Noah St. John:
The epiphany that literally led me to do the work that I've been doing for the last 20 plus years and what's so exciting is to see people's lives change just by virtue of changing this one thing. And so what's so exciting is when you change one thing, then everything starts to change. And that's one of the reasons we've been able to help our clients get these really incredible dramatic lifechanging transformational results.

Michael Walker:
It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high-quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution with today's music industry and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.
All right, I'm excited to be here today with the one and only Dr. Noah St. John. He's known as The Father of Afformations and the Mental Health Coach to the Stars. He's worked with Hollywood celebrities, eight-figure company CEOs, professional athletes, top executives and entrepreneurs. And specifically, he is known for helping his coaching clients make more in 12 weeks than made in the previous 12 months which is pretty awesome. And he's also appeared on over a thousand media outlets including ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, Entrepreneur Success Magazine. So holy cow, over a thousand media outlets including some of the most prominent publications that I know. Super, super cool. So really excited to connect with you today.
And we talked a little bit backstage about, because every successful person I interview on here, his first question is, "How could I provide the most value for your audience?" and so I gave him a bit of a description of who we serve here at Modern Musician. And I really think that the conversation today can be so valuable around really valuing yourself and getting your mindset in order. And for a lot of musicians, I think there's this idea of the starving artist mentality and it's somehow wrong or it's corrupt to make money with your music or be successful. And so yeah, that's a long-winded intro, but thank you so much for taking the time to be on here.

Noah St. John:
It's great to be here, Michael.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. So to get started, I'd love to just hear a little bit about you and your story and how you started Afformations.

Noah St. John:
Yeah, it really started quite by accident. I grew up poor in a rich neighborhood and I know that's a total cliche, but it's totally true. I grew up in this little town called Kennebunkport, Maine, which happens to be one of the wealthiest communities in New England, but my family was dirt poor. And I mean that literally because we lived at the bottom of a dirt road in a drafty unfinished house that my parents ended up losing to foreclosure when I was just 15 years old. So you hear these speakers, I'm sure we've all heard motivational speakers or whatever and they get on the stage and they say, "Well, we were poor, but we were happy. We didn't know we were poor."
Well, in my family, we freaking knew we were poor because my mother, bless her heart, reminded us every day that we were poor and miserable. So no, it wasn't happy. It sucked. And so from a very young age, I hated that life of poverty and fear and lack and not enoughness. That's what I grew up with in my family of origin, but I saw that right down the street, there's great wealth and abundance. So I literally said, "How the heck do I get from here to there?" Now so you mentioned a moment ago that I'm known as The Father of Afformations and The Mental Health Coach of the Stars. I'm also known as the nerdiest nerd in the personal growth industry. I'm like the Sheldon Cooper of Self-Help.
I'm just such a nerd and I've always been that way. So even when I was a kid, I loved reading books. And so as a nerd, I did the thing that we nerds love to do, which I went to the library and just started reading every book that I could on personal growth, self-help, success, all the classics, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Stephen Covey and all the classics, right? And I really, really tried to put in the work, but as hard as I could, as hard as I tried, as hard as I worked at it, I just couldn't seem to get it to work. So at the age of 25, I was broke, I was frustrated. My girlfriend had just left me. She slept with her dance teacher.
And so she left me and it's like a country song, you know what I mean? But it was really happening. Anyway, so I decided to commit suicide. I literally decided to take my own life at the age of 25. Now at the very last minute, my life was spared. And the only thing was I didn't know why. I didn't know why I was still here on this planet. And so I'm like, "I've got to figure out what I'm doing here. I have no idea what my purpose is here on the Earth." And so I went back to the library and I just started reading books on spiritual growth. This was more of an inner journey. The first journey was more of an outer journey success and all that stuff, which I didn't succeed at. I wasn't successful.
And so I went inside and started reading spiritual books like Louise Hay and Neale Donald Walsch and Ernest Holmes, Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson and those types, the spiritual thinkers of our time. Anyway, so long story short, in 1997, I had two epiphanies that changed my life when I realized, "Here is my purpose and here is what is missing in traditional success literature." All those books I spent all those years reading, I finally figured it out what they weren't telling us, what they didn't tell us and what was in none of those books. And so I actually wrote my first book, it was called Permission to Succeed and then I got a publishing deal from the Chicken Soup for the Soul publishers back in 1998, so that book was published in '99.
And since that time, I published some books. My 18th and 19th are actually coming out next year. And you can see some of my books here that had been published. And let's see, and here's in other languages. I've been 18 languages so far. And since that time, we've helped our clients to add over 2.7 billion in sales, meaning we've helped people, as you mentioned, entrepreneurs, athletes, musicians, CEOs, people from all walks of life, speakers, authors, coaches, chiropractors, health professionals, all walks of life to add six figures, seven and even eight figures to their business using my methods. And so it's really been a heck of a journey doing it more than 25 years now. This is our 25th year. And so it's been pretty amazing ride I guess.

