153: Upgrading Your Mind For Your Ambitions with Guy and Ilan Ferdman

Pete Mockaitis
Guy and Ilan, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to Be Awesome at Your Job Podcast.

Guy Ferdman
What’s up, brother? How you doing?

Ilan Ferdman
Pleasure.

Pete Mockaitis
So far, it’s the first time we’ve had two at once. It’s a double portion. I’m excited. Well, could you share with us… First of all, your company is called SatoriPrime, which sounds cool, but what does that mean? What’s the backstory behind it?

Ilan Ferdman
That’s a good first question. It’s a funny little story. So at the time when we started in this space, everyone was saying something like “Work with so and so, or theirname.com.” So with names like Ferdman as a last name, which is not a very sexy name, “Work with Guy and Ilan Ferdman” didn’t sound so great, so we’re like, “Okay, we need a company name.” We always loved the word “satori.” Satori means a moment of instant enlightenment.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love that word already. Is that Japanese? Where is that from?

Ilan Ferdman
It is. It’s Japanese. It’s a moment of instant enlightenment. And I don’t know why. I read it a long time ago. It just sounded kind of like a song-y word. It just had this nice ring to it. And this is the funny part. At the time, we had literally just seen Transformers. Both my brother and I grew up with Transformers as kids. Just loved it. And all summer…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I think I see it. Okay.

Ilan Ferdman
We were like, “Optimus Prime. Prime.” It just had this… And we put it together. We’re like, “Wow, that has a really, really good ring to it.” So that’s it. That’s how we called it SatoriPrime. And then the funny part was, about three and a half months later, we’re doing a training and someone was like, “What does your name mean?” and I was like, “You know what, I never actually looked at the word ‘prime.’” And so I pull it up on Google, I typed in “definition,” and it’s a state or time of greatest strength, vigor, or success in a person’s life. And we were just like, “Wow. Of all the dumb luck things that we’ve done in our lives, that’s pretty good.” So SatoriPrime means a moment of enlightenment to a state or time of greatest strength, vigor, or success.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is so good. That’s way better than “I thought it sounded cool.”

Guy Ferdman
Yeah, absolutely. And it actually perfectly describes what we do, our company function, so it’s kismet, for sure. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
What I also think makes sense is you two have undergone quite the quest for mastery, which I think really resonates for what I’m about and what listeners here are about. What is maybe the brief version of that tale, and what kind of drives you in your explorations?

Guy Ferdman
Look, for us, well, I could speak for me and I think Ilan would mirror this for sure. At 19, I went and started working in the personal development world myself, and through my teen years, like many people, I’m sure, was like depressed and suicidal and just really vibrated mostly anger and annoyance. That was like my go-to mode. And without going to all the details of the experience that led me into personal development, I went and took this class called Landmark Forum.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. I did that, too.

Guy Ferdman
Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Inventing possibilities and such.

Ilan Ferdman
Yes.

Guy Ferdman
And for me, that was just a really, really new concept, especially at that age. And I think for most people, probably well into their 50s, 60s, and 70s, those are still pretty new concepts. Anyway, I had a really radically transformed experience at that event. And by Saturday evening, having gone to the program yourself, you probably know what I’m talking about, just started being completely different. I had a satori moment on Saturday night at that course.
So that kind of set off this path of about 10 years of mastery work and conscious language, neuroscience, NLP, and all sorts of phenomenology, ontological type of experiences and education. And then over the last four years, I moved to California and kind of went from doing a lot of very neurosciency type work to really exploring subconscious reprogramming.
And really exploring the psycho type of stuff, and really digging into what does it take to reprogram the body and the mind, put them into union. And that’s kind of been our deep dive work for the last four years. And I think what Ilan and I are really, really good at is taking just high-end spiritual concepts and making them very palatable for consumption for really the everyman, so you don’t have to go and maybe have these big experiences, but we can definitely give access to what it looks like to start living that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool. And so you’re big on the phrase, and you’re messaging all over the place, getting a 10 out of 10 in every area of your life. And so I like that conception, first of all. So could you maybe share with us, what do you mean by 10, and what would a 10 maybe look like in a person’s career life?

