E207: Becoming Zen and Creating your Future through Mindset with Matthew Belair | CPTSD Podcast

Michael: Hey! What's up, Unbroken Nation! Hope that you're doing well, wherever you are in the world today. Super excited to be back here with you with another episode with my friend and guest, Matthew Belair. Matt is the host of The Master mind, body and spirit show, which is reached number one in over 20 countries. He's a creator of the Soul Compass program, the quantum heart, hypnosis technique, and the best-selling author of the Zen athlete, also, one of my homeboys, Matt, my friend, how are you? What is going on in your world today?

Matthew: What's up, man? It's a pleasure and honor to be here with you and your audience, man. I had a such a great time when you came on my show, I definitely invite your audience to check that episode out, but I'm doing well, man, it's a pleasure to be here.

Michael: Good. Yeah, not that was such a thrill and when we wrapped up I was like – I have to have you, come on and share with my audience and talk about your experience. But before we dive in, tell everybody a little bit about you your background and how you got to where you are today?

Matthew: Sure. I'll try to keep it short, you know, my interest is always has been in martial arts, and in martial arts, they teach you about mind, body spirit. And so, as a very young boy, I'm out my backyard trying to break wood outside, you know, my fence outdoor just punching it from watching martial arts movies, but I also understood that there is this mental side of it. So, in my younger years, I was already realizing that I had to use some sort of force, right? It wasn't just my body that had to break these things and how were these Shaolin Monks doing all this incredible stuff. So I was an athlete as well, I started to apply what I was learning through martial arts, which is about Mind, Body, Spirit into hockey, into skateboarding, into everything else I was doing. And when I was in my teenage years, I was really interested in consciousness, human performance peak potential and so I was reading all these different books and trying things like meditation, lucid dreaming, astral projection, whatever I could find to like, you know, expand my mind, expand my consciousness. I was curious about enlightenment and all these different aspects I would read books on Zen, I was very fascinated with. And when College was done, I ended up going out to Whistler British Columbia because I wanted a snowboard became an international snowboard coach for a little bit, spent seven years in Western it was really amazing and all the while I was just continuing my own education on mindset, performance and human potential.

So I always knew I wanted to travel and when I was done my time in Whistler, snowboarding and training different athletes, I had the opportunity to travel the world and I train with thirty fourth generation Shaolin Monks, I got to meditate with monks in Nepal because I wanted to be enlightened so I figured, hey, I'll go to Tibet and I'll meditate with monks there. But unfortunately, Tibet still occupied by China, so, I ended up in Nepal and got a pretty incredible experience Trek Mount Everest, almost died and roads in athlete in the meantime, and then when I came back from my travels, I started the podcast. And since then, I've recorded over 500 episodes and I'm just a constant student, you know, I like to test myself and see what I'm capable of but I also want to hear about people in the world who are doing incredible things and that's been able to the process is taking me to 30 countries have trained with several different indigenous elders and done quite a bit, just trying to find the truth and and learn about human potential.

Michael: That's phenomenal, man. There's so much you can unpack there and start with. One of the things that comes to mind immediately is like my obsession with martial arts, ever since I was a child; part of it was self-defense in my early years and then what I started understand it was really about this idea of controlling what my body was capable of doing. I mean, I've done weight high and Thailand, I've traveled the world doing Jiu-Jitsu of, you know, I'm lucky in that I've been able to go and experience this thing that I love and this really in-depth way because it helped me get a better understanding and I think for me, and I'm curious about your thoughts on this as someone who has come from trauma, who is dissociated where my brain and my body just weren't connected, martial arts has always helped me feel more in sync with my brain and my body, have you experienced that as well?

Matthew: Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of the spiritual community forgets about the body often and so it's such an important part. And in martial arts, I remember being taught that the body is the first and easiest thing to control, it's easier to control the mind, and if you do call training, I did the Wim Hof called training and I knew about the breath work, and all that kind of stuff and everyone's going in the cold and said, you know what, I'm going to do it for myself, I'm not going to do his breath technique, I'm just going to train my body, I'm going to go in the water and see what happens. And so as I did that the waters insanely called I'm out in the mountains, in British Columbia, it with ice everywhere and my body says, get out, so then my mind has to say, don't; so my mind has to control the body. So, you're in this immediate experience where you're seeing the wrestle in the battle and in martial arts, they say, the easiest thing to control is the body and you do that kind of through the mind, and as you do that, then you start to invoke and engage in the spirit and I feel like we often forget that. And Mark Divine, who is a former Navy SEAL and has some, a great podcast and great training out there, he's helping people, first uncover this process of something bigger, something greater. A consciousness outside their comfort he just destroys their body and that's what they did to me in the thirty fourth generation Shaolin Monks in China, they just destroyed my body because there comes a point where you have to stop thinking and it just goes into something else and we get locked into this comfort state of consciousness and it's a repetitive state and often our society in our culture really aids us and helps us get into this comfort zone where we don't go beyond it. And so training, the body also trains the mind and it trains the spirit at the same time and so it's a really quick way to try and just shift your consciousness in a very uncomfortable way though.