Michael Walker:
Wow, that's incredible. Thank you for sharing that. And what an interesting reminder. Just it seems like in that moment that you were struggling and suffering in poverty, in retrospect, looking at it now, you can see how there is the seed that was planted to what you've done, what you've accomplished now, all of this, the fruit, has really been germinated from that really humble beginning. So that's such an incredible story. Thank you for sharing that and having worked with so many entrepreneurs and really just human beings of all different kinds focused on success, whatever that looks like in your domain ...

Noah St. John:
Right.

Michael Walker:
... I'm sure that you started to see a lot of the same patterns that happen over and over and over again between whether someone's a musician or an entrepreneur or whatever their goal is coming up against the same mental blocks, coming up against the same challenges or mistakes. So I'm curious, in your experience, what are some of the biggest mistakes or challenges that you see people coming across when they first come to you?

Noah St. John:
Well, there there's several things and what's so funny is that people think they have lots of problems, right? And people, like you said, when they hire me, when they come to me for coaching, they say, "Man, no, I got all these problems. I'm putting out all this content and nobody's paying any attention. I'm posting all this on social media, nobody's becoming paying clients," or, "I'm not growing my audience. I'm putting out all this great stuff, but no one's seeing it. I feel like I'm yelling into the Grand Canyon. Nobody's hearing me," and things like that. And they say all these things, right? And I say, "I hear that and I hear that all the time, but I want you to know that you don't have 10 problems, you don't have 20 problems, you only have one problem."
And they're like, "Well, what do you mean?" And I said, "Well, do you realize that all those things you just listed are problems and I get that, but those are actually symptoms" A symptom is something that's like at the surface level. So I'll give you an example. So imagine if you have a toothache, right? Probably most people, one time in your life you have a toothache, your tooth thirds, "Oh man, my tooth," you wake up in the morning and, "Man, what the heck is that? My tooth hurts." So that's called pain, right? So it's like it's an acute pain and it hurts. And so what do you do? Of course, you go to the dentist, right? And you have them take a look at it and he looks at your tooth. Now imagine if he did something like this, a dentist. Imagine if he said something like, "Well, yeah man, you got a toothache. So here's some pain pills and that should mask the pain and that should help."
And he'd be going like, "Well, that doesn't really make any sense, right?" Because you're like, "It didn't come out of nowhere. This pain didn't just magically appear. There's something wrong here, right?" Any good dentist, of course would say, "Well, you got a cavity or you might have to pull a tooth or you might need a root canal. It's very serious," or whatever it is. But the point is that, see, the pain is caused by something. And see, here in this industry, so what does this mean for you and what does this mean for everybody listening? What it means is that everybody's talking about symptoms, pain. And it makes sense, of course, because pain hurts and we don't want to be in pain, right? So, "Hey, get me out of this pain," right?
But the problem is that if you don't go to the cause of the pain, what I call the causal level, what's actually causing the symptom, then what happens, imagine if you took a painkiller for your toothache? Well, of course, you didn't fix it and it's just going to get worse and worse and worse, isn't it? So that's really how I approach this. And so again, going back to my point, "You don't have 10 problems, you don't have 20 problems, you only have one problem." That problem is what I like to call head trash, head trash. Now, that is the subject of one of my books called Get Rid of Your Head Trash About Money. But really, if you look at these 18 books that I published and all the courses and coaching that I do, I've done in the last 20 plus years, it's really about solving this one problem that's causing all your other problems.
In fact, years ago, it's funny, one of my earliest coaching clients, literally years ago, he said to me, "Noah, do you realize that your coaching is the only coaching that fixes every other coaching?" I said, "Yeah, I guess you're right, it does. Yeah, that's a good point." I'm glad he said it. It wasn't me. He said that. I'm like, Yeah, it actually does. Yeah, you're right." Anyway, so the point is that, so what is this one problem? Well, again, I call it head trash. So what is head trash, right? So head trash, again what I've written all these books and coaching and courses about, is the voice in your head that says, "I can't do it because."
And so for everybody listening in this program, I want you to think about your goals. So think about what it is that you want. What do you want to achieve in your career, in your music career, to reach people, to make a difference, to get that creativity and just share it with the world, whatever your goals might be, right? And that's what I like to call your pot of gold, your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, right? That's your goal, right? Now, so when you look at where you are right now and then you look at where you want to be there, those are the two things that we're looking at. We're looking at where you are right now which is what I call your CPR. That stands for your current perceived reality. That means you are where you think you are and you have the limitations you think you have.
And what's so funny is we will fight for our limitations. We will fight for our excuses of all the reasons, "I can't do it," whatever it is. And so that's your CPR. But then over here you have your NDR. Now that stands for your new desired reality. That means that's your pot of goal, "That's what I want, right? I want to have more time. I want to have more energy. I want to have better relationships. I want to have more money." Those are the things that we all want, time, energy, relationships and money. That's what I call my Freedom Lifestyle Formula. So anyway, between your CPR and your NDR, there's a gap, right? Otherwise, you'd already be there. You'd already be yet your pot of gold if there wasn't a gap.
So what's causing the gap? Well, what's causing the gap is in fact your head trash that says, "I can't do it because." So what's so funny about this is that this has nothing to do with thinking positive, this has nothing to do with mindset, this has nothing to do with affirmations, this has nothing to do with visualization or vision boards or any of those things. Now, I'm not saying any of those things are wrong or bad or you shouldn't do them. I'm just saying this is way beneath that, again at the causal level, not the symptom level or the service level but the causal level. So that is one of the reasons ... Well, my clients frankly get so many amazing results so quickly. You mentioned earlier that I'm known for helping my clients make more than just 12 weeks than they made in the past 12 months.
Well, that's pretty amazing when you look at that and you're like, "What? Do you have a magic wand?" And it's like, "Well, sort of, but not really, but kind of," because when you look at these, it's not magic, it's science, right? And so that's why some people call it miraculous, if not magic, but the point is that that's so exciting is when you see the person, number one, identifying what is actually holding them back, what the problem that's causing every other problem is, and then number two, when you remove the problem that's causing every problem, that's when the magic happens.

