"A Story That Could Change Your Life" - Dean Graziosi

what stands between us and where we want to go is never what we think it is it's not the economy it's not the president it's not that somebody already dominated the health food industry or dominated facebook advertising or dominated tv advertising or there's no room left it's never that it's always the story we tell ourselves and why we can't achieve that and if i want to boil it down i would just say what is your biggest why what's your biggest goal that you would love if it was a year from now we were sitting here you're watching this it was a year later and it was the best year of your life what would be the biggest thing that would have changed in your life from money income family love intimacy being a better dad mom whatever that is if you say to yourself i would love that goal like i i'd love to have my company doing a million dollars a year in net profit so it could have freedom for my family then just say butt and whatever that butt is usually your story it's like i would love my company to be doing a million dollars yet but i live in a smaller town and there's just not enough people to do it or the internet's so saturated there's no room to advertise on facebook anymore cause everybody their brother's on whatever that story is usually your story and that's the results you get and that story is the thing standing between you and your next level and i know people are watching right now going oh dean that's nice you guys got money now so it's easy i don't have any money i don't have a partner i don't have any business experience you know this economy is not right for what we do and you know where there's you know that old saying where there's a will there's a way if that if your story is that that's what you'll continue to get so what i would say is if i was gonna boil it down find what that story is now to you might be saying dean you're saying it's a belief it's reality and maybe it's phase three but reality is nothing more than our perception of a situation right we all know that you've read that about you've watched it on tom's show everybody has said it but maybe it's the first time you actually think about it that reality you think is holding you back is really just the story so there's two things i say is go find somebody else with that same story like go look at your your evolution where you were on your couch no money right go look at richard branson's story look at tony robbins story look at you know john paul digiorio or all the amazing books everybody i've read every book in there that's amazing the people you've got to interview and meet but read all those stories and realize that first of all that story you have is probably a lie right so if you can find proof like leverage that it's a lie that's one thing but then the one that would get me is i love aspiration i love to look and say look what you did man i want to get there if he did it i can do it but sometimes you need the pain as well so what i like to do is i like to think take that story and think it's five years from now and think it's 10 you're still in the same exact spot you are now you're still worried you still have envy you still want more you desire more you want to take care of your family you want to provide more and think that story those two sentences is the thing holding you back do you really want to give that story that much power and then think it's ten years from now and that story is still done and all of a sudden like for me i think am i gonna let that story stop me i brought my son with me today am i gonna stop from giving him the opportunities that i didn't i'm not raising i have two children i'm not raising entitled kids i want to give a massive opportunity i don't want to leave him a trust fund i'm going to leave him massive opportunity and train him i'm not going to let any story get in the way of me being that dad if a story pops up that says hey i can't make baseball this week because of this i'll change a damn story i'll fist fight with that story and i'll look at the pain i'll have if i keep that story so i love the aspirational part of this story will stop me from my new life but i also like are you let that story screw you around for the next five ten fifteen years i mean man we're going to be 90 laying in a bed looking up like before we know it and you want to think i squeezed all i could out of life or did i let just beliefs that other people gave me hold me back about two years out of high school my dad goes through his fourth divorce and it hits him really hard it hit him so hard that he checked out and he said hey i'm not going back to the collision shop i'm not paying the rent it's done and i was like i at that phase of my life tom i felt i was embarrassed more than anything like i remember that point because i was like i'm not going to college but i own paul and dean autobody with my dad and it was like in my head not realizing i'm 20 nothing i'm like life's over i have no money in the bank life is just screwed and i started telling myself that story and i lost the spark i had since i was about 12. like since 12 i'm like i'm not this smart but i'm going to do this it and i lost it and i'm going to friends like hey if your dad or anybody you know needs a car fix i'm doing out of my garage and i know my friends are like uh then all of a sudden so this is what i'll share with you maybe you've had a story worse than that or maybe a story not as bad as that

