Episode 12: Life Formula, with Colin Sprake
Hi. This is Colin Sprake, and welcome to MYM Your Business: The Brutal Truth, with myself, Colin Sprake. This week I am having a bunch of fun, because I’m going to walk you through one of the most powerful topics: getting right inside your head. My goal today is for you to be thinking differently by the time you get done with this podcast, and remember one thing: when we wake up every single day, the most important thing we have is our attitude.
I want you to be thinking differently by the time we finish this podcast today. No matter where you are, if you’re in your car, on the bus, in your office, wherever you listen to us, be really, really open today.
I want to go through a topic that’s going to be really hand-in-hand with what we did approximately a month ago. I was talking about the three S’s in your life: The state, stories, and strategies in your life.
Today, I’m going to really get inside your head, get you thinking differently, doing differently, so you can achieve differently. So, welcome. I want to walk you through this, so make sure you have a pen and paper handy, because I want to make sure you take notes.
This podcast is all about taking notes. By the time you finish this show, I want you to go and implement immediately. Because, remember, action is where all the power is. There’s no power in knowledge. Knowledge is just potential power. When you implement and take action, that’s where the power is. So please make sure you’re taking lots of notes as you listen to this.
If you re-listen to it many times, awesome, because I’m going to walk you through what I call the life formula. Now get ready for this, the life formula.
Very simply, I want you to write down this formula: I leads to T leads to F leads to A equals R. Let me say that again for you.
I → T → F → A = R.
I’m going to walk you backwards through this. R is your results. If you’re looking for different results in your life, I want you to understand how to get different results today.
If you say, “Colin, I’m so frustrated about my health. I’m so frustrated about a certain area of my life that’s not working for me right now.” Maybe it’s your business, maybe money, maybe your relationship with somebody that’s not working. I want to walk you through this amazing formula.
R is the results. Your results. Before that is equals. Your results come from A, which are your actions. Your actions come from F, which are your feelings, and your feelings come from your thoughts, and your thoughts come from one of the most powerful parts of this entire formula, and that’s the letter I.
Remember, I → T → F → A = R.
The letter I, a lot of people think it stands for ideas, intentions, what have you. The letter I stands for what are your influences in your life?
I want you to be thinking this through in absolute detail. What are the influences happening in your life right now? Because your influences directly impact your thoughts, which directly impact your feelings, which give you the corresponding actions, and lead to the overall results that you will achieve.
I want you to think about what influences your life right now. Like I said on a previous show, Jim Rohn said it the best. “You’re a product of the five people you spend most of your time with in that area of your life.” What are the influences? What books are you reading? Who are you hanging out with? What shows are you watching on TV? What are the overall influences in every area of your life?
Influences are directly proportional to the results you’re getting. If you want to change the results you’re getting in your life right now, start to think about who the influences are in that area of your life.
Let’s walk you through some really, really great examples. Like I say, this is called the life formula. We have one of the saddest situations happening in the world right now. We have more school shootings than we’ve ever had in the history of this planet. More school shootings. More school stabbings. The reason being, what’s influencing our kids’ minds? What’s influencing our teenagers’ minds?
You might be thinking it might be the TV. There’s a huge influence coming from very graphic video games. These video games are impacting the way our teenagers think, it’s getting inside their heads. Guess what happens. Those video games are influencing them. Influencing their thoughts, and then their thoughts become feelings.
I’m going to talk about feelings and thoughts in a moment. Your thoughts lead to your feelings. We have more school shootings than we’ve ever had. Why? Because there are lots of blood-guts-body-parts-being-blown-apart, computer games influencing our children.
Think about this for yourself. What’s influencing your life? Some people watch the news before they go to bed at night. “Let me watch the news. I want to watch the news before I go to bed tonight.” My question to you is, if you’re watching the news before you go to bed, what is the news? Most of the time, the news is extremely negative.