Michael Walker:
All right, let's take a quick break from the podcast. So I can tell you about a free special offer they're doing right now exclusively for our podcast listeners. So if you get a ton of value from the show, but you want to take your music career to the next level, connect with the community of driven musicians and connect with the music mentors directly that we have on this podcast or if you just want to know the best way to market your music and grow an audience right now, then this is going to be perfect for you. So right now, we're offering a free two-week trial to our music mentor coaching program. And if you sign up on the show notes below, you're going to access to our entire music mentor content vault for free. The vault's organized into four different content pillars, the first being the music, then the artist, the fans, and last but not least, the business.
When you sign up, you unlock our best in-depth masterclasses from a network of world class musicians and industry experts on the most cutting-edge strategies right now for growing your music business. On top of that, you'll get access to our weekly live masterminds where our highest level modern musician coaches teach you exactly what they're doing to make an income and an impact with their music. Then once a month, we're going to have our Music Mentor Spotlight series and that's we're going to bring on some of the world's biggest and best artist coaches, successful musicians that teach you what's working right now. And one of the most amazing parts is that you can get your questions answered live by these top music mentors. So a lot of the people that you hear right here on the podcast, but they're live interacting with you personally. So imagine being able to connect with them directly.
On top of all that, you'll get access to our private music mentor community. And this is definitely one of my favorite parts of music mentor and maybe the most valuable, is that you're going to have this community where you can network with other artists and link up, collaborate, ask questions, get support and discuss everything related to your music career. So if you're curious and you want to take advantage of the free trial, then go click on the link in the show notes right now, sign up for free. From there you can check out all of the amazing contents, connect with the community and sign up for the live master classes that happen every week. This is a gift for listening to our podcast, supporting the show, so don't miss it out. Go sign up for free now and let's get back to our interview.
Wow, that's so much powerful stuff in there. And it's interesting what you're saying rings so true to me, even based on, we have a 12-week coaching program for musicians and we walk through five different pillars to help them grow. And easily the number one most important thing that reflects and ripples across everything else is the head trash. It's the mindset and that's the key differentiator between what distinguishes the people who are the most successful and the people who struggle the most. And so that all rings so true. And the obvious next question then would be around, what is the process for helping to overcome this head trash and be able to become aware of it and be able to work through it and let it go? How does someone who's listening this right now start to maybe shine a light on some of the unconscious head trash that might be happening just by default?

