348. Why Your Life Has no Purpose | Creating Beliefs by Design with Dr. Greg Pursley

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Dr. Greg Pursley: 

There's only two things keeping you from a different life, from the life that you want to build. It's new information and it's new actions.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster, food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself. 

Each episode, you will hear from some of the most amazing, talented, and successful people on the planet who followed their passions and strived to help others. Join our movement to get a million people each day to commit acts of kindness for others. Together, we're going to make the world a better place. Are you ready? Because it's time for your Daily Helping.

Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Daily Helping Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. And our guest today is pretty darn awesome. His name is Dr. Greg Pursley, affectionately known as Dr. G. He's a true catalyst for personal growth and transformation with an ambitious mission to impact lives of a million people. 

He's a firm believer in the incredible power of our belief system. And through his Fix Your BS Academy and bestselling book, Fix Your BS, which stands for belief systems, he empowers people to set and surpass their goals rapidly. I'm going to kind of take the rest of his intro and I'm going to let him tell you that personally, but he has been everywhere. He's been featured on Fox and some of the largest podcasts in the world. Dr. Greg Pursley, welcome to The Daily Helping. It is awesome to have you with us today. 

Dr. Greg Pursley: 

Well, thank you very much, Dr. Richard. Appreciate you for having me. Hopefully, I can share some knowledge that I've learned through the years for people to really improve their lives. That's really the goal, help them improve their lives in a shorter period of time than figuring it out on their own. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Absolutely. I love that. And I was very intentional in cutting part of your important and pivotal history out of your bio. So I want to hop in the Dr. G time machine here. Take us back and tell us what puts you on the path you're on today.

Dr. Greg Pursley: 

Sure. I graduated as a chiropractor at 23 years old. My wife and I had a four, five-month daughter when I graduated. We moved a couple hours away from our family and started a chiropractic practice and thought, hey, we're moving forward in the American dream. You own your practice. You have your wife and your kid and you're moving forward. 

And then a couple of years ended our owning that practice, we had a second child, our son. Our son was born with dwarfism, which is a random genetic change, 80 percent of people who have a kid with dwarfism have no family history. So it was a very big surprise. I was 25 at the time. And it was all of a sudden, like, what does this mean? Like, where are we headed? It just threw us for a huge loop. 

To make matters worse, he ended up having a lot of medical complications with his lungs. And within the first year, he spent six months at a children's hospital, which was two hours away from our hometown. So, if you can imagine, there was a lot of chaos in our lives at that time. He ended up with a trachan event that helped him breathe. And for eight years, we focused on keeping him alive and keeping our family together. And during that time, we made a lot of decisions based on fear and anxiety, and it created a lot of chaos in our relationships, our finances, in my business, in our health, and really shook our belief and faith.

And so in 2018, when he started to get better and he was able to survive day to day, we went, oh, man, we have to reassess where we're at and we can't keep doing what we're doing and making decisions based on fear and anxiety and worry and doubt. And so that started the process of the Fix Your Belief Systems because I had to really change my beliefs about the future and who I was and what we were capable of and where we were headed. And we had to re-dive into that and redefine it. And over the last five years, we've been able to do that. And so that's what I hope to help people be able to do today is build their life on their terms by understanding what a belief system is and how it affects their lives.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

So, I'm excited to dive into this because I think there's something that every one of us is dealing with. And it might not be as dramatic in the moment as your child facing essentially a period of life and death, but our ability to deal with our life has a lot to do with how we view it and the way we view ourselves as either powerful or empowered to make change or powerless because something is happening that we can't do anything about. And those are beliefs, and you are the belief systems guy. Right? So, I know you've got five pillars that people need to really have mastery over. So I'd love to go through this system with you and talk us through it and really give people this foundation that they can use to start making that transformative change.

Dr. Greg Pursley: 

Sure. So the thing I talk about that I have the five As and I have the five pillars. All right. So let me overview those real quick for everybody. The five As are very important because the first A is becoming aware. You have to become aware that maybe the things that you have believed or concluded in your life or maybe there's a different way of looking at them. And if you're not where you want to be in the five pillars, which I'll get to in a second, if you're not where you want to be, then you have to look at things from a different perspective and look at resources to help you change the direction you're headed. So the first one has become aware. 

The second one is you have to acknowledge. You just have to acknowledge that maybe there's a different way of looking at things. Maybe there's a perspective shift I should have. The third one is you have to accept it. You say, okay, I'm aware there's a difference potentially, I acknowledge that it's there, and I'm going to accept the fact that I maybe looked at things in a way that didn't give me the life I wanted up until this point.

