Dr John Demartini- Human Behavioural Specialist and Inspirational Teacher
Click to play or right click here to download.
Transcript of this interview
INTERVIEW WITH DR. JOHN DEMARTINI, transcript of the show.
JOHN PETROZZI: Hi. Welcome to Living Is Easy. I’m John Petrozzi. Today, I’m speaking to world-renowned best-selling author and human behavioural specialist, Dr. John Demartini. Dr. Demartini is best known for his inspiring lectures, books, and other teaching materials revolving around the topic of boosting human performance and finding internal human driver for success. He has recently published a book called “From Stress to Success.” We’re very happy to have him back on our show.
Hi, Dr. Demartini. Thanks for spending time with us today.
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, thank you for having me again.
JOHN PETROZZI: It’s been about a year since we’ve last spoken here. Can you tell us what has changed for you over the last year, what have you really been up to, and what’s going on for you at the moment?
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Oh, gosh. Well, what I love doing is I research every day, I write every day, I get to travel most every day, and I get to speak and teach every day. Those are the four things I love doing most and I continue to do that. I’ve been blest to come out with some other books and travel more and teach more and reach more people. That’s what I basically do every day.
JOHN PETROZZI: Great. Lots of people have either read books written by you or actually seen the movie “The Secret.” Can you give us a bit more of an understanding or a brief description or outline of what the Law of Attraction is?
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, I like to think of Law of Attraction as if you don’t plant flowers in the garden of your mind, you’ll forever pull weeds. Once you concentrate your mind on what you really truly are inspired by, what’s really most meaningful to you, and focus on that and work towards that, you increase the probability of seeing opportunities, acting on opportunities, and attracting opportunities in your life to help fulfil those. So we really attract into our lives what we concentrate on and what we’re inspired by.
JOHN PETROZZI: So essentially, it’s setting goals.
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, it’s setting goals, but the key is setting goals that are truly meaningful, ones that are really high on your values and congruent with who you really are. Because of that, you will tend to see all the things around you that synchronously help you get that, you’ll take advantage of that, and you’ll increase the probability of it.
JOHN PETROZZI: Okay. I remember Zig Ziglar used to speak about goal setting, that if you don’t set goals you really don’t have any direction to a certain destination. The book you’ve written, “From Stress to Success,” can you give us a bit of background as to really what it’s about?
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, just what you started with. What it is are 31 excerpts – small three-, four-, five-page summaries of a principle – so that means there are 31 principles in the book. Each one is anywhere from three to five pages, where you just sit and concentrate on that per day. With that each day, you focus on doing that one action for 31 days. At the end of the 31 days, you start over on them and there’s a checklist to make sure you keep doing them.
The first one in there is making sure that you actually set goals, as I said a moment ago, that are truly congruent, truly meaningful, truly inspiring, that are exactly how you want your life. There is a law in nature that says, “Any space and time that’s not filled with high-priority things will automatically be consumed by low-priority things.” So if you don’t get up and define how you want your day and how you want your life, then somebody else gets up and defines it for you.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: So this first principle is being clear and giving yourself permission to dedicate your life to the way you want it and giving yourself permission to access the potential you have by being clear, because those who have the greatest certainly rule the game.
JOHN PETROZZI: So what’s the best way to put these principles into play? Is it a matter of writing them down or talking to them with people, being accountable, having pictures around your room or office?
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, when I was young, 17 or 18, I first wrote my goals. I started writing goals and I’ve been doing them ever since 37 years now. I now work them on a computer, but originally it was just writing them down on a piece of paper or something and then reading them every day.
But yes, anything you can do that can enhance the reminder of these – you can put visual images with it, you can put tapes and CDs with it, music with it – anything that gives you more detail. Because the master is the one who focuses on every finer detail. Any detail you leave out of the dream and goal that you set is an obstacle and challenge that you may face. So it’s being concise. You know, you wouldn’t imagine building a skyscraper without a plan, and you won’t build a light that reaches to the stars unless you got a plan.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah. So how, I suppose, intricate or precise do we need to be when we’re setting these goals and how often do we need to review them?
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, I have a book; it’s 760-something pages with nothing but goals. They’re very tiny print and lots of goals in it. The people who see that are just kind of stunned that their mouths drop.
JOHN PETROZZI: I actually remember seeing that at one point and I was amazed.