Noah St. John:
Exactly, exactly. Now that is one of the things, of course, that I go over in the head trash book. And by the way, I want to be sure your audience, everybody knows that they can get this book for free at sendmeabooknoah.com. It's very easy to remember, sendmeabooknoah.com and I will send you a book. The book is free and we just ask you to cover the shipping. So that's the head trash, Get Rid of Your Head Trash About Money. Again, that's sendmeabooknoah.com and you get that book for free. So the point is then ... You actually mentioned it and it's funny exactly what you just said, I just want to highlight that for a second because it was another client that I was working with years ago. And he said to me, "Noah, as we're doing this work together, the coaching and going through your process, your formula, your system, it's like you turned a light on in a room that's been dark my whole life."
And as he said that, I realized, "That's exactly what this is. That's exactly right," and let me give you an analogy or an example. So imagine that you're in your home right now, for everybody listening. Imagine you're in your home and someone came in to your home and turned out all the lights and shut all the drapes and it's totally dark in your house now. You can't see anything. It's completely dark and you don't have your phone on you and you're like, "My gosh, I can't see," right? And then they said to you, "Okay, now I want you to rearrange the furniture." And you'd be like, "Well, I can't see." And then they say to you, "Well, come on, get motivated. Set your goals. Think positive. Come on, visualize it."
You see what they're doing? They're saying all this coachy stuff, right? That the coaches do and those positive thinking guys do, right? "Come on. You can do it. Set your goals. Get motivated," and you're like, "I can't see," right? And they, "Come on. You can do it." Anyway, you're just, "Fine." So you're trying, you hit your shin on the coffee table, "Aw, man," you're banging your knee. And it's like, "What the heck is going on right now?" And then, anyway, so it's very frustrating, right? So here's what I do that's different from those guys. I come in and I go, click, and you're like, "Oh, there it is." And then I go, "Now can you rearrange?" "Of course, I can do it," right? Because you can see what you're doing.
See, so that's what this is like. See, nobody does this on purpose. In other words, if you can relate to the fact that you might be holding yourself back from the level of success you're capable of, which is 99% of humanity, right? Most people are doing this unbeknownst to them and unconsciously, unknowingly. So nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Wow, this looks like a great day. You know what? I think I'm going to hold myself back from success today," right? That would be ridiculous, isn't it? Why? Because that's a conscious thought to have a conscious thought of this, right?
So it goes back to the iceberg principle of the human brain. I talk about this in my books and courses, but it's pretty simple. It's the human mind's like an iceberg, right? And about 5% is visible above the surface and the vast 95% is below the surface, right? That's the subconscious. So what's above the surface is the conscious mind. That means when you know what you're thinking, "Oh, I'm thinking this thought. I'm thinking about what I'm going to have for lunch or the song I'm going to write or this gig I'm going to get," or whatever it might be, "I have a conscious thought. I know what I'm thinking," but meanwhile, you have all these subconscious or unconscious thoughts, that's the 95% of the iceberg.
And as I always tell my coaching clients, "It's not the part of the iceberg that they could see that sunk the Titanic,. it's the part they didn't see that sunk the Titanic, and of course, that's sinking all of us too, right?" And so that's why doing this work, we actually bring it from the subconscious to the conscious. That's why, going back to what my client was saying, "Turning a light on in a room that's been dark my whole life." If you're not aware of the thing, if you can't see how the heck can you change it? The answer is you can't. You cannot until it becomes conscious. So that's what a big part of this process is to just become aware.
So here's something you can all do right now, literally in 60 seconds. So I want you to first of all think about what it is that you want, right? I just talked about that, right? So get very clear on your pot of gold, okay? Now when I say pot of gold, I don't just mean money and I know that the people listening to this program are artists, are creative people, which I love to work with artists and creative people because you're creating art. You're raising the vibration of the planet, of humanity, which is that's my stated mission is to raise humanity's consciousness one question at a time. So that's one of the reasons I love working with artists and creative people on this program.
And so what is it that you want, right? Now that can include money, of course, and you say, "Well, I want to make more money." "Okay, here's five bucks, go away." No, you got to get a lot clearer than that, right? It's not just ... So what does that mean, right? So what does it really look like to you, right? So that's the first step. And believe me, most people don't even know what they want. Most people literally don't know. They say, "Oh, I want more money." "Okay, here's five bucks. Are you happy now?" "Well, okay." You got to be a little more specific, right? And again, that's just an example, right?
So the point is, what is it that you want? Now the second step, you can do this again right now is, what do you tell yourself immediately after having that thought, "I want that"? For most people, again the subconscious thought, maybe the conscious thought, "Oh yeah," but maybe the subconscious says, "Yeah, I probably can't do that. That's probably not going to happen for me. I don't think I could do it. That's probably too late. I don't have the right connections or I don't have enough money. I can't afford it," whatever it might be, right? Whatever your head trash is telling you. So keep in mind, whatever you say after the word because is your reality, "I can't do it because ..." Whatever you say after the word because, that's your reality.
And what's ironic is you will fight to the death to defend that truth, even though it's a lie. That doesn't make any sense, does it? And yet, it makes perfect sense. You see, we will fight for the lie to make it true, "I can't do it because," whatever, "I can't afford it. I'm too old. I don't have the connections," whatever you're lying to yourself is. I want you to keep in mind, everybody listening, that there are people a lot dumber than you, way more successful than you and that's because they just didn't listen to that head trash or maybe they just took it out or whatever it is.
And so the point is that once you understand this process of after the word because is your reality, then you go, "Hmm, I think I want to change that reality. I'm not happy with that right now," and then of course, that's the journey that we go on.