Then the fourth thing is you create an action plan. So you say, I'm going to take action on this. What is my plan? And then the fifth thing is you attack that action plan. You say, I'm going to dive into this thing and I'm going to attack it to make a different outcome. So those are the five As. Awareness is very important because you don't know what you don't know. If you don't know what you don't know, then you can't change it. You can't make a different outcome. 

The five pillars are the major things in life that really matter. Relationships, very important. Relationship with yourself, with your spouse or significant other, with your children, with your family, with your friends, if you own a business, then your employees, if you don't, then your colleagues, but your relationships are very important. Your finances, extremely important. A lot of people have a lot of beliefs about money that are not serving them. Your health, very important.

There was a guy that I met one time, he said, if you want to get rid of all your problems, get yourself a brain tumor, because that's what he had. And all of a sudden, he only had one problem, which was eliminating the brain tumor. So basically, your health is very important. Meaning if you don't have your health, you don't have anything else. There's really -- your health starts to fail, that's all you're going to focus on. I always like to say health is one thing people don't focus on until it's the only thing they focus on. Very important to understand that. 

So relationships, you have your finances, you have your health, you have your career or your business. You have to do something that is meaningful. That has a purpose, that's serving you and other people in whole, in matching your purpose. And then finally, is your belief or your faith. Your belief in something greater than you that you're heading in a direction that you have faith in the outcome, that you're moving in a positive direction. Because you can also have faith and belief that everyone works against you and nothing's ever going to work. And you can imagine if that's the belief system running through your head, the outcome that you're going to have. 

So those are the five pillars and I talk about the five As is because all you have to do is really look at each one of those pillars and you rank it from 0 to 10. You say, hey, my relationships, 0 to 10, 10 are perfect. Fantastic. Wonderful. Zero is terrible, horrible. You rank where you're currently at. So just be honest. My relationship with my spouse is a, what? My relationship with me is a, what? Then you rank your finances. And then you rank your business or career, and then you rank your health. And then you rank your faith or beliefs. And that's the part of the awareness. 

So once you become aware, then you can say, okay, well, if my whatever is a four and I want to get to attend, you define what is a 10. What does that look like? What does that feel like? And now you have a gap. So you draw the gap back to where I want to go, to where I am. And you say, what are the action steps that I'm going to take in order to move forward? And that's really the process that you can put yourself through. 

Now, you have to do it though. You have to take action. Nothing changes unless you change. Nothing changes unless you take new actions. In fact, I always say there's only two things keeping you from a different line from the life that you want to build. It's new information and it's new actions. Because new information is going to be make you aware, which will then have, eventually come to different beliefs and different beliefs will have you turn to different thoughts, which turns to different emotions, which turns to different actions. 

And so new information, new actions, and that will lead you in a new direction, but you got to know where you're headed, which is why you define where you want to end up. That was a lot to unpack. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Yeah, it was. And I took some notes here. I've got some questions. So one of the things I want to ask you, because it feels to me, like, belief is really the linchpin that holds all of this together and could propel somebody into making radical change. Belief could also keep somebody trapped where they are. Particularly, like you said, if you come from the perspective that the world is against you. 

So, for people in psychology, we refer to this as an internal versus an external locus of control. And I've talked about this on other shows, the research is very, very clear. It's been replicated over decades in different countries across genders, across ethnicities, across everything. Those that have an internal locus of control, meaning that they feel that they have governance over their own lives, those people overwhelmingly are happier and healthier than people who believe that the sky is falling and there's nothing they can do about it. 

But I wanted to ask you the question, for those with an external locus of control who believe that the world is against them and everything bad always happens to them, their awareness probably comes from that lens. And so, therefore, their awareness is skewed. So, what would be your advice? And we're all pretty good at knowing if we, we could ask ourselves right now, do we think that we have power or is the world against us, right? And for many people, you can figure that out really quickly. So, if somebody has that negative belief system that woe is me and there's nothing I can do, what advice would you give them to start reframing that in a more positive, positive lens?

Dr. Greg Pursley: 

Well, first, you have to understand what a belief system is. A belief is a conclusion that you've made. And that conclusion that you've made is set deep down into your subconscious mind. A belief comes from a thought that is repeated enough times, with enough emotion, that it turns into a lot of buzzwords right now or programming. But really what it is, is that it's your automatic response.

