Robin Sharma: ON How To Release Your Toxic Beliefs & Getting Back To Your Higher Nature (Part 1)

Reference Podcast: ON PURPOSE with Jay Shetty; Episode 97, 13-January-2020

I guess it’s very natural for most of us to share with the world what appeals to us the most. Going by this philosophy, I did not even have to blink while deciding which podcast episode I would choose as the very first to analyze and share with you all. It had to be this one, because this very episode became my inspiration to start my new initiative ‘The Podcast Compendium’, in which I plan to share the analysis of one podcast episode on a weekly / once-in-two-weeks basis. So, here I am, starting with sharing my first one. Happy reading!

This episode mainly revolves around the latest book titled ‘The 5 AM Club’ by Robin. Personally, for me, it is one of the best treatise on how to serve others. That’s what precisely prompted me to take this initiative. Since this episode is pretty long (total listening time of 1:03:20), I’ve decided to present it in two parts, starting with Part 1 as this blog.

The episode starts with Robin mentioning that he has had the opportunity to study great women and men of the world and the one thing they had in common is that they were early risers. He adds that his life transformed when he discovered this revolutionary 5 AM routine and how he has helped one of the most successful people maximize their productivity, activate their best health and bulletproof their serenity in this age of overwhelming complexity, by dialing-in this routine. Robin lays emphasis on the way you begin the day sets-up the way the day unfolds, and how consistently great mornings cascade into amazing days, great days build great weeks, quarters, months, and years (personally I would add great life too!). He then introduces the 20:20:20 formula as the mother of all routines. Before explaining this formula, Jay and Robin discuss how the pristine hours before the sun rises have a magic to them. I love the quotes which follows from Robin “the addiction to distraction is the death of creative production”. He explains that there are a lot of people on the planet who are giving their best hours of the finest days to the ‘white screen’ of attraction and how ‘tranquillity is the new luxury’!  He does add that while everyone has a primal genius within him/her, however ‘playing with your phone’ instead of ‘pursuing your monuments of mastery’ is betraying yourself as well as the world. Robin adds that based on his experience of working with his clients for more than two decades, he can claim that by getting up at 5 AM and running this calibrated 20:20:20 formula will take any human being to a new level of ‘creativity’, ‘productivity’, ‘prosperity’ and ‘service to humanity’.

As the conversation moves forward, Robin dives into the 20:20:20 formula where he patiently explains the belief level of most people, which is not having genes of an early riser, and how any new skill can be installed with 66 days of practice, which can make it possible for anyone to join the 5 AM club. Further Robin elaborates that the first 20 minutes pocket is called ‘Move’, why because when you sweat first thing in the morning, you release ‘BDNF’, which increases the processing ability of your brain, you also release ‘dopamine’, the inspirational neuro-transmitter. After you are on fire, use the second pocket of the formula, called ‘Reflect’, which you can use to think deeply, grounding your values, meditate, visualize, in short you anchor yourself rather than be ‘busy being busy’. The final 20 minutes pocket is about ‘Growth’ which involves reading, studying, developing your skills and most importantly developing yourself. Robin emphasizes on this point by mentioning how the billionaires are always curious and have a white-belt mentality. Robin also clarifies that as per him, this is the minimum viable morning routine and depending on the need and capability, any or all of the pockets can be stretched in time.

Robin expresses his feeling that “potential unexpressed turns to pain”. When we are born, we are born as children into awe and wonder. When we grow and become intimate with our gifts and talents, our parents doing their best to protect our feelings tell us to be practical about our expectations of what we can become. We gradually ‘get seduced by the beliefs of the people around us’ and we go from the awe and intimacy of our primal glory to a state where we get to forget who we truly are. As our dreams start to fall apart and we lose that connection with our best selves, and as we get sad and disappointed, and as we fail, a lot of us shut down. Since we don’t have a process through that pain, we repress it. Robin explains how he works with leaders throughout the world to help them move through that well of blockage within themselves. Here Robin introduces a very disruptive model called ‘The Four Interior Empires’. He challenges the common notion that everything is ‘Mindset’. He claims that ‘Mindset’ is only 25% of the ‘personal mastery equation’. While ‘Mindset’ is important, because that’s your psychology, but a great psychology with a  broken heart or heartful of pain, if you haven’t forgiven the unforgiven or if you are stuck in the past, you can be all on fire however you can sabotage yourself because your emotional life is toxic. Here Robin introduces the second interior empire as the ‘Heartset’, which he feels is going to transform people. He then adds the ‘Healthset’ as the third interior empire. He then quips that if you want to change the world then don’t die and how one of the keys to legendary is longevity. After introducing the three interior empires which are all related to the physical life, he introduces the fourth interior empire as the ‘Soulset’. He goes on to explain why ‘Soulset’ is important by mentioning that if your ego is running the day, you are never going to go up there and change the world. “A bad day for the ego is an awesome day for the soul”, he adds. Robin completes explaining that once you work on your ‘Four Interior Empires’, you go out in the world and automatically whatever you touch is golden, because “our outer success is always a function of who we are on the inside”.