Michael: You know what I think about when you're talking about that is you know, the famous David Goggins quoted that we only ever reach 40 percent of our potential before we quit. I think about times that I have pushed myself physically that have actually made me mentally stronger, emotionally stronger. And this was my experience, where as I was coming through this trauma healing journey, and the audience knows and I know that you may but for those that don't, I used to be 350 pounds and I was smoking two packs a day, drinking myself to sleep, the whole nine, and then what started happening, I started pushing myself physically in the harder I push myself physically, the stronger I became mentally in the stronger, I became mentally, the cycle began was I gonna push myself harder physically. And what I discovered in that process was built, self-esteem, I've built character, I built this place where I learned to love myself and I know for some people that's going to sound really odd, but when you think about your body and I don't know why in this society, we measure the brain and the body, as being separate, you can't have one without the other. The brain does not work without the body and vice versa and yet we don't treat them as the same. So, one of the things you mention is, putting yourself in these positions of traveling the world, to discover, to train, you'll being with various Masters and even Native American elders. Talk to me about kind of the transformation that was happening within your body and your mind as you're in these travels, as you're discovering more about who you are and what you're capable of doing.

Matthew: Well, you know, first of all, the understanding the body piece, I think is so important because in martial arts in many cultures they say, the body is the temple and Socrates has a great quote that says no man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training, it is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable; and so, even the old stoics knew about that.

So trading with the Native American Elders, I trained with a mega ma, which is in Canada and North America, a Mayan Elder, and is Zuni Elder in three different capacities was very interesting, they all had a twenty-thousand-year history, their teachings were incredibly grounded, very unique and for me, it was a transformation in just really engaging in a whole different world view. The way that I grew up what I thought to be normal, what I believed history to be is totally different to them, it's not at the two separate worlds and it's very sad because the Zuni Elder Clifford Mahooty told me, he's about the last one who knows the stories because they're orally passed down. And so it was interesting to training with David Lumber who is actually a martial artist and can do some pretty incredible things, you know, he could build anything, he was trained with, he always had these very fascinating weapons, which he was really good at, I trained with the Shaolin Monks so, one of them is like this monkey fists, it's about 20 feet out, and he could handle that the same way a Shaolin Master could. So, part of his training and a lot of his teachings were very physical, whenever we would do the martial art called shokai we'd always have to be out in the rain and so he kind of integrated all these teachings and if you look at they used have the Boy Scouts and things like that. As a human, we're supposed to be connected with the Earth and I feel like this is why we have such a strong disconnection with what's going on. As a human all you really need to know to survive, is how to eat, find food can forage and hunt, right? And then you can sustain yourself and you get some shelter. Very few people know how to do that now so we feel pretty afraid of our environment, right? A food shortage of all these potential threats because we forgot the basic knowledge and so training with the elders they had these ancient knowledge, but they also had very grounded knowledge is very simple, it was very present and very practical.

Michael: I think very often about and reflecting on my time as being a Boy Scout, which is a very weird experience as a Boy Scout in the hood, right?

So, even though I was like a Boy Scout, it would still be in this weird Urban environment and when we would get out in the nature, do nothing was more terrifying to me than that like I literally remember being like eight, nine, ten years old, going on camping, trips learning how to hunt learning how to fish learning, how to tie knots learning, all these things, as a Boy Scout and being so scared of nature, until I got comfortable with it. I think that there is something to be said about the fact that now even you and I having this conversation, you know on the internet, on zoom, on wherever we're having it puts us in this weird juxtaposition where now we've also kind of remove the human element of connection. I believe and I hope that we get back to that soon, but I think that one of the things that's going to start to happen and I'd love to know your thoughts on this is that this is going to further I hate to say this but I don't have a better way to do that, that it's going to further inhibit people from living their purpose because there's something about being in this digital environment that I think in the same way I was terrified of nature is going to make people terrified of living their life. What are your thoughts on that?

