Dr. Joe Vitale has said, Being ruthlessly honest with yourself helps you discover your passion, and passion is the fuel that brings you new levels of success.
Passion is your guidance system that leads you to change. Passion adds fire to the Law of Attraction. Passion is one of the key principles of change.
Joe is an expert in the Law of Attraction, and has been featured in the movie and book phenomenon, The Secret. He’s been featured on Larry King Live twice, in Newsweek, and in TV, radio, newspaper articles, and magazine articles all across
the country. Dr. Joe Vitale is the president of Hypnotic Marketing, Inc. and is the world’s first hypnotic marketer.
He has been involved with every aspect of marketing from traditional direct mail to publicity to infomercials. It’s his combination of spiritual depth with material success that has lead people to call him the ‘Buddha of the Internet.’ As well, after his huge weight loss some years ago, he was also dubbed the ‘Charles Atlas of the Internet.’ Joe’s marketing methods have made people millionaires, and his deep insights into the nature of life have changed the lives of people all over
the world.
He has authored many books including the number one bestsellers, The Attractor Factor, 5 Easy Steps for Creating Wealth (or Anything Else) from the Inside Out, and Life’s Missing Instruction Manual: The Guidebook You Should Have Been Given at Birth. His Nightingale-Conant audio program called The Power of Outrageous Marketing is also a number-one bestseller, and his latest book, Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Peace and More, will be released at the end of June.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Joe, thank you so much for joining us tonight. It really is an honor and a privilege to have you with us.
JOE VITALE: Thank you. I felt like I was in the middle of a stadium. There are thousands of people on this call. It’s very much a global experience. I’m amazed and astonished and grateful with so many people calling all over the world at all hours. This is an amazing moment.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: I know. Isn’t it such fun? I have to tell you, every couple of weeks when we do these calls and we have people from all over the world just as you said, the first 10 minutes are some of my most fun times to get to connect with the people who are calling in from all over.
JOE VITALE: I can understand that. I was smiling while I was hearing people calling in from Wales and Turkey. I didn’t know you were in Germany at two in the morning. I’m impressed.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: This is my passion, Joe. What can I say?
JOE VITALE: Good for you. That’s what it takes.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Yes. Joe, will you tell us how your passions, the things that are most important to you, led you to the work that you’re doing today?
JOE VITALE: I do a lot of different things, so we’d have to narrow in on exactly what my work is today. I would say the number one thing that I do that I’m known for that I think is my primary passion and my prime directive is being an author. I wanted to be an author when I was a teenager. I had gone through a phase where I wanted to be a lot of different things from a detective to a
magician, to an attorney at one point, an actor at another point, a ventriloquist at another point.
I went through all of these different phases. At some point, it was along the time I met Rod Serling, who was the man who wrote most of The Twilight Zone episodes and invented that series. If you’re old enough to remember, you were probably haunted by a few of those psychological thrillers that he penned. I met him when I was a kid, and I was severely disappointed because he was human.
I expected him to be god-like. I decided right then and there that what I really wanted to do was to write. I loved books. It was a passion of mine. I really was juiced whenever I came across a great story, whether it was science fiction at that time or a biography like of Houdini, some of the things that excited me. I was very passionate about psychology. One of the books that influenced me was The Magic of Believing by Claude Bristol.
I believe it was when I was in my teenage years that I decided I wanted to be an author. I passionately pursued that. I still passionately live that today. Many people will say, What do you owe your success to? I’ll say, Really, the number one thing is I’ve always followed my driving enthusiasm. Whatever I was interested in, whether it was a person, place or thing, I followed it.
I passionately pursued it rarely knowing where it was going to take me. When I was passionately interested in a lost advertising genius by the name of Bruce Barton, I researched him for two years. This was two years when I pretty much dismissed everything else in my life. I was passionately researching this man who had founded BBDO, one of the largest advertising agencies in the world.
