How many of you when you were kids, if a train was coming by, you tried to get near it, run by it, watch it, maybe count the number of cars on the train? How many used to do that when you were a little kid? Now you're on the way to work, a train comes, frickin'train! I'll give you a clue, the train didn't change.
But if every time you stay playful, it'll get better and better. And pretty soon, the very sound that irritated you will put a smile on your face. How many of you have something in your environment?
A person? or a situation that gets, they come in and it pisses you off or it annoys you. So what do you do when you have an environment, something in the environment that triggers people? You have to change what those triggers do to you. you.
One of those tools is understanding the power of priming. This is something I do every single day. So I don't hope that I'm going to show up as my best. I prime, especially days when you're exhausted or tired or hurting or whatever the case may be. It's even more important, but it's important every day.
Now, priming is a psychological principle. It's not a new principle, but most people don't apply it. Most people who apply it are advertisers and marketers, and most individuals don't apply it to themselves.
Priming is this idea that you think your thoughts thoughts and they can be but they rarely are they're usually primed by something going on in the environment and if you learn to prime yourself you won't be at the mercy of other people who may not have your best interests in mind or may not even know what they're doing they're just priming you and so what does it look like one study that grabbed me one of the earliest studies I read was at Harvard, and they took a group of people, they took two actors, a man and a woman, and had them go rehearse doing an exact presentation over and over again. They went to a mall, they went to a park, and what they would do is they would walk up to you. at the Mall of the Park, and they had a coffee in their hand, and they'd say, excuse me, could you hold this just for a second? And they wouldn't ask.
They'd hand it to you and look down so you didn't have a chance to say yes or no, and they'd reach in and grab their phone, do something on their phone, put it back and say, thank you so much, and they'd take it back. And they'd practice having the same facial expression with the same tone of voice, and they used a man and a woman. And they went to 150 people, the man and woman, one way, 150 another way.
They did everything identical except one thing. Half the people, they handed them ice cups. coffee.
The other half, they gave them hot coffee just for a few seconds. Now, interestingly enough, 20 minutes later, somebody with a clipboard would come by back to the mall and they'd see you and come up to you and say, listen, I'd like to ask you to read two paragraphs and answer one question and I'll give you $20 for it for our survey. You read the two paragraphs of this little story.
And then the question was, how would you describe the main character in this story? And what's interesting is over 81% of the people who were given hot coffee said, said the person was warm and genuine. In the story they were reading 20 minutes later. The ones who were giving iced coffee, 80%, only a 1% difference variable, natural variability. 80% said the person was cold and calculating and uncaring.
Exact same story 20 to 30 minutes later. That's how powerful priming is. In certain restaurants, they use music to get you to eat faster and get out when it's busy.
They have tracks that do that. So if you go to various restaurants, especially big chain restaurants that have a lot of money, they've made it a science. They know when they're getting really packed, they put certain music in that primes you to eat more rapidly and get out.
And it works. There are places where you go buy wines and they'll play certain music. They'll play Italian music and 70% of the time, they're going to be eating the same thing.
percent of people will buy an Italian wine. These are unconscious tools of influence. So there's no question priming is real.
The question is, are you being primed? Are you doing the priming? And in most cases, you're being primed.
But I want you to actively take control and prime yourself. When you do it, it really, really transforms you. But if you don't do it, you're just pretty much stuck with anything else.
So priming is happening all the time. Think of priming as like training. We're training our brains. We're training our minds and our emotions. We're training each other.
By the way, the way we treat each other. And we're always doing the training. My youngest son, his name is Josh.
He couldn't walk down to the edge of the driveway and get on the bus to go to school. He was so fearful. And then one day he came home and he had a whole different continence about him.
He was really playful. And then I met his friend. He met a dear friend who was two doors down. They're still best friends today, 30 years later, 35 years later.
And this kid, you ever been with somebody? Have you ever been around somebody who's not really funny? but they think they are.
And they crack themselves up, and they're not funny, but the way they crack themselves up, you find yourself laughing too? Who knows what I'm talking about? That's what this kid is.
He wasn't funny at all. He just thought he was the funniest thing in the world, and he laughed so hard, you find yourself laughing. So he made me laugh.
Josh was laughing. And after he left, I said, Josh, do you really like this kid? He goes, yeah. I said, make him your friend for life. He said, Why dad?
I said because he has wired himself to find joy and humor in almost anything. And if you spend time with him enough, you'll develop the same pattern. He'll prime you to be in a playful state, right?
It all came from priming. Your best friends prime you, and you prime your best friends, right? I can remember one time my daughter was, I think she was just turning 16, and she fell in love with this kid. He played football, he was in college, and my daughter, one night, he showed up like 45 minutes late. I mean, she was so angry.
angry and so pissed off and thrashed him verbally. I heard it from two, three rooms down. I didn't say anything the first time.
And then a couple of days later, a similar thing happened. Instead of saying, hey, I miss you. I love you. I know you must have been engaged. He's playing football.
The practice went long. Instead of doing that, you're teaching him that you equal pain. You are training him, you are priming him. Instead of priming him to feel love from you, like when you do see him, you're sharing your love for him or your appreciation for him or your gratitude for him.
I said the fact that he's not here, you can find out why, but he's not trying to harm you. Part of his understanding that we have... tremendous power to influence each other.
And if you do something consistently, you will prime people. But the place you want to start is priming yourself. So we can prime ourselves.
So the very thing that used to irritate you, that person, that situation, makes you feel great. Or you lose confidence. You go to speak and you're freaked out.
You can prime yourself so that speaking makes you feel strong. You can prime yourself for anything. You do not have to wait and wonder or hope or react to your old conditioning. You want to keep doing that so it gets so wired it becomes your natural state.
It just means that gear is available to you anytime you want it. It's on the edge. Whereas for most people, especially right now in this country, uncertainty, not just this country, around the world, is the dominant emotion. And uncertainty leads to fear, right? And fear that is continuous leads to sadness, depression, overwhelm, and all the other things.
When you see a great athlete, you see a great leader, you see a great anybody parent, they have a certainty inside them. The certainty does not come from the outside world. It comes from within.
And I want you to experience that. I don't want you to just experience it. I want you to leave with it in your nervous system.
So we're going to prime the most important emotion of all. If you prime yourself like this, do you think it would shape the way you would interact with your world? Yes or no?
What happens, you're in this state, you handle a problem very differently, right? So priming is something you want to do minimum the next 10 days, ideally at least 21, and then some of you may decide to commit to it five days a week or seven days a week regularly. If you make it the first thing you do in the morning, it's only 10 minutes. If you prime yourself, it'll be different. It doesn't mean you won't have problems or challenges.
It just means you'll have more of you ready to deal with it. So you start your day in a beautiful state, right, and you build it up. In the beginning, I did it in the morning, and I did afternoon or evening.
I did both. And then now it's pretty well so wired in me, I can do it very quickly and easily, do it just in the morning itself in most cases. But if something was really crazy or stressful, I might take 10 minutes in the afternoon or evening, do it, and then go deal with the situation from this state. Very different, right? Let's see, we can't control the outside world.
We can influence it. We have absolute control of the inside world.