The 2 Decisions that Move Your Biggest Goals From Possible to Inevitable with Hal Elrod
We’re talking about the two decisions that move your biggest goals from possible to probable to inevitable, with bestselling author, Hal Elrod.
The 2 Decisions that Move Your Biggest Goals From Possible to Inevitable with Hal Elrod
Hal Elrod wrote The Miracle Morning, which it’s sold over a million copies and really started the whole idea of a morning routine. Today, Hal is talking about his newest book, The Miracle Equation, the two decisions to move your goals from possible to probable to inevitable, and this equation of unwavering faith + extraordinary effort = miracles.
Today we’re going to get right into it and talk about the two decisions that move your biggest goals from possible to probable to inevitable, with bestselling author, Hal Elrod.
Hal Elrod wrote The Miracle Morning, which you may have heard of.
It sold over a million copies, changed millions of people’s lives, and the whole idea of a morning routine really got started with that book.
Today, Hal is talking about his newest book, The Miracle Equation, the two decisions to move your goals from possible to probable to inevitable, and this equation that unwavering faith plus extraordinary effort equals miracles.
And as always, I’m going to be completely transparent with you.
I get pitches from people who want to be on the show all the time, and many times it’s just not a good fit.
And when Hal’s team reached out about his new book, I was really skeptical.
I read the title and it just seemed like it was a little too good to be true.
This idea of a miracle equation and this whole part about unwavering faith and extraordinary effort– while I could see where he was going, it just didn’t seem actionable.
So initially, I said no.
But his team sent me a copy of his book so I could check it out.
But, after I looked at it, I stuck with my original decision and put it on my shelf.
I’m not one to totally judge a book by its cover, so eventually I picked it up and as I flipped through it, not only is Hal’s story incredible, the action steps he’s laid out really started to resonate with me.
In particular, how he talks about unwavering faith and this idea of how we look for evidence to support the idea that we will succeed.
My biggest takeaway from this conversation was thinking about what kind of evidence we are looking for.
Are you only collecting evidence that supports the idea that you won’t succeed?
And that extraordinary effort piece is really about consistency over time, which is what I’m all about, and it gets missed all the time.
We’re so focused on overnight success and 30-day diets that we forget that it’s really about showing up more days than not, and that’s what equals this amazing success.
So, Hal and his book have won me over and I think you’re going to love this conversation.
If you want to take this stuff next level, I have a Gentle Wellness Starter Guide that you can download, print out, totally free, and start taking action on some of this stuff.
Grab the guide and let’s get to it!
On what led Hal to write The Miracle Equation:
In his life, Hal has had what he calls a few rock bottoms, which he thinks everyone can relate to his definition of:
Rock bottom is any moment in time or in our life where we face a challenge or adversity that is beyond anything that we’ve faced before, which causes us to question a lot.
We question ourselves, our faith, the fairness of life, on and on.
His first rock bottom happened when he was 20 years old.
He had been selling Cutco Cutlery, kitchen knives, which required in home presentations and was not necessarily the easiest gig.
He had become one of the company’s top sales reps, breaking lots of company records, so he was asked to speak at a lot of events.
One night, he gave a speech at a divisional meeting to about 60 of his peers.
After his speech, he got into his brand new Mustang that he bought with his sales commissions only 3 weeks prior, and that night he was hit head on by a drunk driver.
He spun sideways at the car behind him, who crashed directly into him, into the driver’s side door.
He broke 11 bones in just a moment.
It took the responders almost an hour to cut him out of the car, and by that time he had bled to death.
He had stopped breathing, his heart stopped beating, and the medics performed CPR as they rushed him onto a helicopter to take him to the hospital.
Hal was clinically dead for approximately 6 minutes and then he was in a coma for 6 days.
He had permanent brain damage among other serious injuries; he was told he would never walk again.
Nevertheless, he had faith in the possibility that he would walk again.
His doctors called in his parents to update them on Hal’s condition.
They said physically, he was recovering and healing.
However, mentally and emotionally, they believed he was in denial and/or delusional.