That led to me writing a book called The Seven Lost Secrets of Success. That book’s gone through 19 printings. It’s going to be coming out later this year as a revised edition. My point is, when I was following my passion about Bruce Barton and my curiosity about him, I did not know it was going to end up being a book. This has really been my recipe for success: follow my passion and
everything else seems to fall into place.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: That’s so cool. A lot of people tell us, Joe, that they just don’t know how to make a living following their passions. You’ve made an incredible good living following your passions. Would you go back to that time when your passions were just hobbies or just somehow not your primary source of income? Tell us how you made your first dollar following those passions. How did you get started earning an income doing what you love?
JOE VITALE: That’s a big question. I remember Jack Benny, who was a famous radio and early TV comedian. When he was in his eighties he was on a talk show and somebody asked him, and it might have been Johnny Carson, he asked, Can you
remember the very first laugh you got as a comedian? Jack Benny was quiet for the longest time. He was known to be able to do this deadpan for the longest time.
He finally came back and said, I’m 80 years old. I can’t remember my first anything, let alone my first laugh. I’m a little bit like that. My first dollar? Gee, I don’t remember my first dollar. But I have to admit, I have to confess, that by following my passion I did not become an overnight success. I had to take a lot of jobs that were feeding, and I was married at the time, so me and my wife at the time, and doing the survival thing as I kept pursuing my passion.
I want to quickly clarify this because I don’t believe everybody who follows their passion has to go through a two-decade experience of depression and struggle before they make a living at it.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Thank goodness for that. Thank you.
JOE VITALE: Yes. What happens is we have a lot of beliefs about deservingness. We have beliefs about following our passions. We have beliefs about what we can earn and how we can make money doing a particular thing. Those beliefs are what put us in a box and put a lid on our experience. My own understanding is that once I take care of the beliefs that are in the way of me
making money by following my passion, then I make money following my passion.
I had to pursue it for a long time. I did. I was homeless at one point. I was in poverty for a very long time. I never gave up the idea I wanted to be an author. I never gave up the pursuit of following my passion, but I was deeply struggling during those years. As I look back, my own understanding, my own awakening is realizing that I had self-worth issues. I was breaking from my family.
Nobody in my family wrote books. Nobody read books. I was the only one doing that. I left my family. I went 2,000 miles away. So I was doing this very much on my own. I was dealing with all these self-esteem, self-worth, self-value type issues, and prosperity issues and poverty issues. All of those were what put a ceiling on my ability to make money from my passion. Again, yes you can make money from your passion, but you have to be clear about receiving what’s going to come to you.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Can you talk to us a little bit about that because if it’s really our beliefs that keeping any of us from enjoying a rich rewarding life, how do you go about changing those? How do you make that shift?
JOE VITALE: That’s the million-dollar question. I get asked it a lot, so let me talk about it in a couple ways. First of all, I think we all have this internal limit. It’s self-imposed. I gave a talk a while back where I called it the ‘missing secret.’ I was confessing to people that I started making money from my writing, I was on the speaking circuit, and I was having money come by me being an entrepreneur and being a free spirit.
But I noticed that I kept hitting this ceiling. I thought, How can there be a ceiling on my income? How can there be any sort of limit? I’m an entrepreneur. There shouldn’t be any limit at all. There’s no barrier there. As I looked at it, I
thought, Wow. I wasn’t comfortable making more money than my father. When I looked at that, I thought my father had struggled.
He worked on the railroad for 30-some years. In fact, his birthday was yesterday. He is 82 years old. He struggled throughout all of that time period making whatever the hourly wage was. He probably went on salary at one point, but he worked a tremendous amount of hours that brought down that pay per hour. Here I am making money by writing, sending articles out, having books, speaking, and selling things in the back of the room.
Unconsciously, and this is the real catcher here, unconsciously there was this self-imposed limit that was whispering in my ear, Joe, you can’t make more money than your father. What will that say about your dad? What will that say about you? I had to stop and look at that belief and say, Okay, what is my father going to think if I make more money than him?
The reality was, he wants nothing but the best for me. All of our parents want nothing but the best for us. We usually withhold our good and our success from them because in some ways we’re even punishing them. We don’t want to do better than them. We don’t want to show that they were right. I had to look at all of this and think, Wait a minute. My father wants the best for me. He’s not going to be jealous. He’s not going to be ashamed. He’s actually going to applaud me.