So a great example that I use all the time and I've heard used by dozens of other people is if you've ever driven a car, the first time you drive a car, you really have to focus and consciously think about what you're doing. But after you do it a few hundred or a few thousand times, then you don't have to think about it anymore. It's automatic. You don't have to think about where the levers and knobs and buttons are. You just hop in, and you drive. It becomes one thing. It becomes who you are. I just I do it. I just drive. I don't know. I don't know. I just do it, which is different than when you first started. 

So the same thing occurs when you start looking at, once you become aware that, well, do I have that external or internal locus of control? Most of the things external, you really can't control. So when you have that external locus of control or thought of everything out here is affecting me, well, how much control do you really have of external, anything outside of your body? 

Because there's really only a few things you can control. You control your beliefs, you control your thoughts, you can control your emotions, and you can control your actions, which is that internal. When you have that internal, if you can move it internally, then you have that feeling of certainty. Like, I always ask the question what is good about this or what am I supposed to learn about this as opposed to why does this always happen to me? There's a big difference. 

If you can pay attention to your automatic thought processes, there's a big difference between those two thoughts. Hey, this is happening for my benefit. What am I supposed to learn from it? As opposed to, well, this always happens to me, and that's just the way it's always going to be. Well, yeah, if you have that thought process, you're always going to look for something that is going to create the same emotional reaction, which is out of your control. 

So you have to turn it internally and go, okay, well, I don't know why this emotion is coming out. Let me analyze that. Let me look at that. Let me become aware of why this emotion is here because these emotions are supposed to be there for you to use. You are not supposed to be used by your emotions. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Say that again, because that's such a cool quote. 

Dr. Greg Pursley: 

Yeah. Emotions are there for you to use, but you're not supposed to be used by your emotions. So, the way that basically is, is if something externally occurs and you have an emotional response that you feel like you have no control over, then basically you are a slave to whatever that thing is. If it's a person that says something to you that controls your emotions because of what they do. Well, then you are at their whim. Or let's say it's an external event or an external experience outside that you cannot control, and it occurs, and you have an emotional response. Well, if you are saying that I am at the effect of that experience or that thing that occurred, that event, well, then you have no control over that.

And so there's an uncertainty that goes. And who likes to feel uncertain? That's scary. That's, ooh, I don't know if I like that feeling. So you want to take whatever is occurring and you say, well, that's interesting. I have this emotional response. Why is that emotional response there? And what can I do? How can I use that emotional response for my benefit? 

And most people don't do that. They are the opposite. They say, you always make me so angry. Why do they have the control to make you angry? You always frustrate me so much. I'm always annoyed by this. Okay, well that's a thought that you're repeating enough times with enough emotion that seeps into your subconscious mind. I never have enough money. That's a thought that is repetitious with enough emotion that seeps into your subconscious mind. So then you literally will automatically drive yourself toward not having enough money all the time. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

It makes perfect sense. And I like that we have to bring it back. You have the pillars and you've got the five As and I like how you really can bounce between them to arrive at improvement. What I’d like to do is let's take a little deeper dive. I know we're not going to have time to go through all five pillars, right? And I appreciate the 10,000 feet view of them, but let's take one in particular. You can pick any one you want. So, but I'd like to take a deep dive. So what's calling to you right now, which of the five?

Dr. Greg Pursley: 

It really depends on the individual. I can tell you which ones people come to me the most. 

Dr. Richard¸Shuster:

Sure. Let’s do that.

Dr. Greg Pursley: 

They come to me the most about money and they come to me the most about relationships. But we can talk about money. I mean, that's totally fine. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Yeah. Yeah. Let's do money.

Dr. Greg Pursley: 

What's interesting is that one of the things I talk about the most when people come to me about money is I ask them, imagine your money is a friend. It's a friend. It's somebody that invites you to things. It says, hey, come to this party and you go, oh, sweet. And you come to the party, and you show up. And you start complaining that the money is always late. It's never there. How come you never show up when I need you? And that's supposed to be your friend that you're talking to. How much does that friend want to come back if that's the way you talk to it? Like if that's the way you talk to a friend, they're going to be like, you know what? I don't want to be your friend anymore. I don't want to come around. 

Because really, money is something you have to have a relationship with. And that comes from the root inside of you of what you believe you are worth, what you believe your value is, your worthiness to have money, abundance, those type of things. Everything starts inside. I always talk about know thyself. You have to know who you are and what beliefs you have about you. And that translates over to money in the way you think about it, the way you talk about it and the people that you end up attracting to you that help you or hinder you in acquiring or amassing more money.

