I know how to piece it all together. It all started from that shadow-boxing of writing blogs every single day.
If you're out there and you're thinking to yourself, Man, I am not a good podcast guest, I am not a good podcast host, what you need to do is start to create your own podcast. Whether anybody is listening or not, you need to create this shadow-boxing routine. Start writing things down and just speak about it on a podcast. It's that easy. It will become natural to you over time. It'll start to feel like home.
Blogs. Do the same thing that I did. Start writing. Whether anybody sees it or not, you need to start speeding up the process, increasing that myelination. Start developing this rhythm, this ability to act. [17:14.6]
I want to go back to that one sentence I said. auto-mechanism from repetition will activate smoother and faster. This means this autoresponse of answering questions, this autoresponse of how you handle yourself, how you walk into a room, how you present yourself, it becomes very comfortable.
I read this story one time. I think it's from Psycho-Cybernetics, a great book I recommend you read. It talks about how there was a salesman who was struggling to get any sales, and any time that the topic of money would come up, he would just freeze and just kind of lose it. He started to create this habit of not offering anything to sell. He started to go into a meeting with the intention of not selling, the intention of not offering any price, and just to get to know people and be comfortable with them. [18:12.7]
He would go in there where they call it with an empty gun. There's no chance of you getting a sale and that before you go in. It did two things. It allowed the person to be way more comfortable going into the meetings, which made him more of a human being. It built up this myelination or this comfort level of just communicating, asking questions, not even expecting the sale, because anytime that part of the conversation would yield to “I need to sell this person”, he would start to become less happy. He would become less of a human. He would start to get a little bit jittery and his nerves would spike up, and once a person does that, you're going to make the other person way more uncomfortable. He had to increase this muscle memory of just going in and having conversations. [19:05.8]
I talk about how you should never really look for clients. You look for friends who you do business with. It's my philosophy. I never want to go in and say, I need to close this deal. That's a terrible philosophy because now you are dependent on the result, and if you can change your perspective, and maybe this is part of just habit and doing it over and over and over, you’ve got to get comfortable without even trying to close a deal. This is going to make you stand above the rest.
There are these hard closers out there. I am so against these people. If I start to feel like they're putting pressure on me, I back away because I know there's a goal in mind. There's a desired result and that means that my interest is not in their best interest, so it's an automatic response that I have. [19:55.0]
When I talk to people, I say, I can help you with this, this and this. I still present sales and prices and all this. I still do all this, but it was a skill set that I learned from what I was comfortable with. It did take time. I did have to not listen to the sellers out there. I had to become myself, which took a lot of shadow-boxing, a lot of repetition.
That way, when I talk to multimillionaires now, I'm not nervous. I'm just like, Hey, this is what we do. This is what we've done. I'm assuming, because we've done so many books, that my confidence level is much higher than it was when we first did two, three or four books, so that maybe the history of what we've accomplished stands above the rest and my comfort level is directly correlated to that. Whatever it is, it came from building up myelination of doing it over and over and over, over and over, repetition. Okay, if you're out there and you're struggling, think about those. [20:57.9]
Another key piece is the winning feeling that comes from when you're comfortable with things. You become unstoppable the more comfortable you are with sharing a message, telling people who you are, your skill sets, your ability to defend yourself, your ability to fight back. You get this winning feeling. This confidence level starts to rise even more and more.
If you are writing every day, if you're speaking on camera every day, if you're doing a podcast every day, you start to feel a little bit more comfortable, more natural, and you start to develop this winning feeling. They call it a flow state, some people, but the winning feeling is, Hey, I could do no wrong. I'm just going to be myself and I know that the results are going to be there. This creates momentum. This creates inertia. This creates this attraction to you.
If you start to do the repetition, even whenever it's really difficult, the earlier you are in life, the better, but if you're later in life, it just has to be expected that it's going to be more painful and slower. Now you develop all this. It becomes more natural. You become a little bit more attractive to the marketplace. This creates a winning feeling. You start to produce better results. You start to have more fun. You start to feel more natural at it. It feels like home. [22:13.4]
Then, all of a sudden, that creates better results because people are drawn to that. Your momentum picks up, your inertia picks up, and now you become an unbelievable shadow-boxer. You become an unbelievable champion. You become an unbelievable entrepreneur, a leader, based on doing all of this over and over and over.
Another key piece to myelination is teaching stuff. When you learn something, the way to develop your myelination is to teach it. How do you learn something really fast? You teach it. You learn it and then you teach it. You learn it and then you teach it. [22:52.7]
In a book called Influence by Robert Cialdini, he talks about how there are many jiu-jitsu coaches who will teach something to their students and then their students will have to teach it back to them the next day. The science behind it shows that you develop this myelination. These neurons, these pieces of your DNA develop way stronger, way faster, if you're able to communicate it back to someone, because it makes you think of what you're saying, how you're doing it. Do you really understand it?