He will be on the sidelines rooting me on. He’ll say, Joe, go make more. Go have fun. Live a good life. That’s what I want for you. As I released that internal belief-and that’s all it is; it’s a belief, it’s a thought that I gave energy to-I was able to make more money. Now at this point, the sky is the limit and I even tell people, The sky’s not even a limit. There are no limits.
The sky itself is a self-imposed limit. There are no limits. You can just keep going as long as you are okay with it. This raises the other question. How do you find the beliefs within yourself that need to be changed so you can live a life of passion and make a great deal of money, if that’s what you want from following your passion? I say they’re not so hard to find.
I say that you sit and you ask yourself some reflective questions like, What might be some beliefs that would keep me from making money from my passion? At first there may be nothing that shows up, but if you sit with it in a meditative type way, a belief will come up. It will probably be some of the general cultural ones like money is evil. Money, of course, is not evil.
Money is neutral. It’s actually just paper or coin. There’s nothing there except what we empower it with. If we think it’s evil, we’ve bought into a belief. As soon as we recognize what the belief is, I encourage people to question it. The way I
question them is to say, There’s a belief that says that money is evil; or all rich people are greedy; or if I have a lot of money I’ll just blow it, waste it, or I’ll do bad things with it.
Who knows whatever the beliefs are that come up for people listening. I’ll say, Do I believe it? When you bring it into your conscious awareness you may quickly say, No, I don’t believe that one, and it may go with the wind. But you may also have the alternative experience where you say, Yes, I do believe that. I do believe that rich people are greedy, so I don’t want to be greedy. Or money is not spiritual so I don’t want to be materialistic.
Then you ask yourself, Why do I believe that? When I was on Larry King the first time, I told all the listeners, You need to become a belief detective. You’re looking for the beliefs that are inhibiting your ability to make money from your passion. When you find them, you question them. As you dig a little bit, being Socrates here, investigating why the belief is in your life, you
unearth your own evidence for the belief.
This is the most freeing, magical thing. It’s your own evidence. You bought a belief at some point along the way, and sometimes it’s from your parents, sometimes it’s from the school system, sometimes it’s from just being in a culture, sometimes it’s from the television shows. I watched Gilligan’s Island when I was a kid. If you remember, the rich people were very stuffy.
They were not very likeable. They were very greedy. Though they did not tell you money is bad or it’s going to ruin you, you absorbed subconsciously the message that, I don’t want to be rich because if I’m rich I’m going to be like these fools here, and they’re not likeable. All of these are beliefs that we’ve taken on. I tell people, Slow down. Do some internal investigative work.
I’m also a great believer that if you feel that you’re not going as deep as you can on your own, get a coach. In my book The Attractor Factor I coined the term ‘miracles coach.’ I even started www.MiraclesCoaching.com to help people with this. I still do this today. I
am constantly looking within myself to say, What might there be in the way of beliefs that are holding me back from doing even bigger things or even better things?
If I can’t find it or do it on my own, I go to a miracles coach, too. This is one of my formulas for success. I’m always following my passions, but I’m always cleaning the beliefs with help or without help in order to be able to make money and to enjoy my passion.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: What exactly is a miracles coach? What does a miracles coach do for one?
JOE VITALE: A miracles coach, the way I defined it, is somebody who objectively, lovingly listens to you talk looking for the beliefs that are in your own words. When we have conversations we will say our beliefs are, but because they’re our beliefs we won’t even recognize them. Something will happen and you’ll mumble, I knew something bad was going to happen because I was on a
good luck streak, and you’ll let it slide.
That’s a belief. If somebody who is lovingly listening to you could say, One moment, please. Let’s back up and look at what you just said, because that may not be serving you. A miracles coach is somebody who is listening. I was inspired by this way back in the late-70s or early-80s when I was studying the Option Process. The Option Process is a way of discovering beliefs and releasing them.
