GCM 85 | Limitless Mind

 

Ever-evolving and growing humans as we are, there is no saying to the limits of what we can do. Author and advisor, Geoff Blades, invites us to explore who we are capable of being, beginning with the way we think. He goes deep into the game-changing mentality of the limitless mind, building yourself limitless to create that limitless reality. Urging us to dream up the most amazing versions of our lives and create it, Geoff then talks about transformation and going beyond from what is missing in your life to what you truly want for it. He shares some methods to unleash your best top performance along with recounting his own personal journey of transformation. Operate in a spirit of excellence and don’t settle for less. Take some notes from Geoff in this great episode.

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Limitless Mind: Creating The Lives We Truly Want With Geoff Blades

How many of you want to build a limitless mind? Think about that. What if you had a limitless mind? I have author and advisor, Geoff Blades. Geoff is a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and investor at the Carlyle Group. He’s an advisor to Wall Street leaders, CEOs, and other top professionals. Geoff is obsessed with how we create the lives we truly want and stops at nothing to build the absolute best methods for becoming your best unleashing top performance, driving massive goals and going for what you truly want. Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome Mr. Geoff Blades to the show. Welcome.

Rodney, thank you very much. I appreciate that. 

Thank you for coming on the show. I am excited to have you here. I’m excited about what we’re going to dive into and how it’s going to help the audience. How are you? How are you doing?

I’m doing great. I’m fired up to be here because I was reading through your book. I’m thinking about this game-changer mentality. This notion of the limitless mind, if you watch that movie, what do you see? You see this guy whose all down and out, but he’s got this massive dream that was hard for him at the time to write that book. He pops this pill and what happens? It all opens up for him. The key to that movie though is that suddenly the second step in the third phase, something else needs to happen. He’s able to do it in the second phase, but in the third phase, he needs to become it. He needs to go beyond having access to that limitless mind and he needs to build it and he needs to be able to do it without the pill. To me, that booklet that we put out, that’s a free book of the website is a metaphor for a lot of the stuff I do, which is a game-changing mentality all begins in mind. The mind is all. How do you get your mind to that place where you can get limitless scheme and dream, where you can limitless take those actions and you can become it? Don’t just think positive or whatever other platitudes around. Build yourself limitless to create that limitless reality.

To think about it, what’s beautiful about that is your mind is limitless. It’s what you are doing with your mind, what you’re putting into your mind that is making all of the difference. It’s the information and the skills that we’re building. That’s how we build a limitless mind. Every one of us has the ability to do that.

That’s it. I’m looking through your stuff and we’ve sampled a lot of the same old school thinkers. If you go back through the history of personal development and you go back to the new thought movement, the old school, back to the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks. You see this same name which is, as Napoleon Hill put it, “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and bring itself to believe, it can achieve.” In Hermetic philosophy, the phrase is, “The mind is all.” In the Eastern philosophy and the meditation mantras, a world of hypnosis, “It is all about creating that reality in mind.” Whatever reality is throwing at you, whether you’ve got a broken back, your spinal cord, you choose your mind.

Let’s get into this a little bit more. I want the audience to learn a little bit more about you. Both of us are passionate about the work that we do. I want to set a framework for the interview. I want to talk about transformation. The reason why I want to talk about transformation is that as I was looking through your stuff, I have seen bold statements. That’s something that I haven’t seen before and that was my life is a transformation. You have that right there on your website. Tell us, what do you mean by that?

If I look at it in a real broad sense, what I say is Rodney, I am not interested in small changes. I’m not interested in making your life or career a little bit better. What I live for is how do you dream up that most amazing version of your life and then create it? If you want to get yourself in shape, you transform yourself into how you want to be. If I go back to being a kid, I grew up working at KFC and in factories, but there was something in me where I was lucky. There was something in me that believed that anything was possible, even though I had no idea how to create it. I didn’t have role models around me who had created it but there was this kernel inside of me that said, “I can do what I want.” Why can’t you create that life you truly want? To me, that leap from where I started in life was a massive transformation.

That high school enabled me to take that leap with an education. You can take a leap from wherever you are into a great career that landed me a Goldman Sachs, which was a huge leap for me. That was relative to where I started an enormous transformation in my life and what was possible for me. That’s where all this work started. I got to Goldman Sachs and built a career there before I’d ever even picked up a book on personal development or if I ever read a motivational quote or before I’d ever thought about Napoleon Hill. At Goldman Sachs, I started to ask the bigger question, “What do I truly want?” I’d made it to this level and it was an amazing career and people. Many things were great about it. The question that was noodling in my mind, “Is this the life I dreamed of as a kid? Is this the life that I truly want?”