Ilan Ferdman
So a 10 is someone… In a career life or in every area of life, one of the things we strive for is to have people be fully, and I mean fully out there, freedom, self-expression. And it’s amazing that your audience… We were talking about this before that your audience actually loves their jobs, which is a rarity nowadays. For me, a 10 is when you get to wake up every day and you’re doing what it is that you love to do, that it bleeds out of you, that it becomes effortless, that it’s not work. It’s you pursuing a career and a passion. More than a career. Almost like a mission or a calling, however that looks.
And, look, I’m not saying that for every single person, it needs to be this massive “I’m going to change the world and impact a hundred million people,” and such and such. It can really be that “Hey, I’m an attorney and I love being an attorney,” or “I’m a doctor and I love being a doctor.” I just think to be in a place where 80% of our lives roughly, say 70% to 80% of our lives, is going to be spent at this point in time in a task that is going to be creating some sort of income. And to do that just for money and not in the pursuit of mastery and passion, I think, is very limited in thought. And I think, given the technologies that we have today, the opportunities that we have today, it is fully accessible to everyone. So I love that your audience is pursuing that and finding that in whatever their ventures are.

Guy Ferdman
Yeah. And I think part of the reason I like that we chose that moniker, that have-it-all moniker, is that you kind of get to fill in the blank. Ilan and I can’t define for anybody what it means to have it all or what a life of 10/10 means. Well, when we looked out at the space, especially in the entrepreneurial “guru,” like the Gary V’s of the world and whatnot, and if you know some of these guys personally, we saw they might have amazing businesses, but then their relationships are taking hits or they have great relationships at the cost of their business.
And it seemed to us that, for us, spirituality is just creating balance, which means like health balance, work-life-travel balance. Your relationships are in a place that create joy in your life. They’re not de-energizing you. They’re energizing you and helping you grow. So I think everybody gets to define what that means for them. And Ilan and I just have clientele that is interested in creating that kind of balance and they really do want to interweave these different areas of life, because I remember before we had started our business, and I don’t mean this in like an inauthentic way, but I would kind of be one way with my friends, a little bit different with my family, a little bit different in my work life, just kind of modulate who I was being.
And I remember when we started the business, one of my key breakthroughs was kind of tearing down the walls between those three different areas, or it could be more, I’m sure. But I started seeing that if I wasn’t working on my relationships, my business wasn’t where I wanted it to be. If I wasn’t working on my business, my friendships weren’t where I wanted it to be. And suddenly, it just became about just being in life and enjoying life in every way that I possibly could. And really, I just wanted to be myself everywhere. I never have to show up in a way that didn’t make me feel proud of who I was being.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. That resonates here and that’s why we’ve gone really sort of deep at times with, say, sleep doctors because it shows up in your career and all over the place, that interrelationship there. And so I want to kind of hit one quick question, first of all, which was you mentioned that a 10 out of 10 career looks like you love it, it just pours out of you effortlessly, and you feel like you’re connected to a mission or a calling. And that’s cool. I dig that.
I’m wondering, though, at times, there are components of your career, even if you’re on your own thing, that aren’t so much fun. Maybe it’s preparing the stuff for the tax man or whatever. And so I’d love to know, sort of in the heat of things, when you’re in the midst of a particular task which isn’t so much fun, do you have any tactics for bringing forward the fun and energy in that context as well?