Matthew: Yeah, I'd agree with that. I feel like the city structures in themselves, they're not really conducive for natural living, if you get out into nature and you get out under the stars you really have a stronger connection with everything, they'll talk about even healing and forest bathing and things like that. And just common sense from where we came from, there's a book called Jesus in the essenes and it says there's four ways to know God and let me see if I can remember them. One is a teacher, one of them is meditation, I forget what the third one, but one of them is it was to sit out in nature. The book said, just immerse yourself in nature over and over again, just live in nature to understand the flows of how everything works, how you reality works, get really connected and you'll see in this world it's a simulation. So many people go to a nine to five job for forty hours a week and they don't want to show up there, well, if you're showing up somewhere, you don't want to be for most of your life then you're a slave. And this is something that I thought about when I was younger, I realized only when all my friends were going to University and they weren't really thinking about what they wanted to do with their lives they're just trying to get an education so they could get a job in their family, I really kicked in that, I thought a little bit different. I thought forty hours a week, two days off, and two weeks of holidays a year I was like that sounds messed up, that doesn't sound like a good scenario. There must be another option to live and at that time, was a mind-blowing thoughts like, I know there's got to be something, I don't know what it is, but I can't sign up for that; that seems insane to me, there has to be another way. And so, I feel like – with all these distractions, they're getting better and better, if you look at the movie Wall-E, I feel like that is a great example because these people in the spaceship, they're getting rolled around, they got the soft drinks and if you look at our food and you start to understand some of the psychological influences, we're under some of the social influences in some of the food influences were you realize that we're kind of being sedated. This is often what the elders would talk to me about as well saying, you know, you live in a sedated culture you're getting just slower and slower and more comfortable, more comfortable, but that's actually causing you harm the same way you might, you know, freeze to death, you just kind of get your heart slows, and it gets a little bit more comfortable and then apparently, that's how you end up passing away. It's kind of a dark thing but I feel like that's what we really need to do is re-emerge ourselves into what is more natural because you know, screens and cement and all of those things it's not really the natural way to live in my view anyways.

Michael: Yeah. I totally relate to that. I think about some of the most profound healing experiences of my life while traveling, and being in sound healing meditations while on an island in Thailand, looking up at the moon, as it rained on me and I was just like, whoa, this is the craziest, it was like a movie man like it was such this crazy experience. You know, doing psychedelic plant medicine in Vietnam and like all these different things of like, just really diving into to nature and self and being present in it and putting my feet in the water and then being now, you know, obviously trapped in this; in feelings very much removed from the world so I'm very excited to get back to it. But my fear is now, and to your point, this level of comfort becoming just incredible hindrance against someone's potential. And I think about this idea; and I know that you talked about this and I'm really curious to for you to dive in here, about the quantum heart hypnosis experience. How do you mitigate this place of not reaching and not fulfilling your potential? What do you do?

Matthew: Yeah. It's a really great question. You know, for me, I always was wondering what my life purposes, what is the meaning of life? These deep questions; why am I here? Who am I? Who was God? What is enlightenment? All these things I've always been very curious about. And so as I began to live my life and you do all the research I did, I would meet people from around the world to my travels and I'd ask them how they are, and what they do for work and most people describe themselves for what they do as an occupation, as a job. When I started going to festivals like burning man and things like that, it's a very interesting environment because it just shatters reality, after a couple sentences it's not like going down to the pub with your buddies or at the beach is a random conversation, the whole environment is so intense. You really end up having a deep conversation pretty quick and you ask people about their life and they call it, the default world. How’s your default world, right? And often, 90% the time and say, you know, oh, life is okay or I make good money, but I'm not really happy and all these different things and I'd always be wondering, like, why don't you do what you want to do? And that ask him like, what do you want to do? And we just have a really real conversation and a heart-to-heart and I'm always been curious why people don't do what they're meant to do? Why don't you do what you're passionate about? And the reason I discovered when I was trying to help a friend and he's so analytical and I knew if I asked him, I'd ask at Burning Man and I travel, well, what if you had a million dollars a day for the rest your life? What would you do with your time? What would you do if you had a year to live just questions like this? And I knew it was so analytical, he was not going to be able to give me a good answer. So I said, okay, we're just going to do a guided meditation because I've studied hypnosis meditation, guided visualization, lucid dreaming, everything, you can sit shake a stick out of kind of drove into and it's not very complicated, right? It's just really focusing attention and people aren't very good at relaxing their mind so you're just helping them do that. So I just relax his mind and then I put his attention on his heart and I ask them the same questions that I ask people all the time through my coaching, through my training, if they're travels, that are very basic it's not mysterious or complicated and through the process he started crying and after we were chatting, this is a guy it's not your typical emotional kind of guys and auditory digital very practical. He said, you know, that's the most powerful thing I've ever gone through and gave me really beautiful answers. And so immediately, when I had that response, I thought to myself, huh, I don't know of anything there like this because I try it all, I'd try whatever past life regressions, I try it. If you've got a technique, I'm going to go through it and I'm going to see how it works for me.