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Yeah. They realize that I’m keen for detail. You want to just keep writing it in such a way that you’re inspired by it and tears drop out of your eyes when you read it, because you go, “That’s how I want my life.” Any detail you leave out is, again, the challenge you face, so the more detail you put in, the clearer it is.
Now, some people say, “Well, if you get too detailed, then you become rigid and don’t allow adaptability.” That’s not true. At the same time you can be flexible. If something comes along tomorrow that gives you an insight on how to do it more effectively or efficiently, you can modify the goal tomorrow. You can refine that. So I say, “Read it, refine it, read it, refine it.” The faster and more frequent you read it and refine it, the higher the probability the goal, because you concentrate on it.
So I carry my book of objectives with me wherever I go and I’m constantly reading it whenever I have an extra moment. I just read through it, start from the beginning and just keep reading over it and over it and over it. In my life I’ve been blessed immensely with all the things that I get accomplished.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah. Dr. Demartini, do you think you are born this way or have you developed these skills over time? Because a lot of people that I’ve spoken to have read your work. Some of them sort of give up before they even start, because they say, “This guy has set these goals and has achieved these certain things. He talks really quickly, and I don’t seem to absorb all those things that he intends to say.” So they tend to give up before they actually begin the road.
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, you know, I was a high school dropout. I was told I would never be able to read, write or communicate, never amount to anything, never go very far in life than first grade. I had to get through school with the help of the smartest kids and lived on the streets as a teenager.
I did have a goal when I was young. When I was seven years old, I wanted to be a baseball player, but that got shattered when I moved to Richmond, Texas and got beat up playing baseball. Somebody tried to stab me and stuff. Then I got into surfing, I went to ride big waves, and I kind of accomplished that. Then I had a kind of a near-death experience and epiphany at 17 that made me want to teach, which I’ve been doing for 37 years. So yeah, I guess I was sort of oriented towards going after what I wanted in life, but I certainly didn’t have what I have today. I mean, that’s learning.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: I’ve read thousands of books and I’ve studied and mentored. I mean, it’s a game. So I don’t want to give people the impression that they can’t do it because that’s not true.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yes.
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: You know, I’ve worked with thousands of people who have done it and didn’t start from the easiest beginnings. So it’s not a matter of what you’ve been through or what you’re going through. It’s about whether you decide to do it. If you set goals that aren’t congruent with your highest values and aren’t really inspiring to you, you’ll probably give up on them. That’s the first principle in my book, “Stress to Success.”
JOHN PETROZZI: Great. Dr. Demartini, let’s go for a break, and when we come back, we’ll talk to you more about your new book “From Stress to Success” and also some other Laws of Attraction. Stay with us.
[break]
JOHN PETROZZI: Hi. Welcome back to Living Is Easy. We are speaking with Dr. Demartini, best-selling author of the book called “From Stress to Success” and many other books.
Dr. Demartini, can you give us a bit of a rundown of what you think is happening at the moment in the world, in terms of poverty and wealth and peace and war, when it comes to the Law of Attraction?
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, you know, I ask people in seminars by the thousands, “How many of you have moments of inner calm and moments of inner turmoil?” They put their hands up for both, because they have moments when they are calm and there are other moments when they’re kind of internally conflicting.
Then when I ask them, “When you got married, did you finally have peace and calm?” they laugh and giggle, because they know that when they got married, there were times when they agree and times when they disagree, times of calm and times of turmoil.
Then I say, “When you make love and you have children, you finally get peace,” and they laugh again. They go, “Well, no. When you got kids, you got times of calm and times of turmoil again.”
They I say, “Well, when you get together with your family and your cousins at an outing somewhere, do you finally get peace and calm all the time?” “Well, no, no. We have differences of opinion and we think that the way they raise their kids is crazy and they think ours is the same. So there are agreements and disagreements and calm and turmoil.”
I say, “What about work at your company? Do you have times pure calm there?” They say, “Well, no. We have agreements and disagreements, competition, cooperation” – pairs of opposites there.
Then I say, “So at what point does it become calm without turmoil, or peace without war, positive without negative? There’s always a pair of opposites in nature.” They’re kind of humbled and they kind of go, “Wow, I never thought about it. But I guess, if I can’t do it and my family can’t do it and my community can’t do it, why am I having a fantasy that it’s always going to be one-sided finally?”