People say, “But, Colin, don’t you want to know what’s happening in the news?” In some way or form, I do, but I hear a lot of people tell me the stuff that’s happening in the news. They might say, “There’s a hurricane coming through,” or “There’s a tornado,” or “a monsoon.” My number one thing there is, “Just pray for those people.” You don’t need to sit and watch it on TV over and over and over again, watch their misery and their anguish. Guess what happens. When you watch that, it influences your thoughts, your thoughts lead to your feelings, your feelings lead to actions and the corresponding results. There’s a lot of negativity happening in your life right now.
You want to change your results in your life? Change the influences in that area of your life. If you want to become physically fit and healthy, you want to be healthier, maybe lose some weight, then think about who are the influences in your life around health and fitness.
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You want to change your results in your life? Change the influences in that area of your life. Click To Tweet
If you’re sitting on the couch every day watching TV with your five closest friends over a period of a week and eating potato chips, guess what? Those influences won’t let you really think differently about getting physically fit, because those influences will be impacting your thoughts. “Oh, we can all sit on the couch and just not be physically fit.”
Your feelings, which I’m going to come back to really quickly, come from your thoughts. Let’s think about your feelings in this formula. Your influences lead to your thoughts, then lead to your feelings, lead to your actions, equals your results.
Where do the feelings come from? Some people say to me, “Colin, how do we get the feelings in the right place?” Dr. Joe Dispenza says this the best: “Until we get our head and our heart in alignment, we will never get truly what we want.” Let me say that again. Until we get our head and our heart in alignment, we will truly not get what we want, because our feelings come before our actions.
Write this down: What we feel is what we reveal. My philosophy in life is you’ve got to feel it to reveal it. That’s a Colinism as we call it here at Make Your Mark. You’ve got to feel it to reveal it, because whatever you are feeling is what’s showing up in your life. Because effort comes before your actions, which leads to your results.
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You’ve got to feel it to reveal it. What you’re feeling is what’s showing up in your life. Click To Tweet
If you’re thinking rich and you think rich, think rich, think rich, and you’re feeling poor, or you’re feeling broke, your feelings will lead to your actions equal your results. You will start to do broke activities and not get to where you want to be. I want you to really think about this today, because your influences are the most important part of what happens to you on a daily basis, because your influences impact your thoughts and your feelings.
In fact, people say to me, “Colin, how do you get the right feelings?” The way to get the right feelings is simply to surround yourself with the right people that will give you those feelings. You can have as many positive thoughts as you want to about a certain situation, but the challenging part is, if you don’t have the right people around you, you won’t get the feeling in alignment with the thoughts that you’re having in terms of what you really, really want.
I’ll give you an example. I was at an event down in Indianapolis in the United States. I go to this event, and there’s a lady sitting at the table with me. I’m going through the life formula with her, and I said to her, “What’s one of your goals you’re going to commit to doing in the next 12 months?”
She said, “Colin, I want to get down to a BMI, a body mass index, of less than 25.” That was her goal:I want to get to a BMI of less than 25. My next question to her was, “Then let me ask you this. The five people that you’re hanging out with right now, that you spend most of your time with, or you spend a lot of time on the phone with, that really influence your life, those five people, do they have a body mass index of less than 25?”
She looked at me, and she was stunned. She said, “Colin, no, they don’t.” I said, “Well, how are they going to help you get there if they’re not doing it themselves?” Because their thoughts are not about being less than a 25 BMI. Their thoughts are around being bigger than a 25 BMI.
I want you to really get this. The people you need to hang around with and have in your life are the ones that influence you the most around the goals that you want to achieve. You want to have a beautiful, loving, soulful relationship with your significant other, then you need to hang out with people that have influenced you in the same way.