Michael Walker:
This is so good. It's blowing my mind right now. It just rings so true. And even some of the analogies that you used are things that are different analogies that I've avoided to in different ways. But the one question that comes to mind, because one point that you just made was about how the first step is just getting clear on what do you want and setting a target, how that alone is going to crystallize things in a way that most people don't even have clarity on what it is that they want, but then how naturally our minds, when we think about the thing in the future, the ideal outcome, the goal that there's this feeling of discomfort or there's this feeling of, "I can't," or this block or there's something that comes up.
And it does seem like that's kind of where the gold is at, where it's like when you think about the goal and that the thing comes up and it's just like, "I can't do that," or, "I don't deserve it," right?

Noah St. John:
Right.

Michael Walker:
And that's just so powerful. And so one question in terms of, I know that you've really developed so much material and education in coaching and books and many amazing resources for people around this idea of afformations versus affirmations. And I have a feeling that it sort of ties into this idea that we're talking about because afformations are just maybe solving the symptom you're talking about and you're talking about like, "I am super confident," or, "I am the super successful."

Noah St. John:
Right. Right.

Michael Walker:
And maybe not resolving that inner conflict that comes up when they say that and it's like, "Well, that's not true. That doesn't feel right to me." So I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about what's the difference between affirmations, which some people might have heard of or tried like, "Ah, it doesn't really feel right to me," versus afformations, which is what you've really come to coin.