Ilan Ferdman
All right, so let’s look at menial tasks. And by the way, menial tasks aren’t just in work. They’re in everyday life, right? The difference is your perception. So if you can line up a hundred people who go about their day, there are tons of things… Every single person is going to have a different perception.
So I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this story, but a guy walks up to somebody who is laying brick and he’s like, “What are you doing?” and the guy is like…he’s miserable and he’s upset and he’s kind of like moody, and he goes, “I’m building a wall.” He walks down around to the corner and he sees this other guy whistling, happy, doing the same exact task, and he’s like, “Sir, what are you doing?” He’s like, “I’m building a cathedral.”
And the point is that if your vision of what it is that you are doing… And that’s why I said it’s to me, having a 10 in that aspect of your life is mission-based. It’s impact-based. If you’re doing something to get a paycheck, then all the menial things are going to come in the way and piss you off. If you’re doing something on a mission, then doing your tax returns, like for me, paying taxes, I’m like excited to pay taxes. Why? Because I’ve done good work. I just think whatever your perception is of that task or your endgame makes things much better.
So I’ll give you a completely other side of the spectrum example. People always want to lose weight. There’s not a single person that’s listening right now that hasn’t wanted to lose at least a gram.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ilan Ferdman
Everyone knows how to lose weight. It’s not a secret, right? There’s like seven…I don’t know how many billion-dollar industry around losing weight. It’s not a secret. You exercise, you eat healthy, you’ll lose weight. Now, what happens when someone has a wedding to go to, or summer is around the corner and they know they’ve got to get into bathing suit shape? Isn’t it amazing how naturally the things that they do, even the things that piss them off, all of a sudden, are exciting to them? Like going to the gym, there’s a purpose or they’re excited.
So all of it depends on your perspective and what you’re living into in that future. Otherwise, you’re going to get pissed about everything in life. I mean, that’s just the way the human mind works. It looks for the negative side of things all the time. It’s are you willing to shift that such that you can be empowered?
And here’s why I think that’s really important. At the end of the day, I can ask a million people this, and everyone will tell me the same answer. If you’re in a shitty mood, does anything good ever manifest from that? Do you magically create amazing things in your life when you are pissed off and not happy? No. It’s impossible. You create amazing things in your life when you feel awesome, when you feel amazing. And so that’s your choice moment by moment. Your perspective creates that feeling for you. And if you don’t feel awesome in that moment, then just know that you’re fine being there. It’s just going to give you a certain reality that you get to live into.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. So then, in the heat of battle then, if you will, like right there in that moment, I’m thinking you’re saying it’s all about reconnecting then to the mission, to the purpose. Do you have any samurai questions to help quickly reorient that?

Ilan Ferdman
I’ll make it super, super simple. The bigger the why, the easier the how. So for me, there are certain things that I have put myself out there, Guy and I. So our mission, just so you guys know, is a hundred million people’s lives transformed by the year 2020. Now, some people would be like, “What the… How? Where?” And you know what? We don’t know how or where either. The thing is that that goal, when I don’t feel like it, when I have to get on a coaching call or when I’m not feeling healthy or whatever it is, I know that I’ve created an out there that pulls me. I’ve chosen and I’ve said, “I’m responsible for that. People are relying on me to show up that way.”
And sometimes, in the moments where I want it the least and I show up, and this might be your experience also, you actually get more gold in doing that. Getting through that mumbles in your head about “Ah, I don’t feel like it today. Ah, I’m just off today,” and then you show up and everything changes, because when you’re there for others, when you’re actually there pursuing that mission, whatever your mission is, there’s incredible energy when you get past those things that generally hold everybody back. And the people that I know are the most successful, they know how to get out of their own way.
So just little things like if I don’t feel like it or if life gets me down or I’m doing things that I’m not that engaged in, I’m always looking at the bigger picture. What is this cog part of? Am I building my cathedral or am I building a wall? And just simple tools like 5000-year-old methodology, has been handed down to us, called meditation. I know some people are like “That’s so… I don’t have time.” It’s amazing what’s happening in the world.
Corporate America is buying into this. There’s so much science to support just 5, 10 minutes a day of sitting in silence, what that will do to you. So when you feel those moments and that arises, take that five minutes. Close your eyes. Put on some music, a track that you like. Do whatever it takes. And then get back to that which you know is the big picture, and then you’ll do great.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You said meditation, and I was going to ask you, so let’s go here now. So we’ve had Dan Harris talk about meditation in a previous episode. It was awesome.

Ilan Ferdman
Nice.