Then I tell people that it’s not realistic to expect a one-sided world when in actuality, we need both sides to function. We have to have agreements and disagreements or we don’t evolve, we stagnate. So I think that the Law of Attraction, our innermost dominant thought becomes our outermost tangible reality, so what we think about. But the thing is there’s somebody out there thinking just the opposite of us. That’s what makes life so interesting. It’s because you got differences and you got similarities.
The ancient Greeks said that there is a Law of Similarities and Differences. For every individual that’s similar to you, there’ll be somebody different from you; somebody may be close to you, some may be distant from you. You got to have to embrace both support and challenge to master life. True appreciation and love and growth in life demand both.
So I don’t live in a fantasy that we’re going to have this peace, happy, everybody-agreeing kind of thing, because I think that’s delusional. But I do believe that we can learn to compete cooperatively and have a cooperative competition, you might say. What it means is, just like in sports, they have competitions but they do it cooperatively. I think that is obtainable, but they always have to have agreements and disagreements along the journey.
JOHN PETROZZI: It makes sense. You previously just mentioned a law, I think, the ancient Greeks had of “opposites.” What are some of the other universal laws?
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, the most universal of all universal laws that we know is the Law of The One and The Many. It basically states that from The One comes The Many, and from The Many come The One. We could call that – from the Universal Oneness, which is, in cosmology today – singularity point comes the many super galaxy clusters that we have today, and then from the super galaxy clusters, we create super massive black holes that return us back to the singularity point again.
We see this in cosmology. We see this in relationships. If you’re dating many, you’re looking for this special one, but once you got the one, you’re wondering about the many. So what happens is nature automatically keeps us oscillating between The One and The Many. That’s called democracy, The Many, and monarchy, The One. So in social structure, we always have an oscillation between the tendency towards the liberal democracy and the conservative aristocracy or monarchy.
This Law of The One and The Many is the most universal of all laws, and all of the laws are derived from it. We could say that the Law of Electromagnetism and Light is from The One to The Many, because it radiates from a source outward. We could say the Law of Gravity is from The Many back to The One, because it integrates One towards oneness again. So, even the basic laws of physics are actually derivatives of the Law of One and Many. That is the most universal of all laws that we know.
JOHN PETROZZI: I have heard of all these concepts before. The actual example that really made it real was the one about relationships. How can we make positive change in our lives, Dr. Demartini?
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, I would say that you’d want to make transformations in your life, and what you do, somebody will tend to like and some people will tend to dislike. You’ll have both positive and negative to somebody’s perspective.
Let me give you an example. I did a seminar one time where I was teaching how to be more effective and efficient and produce more and be more inspired at work. A company hired me to do this for their employees. Well, without a doubt, the company went up and efficiency and efficacy grew. The leader of the company, the CEO, said, “You know, ever since that seminar, they really improved our company and we’re really pleased. It was a really positive experience for them.”
The problem was that the wives of these men that I helped become more efficient were pissed, because now they’re so inspired by going to work that they’re spending more time at work. Now the wives are upset because they’re coming home later and they’re leaving earlier. The wives are now thinking that there was a negative to it. So the very act of doing a seminar on efficiency at work spun off two polarities of perception: One supportive, one challenging; one positive, one negative.
Every action bears a pair of opposites in our lives. Somebody will like and dislike what we do. That’s part of life, no matter what you do. So I always say that when you go through life, you have to embrace both, if you want to master your life. If you try to avoid one and seek the other, you get humbled. I would say that we seek things that support our values, but we keep attracting things that challenge our values to make sure that we grow. Because if we get nothing but support, we stay juvenile, if we get challenged, we become precocious, and if we get both, we grow naturally. That’s the healthy state that we get.
So you need to use stress, just not distress. “Use stress” means that you get a little bit of support and challenge, and it keeps you on the edge. “Distress” is when you get too much support you get bored, or too much challenge and you get burned out.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Let’s go on a break and we’ll come back and speak to our guest, Dr. John Demartini. Stay with us.
[break]
JOHN PETROZZI: Hi. Welcome back to Living Is Easy. We’re speaking with Dr. John Demartini. Dr. Demartini, how do we push ourselves out of that comfort zone in a meaningful way, not just for the sake of jumping out of an airplane, just because we know we can try it?