Jay is excited by what Robin has just explained which prompts Jay to share what he is really fascinated by right now is healing people’s childhoods. Jay shares that he personally feels that ‘building and breaking habits should have been the first thing we learned at school’, because it feels like ‘The thing that affects our whole life’. He mentions that if we talk about any change, it’s always about habits. He further asks Robin to walk us through his approach to building and breaking habits. Robin completely agrees with Jay and ruminates that while so many subjects and languages are taught at school, why don’t they teach us ‘The Four Interior Empire’. Robin shares a few examples of how and when our heart gets broken in our childhood and early age viz. a fifth-grade child not getting invited to a birthday party while his friends are, a sixteen-year-old losing his/her love, someone starting a business at twenty two and facing a trauma. He suggests that since we are not taught at a young age as to how to work through our wounds, it shows up when we become adults, even when we become highly successful and hold responsible positions. Then Robin explains that when you do the work to release your toxic beliefs and move through your pain, by feeling it, and as you just feel through all the toxicity and the hurt and the wound and the disappointment called the human journey, what is left as you release it, you access your life, your primal genius, creativity and much more. You become more productive when you don’t have to carry this emotional baggage anymore. Robin goes on to say he believes that “the real key to success is joy and inner peace”. Many billionaires have all possible things in the world but quite a few of them are not happy. He adds that our nature is joy, peace, bliss, love, and when we release that trauma, it just shows up, because that’s what we truly are. Robin concludes that he wishes they were teaching this in school and then our leaders would be pure like Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa, and Mahatma Gandhi.

On habit installation, Robin quotes the researchers from University College of London who say that it takes 66 days for any human being to wire-in any new habit. He explains that since each one of us has a gift called neuroplasticity, so we all can do it. He further explains his model called the ‘Habit Installation Protocol’ which comprises of first 22 days of ‘destruction’ in which you destroy your existing neuro-patterns and emotional signatures of getting-up later than 5AM. He nicely dwells on how it doesn’t happen in an instant, how all change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end. The first destruction phase is 22 days, which Robin feels, since it’s hard, it’s good, that’s what real change is. With that awareness you can stay with it. The second phase is ‘installation / integration’, which is like a house renovation, which is messy, that’s why change is messy in the middle, as your old pathways and ways of being are falling apart and the best way to navigate is to let go of who you are. That’s not easy, and that’s why during habit installation, we need to have some bravery. Then you get to the third phase which is ‘implementation’. Now we are on the short roads and neuroplasticity has kicked in. The researchers call it automaticity. Robin claims that every human being can get to a place 66 days later approximately where it gets easier to get up at 5 AM!

My personal take: Until now I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the conversation between Jay and Robin. I loved the way Robin explains the 20:20:20 formula, the 66 days process divided into ‘destruction’, ‘installation / integration’ and ‘implementation’, each comprising of 22 days, the conviction with which he comments that ‘our nature is joy, peace, bliss, love, and when we release that trauma, it just shows up, because that’s what we truly are’ and the ease with which he pronounces his priceless quotations. Most importantly, he speaks all from his own personal experience and that of his global clients.

From here on, the interaction moves on to a further enhanced plane, where Robin takes the listeners to further depths, as if he is speaking to the soul and invocating the natural human nature. I will present all this in Part 2 of my blog. Till that time, I’ll leave you hungry for more…