Pete Mockaitis
As well as some other real lovers and believers. So do you have any kind of pro tips for folks who are thinking, “By golly, I keep hearing meditation is the thing I should do.” Where do they start?

Ilan Ferdman
I love the “by golly.”

Guy Ferdman
By golly. It’s a major thing we advocate for our students. What we often see in the beginning for people is just meditation is not a matter of really doing anything, which is hard for people who are extremely logic-based, understanding-based, and really just trained minds in the western world around “Okay, what do I need to do when I meditate?” And it really is just much more about being in silence and just seeing kind of when it arises.
When you meditate, what you may find is that emotions that you normally stuff down and you don’t let yourself really process and feel them, kind of arise to the surface and show up. And if you get stuck, “Okay, what do I need to do when that shows up?” Well, really, all you need to do is just let it express itself so it has an opportunity to move through and transmute, right? All energy is just looking to move from one place to another. And generally speaking, our resistance to what’s showing up, like an emotional state that we feel that we’re not supposed to be feeling, we kind of stuff it back down.
And that’s just programming for how we’re raising kids today. And we’ll get into all of that, but let’s just…kind of in a more practical sense, I personally think that one of the huge key components for creating massive transformation in your day to day feeling, and I mean specifically about just vibrating in a place of passion, in a place of alignment, stuff like that, is having some kind of morning routine. And that would encapsulate having meditation in there and also a meditation every evening.
So what we guide people to do is work your way up to 22 minutes of meditation, both morning and night. In the morning, you want to focus on creating internal alignment. And in the evening, you want to focus on activation, so like transformative activation. So what that might look like is there’s an amazing app. There’s actually two, but I’ll recommend using the Calm app. It’s either in Android or iOS store. It’s free. They also have a paid version. But that’s a great way to get started. So if you’ve never done any sort of meditation and you just want guided meditation, that’s really wonderful. And then bro, you have to help me with Vishen’s last name because I always forget it.

Pete Mockaitis
Lakhiani.

Guy Ferdman
Lakhiani. Thank you. Of Mindvalley. He’s got a really great six-phase meditation that’s about 25 minutes long. I think those are two really great places to get started. And look, what might show up, like anytime you’re taking something new on, is “I don’t get what’s happening. This is a struggle for me. I’m a little bit frustrated.” It might even overwhelm you.
And we see all of our students, some who just enjoy it right away and they’re like, “Yes, I love meditation. I feel calmer every day. I feel clearer every day. I feel more inspired every day.” And then there’s the ones that are like, “I don’t get what is going on. This isn’t working for me. This is very frustrating.” And we’re always like, “Okay, just stick with it. Just let that go. Stick with it. Keep in the practice.” And then 30 to 45 days later, they’re the ones that are posting and they go like, “Oh my god, this is so amazing.” So it really is just kind of getting beyond that.
For Ilan and I, we have pretty rigorous morning routines. We don’t wake up to a lot of stimulus. I don’t check my news feed in the morning. I don’t look at the news in the morning. I don’t look at the news at all. But I don’t look at the news. I don’t turn on the TV. I don’t even have a TV anymore. It’s really about letting in as little psychic energy as possible from the world and just kind of being with yourself and just seeing what’s in these quiet spaces.
So I really recommend just investing some time in a little bit of reading every morning just to put in new input so you can get new output. Meditation. And then just something that makes you feel good. If you like to dance, dance. If you like to sing, sing. If you like to do some kind of art, whether it’s writing or painting or sketching, whatever it is, just allow yourself to experience your creativity.
I think most of western culture is extremely stuck in left brain thinking. For those that don’t know really how the brain works, left brain is very logical, very male-oriented type doing. And then the right brain is in the creative, the feminine, fierceness, and all that kind of stuff. And if you want to create more balance in your biomechanical system, you do want to be consciously choosing ways to activate both. And we just find that that creates a whole new world of opportunity in terms of how people feel. And it’s kind of been a theme on this interview about just staying in just a positive…not even frame of mind, but like a positive vibration within your body. Simple rule of thumb. You feel good; good things happen. You feel bad; bad things happen.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so I must follow up. You said 22 minutes, which is my number. Where does that come from?