And so after I kept doing these experiences for other people and testing them, the first ten people eight of them cried and one apparently popped out of his body and one of them actually pissed himself from a healing they told me and I was like – that is some wild stuff and I'm not doing anything special, I'm just doing a powerful guided meditation. But here's the distinction, even when you do hypnosis and neuro linguistic programming mindset work and all these different things are number one function of our conscious mind is to keep us safe. So, when I asked you, what your life purpose? What would you do if you had infinite money, right? Who are you, really? What would you do if you could do anything? The conscious mind is answering the question and the conscious mind is there to keep you alive.

So, when I ask you the question, the conscious mind says, oh, you're not going to trick me, Matt, you're not going to kill me and you say, well, how is it going to kill me? Well, just my nose that to survive, you need to eat and for you to eat, you need money. And so if your dream and who you truly are, and who you came here to be, if that doesn't align with your conscious mind, understanding how you can make an income it's going to distort the answer and for most people a distorted by fifty, sixty, eighty percent. So, they're not even close to what they want to do or they don't have that, they know what it is, but they say it's too far away, they can't connect to it. But here's the thing in your heart knows your infinite and eternal, and it's just a different lens that you look through, that's it.

I'll give you an example, so when I was training pro athletes, I worked with Olympians pro athletes, Nitro Circus guys, all this different kind of thing and if somebody told me, hey, Matt, I really can't feel what that trick feels like they want to go to the Olympics, I got to land something crazy, right? All the tricks now are totally insane. And so I say, okay, who's one of your favorite athletes? And they would tell me, okay, just close your eyes, imagine your person, now visualize it can you do it and they would always say, yes.

So there's it's like this hack to a perspective that is more empowering and also more true. So when your heart, when you're asked that same series of questions, you know you're not going to just die, you know you're more capable than your mind is giving you credit for and you know you're linked up into this Universal or system that wants you to live your life purpose, that's wants you to be successful, that wants you to be uniquely you because, in my view, and my belief is that there is a Creator created everyone in its image, whatever you think that is, or at the very least, you have the divine spark in you, your conscience. What is your conscience? What is that little voice that speaks to you? What is this thing that when I look out into nature and connect with everything it seems that to see that everything is working mostly harmonious other than the humans it seems? And so, how do I connect to that force well, it meditation, I felt it but also in your heart?

When your answer these simple questions and the thing is I've done this with well over a hundred people now thousands of people have downloaded it, they always say the same thing, it's actually not complicated but you need to come to your own conclusion. So everybody will talk about a quality relationship, everybody will talk about getting into nature being be more grounded, in nature, clean food, good community and then something that's uniquely theirs, whatever that is something that they're passionate about, and they know what it is and the thing is, it just takes time to get there. So it's actually a cutting out of an enormous amount of programming and nonsense that keep us into this perpetual debt system of not feeling enough needing to acquire some sort of material thing, to get that inner feeling that we've had all along.

Michael: Yeah. I'm so fascinated by this and I think so frequently about the idea that nothing you will ever buy will make you love yourself and that's something I teach my clients when I work with them, when they might be struggling with money or things like that, I go, the truth is, there's nothing there's not a single dollar amount you will ever spend in your life that will make you love yourself, that will make you care about yourself more. Can you invest in yourself and make your life better? Absolutely, hundred percent. I mean, that's why I have coaches, I'm sure you have coaches, that's why we coach because it makes life better. But there's also this thing and I want to dive into this, a little bit more from a conscious standpoint, I'm in total agreement with you. Our brains and our bodies have one purpose survival, well, I guess technically to procreation, right? So survival procreation outside of that we have to create and make meaning of so much of the data that were given in the world and a lot of the data, whether it is coming from books or from other people podcast, from television, from movies, from media, from news, it's so much, so fast all the time that I think, one of the things that happens is we for lack of a better term, get in this place of analysis, paralysis and people say, I don't know how to meditate, I don't know how to even hypnotize myself, I don't know how to do these things because all I hear is noise. So I want you to break this down a little bit more so we have something that's practical for people who are listening or watching right now. In the consideration of the inundation of all the chaos of the world that we live in right now, with all the information, all the data, all the everything. How do you get quiet enough with yourself to learn how to listen to yourself?