They reported that every time they interacted with Hal, he was smiling, laughing, and joking, and that simply it was not normal in this context of a 20-year-old man who was just told he would never walk again.
Hal’s dad sat down with him that night to talk about how he might really be feeling.
And Hal took a moment to think about what he was feeling, but then he smiled, and responded that lives his life by the “5 minute rule”, something he had actually learned in his sales training.
The 5-Minute Rule: it’s okay to be negative when something goes wrong, but not for more than 5 minutes.
“There’s no value, no point in dwelling on something that’s now in the past that you can’t go back in time and change. The only intelligent choice we have is to accept it fully and unconditionally”.
It doesn’t mean we’re happy about it, but it means we’re at peace with it.
Nearly every time something happens that we’re upset about, it’s already happened.
We think that it’s this thing in the past that’s causing us to be upset, but the reality is that it’s never the thing, it’s our resistance to the thing.
And in Hal’s situation at that moment in his life, there were only one of two possibilities:
One, the doctors are right and he’s in a wheelchair for the rest of his life– but he wasn’t about to let that define his quality of life.
Or, two, he will walk again, and no one could really know what would happen, but he was maintaining the faith that he may walk again until proven otherwise.
He had already accepted being in a wheelchair for the rest of his life as a possibility, so it had no power over his emotions.
All of his energy was going into what he wanted.
He went into therapy every day, staying for longer, putting in extraordinary effort, pushing to learn to walk again.
Hal was thinking that is a year, maybe in six months, he would walk again.
However, one week after that conversation with his dad, three weeks after his crash, the doctors came in with routine x-rays unable to explain the quickness of his healing.
In fact, they were ready to let him take his first step in therapy the following day.
So he did, he took his first step, three weeks later he went home, and only a week later he was back on stage winning sales competitions.
That’s the power of unwavering faith and extraordinary effort.
That was the first time he used the miracle equation, even though he didn’t think about it that way until a year post-crash.
And then two years ago, Hal was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer, given a 10-30% chance of surviving.
The first thing that came to his mind when he was trying to figure out how to beat it was the miracle equation.
And that’s how he’s defied the odds every single time throughout his life.
Both in overcoming rock bottom, but also in accomplishing things he never thought he could.
On The Miracle Morning:
The Miracle Morning has really infiltrated society and culture and this whole idea of a morning routine has become its own entity, even apart from Hal.
He had no idea that it would reach all the places it has and that he would sell millions of copies.
More often than not, he would have these thoughts of self-doubt, but then there were moments when he would get emails from people telling him that The Miracle Morning radically changed their lives.
And every time he got one of those emails, it was a glimpse that this idea could change the world.
If every person on the planet started their day with meditations, affirmations, visualizations, reading, and journaling, the world would be a different place.
On what makes The Miracle Equation different from positive thinking:
When The Miracle Equation came to Robyn, she was a little skeptical.
She’s not a huge fan of positive thinking trends, but when she got into the book she realized that there was a lot more to it.
While Robyn’s background is in science, Hal’s is in sales, so since the age of 19 he’s been tracking his progress and getting big into statistics and results.
The word “miracle” is a very loaded word with many different meanings and contexts.
Often, it has this bad rap because miracles are either thought of as these passive, random acts that we have no control over, or in a religious context where it’s pray and wait.
But for Hal, it’s all about taking responsibility for your life.
He may not be responsible for the drunk driver causing his accident, but he is responsible for how he emotionally responds to the situation and what he actually does logistically from this moment on for the rest of his life.
The Miracle Equation is very practical, very step by step, very results-oriented; it’s not about manifesting your goals or making a vision board and sitting back waiting for change to happen.
“A miracle is any outcome outside the realm of what you believe is probable for you”.
Therefore, when you accomplish those outcomes, each one feels like a miracle because you didn’t really think you could do it.
The word “probable” is used very intentionally, because if you are an optimist, “anything is possible!”
But possible isn’t enough to get us out of bed in the morning to pursue our biggest goals and dreams.