Noah St. John:
Exactly, yes. And for everybody listening, we are saying a different word, a new word, it's afformations if you could see the A-F-F-O-R-M-A-T-I-O-N-S, and you can go to afformations.com and learn more about that or our main website with all of my afformations books, but yes, I am The Father of Afformations, as you mentioned earlier. So yes, I did invent this process, this methodology. So everybody, of course, knows what an affirmation is, right? An affirmation, if you've ever read a self-help book or gone to a self-help seminar, everybody says the same thing, right? All these gurus, they all say exactly the same thing, "Say these statements and put them in the positive and, rah, rah, rah," And we all say, "So every book, every self-help book ever written, except mine, says to do that."
And so when I was reading all those books and I was telling you that story when I was reading all those books, so I did that because they all say the same thing, "Okay, I'll do it. They all say it. It must be true." So I put all Post-it notes all over my wall, "I'm happy. I'm rich. I'm successful." Meanwhile, the reality is, "No, I'm not. I'm broke, unhappy and miserable." So I'm like, "What the heck aren't they telling us? What's missing here?" And so this was driving me nuts. It was so frustrating because I was doing everything they said and it never worked. And so I thought I was broken or there must be something wrong with me, right? And millions of people think that same thing too because we've only been taught one way to do something.
But what's interesting is that a study showed, a scientific study was done on this very subject of affirmations and actually showed that 75% of people who use the old affirmation method actually end up more frustrated than before, right? So imagine if you had a smartphone that didn't work 75% of the time. You probably trade it in and you can get a better phone, right? Well, that's what I invented. I invented a better phone. And so well, it works, actually a hundred percent of the time. So anyway, so an affirmation is a statement something wanted to be true. So as a keynote speaker, as a coach, I get to speak all around the world at different organizations and companies and things like that, private workshops and even big multinational events.
And so one of the things I like to do with my audience is I say, "Everybody stand up and say the old affirmation, just like they taught you and everybody say, 'I am rich,'" and everybody goes, "I am rich." What happens next? Everybody starts laughing and I go, "What are you laughing at?" And they go, "Well, I'm not rich." And I say, "But you just said you were." And they go, "Yeah, but I don't believe it," right? Now isn't that the problem with that old method, right, we say the statement that we want to believe, but we just don't believe it? Now the gurus say, "Well, listen, if you don't believe your affirmation, just repeat it a thousand million billion gazillion times until you believe it someday."
Well, for some people that worked, but for 75% of us, it didn't. And so one morning, I was thinking about this, this was April 1997, so over 25 years ago and I was actually thinking about this in the shower. So in my books, in my programs, I call it the shower that changed everything because isn't it true, we often get those aha moments in the shower? You're like thinking about that and you're like, "Aha, that's really good." So pay attention to those, they could change your life. Anyway, so this was the shower that changed everything. So I was thinking about what they said and I said, "Use these affirmations and blah, blah, blah," and so I said, "Okay, well, I've been doing this and it's not working, so what the heck aren't they telling?"
So I started thinking about, "What are we really talking about here?" We're talking about human beliefs, right? We're talking about beliefs because I knew that if you want to change your life, you have to change your beliefs. So I knew that part was right. I knew that was true, that was accurate. I said, "But okay, then what's a belief?" Well, a belief is just a thought. And then I said, "What is human thought?" And the more that I thought about that, I realized that human thought is the process of asking and searching for answers to questions. Not statements but questions.
For example, if I ask you, "Why is the sky blue?" what immediately happens in your brain? "Why is the sky blue?" what immediately happens? You start to search for the answer, right? In fact, you cannot do this. You literally cannot not do it. And a psychologist called this the embedded presupposition factor of the brain. So what that means is when you ask a question, your brain searches for the answer. So I said, "Wait a second, if the human mind is automatically searching for answers to questions, why are we going around making statements we don't believe? Why don't we just cut out the middleman?" And I said, "Well, what would that look like? Well, let's see. You got this statement or affirmation, 'I am rich,' to which your brain goes, 'Yeah, right.'" I call it the yeah, right response, right? I literally call it that. My books and my programs because that's what your brain says, "Yeah, right."
So if that's the statement, I said, "Then what would the question be?" And then I said, "Why am I so rich? Why am I so rich?" Now, when you ask the question, "Why am I so rich?" what immediately starts to happen in your brain? You start to search for the answer, correct? Right?

Michael Walker:
Mm-hmm.

Noah St. John:
And so what I'm teaching and what I teach in my seminars and my workshops, my coaching and my books, is the law of sowing and reaping, "As you sow, so shall you reap." Now, of course, this is nothing new. It's been taught for centuries, and yet, what are we doing? We're sowing seeds of thought. And yet, what are most people doing? Sowing lousy thought seeds, "Why can't I lose weight? Why isn't my business growing? Why can't I get more gigs? Why am I not making the money that I really want to make? Why is there more month left at the end of the money?" And when you ask lousy questions, what do you get? Well, you get lousy answers, right? And that creates a lousy life.
So I said, "What if instead of asking lousy questions that lead to lousy answers and create a lousy life, what if we just flipped the whole thing I said, start asking empowering questions that lead to phenomenal answers and create a wonderful life. So as I was standing there in the shower April 1997, over 25 years ago, I literally said, "Holy cow, I think I just invented something," and so I had to give it a name and the name that I gave, it was afformations. Again, it's A-F-F-O-R-M-A-T-I-O-N-S. You can go to afformations.com and learn more, but really was the epiphany that literally led me to do the work that I've been doing for the last 20 plus years.
And what's so exciting is to see people's lives change just by virtue of changing this one thing. And so what's so exciting is when you change one thing, then everything starts to change. And that's one of the reasons we've been able to help our clients get these really incredible, dramatic, life-changing transformational results.