Let’s stop there because when you think about someone who is successful like Goldman Sachs, you would think that person has the amount of money that they want in life. They live in life at a high level. They have a decent network of people that either work there or they know other investors and things like that. They have a great life. Here you are asking yourself a question, “Is this what I truly want?” That begs the question, what was missing in your life at that time?

Whatever reality is throwing at you, you choose your mind. Click To Tweet

It’s a great question and if I go deeper into the story, I was sitting in Menlo Park, California at that time. It was the year 2000, the internet bubble had burst and then the layoffs started to come. I was watching people around me get laid off. It changed the way I thought about it. Before that, I believed I would be there for the rest of my life because you nailed it. It is an amazing place to work. I see Goldman Sachs as one of the greatest places to work on the planet. I still spend a lot of time with people from Goldman and the notion is that no matter where you are in life, no matter what leap you’ve taken, the greatest thing about the human mind and the human animal is that we always dream bigger. We’re always dreaming of where we can next get to. The negative side we might touch on is that a lot of the time, that’s deferred fulfillment as well, what I call the getting there program in the brain. “When I get there, when I get that, then I’ll be happy.”

Some of my Wall Street clients, all we do is work on topics of happiness and being fulfilled because I made them money. They’ve got incredible success, they’ve got that network, they’re doing amazing things in their lives but to your point, they don’t feel it. What I found back then was I was asking a deeper question, “Is this what I truly want?” The firm that I joined, I thought we were all in it together. I was naive, I was a kid. What I realized is no, it’s a job. It’s a great job but I wanted a mission. I wanted something that mattered deeply in me that I would put my entire life behind it. I didn’t know what that was. In fact, I didn’t even know how to start looking for it. That became my first question, stepping back in 2000, my question wasn’t, “I want that. How do I get it?” My question was, “What do I want?” If you don’t know what you want, how do you figure that out? I’ve gone from nowhere to Goldman Sachs and now I was asking the big question, “What truly matters to you? How do you create it?”

GCM 85 | Limitless Mind

Limitless Mind: Don’t just think positive or whatever other platitudes around. Build yourself limitless to create that limitless reality.

 

That caused a change in your life. It may lead you to different places because that question, “What do you want?” a lot of things could have come up for you. You want it more. Goldman Sachs wasn’t providing that for you so that set you on a quest. What happened next?

This is the transformation part here where I began to transform and why is it I didn’t even know? If you look back on it a few years later when I had a lot of realizations, what I realized was it wasn’t about what, it was about who. I was searching for me. Who am I? What am I in the world? What am I here to do? The way the brain creates that question is there’s something that when I get that, then I’ll have it and then I’ll feel that way. What started for me was I walked into the borders. Back in the old days when you went to the bookstore in San Francisco with my cap pulled down over my face and I walked over that weirdo section called self-help.

Who even goes over here? You guys ever hear it. People from Goldman Sachs are not reading these books. “I’m Geoff Blades. I worked for Goldman Sachs. I got that business. I’m a winner in life. What do I need that for?” I started reading those books and it grabbed me in a way that it became my obsession because I saw two things. One is inside all of those books. I saw your preface from Bob Proctor. Inside the minds and the works of these great thinkers in all of human history, principally, I’d say two topics that mattered to me at that time. One is what the bigger frame for your life is? Everyone wants to make money, be successful or do things that matter for whatever. What’s the bigger frame? What’s that why? Who do you want to be? The bigger frame.

The second one which became a lot of my work and is still my work, I realized that much of the ways I had succeeded was a straight-up brute force. How do you get what you want? It’s a paradigm from school. You put your head down, you work hard, and you throw hours at the problem. In school, what do you learn? No one ever teaches you how even to memorize. You’re reading and rereading when there are all these memory tools out there so you can get so good at that skill, but they don’t teach you which is brute force. The same is true in the working world. You start even a great job of Goldman Sachs, but no one hands you that manual. No one says, “This is specifically how you win at this.” Everyone’s working 80 hours a week but what are they spending their time on? Are they having the highest impact? Where are they shifting their time? How efficient are they? How effective are they? How skilled are you?