And people look at money as like this tangible thing. There's a reason why it's called a currency. It's a flowing thing. It is there to be used as a tool for you to experience things in life. It's there to be used as a tool to grow your business and help more people or to help other people in your community or your family or to, like I said, by experiences and give you options. 

But most people have a very, very minimal viewpoint about money. I don't like talking about it. They've been taught that money is bad, and they believe it and they don't know they believe it. They don't have a clue. And so the first thing I have people do is I go, what's your relationship with money? And how do you talk about it? Is it a friend of yours? Do you talk about it as if it's a buddy? Dude, money, I'm so excited that you're here. Thank you for showing up. I love that you're here. Even though you only came over a little bit, I got to spend a little bit of time with you. Thank you. I appreciate it because that gives you a different emotional connection to it.

And then when it shows up, you're not bitter and angry and frustrated and pissed off that it's there. You go great, man, let's have a big party. How many friends can we bring? How many more of your friends can you bring with you? Because that's going to give you a different emotional connection. It's going to give you a different thought process and actions will change. And you'll start to connect with different people that talk and think and act differently about and with money. 

So the first step is, what's your relationship with money? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it strained? How do you talk about money? When you receive money, what's your first emotional connection or reaction? Is it you get your paycheck, and you go, freaking taxes killing me? Is that the thought process? Is it, oh, I just got enough to pay bills? Or is it, man, I'm so grateful and appreciative that I have this, and I can experience these things. I wonder how it can generate more to where I can have more experiences. Because that's a different thought process. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

For sure. Okay. So that's the first step. What's the next step? 

Dr. Greg Pursley: 

Well, the next step, so it goes through the five As again. So that's your awareness. You become aware. Then you acknowledge. You acknowledge that okay, okay, maybe I have been, and I like to have people write a statement because writing things down is way more impactful, but I like to have them write down the way it has been and the way it's going to be. So you acknowledge it. You say, okay, I have had a relationship with money that is not getting me the results I want. 

Then you accept it. You say, it's the way it was. This is the way I would like it to be in the future. I would like money to come to me. I would like money to be abundant. I would like to talk about money without fear. I would like to have a relationship with money. That's fantastic. Whatever you want. 

Then you can create an action plan. Now, the action plan, when we talk about, we go into steps. A lot of times like the actual steps to take. And so the first step of becoming aware of where you actually are financially, because a lot of people are not even aware where they actually are, how much money is coming in, how much money is going out type deal, because if there's more money going out than there is coming in, you're going to get pretty frustrated with money on a regular basis. And it's going to be very hard for you to be like, oh, I appreciate it when there's not enough. 

So we talk about how can you increase your income? How can you decrease your expenses to where you create a gap? Okay. So the first one is an emotional awareness. The second one is a physical awareness. Does that make sense? The emotional awareness is how do you emotionally connect with money? The physical awareness is where are you actually at? How much money comes in? How much money goes out? And can you create a gap? The more money you have coming in and the less money you have going out, the bigger the gap you have. 

Then you can really man, you create momentum. I earned. I have an extra 10 bucks here. Great. I'm going to keep that. I'm going to build upon that. I'm going to be appreciative of that. I'm going to be thankful that it's there because people think they have this idea. They say, once I reach a certain amount of income, I'm going to start saving. Once I reach a certain amount of income or save enough money, I will be happy. But that's putting all of those emotions and feelings into the future that will never happen because the only time you have is now. Now is the only time you have. 

So you have to cultivate the feeling and the thought processes of the person that has a lot of money now. So how do you do that? You think about how a wealthy person would think about money. They think of it as a tool. It's something they can use. It flows into and out of their life. It is something that you want to amass to help other people. 

But what most people have is, is they feel money is scarce. They feel like they don't deserve it. They feel like, well, if I get wealthy, what will my friends think of me? I'll lose my friends. What will my family think of me? And they get really squirmy and awkward around it. And if you did that with a friend, they'd be like, dude, I'm not going to be your friend anymore. 

So you have to really wrestle with that until you come to terms with it and accept it. Then you can create that action plan of, okay, this is how wealthy people think about money, this is what I'm going to start doing. And I'm going to stick with that plan until it becomes a massive, a mass of fortune or a mass of money that you go, holy crap, I did it. I got to 10 grand. How can I get to 20? Holy crap, I got to 20. How can I get to 50?

