Surrender Works Better Than Hard Work | Here's Why

Justin [00:00:00] I have to get the Grammy award, I have to get the Academy Award, I have to win the lottery, win the President's Club, make a million dollars, make a billion dollars," right?

Justin And so that often you're holding that in place. That starts to become the source of anxiety, even if it's positive, 'cause you're holding an identity, and when you're not achieving it, you're hard on yourself and you're burned out and you're stressed. Intro/Outro: Welcome to And Then I Did This. Prepare to be inspired as we celebrate the unique journeys of individuals who've had the courage to break free and live life on their own terms. Their lives prove that you truly can be free to live your best and most authentic life. Let's get to it.

LuRae Welcome to the show.

LuRae [00:01:00] Today I have a special guest returning to the show, Justin Michael. He's been the secret behind the 1%. He's an accomplished professional in the field of business, and now he's doing it again as a best-selling author of his new book, Rewriting the Law of Attraction. So we're gonna walk through his journey from successful businessperson to writing one of the best-selling, books that are emerging. It's emerging on Amazon now as one of the best-selling books. So Justin, welcome back to the show.

Justin Well, it's a pleasure to be here. It's been a phenomenal journey, so I'm excited to walk through it.

LuRae So for those who didn't get an opportunity to hear our first rundown of Vendasee or Behind the 1%, walk through kind of where you started and how you even got to the point of pivoting to what you're doing now.

Justin [00:02:00] Yeah. So it's really interesting, right? There's so many books that you could write, and if you're listening, you probably have one in you, and you probably have a God-given gift, and you're probably working on your talents, and that's something that we can talk about. But when I was 10 years old, in third grade, the teacher said, "Hey, of every kid I've ever taught, you're the best writer I've ever seen, and I've been doing this 35 years."

Justin And I thought, "Oh, Mrs. Shoup, you probably say that to every kid." Just that's nice, you know? And I didn't get a book deal till I was 40, and that was six years ago.

Justin I was in software sales, pretty hardcore from 2007 till 2021 in the era of SaaS, and I was in the year of mobile. And it's funny 'cause what we're seeing with AI right now is all mobile marketing, and you were there, right?

Justin It was ad tech, martech, mobile, big data, sensors, and then we didn't know it was gonna hit us. But I was in a similar wave, and I was at 13 startups, and I worked my way up to being in these senior positions in companies and big blue chip companies too. I worked for Salesforce Marketing Cloud in the West.

Justin I worked for LinkedIn in the East in the Empire State Building.

Justin And right around 40 years old, my dream, and I'll tie this to the book, was to become a chief revenue officer, and I was offered a role for, I don't know, 400 grand, decent amount of money. But it was kind of a deal with the devil 'cause he goes, "Hey, I heard you have this book, so we'll pay you this, but any leads from the book, we get."

Justin And I was like, err, record scratch, right? I wasn't gonna do that. So I decided, I'm like, if there's that kind of demand from this one employer, maybe this book will hit it.

Justin [00:03:00] So I wrote it with my mentor, Tony Hughes. It was a book called Tech-Powered Sales, and it was just about all these tech stacks. It did very well, and we did a ton of consulting behind it, and that's kind of what got my start.

Justin And the last six years, I've trained 250 teams. I've worked with 1,000 people one-to-one. I've put out 11 books, 10 in my name, and I've done seven books in the last three years.

Justin However, I realized, and we were talking earlier, I couldn't get behavioral change. I couldn't transform humans without going deep into the being and this idea of ontology, which is the science of consciousness.

Justin So I went back in my mind to when I was 26, because I met Jack Canfield at a dinner, and he gave me The Secret DVD, and then I met Rhonda Byrne like six weeks later and got to hang with her. And then I read Wallace Wattles' The Science of Getting Rich, and this is kind of a parallel journey because I started getting into Eckhart Tolle, and Byron Katie, and Dispenza, and Wolfgang von Goethe, and Neville Goddard, and you name it, right?

Justin [00:04:00] All that woo-woo interesting stuff. So fast-forward, I'm trying to write this book like Robert Greene, my last one, The Frame, and it's on power, status, wealth, frame psychology. And it's like I just hear like an acoustic guitar, like of campfires. It's like all this woo-woo stuff keeps hitting the cutting room floor 'cause I wanna talk about the spirituality elements.

Justin And my co-author was like, "We gotta stay focused." And it was good that we did. And so after the whole thing was done, about a couple weeks later, I kinda just channeled this other book, and it was called Phoenix Rising. And then I came up... We were talking, my publisher was like, "Let's just, like, challenge the law of attraction and look at it differently."

Justin And so just to show you these principles work, about maybe nine weeks ago, I got on a call with Mark Victor Hansen. Now, Mark wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul with Jack Canfield, and they sold 500 million copies. So it's staggering. So he loved it, and he's like, "You cannot call it Phoenix Rising. You have to call it Rewriting the Law of Attraction."