Matthew: That's a really great question. And kind of do a sidebar on the answer. When I wrote Zen athlete, you know, I done peak performance and mindset and work with all these top-level athletes. And my thought was, well, I can kind of Trojan Horse self-mastery and educate children because if they know this as kids, if they know the power of all this stuff is children, they're going to be able to take that into their lives. And so when I was thinking about how I would educate, grade one class or a grade to class, I broke it down into this example and I said, okay, you're going to do a free throw, well, the first thing before shooting the free throw is to take a few deep breaths and calm your mind. A person who knows how to calm and quiet their mind, it is a fundamental and monumental distinction in the quality of your consciousness and the quality of your life to be able to have that tiny little gap there, it is massive. And it is a massive difference in your free will and massive difference in your freedom and how you navigate life. The second thing is teach them to visualize a shot going in and what that does is says, hey, you influence your reality, your powerful, if you intend something, if you visualize something you're going to increase the probability of your success, you have this force, that's around you. Number three, is you miss the shot, so if you miss the shot, what's the most powerful and positive perspective you can have? So it's not always going to be life is not successful it's a series of infinite failures by how do you respond to those failures and finally the lead the Zen aspect or the Mastery aspect is, can you be whole and complete and so full of self-love and harmonious in the process? And so, one of the examples I give is like, you know, my daughter's to now is she good enough when she's two or she good enough when she's four, she good enough when she's ten, you know, she good enough when she goes into high school, is she good enough when she gets into University? Or when she graduates is she good enough when she starts her first business, or gets her first job, or gets her first race? And somewhere along these, by this line were supposed to be adults, right? We're supposed to be, oh, well, now we've got to figure it out and we're no longer children but really, we are children. I've interviewed people who are ninety years old, had tons of life experiences and where eternal students and, you know, the wiser you get the less you actually know you only know a little bit of a little bit. So it's can you be harmonious with wherever you are in the process? Whether you're twelve or twenty-five, forty-six or fifty-four? Whatever the case is because it's going and it's never ending, we have this impulse to grow. So, as far as quieting, the mind there are so many ways to do it, there's infinite courses, just do three deep breaths, that's one thing you can do, just do three deep breaths, if you want to go out and nature, go for a walk somewhere, quiet. Your mind is going to kind of go nuts, but that's okay to you, there's so many breakthroughs in music and binaural beats and all these different tools you can use. Sit down, get on some Silvio sound bowls, right? You can find them up, you know Tibetan gongs. I remember actually being in Nepal and I got to sit I wasn’t; I didn't know if I was allowed to sit in because they were doing ohms so they said, sit in and so they have these gongs and these, I don't know, maybe one hundred or two hundred of them, they were doing these ohms and the reverberation of the sound was so intense it felt like from the center, like your solar plexus, you know, how you kind of got that winded or that if you go over a whoop, like, you have that scared, feeling that kind of goes up, it felt my body was dematerializing and then materializing not in like fallen, but like in a light way, like I felt like I was vibrating into nothing and then coming back in as I've, oh my goodness what is going on? This is amazing and so you could just do something like that. So we don't need to overcomplicate it, it's not about going into some mystical land although it does happen if you practice quite a bit, just use something nice and simple that you resonate with and do it as a practice, but you need to learn how to quiet the mind and have this little space before you respond and that's what separates us from animals. Animals are just instinctual, but for us, we have this gap of choice, right? Somebody says, hey, you're a bearded fool, I hate you. You know, I could be like well if you, you know, whatever and throw a stick at them, or I can just wait a second, have a breath and then choose my response in that scenario.

Michael: I love that and I think that I teach this to people all the time, pause and breathe, you have to pause and breathe before you don’t want to act, you don't want to going to be reactive, right? One of the things that came to mind as you said that, I remember you talked about these potential outer body out of body experiences. I wasn't Ubud Indonesia and I was in a sound Bowl meditation, and I'd very similar experience where suddenly my body, and my soul seemed to remove each other from themselves, and then come back together. And I know for some people that sounds like, woo, woo, hippie bullshit, but I will tell you right now, I am not whoo-hoo hippie, there's no sage in my house, I don't have any crystals but the deeper I've gotten into my own consciousness, the deeper I've gotten into allowing myself to live within the space of this reality and tap into really the healing benefits of sound and momentum and vibration the closer I've been able to connect with my body. So I would suggest anyone if you have the opportunity to do something like a sound Bowl healing meditation or a gong, or ohm, go and do it because I was also skeptical, dude, I can't tell you how fucking skeptical I was and then, the more I did it and the more I felt the impact of it the more I was like, there are something to this, And in that I started to kind of feel like I was and you might relate to this a lot, I felt like I was bridging this gap between like reality and then my performance and my life and you know, it felt like the deeper I got into consciousness with myself and my body I was approaching what I would dare call flow state and I know that such a big part of the nomenclature of high-performance athletes and Olympians, and people who are high performers in general is that terminology Flow State. And I know that's a big part of what you talked about for those listening, who really, don't know, or maybe they've heard it in passing can you dive into this and let's talk about what Flow State means, how you bring that into your life and how you navigate it?