One of the paradigms that would start to form in me back then was a lot of the old ways I’d done things, which is brute force ineffective. If you want to do something massively hard, you have to get as good as you can be at it. Tom Brady got his maniacal TB12 Method and people think he’s a loony. He’s playing at the top of his game at age 40 because he has a method. Back then, I didn’t know anything about this. I knew how to work my tail off. I started to formulate ideas around these two concepts, dream and scheme it. Get and create that vision. Where are you headed? Why are you headed there? What does it mean to you? How do you get good at it that you can do hard things that you couldn’t do before, not just by working hard? There’s no edge in working hard especially in a Wall Street type of environment. Everyone’s working 80 to 100 hours a week. How do you do hard things? How do you get good at it that you get more effective and you win more?

I want to go back to the part about the reframe. Create a bigger frame. A lot of times, people have this idea of what their life is and they settle for that. They look at what their mother did, their father did or other people in their life or people that maybe look like them or it’s close to them and they seek success. People that are successful as far away, dis-attached with who they are and their identity. They don’t think that they can ever be that. It’s all because of this framework that you have about yourself and your life. I totally agree that we have to challenge that frame every single day because that frame is a lie.

That frame that you have is something that’s built because of programming that you’ve experienced in your life. It hasn’t been challenged and you don’t know what you’re capable of until you go out there, put the boots to the ground and make something happen. When you talk about getting good at it and working hard, I know people that work hard on the process that when it’s time to execute, execution is easy. You could take debt and negative loan and change your life in that one piece of information there. We spend so much time, we want to be good at stuff, we want to be good at our jobs, we want to be good at whatever it is that we don’t work that we’re doing. You have to put that work in to understand what it takes to be good. It’s not just learning those skills, it’s mastering those skills. Committing to mastery and challenging all of the assumptions that you’re not good enough.

That’s exactly it. It’s mastery. To your point, mastery is simple that when you know something well, that execution becomes effortless. Like Bruce Lee, be like water. That phrase, “Be like water,” was all that you have to associate with his style of the fight, which is the mastery breaks it down into a flow-like movement where there’s no punching and there’s no kicking. It’s effortless strikes. You can apply that method to everything. The masterclasses we’re building are all about, how do I do what I do for people in ways that I do it for my clients? It seems mad. It seems crazy in some ways in some of the stuff I do like six hours win every meeting.

The greatest thing about the human mind is that we always dream bigger, of where we can next get to. Click To Tweet

To your point, why is it six hours? This isn’t the average level player. The highest levels of corporations of Goldman Sachs are the places that I spend my time at the highest levels all day, every day. People are walking in and out of meetings without a specific plan as to how they’re going to get what they want. Vince Lombardi took the package from the bottom to the top because he was maniacal about the way he would run his place. He’s got a great quote on the power sweep. There was nothing spectacular about the power sweep. What was spectacular was that they would drill it many times. His quote is, “If they ran it twenty times, it would work twenty times.”

Your point, not 18, not 19 but the execution was flawless not because they were geniuses but because they worked out it in a way that when it was time to push go, it was dialed in. How do you walk into a meeting and win it? Because you’ve spent hours and hours. One of the programs that changed my life was it’s now called Land That Crazy Job. This is the method I started to get the job at Goldman Sachs. If you’re dreaming massive, what work are you willing to do for a job interview or gain like, “It’s one thing to spend a couple of hours thinking about it.” It’s another thing to spend 1,000 hours working exactly your process and building the skills because it’s a game of skill. How good are you at influence? How skilled are you? How masterful can you get it in your preparation so you can fully execute it?

There it is. That’s the thing. This thing is called life and it requires preparation. It’s like a game. If you are preparing for a game, an interview, a job, you can’t expect excellent results if you didn’t put in working your preparation. I don’t care what it is. You have to put in the work to be prepared in everything that you do. That’s why I believe in practicing excellence in all that you do. When you operate in a spirit of excellence, you don’t settle for less. You don’t settle for mediocre. You are looking for the best, to be at the top. Not in terms of competing with someone else but within yourself. You know when you have given it your all, you’ve given it the time that it deserves. When you’ve given it the effort that it deserves.

No one has to tell you that. That’s the relationship that you have between you and yourself and whatever it is that you’re working on. If you’re not at peace or satisfied with the level of preparation that you’ve put in then there’s a level of dissatisfaction that you’re going to have with the results that come out of that. That sets the stage for the expectation. What can you expect? What are you expecting? When you think about your life and you think about the results that you’re getting, you do have to ask yourself, “What am I putting into this?” A lot of times, we want a lot of things to talk about a limitless mind. I was talking to someone and there are a lot of things I don’t listen to, a lot of things I don’t allow to go into my mind anymore.