It was popularized by Barry Neil Kaufman in a book called To Love Is To Be Happy With. It’s been popularized by dear friends of mine like Mandy Evans, who’s written a lot of books. These are people I turn to when I want to get past some beliefs. They are a type of miracles coach to me. Again, it’s anybody really who can lovingly, in a non-attached way, listen to you to help reflect what your belief system is so you can look at it.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: That’s great. Thank you for that. Joe, when I first heard about you I was told you were just an incredible marketer on the Internet. Yet, as I’ve looked at your books and read some of them, they’re works of profound philosophy about how to live a fulfilled, happy life. How do you integrate these two seemingly disparate things? Many people see the spiritual world, spiritual life and the deep philosophical thinking and Internet marketing as being virtually on opposite ends of the scale. How do you integrate those things?
JOE VITALE: That’s a great question too, a very perceptive question. The truth is for me, they’re not separate at all. In fact, the spiritual and the material are two sides of the same coin. Everything that we see out there, whether you look at money, you look at people, you look at products or whatever, that’s the hard version of the spiritual. The spiritual is within it. There’s no
separation.
In my marketing life for the longest time I secretly was using what we’ll call the Law of Attraction, the Power of Visualization, the ability to call on spirit to get results done. I say secretly because I was working for very conservative companies. I was writing books for conservative publishers like the American Marketing Association, the American Management Association, and
Nightingale-Conant.
I didn’t want to breathe out there that, Hey, I kind of do woo-woo stuff. I kept it a secret. To my amazement, when I would tell it within the privacy of close friends or a few clients I felt comfortable with, they always lit up. In many ways their own passions seemed to get ignited when they realized that I was actually bringing heart to the business I was doing. This was an important
distinction because it ties into passion.
A lot of people who tell me marketing is evil, selling is terrible, they hate to sell, or they hate to market are coming from a place where there’s no passion in what they want to do. I’ll do my best to be clear about this. I think marketing and selling works best when your passion for your product or service is being clearly articulated so the people who will most welcome hearing about it when your message reaches them.
This is when marketing and selling is totally spiritual and totally passionate and totally alive. My favorite example, and this is really going on a lot now with the movie out there, The Secret, is that lots of people are telling everybody and their brother and their sister and their dog, Watch the movie The Secret. You have to see The Secret. The Secret is changing lives. The Secret is teaching you how to create these new things in your life that you couldn’t have
before because of the Law of Attraction.
When they tell people to go watch the movie, they’re marketing that movie. They’re selling that movie, but they’re doing it in a way they may not have recognized before. They’re doing it from their heart. They’re doing it from their passion. They’re doing it from their enthusiasm. That’s what marketing should always be.
The people who are out there who are trying to market or sell a product they don’t believe in are shooting themselves in the foot. They’re not doing a service to themselves. They’re not doing a service to their customers. They’re not getting the results that they want. They’re not selling. That’s when marketing and selling becomes a pain. That’s when marketing and selling is dragging around a dead horse, and everybody’s complaining about it.
I am a spiritual marketer, which was the original title of The Attractor Factor. It was called Spiritual Marketing. I rewrote it. I changed the title when a big publisher picked it up. That became The Attractor Factor. For me, marketing and spirituality are not separate. The material and the spiritual are not separate. The spiritual is inside of me.
If you just looked at the physical part of me, you’d just think, There’s material Joe. Inside of me is the spiritual, which is animating everything I am doing. That’s the same thing with the books. That’s the same thing with cars. That’s the same thing with people, with houses, whatever you want to name. It is not separate. The spiritual is in the material. It’s what animates it and gives it life.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: That’s fabulous. This is called the Passion Series and you’ve been talking a lot about passion. I know many of our listeners know that material success is related to passion. We’ve talked a lot in these interviews about passion being fundamental to achieving material success. Would you talk for a minute about the relationship between passion and that inner value that you’ve just been discussing of spirituality?
JOE VITALE: Yes. Passion for me is the sign that you are on your path. This is incredibly earthshaking if you’ve never heard it before. This is the way to the kingdom. Passion is the signpost that tells you that you are on your road. You are doing what you are here to do. I really believe that we are all divinely orchestrated to play a certain part in the world.
We know what that part is. We have a piece of the puzzle. If we all play our pieces of the puzzle, the whole world comes together in this very harmonious way. How do you know what your piece of the puzzle is? By looking at your heart. When you feel alive, juiced, enthusiastic, blissful and passionate, when you feel that passion, that is the sign on the road that says, You are on the right path.