Matthew: Yeah, absolutely. And I just comment on what you said because I feel like it's important. You know, when you do these sound bowls, are you hear about these mystical experiences? Most people believe, they only have one Consciousness and this is kind of their stress or default Consciousness, which is mostly just based on fulfilling tasks, they have no space in there. And so what are, what are their sound bowl or whatever the case is, the idea is just to experience a different Consciousness where you quiet that inner mind, you quiet that inner critic so then what is the thing observing. And it's just experimenting with that space a little bit because it's a very different experience than you going about your day and so it's also important to realize, it can be a little bit of a mystical thing but though just kind of happened few and far between that's not the goal; the goal is to training, the goal is the recognition as you now understand that there's this deeper part of you, how do you carry that higher self? You know, the honorable self, the virtuous self, the right decisions, quote unquote, you know, being honorable as you move through life, that's really the challenge. I used to think enlightenment was floating around on a cloud and I would just be like Jesus or Buddha or something, and it's not like that, it's just doing my best to do the right thing each and every moment of each and every day, and to maintain my integrity and not compromise that.

So, Flow State, I love; I've always been curious about the limits of human potential, what can I do? What are humans capable of? What am I capable of? And when Flow State came out a kind of annoyed me because everyone was like, oh, well, you do this technique and then you're in the Flow State and what I've come to believe is that flow state is a process and you can you can use tools to enhance that. So I would teach some of my athletes that were Olympians or you know, extreme sports athletes are different than every other asked athlete because they have to manifest reality in that very moment and their body is on the line. So if I'm telling a NBA player how to shoot free throws use visualization and these positive cues and all these different techniques, well if he misses the free throw, he's not going to break both his legs simultaneously, right? But in extreme sports, you might do that and so I have this one athlete, Brody Carmichael who is a freestyle Motocross rider and he reached out to me because he fell on a front flip on his motorcycle and he said, hey man, I heard you're good at what you do, I want to land a front flip front and a couple front flip variations. And so we went over some of the stuff he was doing in his mind set was pretty strong then I said you can read my book and it'll be helpful, but you don't have to and you can do my course will be helpful, but you don't have to. All you have to do is visualize this trick every single day for an hour. If you do that, there's going to come a point where, you know, you can land it at that point, go ahead and go do the trick. So three weeks later, he lands the front flip in competition, three weeks after that he lands the world's first front-flip heel clicker, on a motorcycle three weeks after that he lands the world's first, front flip superman on a motorcycle and he wasn't even practicing it into a foam pit, he was going around schools, you know, do an inspirational speaking and stuff.

So that to me kind of sums up like – one element to Flow State, but there's all these other factors that play so he had hours of visualization, right?

So, what I mapped it out for Zen athlete which applies to everything, it could be Zen music, it can be Zen entrepreneurship and basically what I transition to was teaching this peak performance element to finding your life purpose because it doesn't matter if you have peak performance, but you don't know what you want to build. You know, it's more important to know exactly what you want to build and have no idea how to build it then to be building something that's not meaningful to you, right? So, how can I teach people as Peak Performance mindset stuff to the most meaningful thing to their heart and soul without any distortion from the environment, without any fear, without any influence, that is not them and to have them have the courage to actually follow through. And so, you know, I broke it down into elements that are quite simple dedication, it has to inspire you, focus your quality of work, meditation, being able to quiet the mind, visualization, being able to see the future that you want to do belief. What do you believe about it?

So many people have so many limiting beliefs and they're so little, once you analyze them and pluck them out, you know, working on limiting beliefs is not that challenging we just aren't taught these tools and how to remove them and then install the most powerful beliefs that we can to succeed in whatever we want to see succeed in. Then you have simulation, nutrition and fitness and that's taking care of your body, you know, understanding what you put in and you use this as a cycle, with each of these elements, if one is way off and you improve it as a whole cycle then you really are moving towards Peak Performance and Flow State and that way when you go to perform, right? If I'm going into a boxing match, it's not like I'm going into the ring and I've got Flow State and I'm going to beat this guy up who used all these things it's on the way to the ring, now using these refined tools for this moment in time continuing to tell myself, okay, here we go and it all becomes automatic, it becomes reactionary but you train yourself into that level of Mastery; it's not like it just happens, you know, but we also have the instinctual thing.