If everything is possible, possible means has no power.
And we don’t pursue goals that are possible.
What we need to do is take some specific steps and make some specific decisions to move it from possible to probable, because we pursue certainty.
And what makes something appear outside of the realm of what we believe is probable for us is typically anything we’ve never done before.
We have rearview mirror syndrome, where we’re constantly checking our past to determine our future.
On pursuing certainty:
From a neurological perspective, certainty is just neural pathways that we’ve already created.
The brain will pursue the path of least resistance based on what it knows how to do, and we start to believe pursuing certainty is the reality of what’s possible.
We make a decision about what’s possible and then we look for evidence that supports that.
Then, we automatically have a bias and we’re only going to find things to support what we already decided is or is not possible.
On the two decisions needed to make the Miracle Equation:
You don’t actually have to believe that you’re going to reach your goal in order to reach your goal.
The two decisions to move your goals from possible, to probable, to inevitable make up the miracle equation.
These decisions are deceptively simple in their explanation, but extraordinarily rare in their execution.
Hal offers a challenge to think of someone who is extraordinarily successful (in whatever way you define “successful”).
And what you’ll find is that if you study the world’s most innovative, successful individuals, they live by these two decisions; they are fundamental.
“What we need to improve our lives and improve ourselves, we don’t need more information… what we need are methods for implementation”.
Rather than tell me I need to exercise and that the world’s greatest people exercise, tell me how to make exercise simple.
The two decisions of the Miracle Equation:
Decision 1 | Develop unwavering faith.
Decision 2 | Maintain extraordinary effort.
And these are not one time decisions.
Instead, you’ve got to make these decisions over and over and over again, until they’ve become a part of who you are and the way you live.
Hal calls someone who is living their life to the fullest, who has unwavering faith and gives extraordinary effort, “a Miracle Maven”.
On unwavering faith:
First, you have to establish the faith that you can do something you’ve never done before.
And by default as a human being, as we grow and evolve, we’ve had to step out on faith that we could do something we’ve never done before.
And because we’ve never done it before, there’s no evidence from the past that we can do it.
Many of us will step out on faith thinking that anything is possible.
But for the majority who do that, as soon as we hit an obstacle, things get difficult, and don’t go the way that we planned, the faith wavers very quickly.
And that’s applicable to anyone who’s started a wellness routine– we get fired up and we start a new routine, but something comes up and we get set back.
That’s where evidence comes in– we see our set-back as evidence that this isn’t going to work.
And here’s the thing: you can still have unwavering faith even if you doubt yourself sometimes.
To Hal, the epitome of a Miracle Maven is a champion athlete, so for example, take Michael Jordan (or any other champion athlete).
At some point in every champion’s career and journey, they make a conscious or unconscious decision to approach every shot that they take and every game that they play in with unwavering faith.
The way that it looks in real time, is that Michael Jordan believes that he’ll make every shot that he takes, and you’ll hear a lot of athletes approach the game that way.
And even though the average for the best players in the world is right around 50%, meaning he has just as good of a chance of missing the shot as he does making it, it doesn’t change the way he approaches his shots each time.
And often, when a shot is missed, the seed of self-doubt and fear is planted in our head and we start to water it with our thoughts.
Am I having an off night? Should I have not tried this? Am I not qualified?
And as we water that seed, it grows larger and larger.
Now in this basketball example, after a typical player misses their first shot and the ball is back in their hands a second time, they have a little more doubt in their mind, which affects their physical body and the way that shot leaves their hands.
And if they miss a second shot, their self-doubt only grows.
Then when the ball hits their hands a third time, they pass it back.
And that’s what we do with our opportunities, we deflect them, we give up on them.
But Michael Jordan, like any champion athlete, would say “give me the ball, I’m going to make it” and even if they miss it, there’s no self-doubt.
They keep shooting, and they keep shooting until they find their stride.
Unwavering faith doesn’t guarantee anything in the short run.
But it radically, significantly increases your probability of success every single day that you approach everything you do with unwavering faith.