They were asking me, “Why don’t you listen to these things?” I said, “I filter a lot of things that go into a mind.” Especially as a speaker because whenever I open my mouth, what comes out is the by-product of what’s going in. Life is the same way whether you’re a speaker or you’re working on your job. We can tell what’s going in by the results that you produce. It’s all about that prep work. That’s the dictator of the outcome over your life. It’s what you’re putting into it. I want to ask you because I know you’re a bit of a myth buster. I was listening to some videos that you have created and there are some myths that you have identified that give everyone problems when it comes to mastering. They’re getting what they want out of life. Could you walk us through those myths?

I want to hit something that you nailed. These are things I got from your book, writing preparation. Some of the ideas I extracted from your book, “Look beyond the status quo to envisage what’s possible and manifest it. Here’s this grit, unstoppable, unmovable, unshakeable determination, sustained effort, seek out life’s challenges, be willing to do whatever it takes.” If you think about that word, whatever it takes, push to new levels, fire and desire. This one I love, “Even if you can’t win, leave it all on the table.” One of the things as well that you get in this topic of preparation is a lot of people who say, “What if I do all that and I don’t get the result I want?”

Go ahead. You’re getting me fired up even more because I have so much I want to say about that. What do you have to say about that?

That’s the thing about our world, which is if we’re focused on those outcomes, if we think that it is about making that money or winning that goal, it’s about who you become. Who are you becoming in picking up that anvil? Steel is forged by heating it up and beating it against an anvil. Maybe you get out of that steel, a beautiful car. What comes of building yourself the same way? Forging yourself. Who do you become? Whether the outcome is there or not, even if you can’t win, you’re doing it because you’re leaving it on the table, that’s the point. They’re making me think of the chicken thing we talked about your mom. If you had lifted on the table, you had to do the work to train yourself to eat again and she had to see that in you and you had to be willing. She had to be willing to watch you drop all that food all over your clothes too nor she had to clean them for you unless you do the work. The point is the works.

A lot of times, we look at people in what they have and the success that they’ve achieved in life. It creates an illusion that a person may have more than you, that they’re more successful than you and that they’re better than you. All of that is a bunch of bull. It’s all an illusion because in life there is no competition. It’s not about what someone has that’s more than you whether it’s money or whatever. It’s about you reaching the potential that you have within yourself. Society has to have someone, they have to walk away from the game and say, “They scored more points. That’s the winner.” That’s what that’s for. It’s not for you because of how many times have you seen games? Someone who’s won the game but you can see that they’ve been outplayed. The ball didn’t bounce in their favor in this particular game so they lost but they played a game that was amazing. They played beyond their potential.

They have done everything well. It’s just the ball didn’t bounce their way that day so they were declared the loser. There have been many experiences where I’ve walked away from and I know I was declared the loser, but in my mind, I know I won because I won the experience. I took away way more than the winner could have ever taken away from that experience and it developed me. It changed me, it created me. If we can walk into life, into meetings, corporations, businesses, and any in every area of our life with this particular mindset, you never lose. When you’re giving it 100%, when you’re leaving it all out there on the field, you cannot ask yourself for anything else. It’s when you don’t, you can win the game and play half-ass and be declared a winner but you did not win because you didn’t play to your potential. You knew you could have done better but you didn’t. That’s what a loser is.

It makes me think of the definition of mediocrity. Often the word gets framed like it’s a judgment. Someone is being mediocre. The definition of mediocrity isn’t a judgment on who someone is. It is a judgment on how they are performing relative to their potential. There are people at the lowest levels of our society that are playing so far beyond their game They are playing their winning game and there are people at the highest levels who are getting a lot of accolades, who are making a lot of money or having a lot of success but they are being mediocre because they have much more potential in them.

GCM 85 | Limitless Mind

Limitless Mind: If you want to go for something massive, you have to get as damn good as you can be at it.

 

It comes down to effort. In order to get a plane to altitude, you have to give it full power. If you don’t give it fully in mind, you’re going to stay beneath the clouds, you’re going to look up and see these other planes flying at altitude. They’re gliding through the air seemingly, effortlessly and you’re not because they’ve put that force behind what it is that they’re trying to accomplish. They are there until you do that. That’s the way this process works. You have some people who are fortunate enough to be born into certain things, but then you find that they’re not happy because they’re unfulfilled. I believe that when you find something that is true to your heart, that you can connect with, that’s your true purpose. You can go all out for that.