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Hang around with people that can influence the goals that you want to achieve. Click To Tweet
If you’re hanging out with people that are challenging their relationships, or don’t like relationships, or are recently divorced, guess what happens. Their influences around having a very positive, soulful, beautiful, loving relationship, aren’t the right influences. They will start to impact your thoughts, your feelings, and then your actions. The result is, you’ll probably start to have challenges in your relationship. Why? Because the five people you spend most of your time with, whether it’s on the phone, or in terms of actually being together in the same room, if those people haven’t got the results that you’re looking for, then please, you shouldn’t be hanging out with them.
Last week, Mike Koenigs spoke about this in such a deep way. Mike said, “Colin, I hang out with billionaires now. Why? Because their mindset is different. If I want to be a billionaire, I’d better start hanging out with billionaires.” So he went from San Diego to Los Angeles to go hang out with billionaires. He says, “Colin, they’re just normal people, but they think differently.” They have a different influence in his life.
Remember, your influences are directly proportional to the results that you’re achieving. If you want different results, change your influences. Now, I’m not saying get rid of people out of your life. What I’m saying is you could take people that are really challenging right now, you could hold them up, or you can push them down. I don’t believe in ever pushing people down. I want us to hold people up to a higher standard.
The thing though is, when you let them go, if they fall back down to where they want to be, that’s their choice. You do not have to keep on holding everybody up. Because while you’re busy holding everybody up, the only person that’s getting squashed is you, and they’re squashing you down. You want to be ahead, you’ve got to do things differently to get the results that you’re looking for.
I really want you to think about this formula. I’m going to say the formula once again. I → T → F → A = R. Your results come from who you hang out with the most. I’ve repeated this a few times on the show today, because I really want you to get this. I call it the life formula because it happens in your life every minute, every second of the day.
Sadly, so many people have the wrong influences in their life. You might be saying, “Colin, my biggest influence is my spouse. My spouse is negative.” Remember one thing, be very careful saying, “My spouse is negative.” When you say your spouse is negative, who’s the one really being negative? Just ponder that for a moment. Who’s the one really being negative? Because when we say those kind of things, “My spouse is negative,” guess what? The way we see others is a true reflection of who we are.
The most important thing to understand is who’s influencing your life in the different areas you want right now, in terms of your business, in terms of your health, in terms of your fitness, maybe finance, maybe relationship. Who are the people influencing you in those areas?
I would love you to think about writing down the top five people you spend most of your time with. Even if you have a girlfriend or a friend that you phone every day and you spend an hour on the phone together, well you’re spending a lot of time with that person. What are they saying to you? How are they influencing you? Because as they influence you, it impacts your thoughts, impacts your feelings, it gets you corresponding actions with corresponding results.
You might not be wanting those results. So the way we shift our results is by shifting our influences. Your feelings are so, so important. People say to me, “Colin, yes, your thoughts lead to your feelings. Tell me more about the feelings part.” Well, let me explain this to you. Our brain has about a hundred billion neurons in it. That’s it. About a hundred billion neurons.
They did a cross section through the stomach wall and the tissue, and they found in our stomach wall, we have about a hundred million neurons, 21 of which are identical in type to what they find in the human brain. Guess what? Our stomach is a thought center. What we feel is what we reveal. How many times have you gone against your gut feeling and wished you hadn’t? There’s a reason for that.
Just think about it. So now, they’ve done the same cross section through the human heart, and they found that the tissue in the human heart also has neurons in, even more pronounced than what they found in the human stomach. Therefore, our heart is also a thought center. So at the end of the day, our stomach and our heart are like the center of the body. That’s your truth center. That’s where all the truth comes from.
When we marry our head and our heart and our stomach together, that’s where we get the results we’re looking for. In a later episode coming up, I’m going to talk about these foundational beliefs, these challenging beliefs, that we have in our lives that are holding us back and not getting us the results that we want. Why? Because we are influenced by the wrong people.