“You don’t have to believe it, you just keep doing it”.
There is evidence across the board that if you keep showing up, if you’re consistent, that’s the magic.
On extraordinary effort:
Extraordinary effort isn’t about working hard, it’s about consistency.
“What makes effort extraordinary is consistency”.
Of all the things that can derail us and cause us to lose our faith, one of the top things is when the initial excitement wears off.
We have ideas about things that we want to try, but once we hit a roadblock, that initial excitement wears off.
Extraordinary effort is about consistency, it’s about doing something everyday that moves you closer to your most important goal.
Success is not complicated, it’s super simple, but it’s not easy, because human nature is to give up when it’s not exciting anymore.
You do one thing everyday that moves you in the direction of your biggest dream, your mission.
You can’t fail, you eventually get there, it’s just a matter of time.
Most of us want things to happen right now, but things take time and instead of taking it as evidence that it won’t work, just keep showing up.
We’re almost always wrong on the timeline.
Any goal, or dream, or outcome we have, it’s always preceded by a process, and the process is what produces the dream or outcome.
“The secret to success is to figure out how to stay committed to your process without being emotionally attached to your short term result”.
You’ve got to develop unwavering faith and maintain it and put forth extraordinary effort.
To sum up in one word: until.
“Until” is a powerful word that most of us don’t give much mind to.
Successful people commit to maintaining unwavering faith that they can do something they’ve never done.
They put forth extraordinary effort, which is nothing more than a consistent, daily process that you define based on your outcome, your mission.
And then if you apply both of those decisions each and every day until your mission, your miracle becomes a reality, you cannot fail; it’s only a matter of time.
When you finally achieve the very thing that you’ve been working so hard on for so long, you almost never wish it would have happened any sooner.
Instead, you finally achieve your mission and you look back and realize that it was supposed to take that long, you had to overcome all of those things because they shaped you into the person you needed to be to create the life that you ultimately wanted.
And it happened in perfect time.
Rather than suffer, be at peace where you are, even if you’re in a difficult place.
“You can be the happiest, most grateful you’ve ever been, even when you’re going through the most difficult time”.
On the 30-day challenge:
In the Miracle Morning, Hal’s previous book, he included a 30-day challenge.
It’s something that he’s done for a long time in his own life, is live in 30-day challenges.
Every month he identifies an area in his life that he wants to take action in that he doesn’t normally take, and he does a 30-day challenge.
And once you get to the end of the 30 days, it’s kind of running on autopilot.
It’s something Hal includes in all of his books to get people involved in the process, rather than reading the book and then moving onto the next book.
So, at the end of The Miracle Equation he offers a 30-day challenge to integrate a mindset of unwavering faith.
The objective is to follow the 30-day challenge with unwavering faith as your default mindset, so you then have more faith in yourself and your abilities and you can take on and accomplish anything that you’ve thought about trying but never did.
“The real purpose of a goal is not to hit the goal; it’s to develop yourself into the type of person who can achieve any goal you set”.
You can’t fail, you can only learn, grow, and become better than you’ve ever been before.
The 30-day challenge is about integrating unwavering faith and extraordinary effort by clarifying your mission, defining your process, committing to it everyday.
It’s only an extra 30-60 minutes a day to have the most extraordinary life that you can imagine.
On what it really means to be healthy:
“To me, health is living, pursuing your full potential in every area… it’s clarifying what level 10 would look like in each area of your life and then consistently doing things that move you closer to level 10 in every single area”.
Guest Bio
Hal Elrod is on a mission to elevate the consciousness of humanity, one reader at a time. As the author of the international bestseller The Miracle Morning, as well as his newest book, The Miracle Equation, he is doing exactly that. After overcoming multiple near-death experiences and impacting millions of lives, he has dedicated his own life to showing others how to overcome their challenges so that they can fulfill the unlimited potential that is within each of us.
Resources
The Miracle Equation, by Hal Elrod
The Miracle Morning, by Hal Elrod
https://www.miraclemorning.com
Join the Miracle Morning community
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