I use the example, if a tiger comes in and tries to get you will all be doing parkour because the body actually has an intelligence, right? We don't think about all the things we need to do to get away from the tiger, we'd be hanging with two fingers from the Lamppost if it came up like, how the heck did it do that? So you're gauging with this infinite intelligence with it, which is within the body and that's where the whole free will spirit soul thing comes in. You know, what is your soul and heart telling you to do? Who are you really? Are you compromising that? Are you telling yourself a story? Oh, because of this, because of that, because of money because of my what will I do and you let all that go and you be who you truly are and you add these elements to it over maybe not even six months, maybe not a year, maybe not two years, but over five, then, fifteen, twenty years, you'll leave a legacy, and when you leave this planet, you'll know that you did the thing that you wanted to do. You'll be proud. You'll be fulfilled. You'll know you honored your life and what you came here to do.

Michael: That's everything right? I think about this, every day that's the most important. Like my number one fear in life is that I'm going to die with regret, because I didn't push myself into the discomfort that I needed to push myself into to create massive change in my life. And so, I always try this every every single day. I'm like – how do I push myself harder? How do I try something? So incredibly uncomfortable, that makes my palms sweaty, right? You know what I mean. And you touched on something that I really that, I'm going to go into a little bit deeper here that I want people to hear that in passing probably just skipped over them because they go, yeah, I hear this all the time. Visualization is such an incredibly important technique partly because the brain doesn't know the the difference between what you're forcing into it and reality and when I think about some of the greatest things I've ever done in my life, where I've been on stages in front of ten thousand people, where I've won awards, where I've even done things I didn't think my body was physically capable of doing, it started with me thinking about it and just going through it, and practicing it in my head, the moment, the smells, the feelings, the emotions, everything that came along with that moment and I remember sometimes I'd be in this rooms and people would be like, yeah, I'm gonna win this competition, I'm gonna do that thing but in my head I was like – well, I already wrote one that's impossible for you, I'm sorry, you'll get it next time. And then I would go up there and I would win and that's not a callous thing, that's not a selfish thing, that's nothing other than just instilling this unbelievable amount of self-belief through the visualization because I believe that there's something to this idea. I have deja vu all the time, Matt because I'm like – what I do is I put myself in that situation and when it comes to pass, honestly, I'm not surprised because I've done it so many times. Now, of course, there's hard work involved in that, there's practice involved in that, you can't visualize yourself into success singularly, there's a lot to it. But one of the things that I've often thought about in visualization is that it's very practical and helping you navigate fear and helping you move through and changing your mindset around what you're capable of doing. What are your thoughts on that not only necessary, just to the practice of visualization because we talked about it but how do you navigate fear? How do you step into changing your mindset about what you do believe that you're capable of doing?

Matthew: Those are all fantastic comments and I totally agree. It reminded me of Mike Tyson and somebody asked him, why don't you celebrate when you knock somebody out? And he says; because that's what's supposed to happen. And so visualizations, incredibly powerful tool and completely underutilized, it's used in martial arts has been used for thousands of years for high performers of various tactics and it's something that most people don't engage in and the reason why is because they can't see the immediate benefit but when I work with an extreme sports athlete somebody like Brody Carmichael or who if they perform the task and they fail, they get seriously harmed, they are very eager to explore anything that will increase the probability of their success and when they start doing it, they realize how amazing it is. One of the people that I coached was a girl named Sophie Turnertskie and I'm trying not to butcher her name, hopefully, it's pretty close, but she would have the Olympics were in she would have basically one this year, she was only about thirteen at the time. And when we started working together, she was using it, she said, it's kind of like magic, right? And I was like, yeah, it's exactly what it's like. And so the first thing is you need to get clear on who you are and what you want to do when I was younger I would focus a lot on my snowboarding skills and martial arts skills and traveling, in my journals I would write down, I want to travel to these countries, want to train with these people, all of my journals for everything I wrote down has happened basically more or less some stuff, you know hasn't exactly happened but a lot of it has. And so then you take those goals and you write them into affirmations, you can say I love the idea of I'm traveling the world, this is who I'm becoming and we begin to create who we want to be over time. We get to choose that each and every day who we create and then you know, for people this is really challenging, it's so easy once you have those affirmations of what you want to do, right? You could write out goals that are physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, relationship,  whatever the case is, but you want to get down to what's most important.