Ilan Ferdman
It’s our number, too.

Guy Ferdman
22 is a lot of people’s number. There is a lot of spiritual significance to that number.

Ilan Ferdman
That’s what our practice is. I’m telling anyone. I know you’re thinking like, “I’m going to start 22 minutes? Holy moly. I don’t have that time.” You don’t have to do that. Seriously, get a Calm app. They have five 10-minute meditations. Just start with that. Really, the time thing, that will come later. The first thing is like you need to results of it.
So one of the things that we have people in our community do is we have them sign up for a 30-day meditation challenge
The compounding effect of it is really what’s magical. And so here’s what we’ve noticed. People will do a 30-day meditation challenge. After that 30 days, whether in the next week or the week after, inevitably, they won’t meditate, like “Oh, I can skip a day. Whatever.” They skip a day, and then they go to work and everyone pisses them off. Everything is annoying to them. They’re like, “Oh, man. I haven’t felt like this… Oh. I didn’t meditate today.” And that tends to be the last day that they don’t meditate.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. The voice of experience there. Very nice. Well, shucks. I want to make sure we also get a chance to hear, when it comes to limiting beliefs and confidence. I know you guys have done a lot of work there, and I think that something that shows up a lot in terms of in the workplace, folks feel nervous or scared or embarrassed about stepping out or speaking their mind or disagreeing. What’s your take here?

Ilan Ferdman
Is there like a specific thing that you think your audience has a limiting belief of?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s just say the belief is something like “My ideas are not as brilliant as others,” or “I don’t belong here.”

Ilan Ferdman
Oh, that’s so good. Okay, I’m going to tackle the “I don’t belong here” first.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ilan Ferdman
And then I’m going to write “My ideas don’t matter.” And they both kind of stem from the same place. I know a lot of your audience probably go through different networking events or different rooms all the time, and meetings, etc. When Guy and I were starting to build our business, I walked into a room of…I think pretty much everyone there…everyone was at least a seven-figure earner, and there were some even eight, and there was one nine-figure earner in there. And I remember at the time, we were just kind of like cracking the multi six-figure range, things like that. And I remember walking there and going, “What the hell am I doing in this room right now? I don’t belong here.”
Now, the first thing you want to become very, very cognizant of, and this is just a tool I want you guys…I’m a visual learner, so I’m going to give you this tool. The thing that speaks that to you and the thing that you hear in your head, if you could imagine that who’s talking to you is a five-, six-, seven-year-old version of you. So if you can imagine you’re like walking into the room, and right before you walk into the room, you look down at this six-year-old and you ask him, “Hey, we’re about to walk into this room. How should we act?”
Now, to a six-year-old, everything is scary in the world, right? You imagine walking into a networking event or asking somebody on a date. It doesn’t really matter. That six-year-old is terrified. Now, my question to you is would you ever ask a six-year-old how to operate a networking situation? You’d never. And yet this is what we do because as adult as we get and however many years we’ve grown in age, the thing that runs us, the voice in your head has stayed very, very young. It’s like a very, very, very old operating system that we still try to use today.
So the first thing that you want to do is just be aware that that is noise in your head. That’s just a conversation of a six-year-old. And if you could just get that, you already now have a choice. And that choice is do I get to walk in there with that as my pre-frame, or do I get to choose one that empowers me that when I go in there, I can actually make a difference for these people? So that’s step one.
The second thing, so once I heard that, I was like, “Well…” And this is a question you can ask yourself. “Do I know that to be 100% true?” like “I don’t belong in this room. Do I know that to be true?” And here’s where it gets really interesting. If you actually investigate that, you’ll know that if you’re there, anywhere, you are perfectly supposed to be there. However you got to that situation or that place or whatever, you’re exactly supposed to be there. You belong by the virtue of you being in that room.
Everything after that, all of the stuff that runs in your head, that’s just shit that you’re making up. And if you can honestly stand in a place of like “I belong in this room,” how much better are the conversations you’re going to get to have with people? If you can sideline those conversations of “I don’t belong,” or “I’m not smart enough to be in this room,” or “I’m not worthy to be in this room,” etc., if you just do that, every place and every room and every situation that you walked into, you were meant to be there, that would alter everything for you.
And so to spin that to your other point, like “My ideas don’t matter,” well, if you’re in that room and someone asks you for your idea, or you’re in that room and you’ve sat back and not given your idea, because what’s happening in your head is probably like “Oh, John is so much smarter than me,” or “Sue always has the best ideas…”

Guy Ferdman
“Someone else will answer it.”