Justin [00:05:00] And then I kind of thought of RLOA, the movement. And then when I dove into the book, I looked at tons of aspects of the deepest level, like who you're being influences how you're thinking, and then what you're doing, and then the results. Whereas a lot of the surface stuff is like Think and Grow Rich, where thoughts determine life, so dream boards and tons of I am statements.

Justin But what does that really say to the universe if you have to constantly say, like, "I'm rich, I'm successful"? It's good to do, but you have to believe it. At a certain point, you need to stop and release it.

Justin So there's this book called The Surrender Experiment by Michael A. Singer, which is phenomenal. Another coach gave it to me.

Justin And I read The Go-Giver too, by Bob Burg. And amazingly, he just shared my book, and he said, "I'm in my 60s, and this book, Rewriting the Law of Attraction, is one of the best I've ever read. I'm gonna read it multiple times, and I wish I had it in my 20s." So that's quite something.

Justin There's this book by David R Hawk- Hawkins called Letting Go. Do you know that one?

LuRae [00:06:00] I've read it. Yes, I have it.

Justin Yeah. And essentially it just says that surrender is the answer to everything. So I look at Christian mysticism, Buddhism, Eastern, Western philosophy, and it's like having faith in a higher power, surrendering to what's coming to you.

Justin And then, the thing that Esther Hicks said was the hows are the domain of the universe. Like, how we actually get there. And so that's like the most powerful way you can live, and it's helped me at certain moments that have been like extinction level events, like points of devastation. Points in my life where I had a collapse when my father died or, you know, talk about a few really heavy moments in the book.

Justin So you may be hearing this and going through one of those heavy moments and feeling pressure and anxiety and you're pushing. You may also be like this type A hard charger in corporate that has built this identity that you're really attached to, right? Like winning an award, like, "I have to get the Grammy award, I have to get the Academy Award, I have to win the lottery, win the President's Club, make a million dollars, make a billion dollars," right?

Justin [00:07:00] And so that often you're holding that in place. That starts to become the source of anxiety, even if it's positive, 'cause you're holding an identity, and when you're not achieving it, you're hard on yourself and you're burned out and you're stressed. You could just surrender. So here's the last visual I'll give you.

Justin We're all in this cosmic river, and we're in these canoes, and we're paddling upstream, and someone's like, "Oh man, I've got an outboard motor. I'm gonna motor upstream into the wind." And then I'm thinking, "Should I just get out of the canoe and then like flow with the current of the river?" And then, "Oh, there's this big sea out here."

Justin So like spiritual people are on this other journey where it's like, okay, live in the moment, be grateful.

Justin And gratitude was the longest chapter of the Wallace Wattles book, Science of Getting Rich, and Rhonda would quiz me on that one. So her recent work, The Greatest Secret, is very aligned with this, but I think a lot of people use the initial secret in a materialistic way to try to get stuff for themselves.

Justin And I wanna go a little deeper 'cause the best things in life are still free, and everyone actually knows that. But it's okay, like what if there's something better for you?

Justin So this concept called pronoia, which is the opposite of paranoia. So it may be God's plan or the higher power or the God of your understanding.

Justin [00:08:00] Maybe there's something even better if you just let go of what you're forcing.

LuRae Exactly. It's all so good, and it's all so true. Before we started recording, we were talking about the people that you know, have worked with and their perceptions of what's possible for them.

LuRae I think about that in terms of whether it's people wanting to step out of that, the corporate treadmill, off the hamster wheel, or just doing the next thing in their life. Talk a little bit about that and how, what the concepts in your, in the book address those underlying issues that people have, and they don't even realize it.

Justin [00:09:00] Yeah. So the idea of, like, letting go and surrendering and sort of... There's this Werner Erhard quote, "You can create your future from the future." And everybody's kind of, like, looking at their resume. Here's the CV, and here are the verticals I know, and here is my actual skill set. I meet with so many people, it's funny.

Justin They'll say something like this, "You know, I'm just a natural public speaker. Every time I do a speech, it's simple. I don't prepare and I kill it, even like 1,000 people." And they're like, "But I'm really trying to get my... do this." I'm like, "Wait, back up. Why don't you do public speaking? Because everybody else is terrified of that and bad at it."

Justin Because I coach people to transform their lives, I find that they're often just like there's some kind of God-given gift that they came into the world with that's so easy, it's like breathing. If they turned that to 11, they'd have this magnificent outcome. So that's one clue.

Justin The phoenix rising element in the book is, like, really just burning out the past. So, like, writing down all your affirmations is one ritual, and then just burning the piece of paper. Just releasing it for a second, right?

Justin A lot of the transformational elements of life is, like, letting go of resentments, letting go of anger, finding people you don't like and praising and blessing them and wishing them well.