Some of you might laugh when I say this, but you might have to do a friendectomy or two. In other words, say goodbye to some people in your life. You might say, “Colin, but I love these people. They’re so beautiful. They’re so awesome.” Yes, they are. They might be a beautiful human being in some way or form, but if they’re holding you back. Maybe if you want to be financially abundant and they are telling you consistently, “Rich people aren’t good. Rich people do ugly things to people. Money doesn’t buy you happiness,” all those negative things you hear, those influences around you impact your thoughts, impact your feelings, and you start to feel like, “Oh. I should feel broke. I should be in that place.”
Your actions become your results, you don’t get to have financial abundance, and I want financial abundance for you as you listen to this show, because everyone deserves to be financially abundant. We just need to figure out who we hang out with the most. If we all start to hang out with the people we really aspire to be in some way or form, that’s when we start to get amazing results in our lives.
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If we hang out with people we really aspire to be, that's when we get amazing results in our lives. Click To Tweet
I want you to take this formula, and think about it in absolute detail today. Start to put things into your head about who’s influencing you in your life. If you want to get physically fit, hang out with people who are physically fit. You want a beautiful, loving, amazing relationship, hang out with people that have beautiful, loving, amazing relationships.
You might say, “Colin, it’s easier said than done.” I understand that, but I can tell you one thing: You want to get ahead, you’ve got to hang out with the people that are going to get you ahead, not the people that are going to hold you back and stop you from getting what you deserve, which is success, financial abundance, major amount of love in your life, whatever it is that you’re looking for. It just fascinates me how many people hang out with the wrong influences.
As we finish today, I want you to think about something. If you’ve written down those five names of the people you spend most of your time with, I’m going to ask you to make a commitment to yourself to do things differently.
If you’re looking to build a $20,000,000 company, and all the people you’re hanging out with all barely make any money and are battling to get ahead, how can they help you to become a $20,000,000 company? The way you become a $20,000,000 company is when you have the right influences in your life, those people who have done it influencing your thoughts, because they have different ways of doing things, so they’ll influence your thoughts. Your feelings will be in line because you’ll start to feel these people around you, these super successful people. They will change your game, your mind, your results, and your actions.
Think of who’s in your life right now, the five people you spend most of your time with in some way or form. I want you to think, what do you need to do to move that to the next level? You want a successful business? Find a group where there are massively successful business owners. Hang out with those people that will raise your game.
I was with a really good friend of mine on the weekend, Sandra Yancey, the founder of eWomenNetwork. She said, “Colin, I want to be,” and no disrespect to anyone, “I want to be the least intelligent person in the room.” In fact, “I want to be the dumbest person in the room,” is the way she said it. She said, “Because when I walk in, and I’m the dumbest person in the room, I sit down and I listen. I listen to other people, which influences me because I’m not the smartest one in the room. These people give me all this information. I’m listening. It’s influencing me, influencing my thoughts,” her corresponding feelings, her actions, and her results.
If you want to be the smartest person in the room all the time, that’s when you start to go backwards. It’s about being smart for sure, helping other people get ahead, but have other people take you to the next level by you not being the smartest person in the room, and all you need to do is sit back, listen, take notes, learn, get their influence from them so that influence impacts your thoughts, impacts your feelings, and you take these corresponding actions and you get the most amazing results.
I want to leave you with that today. Now remember one thing. This stuff is so powerful. When you start to think about this life formula and what it can do for you, it can change your life today. When you press stop on this podcast and you decide to go and do your next thing, think about who you’re going to see. Who’s the person you’re going to go see next? Is that person raising your influence game? Or is that person holding you back?
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My life formula can change your life today. Click To Tweet
Wherever you’re going, whether it be to a vendor, a client, a family member, a friend, whoever it is. Are they raising your influence game? Because if they’re not raising your influence game, you are going backwards. You are going backwards. I leave you with that today.
Thank you so much for being on here. Make sure that you implement what you’ve learned from today. Writing things down and doing nothing with it is not what I want for you. I want for you to be ahead. I want you to take your life by the horns. Take the world by the horns, and go out and become massively abundant in every single way and form. Keep implementing, keep being awesome, and I’ll see you next week. Bye.