Michael Walker:
Man, that's so good. So yeah, it sounds like what you're saying is that rather than making statements, which when you make a statement, it's the same thing as having a conversation and only talking or only speaking but never asking questions or never listening. You learn so much more, you get so much more value out of learning how to ask the right questions. And actually when you listen, that's how you learn. You don't learn anything new by repeating things that you already believe, right? It's by asking questions. And it opens something up. So rather than just affirming or saying something is, which your mind doesn't believe anyways, you want to flip it around and actually ask questions that open things up in your mind, that actually move you towards that.

Noah St. John:
That's right.

Michael Walker:
I'm curious, the question, the example that you gave, "Why am I so rich?" it's interesting because for ... The effect of that question, I think, for a lot of people, they might necessarily see themselves as rich before they ask that question.

Noah St. John:
That's right.

Michael Walker:
But then when they ask the question, they might start realizing, even that they have more, they're more rich in their own life than they might have even realized.

Noah St. John:
Yeah, that's right.

Michael Walker:
So I guess I'm curious, this is a big question I have around fulfillment and personal development and growth, is that balance between having a goal and a future and establishing that gap, moving towards fulfillments and achieving something and then also balancing it with, and you say, being fully present or fully alive and aware and happy and satisfied, and it just seemed like sometimes that's a hard balance to strike because if we spend too much time wanting to get somewhere else, then we don't fully appreciate what we have. So I'm just curious to hear your perspective on how you view that ebb and flow and that balance when it comes to fulfillment versus being fully present and fulfilled in the moment.

Noah St. John:
Oh, I could talk for about our weekend on that one, but I'll try to keep it brief. So it is very easy for us, humans, to focus on what we don't have. And by the way, this is reinforced literally everywhere. Going back to the phone, I actually call a smartphone BMs. I call these ICBMs. Now too young to remember what that meant back in the '70s and '80s, but ICBMs were intercontinental ballistic missiles. That's what Reagan and those guy were doing. Well, this ICBM, what I trademarked is infinite comparison and bullshit machines. That's what we've done. And what I mean by that is, whenever you're on social media, it's all about comparing to others, comparing ourselves to others, right? And, "This guy's got a yacht. This guy's got a helicopter. This guy's on a boat with all these girls," or whatever the heck it is.
And it's like, "Oh crap, I suck compared to this guy," right? And that's what our brains immediately do. And then of course, all of that is total bullshit. So that's what I call it the infinite comparison and bullshit machine. And so the point is that it is reinforced everywhere of what we don't have and it is very, very easy for us, especially in our modern day, to focus on what we don't have. Now when you focus on what you don't have, what do you get more of? The experience of not having, right? And it is ironic and sad because it is completely based on what you're focusing on.
Now, let me give the flipside of that. Have you ever had the experience where maybe you've gone to, let's say, a foreign country and maybe you've gone to a place where they really don't have anything compared to what we have here in the United States, for example, running water, okay? Now that sounds like silly, right? It's like, "Come on, running water, really? What's the big deal really?" For a couple of billion people on this planet, they don't have running water every day. So of course, here in the West, we're like, "Really? Is that such a big deal?" I invite you to go other places on this planet and realize you have running water for the love of God. That's enormous, right? Indoor plumbing.
Now I know I'm using maybe silly, even basic simple examples, but nevertheless, of course, we want to have more than these basic things. But when you form the question, using my afformations method, I'm using this as an example of, "Why am I so rich? Why do I have so much?" versus what we all do all the day, which is, "Man, I suck. I don't have anything. I'm broke. I don't have any money." You're forming, as I stated earlier, "Why is there more month left at the end of the money?" and of course, I'm just using money as an example. You could focus on anything you want in terms of what I don't have. You could say, "I don't have health. I don't have the relationships I want. I don't have the fame that I want, the influence I want," whatever. So we're focused on what we don't have.
So what my afformations method enables us to do is literally change the questions that we are forming. That's why I created the word afformations. By the way, the word affirmation, the one we're all used to, comes from the Latin word firmare, which means to make firm. Now the word afformations that I invented, and by the way, it's perfectly legitimate to invent a new word, when you have a new way of looking at the universe or a new technology. Isn't it true we often need a new word to describe it like internet, software, computer, Google, Facebook, YouTube? These are all very new words in terms of human history. They've only been around a very, very, very short time, and of course, now we use them every day, but it's a new technology, we needed a new word to describe it.
So what I'm teaching in my books and my coach and my programs is a new technology of the mind. And so afformations comes from the Latin word formare which means to form, to form or give shape to. So the question that I often ask my coaching clients and my audience members is, "What if you're making something firm, but it's in the wrong form? That means you formed the life you didn't even want," using those disempowering questions that I was sharing with you. So that's one of the ways that using my afformations method does in fact change your entire life just by virtue of what you are focusing on, by virtue of the questions that you ask.