You can give it everything that you have for that. You don’t mind going all out. When you reach that thing, there’s so much fulfillment in that when something is given to you. You didn’t have to work for it, you didn’t have to go through this process of becoming because the end thing, whatever you get out of it, that’s the price at the end. All the juicy goodness is in the process. It’s in the becoming, it’s in the transforming, and it’s the discovery of who you are, the becoming of that person, the change. That’s where you identify, relate to and connect with your purpose of being here, your purpose of existence. There is no greater fulfillment than that. I sometimes feel whenever we do guilt things away, when people don’t have to work for it, it’s a disservice.

I learned that through having to deal with a disability because I tell people, they want to help me sometimes like, “No, don’t take it.” I know it looks hard, it looks challenging to you on the outside and it is challenging to me who has to deal with it. Don’t take that away from me because there’s going to be a feeling that I’m going to get from overcoming this. This may take me a lot of times before I can overcome it, don’t take that away from me because I want that. I know that’s meaningful to me. It’s fulfilling to me. Everyone should go through that process. We’re not supposed to be talking about my book, we’re supposed to be talking about you or your stuff, but you brought this up. Seek out life challenges. That’s what that’s all about.

When you’re seeking out those challenges and you’re overcoming those challenges, you’re learning what you’re capable of and then you’re expanding your territory. Once you start overcoming, you feel that level of success. You start looking for other things that you can do so that you can maintain that feeling. The fact that you overcome the challenge or whatever it is that you gain from overcoming the challenge, that’s the by-product. It’s the process. The process is what makes all the difference. The secret if anyone’s looking for it, it’s being willing to go through that process. That makes all the difference in the words. I want to come back to these myths because I looked at these videos and you made some good points about the myths that we have. These are some blockers to people that are attempting to have an unlimited mind that would like to understand more about what it means. Walk us through your thoughts about these myths and why we should bust them.

That was beautiful, by the way. You’re right on, that is exactly it. One of the things that you say and on effort and this is the perverse thing. You know this is true which is when you’ve made it to Goldman Sachs, you got something to lose. When I’m a kid and my alternative is I’m going to work at KFC. I’ve either got this path in school where I can get great grades and massively leap in my life or I don’t, but I have got nothing to lose. There’s nothing that I can lose through giving it my best shot, I can only gain. If this is a Jim Collins’ book, giving up the good to go for the great. If you’ve already got a good, if you’re already winning then this is where it gets hard, which is now you’ve got something to lose.

Mastery is simple in that when you know something well, execution becomes effortless. Click To Tweet

You might see those other people flying high over there, but these are the gremlins in all of our brains. In my book Building Your Limitless Mind, there are two things that matter to be limitless. The first is to recognize the unlimited. What are those things that make us limited and hold us back? It’s like driving a car with one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas that no matter how much you want something, and this is why I look like I’m a bit of a jerk to some of the basic teachings in development. You’ve got to have passion. Passion is important. If you are holding yourself back with your foot on the brake as well, how do you remove that limited thinking?

If you’re sitting at Goldman Sachs for instance and you dream and you can start your firm. You can run the firm. You’re as good as anyone else. That little gremlin in the brake is like, “Are you really?” There are a lot of excellent people around you. If you’re in GE where they fire 10% of the bottom and everyone’s rising to the top and you’re looking at the lead as a man, you’re saying, “I can do that,” but then their gremlin is saying, “No. Are you sure you’re that good?” That imposter syndrome that many, even highly successful people, have that one day someone’s going to figure out they’re no good as they say they are. These things that hold us back, removing limited thinking and the structure of that Limitless Mind book isn’t thinking on this stuff. Its three phases.

You’ve got to get to the heart of what’s going on in the head. You’ve got to understand where their heads at and this is the core of what you set up programming. Two is you need tools. It’s not theories. It’s not philosophy. If you want to get strong at the gym, you get on a bench press. A pushup is a tool. You’ve got an exercise that you repeatedly do, consistently to get strong. The third is you need a program to do it. The Limitless Mind book isn’t having read hundreds of mindset books and having trained with who I perceived to be the best transformational teachers in the world. It’s not about what you know, it’s about what you repeatedly do. What are those myths that they tied into this? You are who you are.