Justin [00:10:00] And I learned this from Rhonda Byrne, you know, and she talks about it. She would go to her ATM, take out $20 bills, and just, like, hand them to people. Because the big thing about these laws is people usually use it in a selfish way, and then there's almost a curse about it. So I really wanna stress that the book is about service, it's about giving, it's about reinventing yourself, and kind of being reborn.

Justin And you can only do that if you allow the identity you have in place to burn. Imagine myself, like, I was... All I wanted to be was a rock star until I was 21, get a Grammy, and I was depressed I didn't have it. Then all I wanted to be was a CRO, and I got offered that by 40. I worked for 20 years to get there, and that's not what I wanted.

Justin And then lately it's like, hey, this life has led me overseas, into this coaching world, into this writing world, and, like, if I went back to myself at 19, say, "Hey, you're gonna have a hit book and coach people," I'd be like, "No, I'm not. I'm gonna play my guitar." Like, right?

Justin [00:11:00] So I say on these interviews that not all those that wander are lost. That was the J.R.R. Tolkien Hobbit quote. And when you're furthest from the path, sometimes that's still the path. So that's a lot of mixed nuts of wisdom right there.

LuRae Yeah. Yeah. And it's so true, because I think intellectually we get pushed... You know, we get on this conveyor belt, and we're pushed through this sieve of, okay, you gotta do this, go to school, get a good job.

LuRae You know, it used to be work with them until you retire, I add a D at the end, retirement. You know? 'Cause people are tired by the time they get there. So don't do that to yourself. Like, there is a better way.

LuRae One of the things you also talk about are the inner child things that come up that people don't realize are there also, which I think if you wanna touch on that topic just for a little bit, because that will block people from taking the steps into doing new things.

Justin [00:12:00] Yeah. I mean, I guess I loved the analogy of Jack Canfield that, and it's been popularized, but like there's the baby elephant on the chain, and then it grows bigger and bigger and bigger. Now it's a giant elephant, but it still feels the chain there. There's a lot of trauma before the age of seven which you need to deal with.

Justin Psychotherapy is a good route. There's meditation, different practices you can do. But like Wayne Dyer used to say, you don't wanna die with your music still inside you, because you never meet someone on their deathbed who's 85 or 95 who goes, "Geez, I wish I had just studied harder." You know? "I wish I had just done better at that job."

Justin No, they're thinking about the people they love, but they're also thinking about those risks that they didn't take, the positive ones.

Justin So when I got in the coaching game, I'm like, "Burn the ships." I'm like, I looked at the other people doing it, the authors, the coaches. I thought, "I have to be able to do this. I'm seeing what they're doing. I can do this." And I just burned the ships and I went for it.

Justin [00:13:00] Well, then you find out that most people that become millionaires are 55 to 65. Like that Game of Thrones writer was 62. So you got a shot for a third act, as my client, Matt Fox, great coach out of UK likes to say.

Justin And so that's what I've just been doing, but it's been a huge risk. I've been like, "Hey, there's this phoenix and it's rising." And it's like, okay, Mr. Michael, chop your head off. Like, what? Have you done ayahuasca recently? What is this on LinkedIn? You know, I'm putting all these phoenix birds up, like he's truly lost it.

Justin And then they read it and they're like, "Oh, this is like The Alchemist. Like, this is powerful." And everyone loves it from every faith because it's non-denominational. It's been a cool thing. So I worked with an editor carefully to make sure it was digestible for all people. It's very short.

Justin It's only 17,000 words. A normal book's 90,000. Frame was 33. So you can sit down and read this on an airplane. You can read it an hour or two, and people are reading it two or three times.

Justin And the way I knew it was brilliant, like lightning in a bottle, is I'd done a lot of editing of my own stuff, and when I would edit this, I'd cry. It's like, just sort of tears of joy. I cried at Finding Nemo, so like, don't take this too seriously, right?

Justin [00:14:00] But it just, it has a poetic sort of Psalms quality to it. It's a philosophic text, like The Four Agreements or The Alchemist or The Secret or something like that.

Justin And I have three laws in the book, and actually the law of attraction isn't wrong. It's just sort of a... It's one law, the law of love.

Justin Second law is the law of assumption. Assume the wish fulfilled, and Wayne Dyer did the book, Wishes Fulfilled. And Neville Goddard's whole thing is write biblical interpretations of that.

Justin But the third element is the law of becoming or being.

Justin So I ran into this coaching pocket of Steve Hardison, Steve Chandler, Rich Litvin, like prosperous coach people, and they're all about being, like who would you have to be and the book of being and being. And then we're in our heart going like, "Yeah, but how do I do that?"