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, anytime we’re in a comfort zone, it means our vision is probably clouded and not clear to go to the next level. Our nature is to continue to grow. As Emerson says in his essays on Circles, “The mind may get helmed in by a paradigm or belief system, but the soul keeps calling us to wanting to grow beyond what our limits are.” So we really are here to continue to grow; it’s our nature. If we’re not, it’s because we’ve run into a stagnant strategy to get past ourselves, and we’re also setting goals that aren’t congruent with our highest values that are really most meaningful to us.
So we have to make sure we set goals that are truly inspiring to us. We have to chunk them down into small enough actions, which is what my book “Stress to Success” helps do. Break them into small enough so you overcome inertia. I always say that piggy banks become biggy banks, and little actions make big dreams.
Then you want to make sure that you also delegate lower-priority things to others who would be inspired to do it, so you can get on to doing higher-priority things that inspire you. If you do, you automatically set free the boundary and start moving up again to the new notch on the tree of life.
JOHN PETROZZI: Okay. So for our listeners, what are a couple of small little steps they can take to push themselves out of their comfort zone if they do feel that they’re stuck in a rut?
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, the thing to do is to get up in the morning and stop, close your eyes and think, “What are the seven highest priority action steps I can do today that will increase the probability of me achieving what I want?” and write them down. Then, go do them. Prioritize them and go do them. Get just those seven things done. Don’t give you 25 of them and then not get them all done. Just stick with the seven things and get them done. At the end of the day, celebrate that you did it. Then document what you accomplished that day and keep a list of everything that you’re grateful for that you do accomplished in a day, and then the next day, do it again.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: What this does is if you’re grateful for what you get to do and you document and prioritise what you do on a daily basis, you start to move and get past the nourishing and get into momentum.
JOHN PETROZZI: Hmm, they’re simple steps. I know you’ve written about those in many of your other books as well. In some of your other books – I can’t remember the name of the book – you spoke about unconditional love. Can you tell us what unconditional love is and how do we practise it?
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, unconditional love – I always say that the soul represents the spirit of unconditional love. I think that our real truest nature is to love. What we do is, because we live in this mortal physical structure, this body of ours, and because it has finite senses that limit its outreach and sensory awareness compared to the infinite possibilities that are out there, there’s always an “unknown” outside our “known.” There’s always a mystery outside our history. There’s always a question outside our answers.
As a result of it, our finite perceptions tend to judge things incompletely. Anything that supports our values, we tend to label “good” and anything which challenges our values, we tend to label “bad.” We tend to polarize and avoid and seek things and filter our reality, and exaggerate or minimise our realities and hold ourselves back from seeing the magnificence of the two actual lives.
As a result of it, that judgement or that filter blocks us from an unconditional state and puts conditions on things and hold us back from the observation of the magnificence of the universe, as I call it. So what we have to do is we have to stop and take the things that we think are so positive or negative, and we have to neutralise them by asking, “What’s the downside to the things that we think are so positive? What’s the upside to the things that we think are so negative?” Literally equilibrate or bring equanimity and poise to the mind to liberate us from the emotional baggage and bondage of the imbalanced state. Once we do, we’re actually free to actually get on in an unconditional state and love.
JOHN PETROZZI: Okay, let’s try and make it a little bit real, just for the listeners. Let’s have an example. There are people that are going to work every day and they’ve got some work colleagues that they love and adore and have some great conversations with, whether it’s about work or social settings. What if there are some people in the office they just can’t get along with, or if it’s their loved one, or if in fact it is themselves that they can’t get along with, how do they practice unconditional love in that situation? Is it simply non-judgemental or-
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, what happens is anytime that you resent somebody, you’re assuming they cause more challenge to your values and support, more negatives than positive, more pain than pleasure. That means you haven’t taken the time to ask, “What are the benefits of this person? What are the gains? What are the positives? What are the pleasures this person gives me?” and rebalance the perception. If you ask that, it’s always there. You’ve ignored it because you filtered them.
The person that you admire at work, if you don’t ask “What are the downsides, what are the drawbacks of this person?” you’re going to get infatuated with them. Anybody you’re infatuated with or resent run you. You don’t run them, they run you. That’s not unconditional love. That’s a condition that you put on them because you have an incomplete awareness of them.
So if you actually get to know the person you resent and the person that you’re infatuated with, you’ll discover that both have both sides. Once you do and you have a nice perfectly balanced state, then you’re set free to love the people for who they are, not for the fantasies or nightmares you’ve created out of them.
