Courtesy of Matthew Ferry
While training real estate agents on how to sell more houses, Matthew Ferry noticed something. "Their mental state, how they were relating to the situation had a much greater impact than just teaching them how to sell or what the fundamentals the business are," he says. He began looking into how what he says "inner optimization became outer acceleration" and now, he's written his own books on the subject and most often consults those who work on Wall Street.
Mental health, he says, "is the ultimate state for a human being. When you are mentally strong, when you are emotionally happy or uplifted or even just neutral, your experience of life is dramatically enhanced." It's why he works so hard to help his clients find this.
Next, on October 18, he'll speak at Cortex's Innovation hall, hoping to help St. Louisans quiet their own minds. Ahead of his lecture, he spoke with SLM about what he's learned over the years.
Are there common things that you see people suffer from? Absolutely. Over the years, I've developed a methodology, it's called the rapid enlightenment process. The rapid alignment process is a surefire way of getting your mind to go quiet, which really means to reduce the stress, reduce the anxiety, go into that peaceful place. One of the things that I've seen, that people suffer from on a regular basis is something that I call "the drunk monkey." And the drunk monkey is all that negative chatter in our head, and it has certain functions. If you know what the functions are, you can spot them, you can be aware of them, and then you could do something different. So for example, the drunk monkey, which is, in essence, your survival mechanism, is constantly trying to forecast the future, trying to understand what's going to happen in the future, then avoid negative things, and move toward pleasurable things. But I think most people realize, if you just let the mind do what it's going to do, it defaults to the negative. It's constantly looking for one of those negative things that are going to happen in the future. But the problem is most of those things aren't actually going to happen. So we stress out, and we freak out, even though there's nothing going on.
What is something you do to have peace of mind? Well, there are four steps that I take people through to achieve what I call the "quiet mind state," and that is to first, observe or notice the drunk monkey in action. Notice that it's forecasting the negative. Notice that it is trying to fit in, it's trying to be right. It has opinions about everything. Just notice that its objective is to try and navigate the world. Then the second thing that I ask people to do is to begin to, in essence, heal their underlying survival consciousness. It's something that I call the hidden motives to survive. When you recognize that the drunk monkey in your head—all that negative talking—is trying to navigate in the world, you start to say, "Well, what is its motivation?" "What is what's it trying to do?" You begin to see that greed, grudge, hatred, victim following illogical rules—these are underlying aspects of our consciousness that are driving our thinking and, and they're making us more nervous, more stressful, anxious, angry. We feel like an imposter; we don't fit in. So you got to see the drunk monkey, then you have to work on the hidden motives that are driving the drunk monkey. Then you start to connect with enlightened perspectives. The fourth component is something that I call recontextualization. It is the skill of being able to describe the conditions and circumstances of your life in a way that creates an empowering reality for you. The ultimate empowering reality is the recognition that all as well.
What do you hope attendees take away from your St. Louis event? The event is really about helping the people in the audience go into a quiet mind state maybe for the first time in their entire life, where they're they started they close their eyes for a moment they breathe. And they notice, "Oh my gosh, there's no worry. There's no fretting. I'm not thinking about the next thing that's coming up. I'm not worried about what's going out of my email. I'm not thinking about my kids right now, not wondering what bills are going to get paid." The mind is completely and totally quiet there in a serene peaceful state. The objective is to then see how they take that state and put it into everything that I do in my life.
Do you incorporate meditation? Meditation is a phenomenal tool. It is so helpful in getting you to seeing that you have a drunk monkey in your head and that the drunk monkey, that negative self-talk that's in your head, it doesn't actually care about you. It doesn't actually like you. It doesn't. Through meditation, you can step back, pause, and notice that there is a biological function that talks whether you want it to or not. Meditation is a tried-and-true way of getting to that place where you see that there's a talker in your head—and that's not you.
What are some of the performance changes that you've noticed in your clients? Predominantly, the performance changes come at their ability to react in a logical and calm manner, under stressful and very agitating situations. So for example, I have a client that I was just dealing with, who was moved to London. When he got there, they didn't really have a plan for him. He felt lost and he felt like, maybe, he had made a mistake. Using his set of techniques, he was able to actually shift the way that he was relating to the situation and become empowered, even though there was no evidence that he should be empowered in the situation. He was able to communicate effectively to get the changes he wanted to happen, so that he could move forward in his new job in London. He was literally thousands of miles away from home and feeling like a fish out of water. Yet when he changed his framework, suddenly he was empowered, taking action and making things essentially setting up his new life and his new business in London.