Michael Walker:
That stuff is so powerful. Yeah, I super appreciate you coming on here to share some of these lessons and wisdom with our community because I think that for a lot of musicians ... This is just a human being thing-

Noah St. John:
Right, absolutely, yes. As I like to say, "Wherever you go, there you are," right? So you're bringing your head trash with you, whether you know it or not. And of course, most people don't know it, right?

Michael Walker:
Yeah.

Noah St. John:
And so yeah, absolutely, you're right. And going back to your point is that's why I've helped people from literally dozens and dozens of different industries. Some people say, "Well, will this work for my industry?" "I don't know. Are you a human? Who do you sell to, dolphins, gorillas, orangutan? I'm not sure. Then it probably won't work for you." You know what I mean? It's, "Wherever you go, there you are and there your trash goes too, until and unless we take it out, which I hope you do."

Michael Walker:
Yeah, it's super interesting. I really feel like at the core of your methodology and what you're teaching is about thoughts and creation itself ...

Noah St. John:
Right.

Michael Walker:
... and what is it that has made humans the dominant life force on earth, our ability to craft ...

Noah St. John:
That's right.

Michael Walker:
... realities that haven't yet occurred through our thoughts first and use tools to essentially make those things make happen. And you've created a method to literally be able to harness the creative force of the universe itself. That's pretty dang cool. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on here and share some of these lessons. Personally, there's so many things that you're saying that are ringing true, and for me, really the last 15 years of my life, I'd say are period of transformation that at its core has been around the work that you're describing right now. And so I've personally experienced that and I've seen the results of our artists and the community that have taken this, what you're teaching to heart and actually focused on internal work and transforming, forming afformations, transforming themselves from the inside out.
So yeah, I just want to say thank you again so much for coming on here and doing what you do. And for anyone who's listening or watching this right now, it sounds like having done this for decades now, you've created so many amazing resources and tools, materials, what do you recommend for anyone who's listening this right now who might be asking themselves, "Out of everything that's available, where do I get started? What's the very first thing for me? How can I find out the right next step for me?"

Noah St. John:
Absolutely. I would recommend two of my 200 websites that I do have, so yeah, it's a lot. So first of all, make sure you go to sendmeabooknoah.com, "Send me a book, Noah," easy to remember, "Send me a book, Noah," and we'll get you the head trash book for free, just cover the shipping. And then the other domain to go to is freegiftfromnoah.com. Again, all easy to remember, right? freegiftfromnoah.com. Actually, this is brand new, I just created this 29-page PDF on how I help my coaching clients make more in just 12 weeks than they made the past 12 months. So we call it My $2 billion PDF and that is at freegiftfromnoah.com.

Michael Walker:
Very cool. Well, like always, we'll put the links for easy access on the show notes. You can click on those and check them out, but yeah, again, thank you so much for the work that you're doing and I really do see this at the core of transformation and what really helps people to overcome poverty, poverty and their biggest challenges and internal struggles. So I think it's really important work and thank you for taking time to be on thousands of outlets sharing this work and to help people with it.

Noah St. John:
It's my pleasure, Michael.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value at this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guests today. And if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us. That really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take their music careers to the next level. The time to be a modern musician is now and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.