Ilan Ferdman
Yeah. What’s the point, right? That’s squelching your self-expression, which I would assert is stopping your fulfillment and love of that situation. Now, again, if you go back to the thing that’s speaking that, like “Oh, don’t say that. They’re all going to laugh,” or “They’re going to think you’re stupid,” or whatever it is, that’s because at some point, maybe you were 7, 10, 12, you raised your hand, you thought you were going to give this amazing answer, it was totally wrong, the teacher laughed at you, the kids laughed at you, and you’re like, “I’m never going to do that again.” And then that’s what’s been running the show for you for decades, for most of us.
And so if you just get… Look, the world isn’t going to show up differently until you start responding differently. No one gets six-pack abs by sitting on a couch. You have to go to the gym. You have to start eating healthy. You have to start reprogramming a lot of these thoughts and old (I mean old old) operating systems that you’ve had that have been running the show. And if they don’t serve you, that’s the ultimate question. “Does this thought serve me?” So the question is does a thought like “I don’t belong” or “I can’t make a difference” or “They won’t listen to me,” does that thought serve you?
And the next question is do I know this to be absolutely true? And there’s nothing that you can come up with that is absolutely true 100% of the time. That is impossible. And so when you get to that place, you’re like, “Okay, well, if that doesn’t serve me, what’s something that I can put in place that would serve me? My opinions matter. I enjoy giving my opinions.” And then what happens is you’re going to say something and it will be received and it will go completely against any expectation that you had, and then you’re going to go there and go, “Whoa. That went nothing like I expected it to.”
And over time, what you’re doing is you’re actually upgrading the operating system so that six-year-old who is terrified of speaking their mind will now look at it and go, “Oh, well, when we speak our mind, it’s not the end of the world. People actually enjoy that. Okay, let’s do more of that.” And that’s how you just build that muscle over and over and over, and just start creating a new life step by step by step.

Guy Ferdman
It takes those small incremental shifts. And I think the simplest way for me to always operate and think about these things is just run an experiment.
If you’ve spent your whole life sitting in the back, being a wallflower, not expressing yourself, growing up, I absolutely considered myself an introvert. Today, I can get on stage and speak in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. And that just really came from taking small steps to see that “Hey, this isn’t not safe. I’m safe to express myself. When I open my mouth, it makes a difference for people.” And it’s just a little bit at a time. So it might just be starting with small shares or maybe like sharing with a colleague or something like that, but those little micro shifts definitely end up making macro differences.

Pete Mockaitis
I really love that notion about choosing a pre-frame. I remember when I was interviewing at Bain and I was so excited because this was my dream for years. And I was freaking out, like “I really don’t want to screw this up.” And it’s just like, “This isn’t working for me,” and so I decided my new frame was “I’m going to have as much fun as possible, engaging cool people, solving some problems, and sharing my perspective along the way.”
And sure enough, it made the difference. I had so much fun. I wanted to keep doing more case interviews, actually. And when I did make a little booboo, I was able to just kind of laugh at myself. And I think that came across kind of quite appealingly to the interviews, like “Okay, this guy, he’s approachable and he’s not all defensive and weird about it. Okay, cool.”

Guy Ferdman
I think that’s so true. Go ahead, bro.