So, one of the examples is when I left college and started traveling the world. I wanted to snowboard every single day for myself and so, I could have said, well, I'm going to work this job and I'm going to make enough money then I'll go to Whistler but what I did is I went to Whistler, I became a snowboard instructor, the first year I kind of coached people that were, you know, okay, and then the second year started to coach, basically mostly Snowboard Park, which I wanted to snowboard and then, the third year, I had an online business, I was coaching mostly privately in a snowboarding every day for myself. So it was this progression in time but the affirmations and how I would visualize that would be a constant part of my practice.

So it's such an underutilized thing just to set some goals, know who you are, right? Some information’s and then just do a guided visualization for yourself and you could use some music, you can do help people, these meditations very simple, you know, just relax your mind; there's lots of ways to calm your mind and calm your body. But going into fear is such an important thing. Fear is the biggest blocker of all dreams in the first thing to do is again, figure out where you want to go, then start to analyze all those beliefs and so many people, I worked with this all I couldn't do that and has to do with the perception of other people and it's weird because one of these people I was working with was a writer, very talented writer, wouldn't put anything out there and I was like well, if you can get to the point where everybody, you know, tells you that you suck at writing and they give you a handwritten letter and you still right now you're on point because it has nothing to do with the result. It has to do with you honoring who you are and you're the only one who's going to be able to dishonor that for whatever reason, you want to make up because you're afraid of what my what people might say and most likely is not going to happen. So the first thing about fears is to write them all down, what are they? Are they as bad as you think then say? Okay. Is there a way that I can educate myself? Can I improve this thing? So if you have the knowledge, right? All knowledge, all fear comes from lack of knowledge, right? Just when I was thinking about some of the nonsense is going on in Canada, you know, they're destroying the food lines in the farms and stuff like, oh my goodness, what if there's a food shortage? Then I think, okay, well, how do I make sure I have food and then I just like, well, if I knew how to hunt and I knew how to do these things, I would be no longer afraid and so when I started to educate myself, I felt more empowered, it's just like martial arts in knowing those things, being able to defend myself, I don't want to fight ever, I'll run really fast in the opposite direction. But if I have to, I'm going to feel more confident, not good, not comfortable but the fear is much less as it go around these different environments, including traveling the world, where I've had a gun held to my head where, I've had a talk down, a man with a machete was going to kill another man and the body just went into action through the training to solve those situations through, simply words know physical action had to happen, but it was the training that allowed that to unfold. So really just with fear, writing it down, seeing it because it's way more frightening behind you face it what will be the worst case scenario and then what? And that's why when I work with people following their dreams, I go, okay, what if you follow your dreams and you fail then what? What if you're a homeless on the side of the street? Are you going to get a job? Are you going to figure it out? They're like, yeah, like great, so it's not that scary. You would figure it out, you get to that next step. And the other example, I like to give is like, okay, just imagine, you have five years of your life, right? And you had everything you ever wanted, right?

But all of a sudden, you go blind, right? Now that you're blind, you can give all up that that fame and that fortune and everything, but you can get your sight back. Are you going to give your site back to go back to square one and just work at McDonald's or you going to stay rich and everybody goes, I want my sight back, I want my legs back, right? If I say I now you've lost both legs, you can't walk, you want your legs back or you want your fame and riches always, they want those back because we're so blessed just to be alive and to experience and to grow but what happens is we get pacified through various means and so it does take some inner will some inner tenacity, some inner knowing, some going against these fears in these influences so we can create who we were meant to be and that's up to us and we know who that is and the inside we just have to keep searching for it and moving towards it moving towards that feeling.

Michael: Yeah, very powerful man, and I am in total agreement with you; it's beautifully well said. One of the things I always think about in this, is this, commit first figure out the rest later, because once you do that, fear starts to go to the wayside. My friend, amazing conversation before I ask you my last question, can you tell everybody where they can find you?

Matthew: Yeah, they can go to mattbelair.com and also link tree forward slash maple, you going to get all my stuff over there and there's some meditations and even the quantum heart hypnosis, if people want to experience that, and anything that I've ever created, if they want that, you know, they're welcome to have it. Hopefully it will help them, you know, live a more empowering life.

Michael: Beautiful, my friend and my last question for you is, what does it mean to you to be unbroken?

Matthew: Does the not give up, I said. Just don't give up persevere, get up over life is failure and you know in skateboarding and extreme sports, you know, especially skateboarding is only failure, right? So just keep getting up, keep trying and you'll get there and even if you don't the process in itself is beautiful and worth it.

Michael: Amazing, my friend. Thank you so much for being here.

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