And then you build that momentum, and you start to go, you know what, I like having money. Money's fun. Money's exciting. I get to do more stuff. Let's have more friends of my money. Let's have more of them come over. Now I have this momentum going, I'm a wealthy person, I'm a successful person. And all of a sudden, you have this positive momentum instead of this downward spiral.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

This was awesome. Yeah. What I really like about this is just how simple and actionable this is. You have five pillars. You have these five As and you're just basically plugging in. But I think what makes this different is that you have found a way to separate the emotional piece from the actionable. Because a lot of times people can't decouple their emotional relationship with something like money. A lot of times they can't decouple -- you said it exactly right. A person doesn't frustrate you, you allow that person to frustrate you. 

And so you have a very good way of breaking this down into clear language that's understandable and that somebody can take action on. So this was great. Our time together has flown by. I love the conversation. As you know, I like to wrap up every episode by asking my guests just this one question, and I know this is going to be a good one. What is your biggest helping, Dr. G, that one most important piece of information for somebody to walk away with after hearing our conversation today?

Dr. Greg Pursley: 

I love that question. I've been asked that question a lot over the years with different podcasts and things I've been on only because if you can boil everything down to one thing, what would that be? And really what that is, is I have a workout room and in my workout room, above one of the squat rack thing, I have this saying and it says, know thyself. Know thyself. 

What that really means is most people are living a life that is based upon beliefs and fears that were imposed upon them from other people. I have to do this job or it will let my parents down. I have to do this thing or to let my spouse down or my friends won't like me, or I have to stay in this area of my life. I can't do this thing that I feel like I want to do because I'm afraid of what people think about me, or I'm afraid of what I'll think about myself. Or even worse, I don't even know what it is that I actually want. 

See, I believe -- and this is what I went through over a four and a half, five-year period. I believe that if you can start asking yourself in quiet, I mean, just people talk about meditation or prayer, but just in a quiet time, sit down, no distractions and ask yourself, if money and time and emotion and ego didn't matter, and you just said, what would I want my life to look like? Like, what would a great day on a regular basis look like? Because most people don't even have a vague idea. They say, well, I want a bigger house. Why? What does that even mean? I want a better relationship. That's vague. How can we get down to who you really are?

So know yourself, look inside, figure out who you really are and what you really want in life. And then you can start working toward developing it. But you have to know it first. It's literally like this example. Like, let's say there was, you won $10,000. Okay. Let's say you want it. Your attorney called you and said, guess what, you won 10 grand, and we wrote a check and it's coming to you. It's going to be there in a few days. You will feel and you will have this knowing, this expectation of this check coming to you. This 10 grand, it's coming to me. Like I know it. I don't have to think about it. Like I know it, it's coming to me. I'm excited about it. 

That's the way you want to feel about the future, about what the vision that you have for that. And you should know it like I expect it. It's happening. It's coming. And that's what you really want to be able to do. You want to pull the future forward to now by feeling it. And once you feel it, that expectation, it will come to fruition in a future date that becomes your now. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

I knew you were going to have a good one. I love it. Dr. G, where can people learn more about you online? 

Dr. Greg Pursley: 

Just go to Instagram. Go to Instagram at @DrGregPursley, D-R-G-R-E-G-P-U-R-S-L-E-Y. They can go to my website too, fixyourbs.net, F-I-X-Y-O-U-R-B-S. BS stands for belief systems but BS.net. And they can check it all out about what we do. We just want to help people, empower people, and help them figure themselves out so they can develop a life that they're excited about. The biggest travesty in people's lives is they settle, and we don't want you to settle. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Amen to that. And we're going to have everything Dr. Greg Pursley in the show notes at drrichardshuster.com. So we got you covered there. Dr. G, this was awesome. Thanks so much for joining us today. I love the conversation. 

Dr. Greg Pursley: 

Thanks, Dr. Richard. Appreciate you. Hope I helped some people out and everybody take action. Nothing changes until you change. Take action.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

That is absolutely true. And for each and every one of you who took time out of your day, I want to thank you as well. If you liked it, if you're inspired, if you're going to go dive into your five As and your five pillars today, go give us a follow on your podcast app of choice and leave us a five-star review, because that is what helps other people find this show. 

But most importantly, go out there today and do something nice for somebody else, even if you don't know who they are, and post in your social media feeds using the hashtag #MyDailyHelping, because the happiest people are those that help others.