This is who I am because I’m black or I’m disabled or I grew up in this neighborhood or this is who my parents expect me to be. Frankly, because I’m white. I grew up rich. This is who I am. No, you are whoever you choose to be. You are whoever you define yourself to be. What is that self-image? It comes back to the core tooling. It’s not just knowing this like Maxwell Maltz has a great book that is all about psycho-cybernetics, which is it’s all about whatever image you perceive yourself to govern what’s possible for you. We are not who we think we are. We are whoever we choose to be. That’s your video on your website. You’ve got to start with what I refer to as the grandest visions. What is that dream you have felt like?

The second myth is your life is whatever it is. Whatever’s possible for you is baked into your life. Why? Who said that where you are now in your life? Who said that what’s possible for you, because someone else did that, are your possibilities? That myth is that we limit ourselves. These limiting beliefs, these limited ways of being. It’s not about knowing this. It’s about what are you willing to do to drill into that brain of yours and drill out those limited beliefs and build limitless ones that anything is possible for you. That you can break your back and you could walk again. Joe Dispenza’s book on You Are The Placebo. Nearly everything in medicine comes back. The role of a placebo is not understood in science because the role of the mind is overlooked in science. When the mind is the ultimate science, it always has been.

The third myth is skills, your capabilities of what they are. No. Your skills you train yourself to be. What are you willing to do every day to condition your mind? What are you willing to do every day to take those skills that you want to hone and train them? Are you writing it out as a method I built I called the system for learning? It sounds basic but there are three steps to learning that we often overlook as adults. People are reading this blog and you’re getting information. You’re getting knowledge. If you read this all day, every day, you’re still only getting information. There are thousands of diet books but we only get fatter. Nobody gets in shape by watching Arnie pump iron. No one is getting mentally tough or reading this. They’re getting some kernels.

The second step is how you now take this and build yourself tools. What are you going to do every day? Like in your book, which of these mindsets are you going to adopt? This one, by the way, I didn’t say before, I love the powerful reframe from dying for an emotional death. How many people out there are dying an emotional death? They’ve given up on their goals, their dreams, on love, and on making money. They’ve died an emotional death, they’re stuck in drugs, they’ve wasted time online, they’re stuck on stupid social media and whatnot versus you are as capable as you train yourself to be. What are you willing to do every day to get more capable, to get stronger, to create that life, get beyond that myth that you are who you are now? No, you’re not. You are who you train yourself to be.

I was talking to someone, we were discussing some of the great things that are going on in my business now. Some of the things that are going on was creating a forecast, an outlook of some of the things that are going to happen in the future. I was setting a framework if you will. That caused me to look back at some things because it didn’t look like this when it was hard. I was putting in all this work and wasn’t getting paid. I was making all this effort in it and seemingly to no avail. I knew but this person didn’t. Things will come into fruition and they had a look on their face like, “Wow. You’re amazing.” I said to them, “If you could see what would happen in your life, if you put the effort in every single day to achieve your goal, you would put that work in every single day. The problem is you can’t physically see it.”

You can’t see a few years down the road. You can have a vision but it’s just that. It’s something that you’re holding in your mind, which is a powerful thing. I’m not downplaying it, but I’m trying to make a point that you can’t see it and because you can’t see it, you don’t act on it. If you could see what would happen in your life 10, 15, 20 years from now, if you would put in the effort every single day, it will cause you to put in the effort every single day. I am a living witness to that. Being laid on my back, I couldn’t walk, I knew one day I would, doctors told me I couldn’t. I was crazy enough to believe that vision and do it. I’m crazy enough to believe the vision in my business and put it into work every single day. I tell people all the time if you could see it. The beautiful thing about all of this is that you can create a vision in your mind and hold that vision and let that be the thing that you work for. 

Let that be the reason why you get up every day and bust your behind. Put the work in. Let that be the thing that you can’t physically see. Let that be that. Let it be the thing that you can’t see and do it anyway because I’m going to tell you, if you could see what your life would be like in 10, 20, 30 years, if you put in the effort every single day, learn and grow, be willing to make mistakes and get back up. You will bust beyond all of the limits and limitations that you have placed on yourself that you think are going to stop you and holding you back. It will be challenging, but I’m telling you, if you commit to doing it every single day, your entire life will change.

GCM 85 | Limitless Mind

Limitless Mind: The definition of mediocrity isn’t a judgment on who someone is. It is a judgment on how they are performing relative to their potential.