Joseph Campbell is known for saying, Follow your bliss. The larger quote that that one line was taken from went on to say, When you follow your bliss, which to me is following your passion or following your heart, following your love, when you follow it, it seems like the rest of the world orchestrates things so that your life is easy. It becomes effortless.
It doesn’t mean you don’t take action. It doesn’t mean you don’t do things that look like an effort to other people, but they’re effortless because you don’t have resistance within yourself for them. You are on your path. Passion, to me, is the great gift from the Divine that tells you that you are on the right road for you.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Fabulous. Thank you. You have mentioned tonight the movie The Secret. Of course, you were featured in both the book and the movie very prominently. Will you talk with us a little bit about the relationship between The Secret and the rest of your work? I know the Law of Attraction is integral to your work. I also know that there’s a lot more to it. Will you talk a little
bit about the relationship between them?
JOE VITALE: I’m very glad you asked me that. I mean that because it gives me a chance to vent a little bit and to clarify things a little bit. There’s a whole movement that absolutely loves the movie The Secret. I love the movie. I’m so honored to be a part of it. I really believe that movie can help awaken humanity. I really believe that. It stirs people to realize they have more power than they ever thought before.
At the same time, I know there’s a movement of people who criticize it. They criticize it all the time. They say it’s incomplete, the Law of Attraction doesn’t work, or any number of things that they come up with. The first thing I want to say is the Law of Attraction is simply one law. The movie The Secret, as beautiful as it is, is not the be-all and end-all to all the laws of the universe.
This is why I told everybody, and I surprised Larry King the second time I was on-I didn’t know he didn’t know there was going to be a sequel to the movie-there’s going to be a sequel. He’s wanting to know more, and I said, I don’t have anything more. I just know there’s going to be a sequel because the Law of Attraction is only one law, and the movie The Secret was based on it. There
are other laws.
There’s naturally going to be more material coming out. I’m also somebody who says The Secret, which describes the Law of Attraction, doesn’t tell you that if you’re not clear within yourself about the things you say you want, even if your passion is there, if you have internal blocks about receiving it, you will block it from coming. Then you’ll say, The Law of Attraction doesn’t work.
I say the Law of Attraction is a law and it always works. There’s no exception. Whatever you have is what you attracted. If it’s
something you felt you didn’t really want, that’s on a conscious level. On an unconscious level, you most certainly wanted it. This is why I think the miracles coaching and belief-clearing is so important. I call this the ‘missing secret.’
Once you look within yourself and you find out what might be blocking something from coming into your life with the Law of
Attraction, you remove the barrier and then it comes into your life. I’m spending a lot of my time writing books to explain this. Of course, Zero Limits comes out at the end of the month, which we’ll get to talk about
later. I also finished a book that will come out at the end of the year called
The Key which is the missing secret to attracting whatever you want.
It’s very much about this whole concept that you have counter-intentions within yourself that will block your receiving the very thing you say you want. My best evidence for that is think back to January 1st. Everybody says, I’m not going to eat dessert anymore, I’m going to work out at the gym, I’m never going to smoke again, or whatever the resolutions were. You stated intentions. Those were clear intentions.
You had the best of intentions when you stated those intentions, but on January 2nd you can’t remember the gym, you can’t
locate your keys to go work out, you’re smoking again and forgot all about it. What happened? What happened is that you had counter-intentions within you. When those counter-intentions are clear, then you get your stated intentions.
As much as I love the movie The Secret-and I will always praise and promote that movie; I love Rhonda, I loved being in the movie, I love the movie-I will also say there’s more to the story. They’re more steps, more secrets, more laws and this whole business of the missing secret, about counter-intentions and cleaning them, is one very powerful aspect to success.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Fabulous. So we have a lot to look forward to here.
JOE VITALE: I’m excited. Yes, I can’t wait for the movie to come out.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Great. You touched on this a little earlier. I know you’ve said it in other ways and other places, that living a happy, healthy, wealthy life is an easy thing. It’s not a difficult thing at all. Many people in the world would say their experience is it’s not easy at all. How can you say that living a fulfilled, rich, rewarding life is easy?