Ilan Ferdman
Yeah. I was just going to say that example is perfect. We have a vision of what reality should look like, and it’s based on all these old programs. You reframe that. You go out and you take those actions because they’re consistent now with this new pre-frame that you created. It produces excellent results because it’s a new way for you of being. It’s a new way of doing things. And then all of a sudden, you come back and you’re like, “Wow. So all those years, I thought x, y, and z. But in reality, when I actually did it, it wasn’t like that at all. In fact, I love doing it.” And that leads to greater and greater action ongoing. And that’s it.

Guy Ferdman
I also think it’s charming when a person fumbles, but you’re standing so firmly in who you are that you’re not making yourself wrong. You just kind of can laugh it off, like if you watch somebody trip on a crack in the middle of the street and it doesn’t throw off their aura, it doesn’t ruin their day. And I think as Americans, actually, there’s this really wonderful book called “The Culture Code,” and I think Americans don’t expect perfection, but we love when people just own up to their charming qualities. I think if most of us checked in with our friends, like why they like you, the things that you tend to not like about yourself are some of the main reasons your friends love you. They think that stuff is charming.
So it’s like just giving ourselves space to be human and not expect perfection from ourselves. And for anybody who is listening here, whether you’re involved in personal or spiritual development of any kind, I truly believe that the number one disease on the planet is a lack of self-worth and self-love. And that all stymies from just being kids and being told like “Boys don’t cry,” and “Girls can’t do this.” And with all that programming just came a lot of you disabling yourself from thinking that you’re allowed to feel certain things.
And if you look at where self-worth stymies from in the subconscious, if you’re not willing to fully express or feel an emotion to the subconscious, it’s programming and you’re not even worthy of feeling this emotion. And if you’re not worthy of experiencing your own emotions, then what are you actually worthy of, right? So then it’s like, “I want a million dollars,” or “I want that raise,” and it’s like your 20 or 30 years of programming is going, “You’re not worthy.” So your brain wants one thing, but the internal programming, which we’re calling the subconscious mind, and it is partly in the mind, but a lot of it is actually the vibrational frequency of the body, is completely not in alignment with that.
So I know I’ve kind of said this a bunch of times here, but a really amazing thing, a practice, especially when you’re meditating, to do is as the emotions arise, and they arise often, just notice how often we squelch things down. And Wayne Dyer, so many spiritual leaders will say dis-ease, meaning when your body is out of ease, it’s creating disease. So like cancer and so many of the stress problems that happen in the gut and different things like that is really just a matter of people unwilling to fully experience and feel their emotions.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so good. Thank you. Well, I want to make sure we get to hear a couple of your favorite things before we have to jump here. So can you, for starters, share a favorite book, something that you find inspiring and go to again and again?

Ilan Ferdman
So many. I’ll tell you the one that’s probably shifted my awareness the most in recent years. It’s a book called “The Surrender Experiment.” It’s by a guy named Michael Singer. He’s been on Oprah. He’s incredible. So he’s got two. One called “The Untethered Soul.” One called “The Surrender Experiment.” Both absolutely fantastic. “Surrender Experiment” is much more of his story of life. Talk about a reframe of how you think life is lived. When you read that book, it literally changes the way you view life.
And I think one of the biggest…and I might get a lot of flak for saying this on this episode. I think one of the biggest misnomers or myths is that you have to work really hard to earn a living, or that you have to work hard to be successful. And I’m not saying that you don’t have to work. I’m saying there’s a big difference between all these guys that are out there going like “You have to hustle,” and “You have to grind,” and all that stuff, to working from inspiration, from inspired thought.
And the book speaks about really being in the flow of life and letting that guide your decisions and what happens. And even the most scientific and logic-brained people, this will absolutely expand your mind. In my opinion, it’s one of the books I recommend everyone that joins our community read.