 

You’re hitting on the real core of something that is the seed in my first book. It’s not as obvious in the book is what I have decoded now and I do for myself and for clients, which is a myth is you’ve got to have goals, now you dive. You’ve got to take those goals and drill them into the mind every day. What is the purpose of goals? It’s not to have them, it’s to use them every day to drill it into the mind and use that to take that action. What are the methods? It seems simple but it’s what a lot of my client work has come down to is condition your goals, in fact, all day every day. Wallace Wattles is one of the best authors from the new thought movement. One of the reasons Wattles is effective is because he doesn’t try and teach you everything you need to know. He says, “Just do this.” Live in the attitude of gratitude which I would call energy.

It doesn’t need to be gratitude, but it’s this energy that you’ve got it and hold in your mind your vision all the time as he calls it without ceasing. As you’re saying like what is the technology of manifesting to the best I can decode it is holding your mind that your vision is already now, that ten-year vision is already now. Live in that energy and only focus on that next step right in front of you. That next step right now because the illusion of this field of reality is it tricks you into thinking too far ahead. Whereas if you can live right now in this moment, in your grandest vision and hone in on this step you’re taking right now and let go of the rest of it because that moment will come when you’ve gotten through this moment and then the next moment.

I like helping people with this by asking a simple question. What type of person would you be? Let’s say $1 million. If you are a millionaire, let’s say your goal is to make $1 million a year. What would you do? What would you be? You have money, you can spend the money but what kind of person would you be? What food would you eat? What movies would you watch? How would you talk? How would you dress? Let’s get past the whole materialistic side of it and talk about the personality side of it. How would you be? What type of human being would you be? Once you have that, start being that type of person now. Start practicing what it would be like to be a millionaire. Start trying that on. You’ll sometimes find that a lot of the materialistic things that we want, if you were to practice like, “Once I get it, this is the type of person I would be,” and you tried it on, you’ll find that, “I don’t know if I want to be that type of person.”

You can find it but there’s nothing stopping you from trying on the feeling of what it would feel like to accomplish whatever it is that you want to accomplish. As a matter of fact, I would highly recommend it because that’s where you can produce the power and the energy to produce the result because being a millionaire, the enemies, the end goal, and the end product is a result of who you are. If you can start being the type of person that can make $1 million a year, then eventually you will be a person that makes $1 million a year because that’s the person that you are. How do you feel about life coaches? You have an interesting aspect of life coaches that I want to get into. Tell us about that.

It’s a tricky question because I don’t want to be dismissive of all the people who call themselves life coaches. There are a lot of great advisors out there, a lot of people who are helpful. For the most part, I’m going to reframe that. I don’t know how many of these people have ever activated in their own life. To go and do a course that someone teaches you how to elicit someone’s values or say a few positive things to them and layout a few steps and then hold them accountable. That might be valuable to some people. If you are looking to go for it, to make massive leaps in your life, you need someone who can help you do that. If you look at the people and they look at the coaching profession as becoming this cool thing. When I started doing this, the notion of coaching didn’t exist. It didn’t exist in my mind. The notion of coaching has become a thing because there’s so much need out there. Like the thousands and thousands of self-help books that are out there, anyone can do it. How many people can help you do what you need to be able to do? That’s why I have a crazy-sounding thing on there about coaches that I won’t go into, but my business and my life is transformation.

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This isn’t a business for me. This is the most important thing that I can imagine in my life and me doing it for other people. To me, that comes with a massive amount of responsibility. I only work with clients on retainer. I don’t see anyone for an hour. I don’t do ten sessions or whatever because to me, I partner with my clients all the way until they get what they want. I want to be their partner. I have a high-end clientele, but I only work for leaders, CEOs, and founders of businesses. I work for a retainer and for the upside because I want to win when they win. I don’t want to dispense my time. I don’t want to give people good sounding advice and send them on their way to, “Good luck with that.” I want to give people the best that I can and that’s the same as these audio masterclasses. I’m trying to do what I do for people in a highly systematic message you can do for yourself. A little bit of advice over here is as useless as the thousands of self-help books and diet books where we still get fatter, where our minds still get worse, these thousands of years of self-help books on mindset.

You look at our society, people are getting more victim mentality, more depression, more addiction, more anxiety, more fear because the advice is only the starting point. To get a coach is one thing and if you can find someone awesome, go for it because often we need help in life and that person can be valuable, but the wrong person is an anchor as well. The wrong person is not as helpful because they become that anchor like you said, “Don’t help me. If I do it myself, if I condition myself to do it, that’s who I become.” If you need someone to hold you accountable, if you need to read an inspirational quote to get on with your goal then you’re not serious. Get serious and commit yourself to do whatever it takes. The people who are the right coaches or mentors or whatever you call them, they’re going to come along.