Justin [00:15:00] Like how do I, and because I have to, you know, coach people and get a result and an ROI, you know, they're gonna just kind of truck along Groundhog Day. I have to push them over their comfort zone, but they have to become a new person. Like, they have to have the realization of where they're blocking themselves, and it could've been going on since childhood.

Justin And once they realize that, they become empowered, and then they break the chains themselves, which is... That's the thing I love most. Someone coming back and being like, "Wow, I can do this," or, "I just got my first client," and they're just triumphant, you know?

LuRae Yeah. Yeah. It was going back to that elephant analogy. It's like I know I had actually created a graphic of that and a post on that, and it was like, "It's not the rope, it's the belief." And people just were, they're just drawn to it because it, there's so much truth in it that what we believe about ourselves is what creates our reality because our thoughts, what we focus on, that is what we create and what we believe.

LuRae And simultaneously to reading your book, I was reading the, I ordered Neville Goddard's The Power of Awareness.

Justin [00:16:00] That's my favorite book ever. I've read that, like, 50 times.

LuRae I think actually I heard about that through you. Yes.

Justin Yeah, the pruning shears a revision. As Rhonda says, before bed you get into this theta state.

Justin That's why I did Musification. So I use these, like, solfeggio frequencies to calm the brain. Get off caffeine, or before bed play 532 hertz or 428 hertz. So Think and Grow Rich, it's be and grow rich.

LuRae Right. Exactly. We have to step into who we are, what we envision for ourselves. We have to become that. Be it until we become it.

Justin Yeah, and then the Buddhist thing of, like, thoughts. We are our thoughts. It's still beingness is deeper.

Justin [00:17:00] So I guess where I'm going with this is like you look at a Jeff Bezos, who knows he's a billionaire, and, you know, the average person has 70,000 thoughts a day, but they still have a billion outcome because that's their identity. That's what they believe deep down.

LuRae Absolutely. So I wanna touch on this before we're through. You mentioned at the very beginning that many people have a book in them, but may not know, like how to even get started. If you wanna share a little bit about your journey. I've thought of you actually as you may, not that you wanna become a book coach, but or a writing coach, but, but just sharing some of your journey and advice on how people can get started if they feel like they do have a book and advice that can be put into a book that would be helpful for people.

Justin [00:18:00] Yeah. I mean, I think like the fundamental thing, like you could work like with my publisher and do like a book. If you wanted, like you could cobble something together. Like that's definitely something you could do, but you definitely have to have like a really strong idea, you know? Like, I mean, like what is your expertise and what are you trying to accomplish?

Justin Like, people think they need to have like a best-selling idea or to write the next, you know, million seller or something. But like I work with Jeremy Jones, and what we basically do is take a tactic.

Justin Like, I have a book that's just about like sales superpowers, and it's a bunch of techniques. And then I have a book that's more like for consultants, and these are manuals. It's like, you know, 45,000 words or something. It can be short.

Justin And so people take two years, five years to do these things and tear their hair out and take it so seriously. And, you know, I think if you've got the 20,000 hours, you can just put it out there.

LuRae Right. Yeah. Absolutely. And just start writing. I mean, just start. And like you said, working with someone who knows what they're doing is also a good idea.

LuRae So I guess final words of advice for people who are out there on the edge, on the fence, not sure, feel like they should be doing something different, but don't know and don't have the courage to get going. One is probably buy your book, but get started.

Justin [00:19:00] I would say trust your gut and your inner voice, right? So I'm thinking like a lot of people were asking me to be on boards or, you know, do some manner of advisory, and then a lot of people were saying, "Hey, you should write a book." And so if that's you, I would just say jump in, but it could be something else, right?

Justin It might be a podcast or a YouTube video or some piece of content that you can monetize. You will feel like terrified in a way, like freaked out, like because it's the unknown, and it'll feel like free falling, but you will kind of find your wings essentially.

Justin So, you know, the cool thing about this publisher is he works with consultants to help them write a book and to then monetize it and use it.

Justin I know that's like a plug, but I've worked with the major publishers too, like Wiley and Harper Collins, and that's fun also.

Justin But just like, there's a book called Turning Pro by Pressfield, Steven Pressfield. It's so good. And whatever you do, just be excellent at it and pursue it for the art that it is.

LuRae [00:20:00] Yeah. It's so beautiful. So beautiful. Well, we're gonna put the link to you and the link to the book and all of that in the show notes, so people will be able to find you and find it. And thank you so much for coming back on the show and sharing a little about your journey as your best-selling book continues to take off.

Justin Yeah, it's been phenomenal and unusual, and yeah, if you put yourself out there, it will pay off.

LuRae And that's a wrap on another episode of And Then I Did This, celebrating the lives of those who've walked away from the beaten path to pursue work and a life that nourishes their soul. If you're feeling inspired and ready to explore your own path to freedom, check out youcanbefree.life where you'll find resources and support to help you break free and live life on your own terms. See you next time.