Guy Ferdman
And then I’ll just throw two into the mix. Robert Greene has an amazing book called “Mastery,” which I think is just a beautiful read, but it’s also extremely insightful. And I think a lot of people who are dispassionate is because they’ve been convinced that if they’re not good at something immediately, then they must not just have talent. I truly believe, even if you look at the great men and women of the past, talent is always earned.
There might have been like a strive or like if you have a particular body that’s better for sport or something like that, but all the greatest people we know in sports have all been the hardest workers in sports and the most disciplined and brought something new to the game. And I think when you start looking at the pattern recognition of what it takes to be masterful at something, and kind of start living in a joyful manner, that it doesn’t have to be perfect, that you’re going to be a student for a while, a practitioner, and it does take time to get mastery. So that’s a really great one.
And I think that couples really well with…Carol Dweck has a book called “Mindset,” which just creates the distinction between fixed and growth mindset. And again, a lot of what we’re talking about here is like how do you allow yourself to open back up to growth. And I think there’s just a lot of joy in the discovery of new things all the time, like children are in discovery all the time. As we get older, we get obsessed with knowing, and it has a lot to do with the mechanism of the brain and its obsession with predictability for survival.
So it’s like it becomes safe to know and then we’re like unhappy and dispassionate. It’s like, “Well, I know everything and I sound great at dinner parties, then I fight with everyone about my opinions, but I’m joyless.” So it’s kind of like releasing some of that stuff to really open yourself back up to “Huh. Okay, it’s kind of fun not to know and just to be in exploration all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Powerful. Thank you.

Guy Ferdman
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share with us maybe a favorite sort of articulation of some of your messages, something that when you share with coaching clients or others, it really seems to resonate and getting folks nodding their head, being like “Whoa. That’s awesome.”?

Ilan Ferdman
Okay, so one of the things that we’ve really shifted our coaching to, and this might… Just experiment with this, okay? And this kind of goes with “The Surrender Experiment.” A lot of people, if they have an issue, they’re like, “Let me think through this. Let me think. Let me think. I’m going to think about it. I’m going to think about it.” And they get trapped in this place of just thinking, thinking, and thinking all the time. And once they make a decision, they’re like, “Well, did I make the right decision?”
I want to hopefully share with you guys and make you aware that you have a guidance system inside of you. A very, very quiet guidance system. It’s the guidance system that when you fell in love, it spoke. It’s the guidance system that sometimes you walk into a room and you’re like, “I cannot be in this room,” and if someone asks you why, you wouldn’t even know. You’re like, “I just can’t be in there.” So the most simple and mundane thing like sometimes you’ll put on an outfit before you go out to work, you’re like, “No, wrong shirt,” and you’re like, “Where did that even come from? How do you know this is the wrong shirt?” and you just trust it.
So what he talks about along “The Surrender Experiment” is feeling it versus thinking it. So the way we say it is “Feel it through versus think it through.” If you were to tap into that guidance system and use it as your new compass, and whether you’re going to take on a deal or not at work, or whether you’re going to pursue some sort of action at work or not, instead of just constantly being in this world of thinking, thinking, and thinking, if you actually took time and like “Does this opportunity feel good to me?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ilan Ferdman
And we all have this. Very quickly, you’re going to know like “This feels good. I want to pursue this.” And I’m not saying you’re going to feel like “Oh my god, this is so easy.” No, no, no. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do the work. It doesn’t mean any of that stuff. It’s just there’s this innate system, like sometimes you’ll get on the phone.
Guy and I just had this happen, like we get on the phone with someone and they’re pitching us, they want to do work for us, etc. And they could say all the right things and my body is just like, “No. I don’t feel like you’re the right fit.” And then lo and behold, they’ll do something a week or so later that proves exactly why they shouldn’t have been there in the first place. So I would just recommend, play with that, the intuition, the gut, and see if you can develop that as a muscle. It will lead you to unexpectedly incredible results in your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. So tell me, if folks want to learn more or get in touch and see what you’re up to, where would you point them?

Ilan Ferdman
Easiest place is just head over to satoriprime.com. We also have a podcast called the “Have It All” podcast. And if you just search for us on Facebook, we do a ton of live content. We have a show that’s run every Monday and Wednesday. So whatever works for you, we’re here to serve.

Guy Ferdman
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. Well, thank you so much. This has been really fun, resonant, sort of eye-opening stuff. I wish you lots of luck, and keep on rocking.

Ilan and Guy Ferdman
Thank you.