Geoff, how can people connect with you if they wanted to learn more about you, download your book or simply sign up for one of your online masterclasses? 

Go to GeoffBlades.com.

I do want to talk about one more thing that I thought was interesting about you and that is you spent some time in the desert with some Navy SEALs. I was reading about that and I thought it was a wonderful experience and it was some lessons learned out of that. If you could tell us that story and pull out those nuggets we can take with us from that experience.

GCM 85 | Limitless Mind

Building Your Limitless Mind

We’re cycling back to this notion of transformation too. When I stepped back from my career and started reading all these books, what it led me to is a concept I called mix it up. If you want to think differently and feel different, you’ve got to do different things. One of the things I started doing then was I started training Muay Thai and I’d done Kung Fu as a kid. Training Muay Thai, I was in the Thai neighborhood of San Francisco at that time. It was a whole different group of people training Muay Thai. When I left Goldman, I went and fought mixed martial arts full-time, training with UFC fighters.

Over that time as well, I had a singing coach in LA where I learned to sing. When I quit the Carlyle Group to start this, I moved to the mountains of Vail, Colorado. I became a ski bum. I went to what I call my mountain Chrysalis to transform my mind. To have that transforming experience, I skied 100 days and I went out there for three years when I was back in New York to have that transformational experience. I could list off a dozen of these things, training with a psychic spy named Joe McGonagle in what’s called remote viewing. Our NSA and CIA invested in a project called Stargate which is, how do you take your mind and spy on Russia?

There’s a whole bunch of these things I’ve done throughout my life and it comes down to what are those experiences that my brain tells me to do? One day, I woke up with this idea I’ve got to learn to shoot. I don’t know where it came from but I know it’s about you. If the brain gives it to me, I have to do it. I’m not in charge of this Geoff Blades machine but I have to do it. I looked up these Navy SEALs out in Vegas and I called them up. I said, “I want to shoot like John Wick.” They said, “Come on out.” Since then, I shoot with these guys regularly and I train at home. I have training pistols and whatnot. To me, it’s that notion of following those experiences that force you to transform.

When you hang out with men who were Navy SEALs, being around them and that mindset that led them to become SEALs, you then get to know them as friends as well. What are the struggles that those powerful men face when they come back into the civilian world? They’ve come out of the teams. Who are they now? What are the transformations they then need to go through? These are people who’ve done the hardest things like making it through training. Now, they come back into the world, they’ve got to integrate again. They’ve got to build businesses or get a job, whatever it is they do, and you get to know them as people. It’s simulating in these communities. Becoming part of that, we then started building a business with Navy SEALs. We would build a unit of SEALs, where we were doing certain things with them.

The thing that I found more and more is if you can have that humility. One of my clients built a $1 billion business fast. His thing is simple. He says, “You’ve got to be willing to suck at things.” You’ve got to be willing to do things that you suck at. When I started training MMA, I was training with a guy named Karo Parisyan. He is one of the old UFC guys. That day with a brutal guy who would keep hitting me and hit me. He’s like, “You’ve got to be willing to suck at it.” When I train with Navy SEALs, I’d never picked up a gun. If I go out there like, “I’m this expert and I do this and this is who I am.” It’s like, “No, you’ve got to be willing to step into someone else’s world and suck at it.” Be humble enough not to know, but then commit yourself to earn their respect by doing the work and getting good at their craft. It’s part of my life, I learned a lot of stuff but whatever reason I learned it for that these skills and anvils, if you will, that force you to become a different person.

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Geoff, thank you for coming on the show. This has been a wonderful conversation. I love the work that you’re doing. Any way that we can support you, please do not hesitate to let us know because we are here for you and the work that you do. It’s amazing what you’re doing. Thank you and before we depart, do you have a game-changing mentality message you can leave with us?

Here it is. It’s a Nike slogan, “Just do it.”

It’s simple but yet powerful. Thank you, Geoff, for coming on the show.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

There you have it. Another successful episode of the show and I love Geoff’s message, just do it. There are a lot of things that were said in this episode. Reach out to Geoff if you want more clarity, more information, and a masterclass where you can learn. Learn these skills so that you can go out and just do it. Thanks.

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About Geoff Blades

GCM 85 | Limitless MindGeoff Blades is former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and investor at the Carlyle Group, and today is an advisor to Wall Street leaders, CEOs and other top professionals.

Geoff is obsessed with how we create the lives we truly want, and stops at nothing to build the absolute best methods for becoming your best, unleashing top performance, driving massive goals going for what you truly want.


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