here today with the Vision Pros podcast.
Today I've got Brad Smith.
Please, Brad, tell me about your vision.
Which level?
My vision.
Well, my vision.
Oh, I have lots of rabbit holes I can take.
For each.
So if this is for business people, right?
Is it?
Yes.
Our vision is a vision for business people.
Every one of the people that are listening to me,
except maybe Amazon and a couple of those big ones,
if you add a zero, there's a lot of work involved.
Add a zero to your revenue and add a zero to your net revenue.
Both of those are possible.
I've done it repeatedly.
So challenge yourself and find out what are the limitations
and if you're half of that.
OK.
So adding a zero at the end of your net revenue.
Where did that idea come from?
How did that start with you?
Everybody wants to add that money.
I did it with a client.
It startled me and then I got done with it.
I turned him into a millionaire.
And by the end of that process, it took about three years.
But at the end of that process, I stopped myself
and I said, OK, Brad, what is it that we did?
What is it is possible and how many more people need this?
And I realized that almost everybody I talked to
requires boosting their vision deep enough and broad enough
so they can understand what all the impediments are.
For myself, one of the things that I've discovered
through my life journey is that I was the biggest impediment
to everything that I wanted.
Not the world doing it to me, but me
using the mechanisms of the real world, not our imaginary one,
but the real world to come back and limit me.
And I'm still working on that.
Yeah.
So how did you begin this?
You didn't always become like right out the gates.
You weren't a coach for CEOs.
Oh, Lord, no.
There's a journey involved.
So let's talk about it.
Fall term freshman year, so I had a couple of,
started out in, my dad was a chemical engineer
and had a PhD, bachelor's in chemical engineering
and a PhD in biochemistry.
And he essentially raised me to think like a chemical engineer.
If you've got a result, that means there is an effect.
If there's an end result you want,
then there is a cause for it.
And so fall term freshman year, one of my biggest life lessons,
I developed an ulcerated colon.
Ulcerated colon, bleeding colon.
Uncool.
And I suffered with that for about two months.
And then I finally got to the doctor
because it took a while, five or six weeks to get in to see him.
And within about 20 minutes, he said to me
three sentences that changed the course of my life.
So I had chemistry as a background.
If there is an effect, there's a cause.
That's the foundation.
So he said to me, gee, Brad, if you'd
have waited six weeks to come see me, you'd have bled to death.
He had my attention.
And I didn't know it was that bad, but it was that bad.
I didn't want to bleed to death.
Yeah, don't joke.
This isn't going to happen.
And then he said to me, you'll never eat strawberries, corn,
or lettuce, all things I like.
Well, maybe not so much lettuce, but strawberries and corn.
You'll never eat anything with roughage ever again in your life.
Wow.
And my 18-year-old brain said, fat chance, buddy.
That's not happening.
Then he said, the killer was, you have a psychosomatic disease.
And I knew what that meant.
You have a psychosomatic disease.
Your emotions affect the severity of your symptoms.
And in that instant, I made 100% commitment
to conquer the disease.
If it's caused by my emotions, because that was my thought,
if it's caused by my emotions, then I
have to go back, find out which emotions are creating that,
study my body, study my emotions,
and look for the patterns that created that,
and then reverse it.
Because psychology is a decision process.
And so I went back in.
I studied Brad.
Brad was the beaker, if you would.
I studied my emotions.
And over time, I learned how to track patterns.
And eventually, oh, so within a year,
I had the bleeding stop, right?
Or at least intermittent.
And then the pain, which was pretty bad and constant,
if I was conscious I was in pain,
took me about three years, maybe 3 and 1 half,
to get that conquered, at least down to intermittent.
But it was still part of my life.
And I had to watch my diet.
He was pretty accurate about that for a while,
had I stayed that way.
But as I studied the psychology of it
and the results of that in my body,
eventually I got to the place where
I remembered a single event at about 11 months old.
It was conscious, normal memory at 11 months old,
where I went back and reworked that with hypnosis at age 47,
18 to 47, right?
So at 47, went back in and reworked that
in a single hypnosis session.
And it was essentially me at 11 months,
had to live off the diaper pail.
I was curious as all get up, swirling the diapers around,
like freaked my poor mom out.
And she grabbed me, spanked me.
So I just assumed that I was my first spanking.
I went back in, reworked that from an adult perspective
instead of a toddler perspective.
And that change permanently changed my biology
so that I no longer had colitis.
Wow.
Right?
What a story.
What a highs and lows, just like the hero's journey
that you've been on in that story.
That's crazy.
But what I learned from that is all of life,
I'll just put this thought out for most people,
if there is an effect in your life,
there's a psychosomatic cause behind it.