Teaching it, imagine if you learn something today and you teach it tomorrow, maybe, okay, this isn't like you're going to be a doctor and you're going to do surgery on people and you're going to teach it the next day. It could be a great quote from Jim Rohn. It could be a piece from a book that you realize did work in your life. You found out why it worked and then you teach it to someone else. [23:53.2]
I'm in a branding master class with a guy named David Brier. He talks about how when we teach you something, I want you to teach it to someone else, and the reason is that science shows your brain develops this habit faster, stronger, if you're able to learn it, and it's not just for you, it's for someone else, and you're able to articulate it out there, muscles and neurons that are required for you to do that are insane. There's a lot going on and it allows you to understand it at a much higher rate.
That's teaching. Start to take whatever you learn and give it out to your clients. Give it out to your audience members and you'll become way stronger. You'll be a better fighter, a better producer, in the end. You'll be more relaxed. You'll have a sense of confidence like you'll never ever get from anything else. You'll have a sense of accomplishment because, once you are able to see how far you've come, it's amazing for me to look back on my early writing. It's amazing for me to look back on those early videos. It's amazing for me to look back on those early books. I love seeing the transformation. [25:01.7]
This gives you this little boost in your step that says, holy shit, I am doing it. I am now way further, and it feels easier. Even though you're doing the same thing, it just feels easier. There's less resistance. You’ve built the calluses up. You are able to communicate in a way that makes you a street fighter. Damn, Jordan Peterson always says that if you can articulate yourself, you become dangerous. The way to become dangerous is you practice the art of shadow-boxing in everything, wherever you go.
Sometimes it's difficult to manage other people. Yeah, as entrepreneurs, we can manage ourselves, but can you manage someone else? Can you inspire other people? Can you get other people to do certain things in their life? Can you increase your influence to a point where you can change other people's lives? That's another skill set. It's more connections you need to make in your brain. [25:59.0]
It's hard in the beginning. That's why people get to a certain point of income and a certain team and they're okay with it because the next level is hard. At the next level, they have to learn new things. As time goes on, it becomes harder. It becomes more painful. The calluses aren't there. Time is not on your side. You've got a lot of pros and cons. You have to weigh everything then.
But the people who keep increasing this—they keep shadow-boxing. They keep putting themselves out there—are the ones that will seem like they're the naturals. They're the ones who get all the attention. They're the ones that break the records. It doesn't come easy to them. It's just that they never gave up.
Understand this, that your brain is doing something behind the scenes, and if it feels tough, there's a reason for it. It is foreign. Your calluses are not built. You haven't been doing it long enough. If you love it enough, if this is a desired goal, you'll push through it and it will become second nature. [27:06.5]
Last key piece to this chapter of the podcast is that you can't do it over and over and over and over without breaking down and resting. You need to rest. You need to do it and it's almost like studying for school. You need to do it, rest, go back at it, rest. Power of sleep is real. The power of rest is real.
I realized that repetition is not just all in one day. I now listen to the same audiobooks once a year or maybe every couple months, or certain speeches every couple of weeks, because in your brain, there's so much information, and depending on how your brain is set up, it's not going to take it in at one time. Even though you're feeding it with good information, sometimes you need to hear a message over and over and over before it actually sinks in. [27:55.8]
Great quotes by Jim Rohn and Jordan Peterson and Robert Greene, another guy I'm watching quite a bit, Patrick Bet-David, all these things that they're saying will become your lingo, how you think, how you act, and your brain cannot take it in in one sitting. You need to give yourself rest, give yourself a break every once in a while, and your brain will start to allow it to sink in and develop and develop at the right rate.
I talked about it before. If you are trying to grow a business, you want it to happen so fast overnight and it just doesn't happen, and maybe that's to your advantage. The slower it takes, the more you're able to develop these calluses. You’ll develop these skill sets behind closed doors. You're able to shadow-box and become better and better and better at certain things that you will need down the road.
Maybe you don't need it right now, but six months from now or a year from now, you will have this skill set. You will have this connection. You will have this ability to fight for yourself and speak in a certain way that attracts that certain member, client, business partner, affiliate. You're developing these skills and it's all to your advantage. [29:04.2]
Increase your myelination today. Start practicing shadow-boxing now. You don't need a huge audience. You could do it with an Instagram post, a Facebook post, and over time, you'll become the natural or they'll call you the natural.
Hopefully, you got something from this podcast. It's all about repetition, and if you become a repeater of great habits, you're going to be a leader that other people will say, Damn, he didn't give up and neither did I. Neither will I.
I will see on the next one, guys. Thanks so much.
This is ThePodcastFactory.com