JOHN PETROZZI: So really, the major premise that you’re teaching and living by is the fact that life is, I suppose, one big school, so there are lessons to be learned in every situation.
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: It is a lesson, and it is a lesson in teaching you balance. Because how are you going to have a balanced life if you can’t have a balanced perception. How are you going to have a balanced physiology and well-being if you can’t have a balanced perception? So the quality of your life is based on the quality of questions you ask. The questions that bring you into balance are what liberate you.
JOHN PETROZZI: Dr. Demartini, let’s go on another break and we’ll come back and speak to you more.
[break]
JOHN PETROZZI: Hi and welcome back to Living is Easy. We’re almost out of time with our interview with Dr. Demartini, but there are lots more questions that we’d like to ask you. Dr. Demartini, what’s in store for you next, in regards to your speaking, teaching and writing pursuits?
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, I’ve been blest to open up a new country. We’ve got some things coming up in Saudi Arabia. We just got back from Kazakhstan and Russia. I’ve got a new movie that’s coming out next few weeks called, “Oh, my God!”-
JOHN PETROZZI: Oh, wow!
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: -that’s got some amazing people in it. It’s got Hugh Jackman and David Copperfield and Ringo Starr and myself and Bob Geldof and Baz Luhrmann.
JOHN PETROZZI: Fantastic!
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: There’s a lot of people in it. Then we got another movie we’re working on right now called “One” and another one that’s called “The Cure.” We’ve got a bunch of movies that are coming out.
JOHN PETROZZI: You’re in a transition from writer to movie star.
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: I do. I’m doing something up here. I’m coming up with Jennifer Elster. We got another movie coming out in the making.
JOHN PETROZZI: Fantastic!
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: So there are lots going on in the movie world. Then we also got new books. I got another one called “Inspired Destiny” coming out. We’re working now and we’ve got, I think, in November 6 in Washington, in Baltimore, Maryland, with the [21:30] administration to introduce my methodology for addiction resolution. We just worked with the government and the police force in South Africa. There are just things going on all over the world. We got things going on in Japan, in China. I’ve been very blest.
That’s why I tell people, “Set goals.” In my book “Stress to Success,” I tell people, “If you just follow these 31 things, you blow your mind on what you get to have in your life.
JOHN PETROZZI: What legacy do you want to leave for the next generation?
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, you know, I set out on my mission at 17 to travel the world and step foot in every country on the face of the earth and share my research findings to people. That’s exactly what I intended to do. So at the end of the year, it will be over 60 countries I’ve lectured and spoken, and we’ve got students in about 138 countries now. So I just keep working until we got everybody across the planet. We approached and passed the three-billion mark in reaching people in media this year.
JOHN PETROZZI: Congratulations.
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: So we just working and keep plugging away. So my institute, the Demartini Institute, is designed to help people, educate their lives and live more full, expanded and inspired lives.
JOHN PETROZZI: Fantastic. That’s exactly what seems to be happening at the moment. Do you have any closing remarks for us before we go?
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Well, I just thank you for the opportunity to share. Just know that you got to give yourself permission to live an extraordinary life and give yourself permission to have an amazing and inspired life. If you don’t put your hand into a pot of glue, you don’t get to have it stick. So you want to put your mind into great thoughts and ideas and stand on the shoulders of giants, not in the shadows of anyone.
That’s why I put on my Facebook, “Inspiring ideas every day,” so people can get something to just trigger an action for the day. That’s the purpose of trying to reach and educate people. If everybody does that, their life changes. The people you meet and the books that you read determine your destiny.
JOHN PETROZZI: As always, Dr. Demartini, it’s great speaking with you. It’s always inspiring, and you got some fantastic messages that are always very practical. Thank you very, very much. We appreciate you.
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Thank you, John.
JOHN PETROZZI: Thank you and all the best for the future.
DR. JOHN DEMARTINI: Thank you so much.
JOHN PETROZZI: You’ve been listening to an interview with world-renowned human behavioural specialist and best-selling author of “From Stress to Success.” For his website, you can go to drdemartini.com. He’s written many other books worth reading.
This is Living Is Easy. I’m John Petrozzi. Until next time, stay well and stay happy.
For more information about health topics and inspiration check out these other websites:
www.bodymindcentral.com.au www.suzipetrozzi.com Empowered Women Retreat information
Facebook John and Suzi Petrozzi Facebook: BodyMindCentral Facebook: SuziPetrozzi