but i remember being in there and saying to myself like what the hell am i doing telling myself this crap like if i feel this way this is going to be my dad and i remember at that moment i changed the story and i started thinking to myself and it didn't happen overnight this is what i want to encourage you when you find the bad story find a way to just reverse the whole thing i'm like no because i don't have a college degree i'm going to fight and i'm gonna do this because i was always small have no money i'm gonna do this because my friends think i can't i'm gonna do this and all of a sudden i started changing this story not overnight but over weeks it became my empowering story i wasn't looking at a deficit i'm like screw you guys you think i'm not going to do this because i don't have what you have i'm going to show i'm going to blow right past you whether that's a good thought or not at the time it serves me that's not how i look at things now but at the time it served me some of it was and i was able to reverse that story and that story got me through just like what got you from going to the couch getting change to where you've what you've created it's unbelievable the impact you've made on the world but if we had the wrong story beliefs we're screwed before we start i'm glad that we went down this road because if one person watching today just says screw this old story and you spent the time to make that an empowering story then i think the game changes forever do you have people that ask you like hey i'm rewriting my story but it doesn't feel real what advice do you have for them um rewriting my story and it doesn't feel real of course it doesn't feel real because you've been living the old story so long all changes is uh you know all freaks people out whether they believe that they like change or not and i think not only been telling yourself the story so long is when you tell yourself a bad story we look for things did you ever have something bug you like everybody does and you google it and you find all the negative stuff like oh my god i got cancer i have you know it's i have a tumor right it's the same thing with our insides right when we have a story that's holding us back we find social proof all around us it tells us it's the truth right you talk to your aunt who says yeah that hey listen rich people get to do those things we don't you just play it safe and all of a sudden subconsciously you're like oh maybe that story is right so you have all these years of sometimes years months weeks whatever it is you have the story and then you only collect the data that supports the story so your subconscious can be okay with playing small what i love in your real life story is that it wasn't like you were saying oh this epiphany i look up the stars of the line it was okay you have the trouble with your dad and his most recent divorce yeah looks like everything's collapsing you get it back it's going in the right direction we're winning again this is incredible and then you make a deal to sell your car flipping business yeah and then that goes to hell yeah and in that moment the story comes rushing back if maybe everybody was right maybe i wasn't smart enough absolutely and so that in fact you just posted this on your instagram i thought it was so brilliant it was the life of an entrepreneur and it showed this like i'm winning everything i screwed up i really said ah i'm winning again yeah i've got this figure and just like this back and forth how did you when you thought oh i've overcome this i've got the empowering story and then it all falls apart again the inner villain as you call it like start speaking up how did you deal with it the second time around was it easier was it harder i think it was harder because it was bigger because so the story just so you said i went i got i ended up after that i worked in that little garage i was working on one car my story changed i started getting power two cars three cars i went to the woman who owned the collision shop my dad had rented for her mrs mary lopresti she was a great old lady elderly lady and we became friends and she sold me the collision shop with no money down so i bought the collision shop my dad lost i named it dean collision center i took the paul off i was mad at my dad so i named the dean collision center i bought it and i started and i got enterprise rent a car account i got hurts we went from this rinky dink collision shop to a successful collision shop started buying and flipping more houses and then in the late 90s i wanted to teach people how i made money with cars i used to wholesale cars if you ever went and traded in a car and they give you a low price i'd run ads in the classified said hey if you're getting a low offer call me i'll sell your car for you and then i'd match buyers and sellers and make money in mill so i created a course called motor millions and i'd watched tony robbins on infomercials and i had no idea what i was doing i put all the money i had together hit credit cards and i filmed my first infomercial in 1999 and i sold a course called motor millions and went on tv and was literally running motor millions my education business out of the collision shop like i had three phones on the desk and oh no that's the motor millions phone and uh and we ramped up and i had no idea what i was doing i knocked on a lot of doors and finally rolled out on tv and probably got to a 10 million year company you know the trials and era figuring it out right a lot of mistakes

because i had no idea what i was doing and i was about three years into that and i wanted to teach everybody real estate and i had somebody come in and offer to buy motor millions uh and they uh they took the company and came in like hey you're running like a mom and pop we're gonna turn into a company and they blew the company up i mean like in nine months like as fast as you could blow a company up they blew it and uh i remember when they were making all these changes i remember thinking well i'm not that smart these guys are smarter than me so they're probably doing it right even though it didn't feel right it's a long story short the company went belly up but my name was attached to it and they didn't pay refunds for people who bought my courses and stuff so i went to court and literally took back the debt and then i over the next two years i paid off 100 of the people who had bought even though they bought through the company bought it my bills were ridiculous and all of a sudden cash flow was shut off immediately and i'm fighting to take back a dead company like it was like i gave them a thorough bread that was ready to grow and they broke its legs and gave it back to me i had to fight and pay to take it back then paid off and i thought i was going to lose it and those limiting beliefs at a different level came back and said ah see you didn't go to college you didn't study enough you weren't smart enough to own a 10 million dollar your company you weren't smart enough to negotiate right what do you think you're doing get this paid off go back literally i'm saying go back to marlborough go back to just real estate car business you can make yourself 300 grand a year like literally those beliefs came in all over again and i would bet to say what did it for me then was two things is i started thinking back of all the things that i went through and it was just as painful when i was broke getting my first deal done get broke living in a bathroom broke in that garage going to the collision shop and i realized that it doesn't matter how many zeros are at the end or how big your company is the pain is still there if you have the ability to get through a death get through a hard time get through something horrible in your life you have the same ability and you probably agree this when your company's got you know three zeros or nine zeros or ten zeros it does like the stress and the worry is almost the same if you look back it's just you're just handling bigger problems and i think i mean you want to upgrade your life upgrade your problems right but i think that's what got me through is i literally looked back and said wow i thought i was dead then i wasn't i thought i wasn't going to make it there i did and i started this mantra if i can get through this anything and i remember i would just walk and i would say it oh if i get through this i can get through anything this is my time this is my purpose this is my calling i went from the worst time in my life to be in being empowered and motivated and the energy just i took my team with me they felt the energy they felt the motivation and we just blew right through to another level you