If you have a struggle getting a job,
then take a look at you and who you are
and how you relate to people.
Right?
What's your character?
Do an analysis of your character.
Write down all your values.
Write down all the things you love about yourself,
all the things you admire about other people.
Those are the high ones.
Then you go back through and do, what are all the things
that people yell at me for, that they hate about me,
that I don't like about me?
About me.
Right?
And then also, what is it I don't like?
The third list is, what is it I don't like about my life?
And the purpose of blame is to shift responsibility
off yourself.
That's a two-year-old emotion, if you would skill.
Right?
So in order to reclaim responsibility,
you have to make the decision to conquer it.
I think there's three major decisions
we make when we're born.
First one is, at 20 inches long, when we're not verbal,
I'm not capable.
That's the primary one.
If I'm not capable, the second one is, I can't be responsible.
And if I'm not responsible, somewhere along the line,
we make the decision in our first year or so,
I'm not valuable.
And those three decisions, I'm not capable,
I'm not responsible, I'm not valuable,
run our lives from our subconscious
until we go back in and choose to be responsible.
That's the one entry into those three.
And then if we choose to be responsible,
then we learn capability.
And if we learn capability, then we learn and infer
that we're valuable.
Huge, isn't it?
Yeah.
That right there is the core of that whole journey
with my kaleidos and what it taught me.
It's the building blocks to starting off.
Right?
So you've got to choose to be responsible.
What's the difference between someone that's immature
and someone that's mature?
They take full responsibility for the things that they do.
Yeah.
Right?
So I want to throw one more in here.
My definition of integrity, which I just
describe as the governing value, there's
no other word like it in the English language, integrity.
You can come close.
But I describe integrity as what I believe.
That's the depth of my subconscious.
What I think, that's my momentary consciousness.
What I say and what I do.
That progression.
And if they all line up, that's integrity.
How many people can say, I went this whole last year
and I counted the number of lies I told everyone else
and myself, right?
Yeah.
And when I realized, when I finally got that definition
of integrity, I realized at the end of the year,
I had been tracking the number of lies
I had told consciously to other people.
And I realized it was only five.
Five.
So I made the commitment to try and work to get lower.
I'm down to the point where now when I talk with people,
I either am in silent, because that's not a lie.
Right?
I'm in silent or I tell them the truth.
And I've got that.
Now what I watch is my impulses to lie.
And what that is is a screen for me
for how secure or insecure I'm actually feeling.
Yeah.
These are really freaking high standards, right?
Yeah, absolutely they are.
You're putting yourself to high standards, for sure.
Hold yourself to those high standards,
then insist the people around you do their best to match.
And that creates a different world for you.
Let me put it this way.
The core of everything is my self-authority.
Do I believe what I believe, right?
And what I say, what I think and I do, right?
The core of that is what I put myself into and make decisions
about.
That's my self-authority.
If everybody had a really good view, an accurate view
of their self-authority and used it consciously,
we would have a different world.
We wouldn't have war, because we wouldn't blame other people
and we wouldn't think scarcity, right?
Yeah.
Let me ask you this.
Pointing at early entrepreneurs, I
want to talk about why leaders hide from funding their vision.
Why do you think leaders hide?
And a part B to that that I also ask as a follow up
is how can leaders lean into funding their vision?
That's a tough one.
I'm a bootstrap guy, right?
So I agree with that.
But I also watched my dad start 34 companies while I was growing.
So a few, right?
Funding, not funding, hard work, bootstrap, right?
But the reason they hide from funding their vision is that,
bear with me, is that they don't believe it deep enough
and they are not committed.
Just like my decision about my colitis,
I made 100% commitment to it.
I was committed.
It wasn't if I was going to conquer that, right?
So are you committed deep enough that you're
willing to risk failure?
And that's the key question.
Because if you're willing to risk failure,
then you're willing to be blamed, right?
It's like, well, I did my best, right?
Did you do everything?
Did you look at everything?
That's hard work, right?
But how do we learn how to walk?
You keep falling.
You keep falling on your butt until you get it figured out
and you build muscle.
Every time you fail, whatever it is, right?
I've been divorced twice and I'm not really good at that.
Both of them were long term.
19 years the first one, 20 years the second one, right?
Wow.
I may be headed for my third one,
but we'll see what she says, right?
Yeah.
But in order to do that, I have to figure out
how to fund that, right?
So one of the challenges this young lady has brought
into my life is, why aren't I a millionaire yet, right?
So that challenge has been, get out, talk about what you do,
own your mistakes.
And I've had a bunch, right?
Own your mistakes, stand up, and build
the skill of resilience and determination.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.