Episode 234
Title: Living a Legacy: Dr. Demartini on Values, Priorities, and Lasting Fulfillment
Host: Dr. Nicole Rivera & Dr. Nick Carruthers
Guest: Dr. John Demartini
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Transcription:
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Integrated You Radio.
We are unbelievably excited for our special guest here. We have Dr. DeMartini. You guys have heard us talk about him about a million times.
And we feel so, so fortunate for him to be here and share his gifts with our audience.
And we are, of course, going to be talking about values, which is something that has radically changed both Dr. Nick and my lives, and we get so excited talking about values with other people, and here is literally the guru.
So, Dr. DeMartini, I would love for you just to give a little brief introduction.
I know that nobody can ever do justice to an introduction, especially when you've accomplished so much in your life.
So can you tell everyone just a little bit about yourself?
My life is dedicated for the last fifty-one years to teaching, well, researching, writing, teaching, and traveling the world, and also in the healing arts.
So those are my main areas of focus. Anything that might assist people in maximizing their potential, their awareness, their evolvement, achievements, I have been devouring.
And the second year of teaching. I've done fifty-one now, and I just love it. And that's what I do. So I just every single day I research, write, travel because I'm right now in Antarctica for anybody who may be doing it right off the window is Antarctica. And I'm, on my ship sailing in Antarctica right now. So I travel teach research, write, and travel. That's about it. I'm useless everywhere else.
And that's because that is your highest values.
Correct? Those are it. I mean, my highest value is teaching. Second highest is research and writing learning. Third is traveling, and that's basically it.
I also wanted to be financially, you know, well off. So I invested. I've been investing for all these decades, and I've been blessed.
So I travel world around the world on my ship sailing around the world, let's put it that way.
So I have a question about what you just said because I think the beautiful thing about values is it's your blueprint.
It's your uniqueness. And you're mentioning your values teaching. But your version of teaching and someone else's version of teaching can look really different.
So can you just speak to, you know, values, like, what are values, and then how do you further just define your values?
Is it just about teaching or is it your specific version of that?
Yeah. Yeah. When I say teach research, right, and travel, it's a bit vague in general.
Teaching on this path of self-mastery on awakening awareness and potential, on empowering the seven areas of life.
These are more specifics in the field of teaching. So teaching is sort of a generic, but the actual specifics does anything that allows a human being to maximize their contribution on the planet.
And wake up their authentic leadership and mastery. So, yeah, that's every discipline, every field that I've been blessed to devour has been for that aim.
And I started that at age eighteen. I'm sixty-nine now, and so at eighteen, I wanted to master life.
I was watching a show with David Carradine called Kung Fu. Some people may be watching this, maybe too young to remember it, but some may be old enough.
And it was this master martial artist that walked around and kinda taught philosophy and helped people solve problems and things.
And I thought, wow, I like this and he was talking about his Shaolin Master martial artist that taught him.
And then when he talked about that, I said, wow, I wanna be a master. Sounded cool when you're eighteen. And I said, okay. What is that what does that look like?
What exactly is a master? Sounded really cool, but what was that? So I tried to narrow it down, and I divided life into seven areas.
And I believe that we have an inspired mission in life, our spiritual quest, a desire to wake up our genius and contribute original ideas that serve human beings.
A desire to create a contribution with sustainable fair exchange in business, where we have a source of income and a feeling of fulfillment by making a difference in people's lives through serving people, financial remuneration.
And I wanted to master my finances where I was not having to work because I had to, but work because I love to and have my money working for me instead of me working for it.
I want to have a global family, wanna be a citizen of the world, and the name of the ship is the world, and it goes around the world.
I want to have social interactions, to meet amazing people and go to amazing places and experience different cultures, which I've been spoken in a hundred and ninety-four countries now.
And I wanted to have physical vitality. And, you know, I wanna be in a situation going backward instead of forward and aging kind of thing.
And, even though I have aged, I'm but sixty-nine, I got more energy than most people.
So I wanted to empower all seven areas of life and contribute to something in each of theirs and to wake up, the immortal effect of empowering those areas that it has to exemplification on other people and live an exemplary life.
And that to me, the measurement of my goals and my, you know, objectives was how well am I living it?
A demonstration. It's the demonstration of it more than anything.
And so that was my objective since I was eighteen, and I've been working on that every single day since.
I know you really have a question, Nick, but I have a question too.
So who goes first? I saw your face.
Ladies first, this time. So what you just described, I resonate with so much.
And I feel like in the beginning stages of really understanding your work and your amazing wisdom is I felt like I had an identity crisis of I want this and I want this and I wanna you know, I wanna have the financial freedom and I wanna teach and it could feel like a lot for people.
Who am I, what am I, what's my purpose? I have all these interests, and they're all different and separate.
So when what are your words of wisdom for people that feel like they have a lot of passions, they have a lot of interests, and they don't they're having trouble with how to create a life from that.
They're having trouble really narrowing down, like, what is that my core?
What are my core true values?
Well, I believe it's wise to first stop and introspect and reflect.
And on my website, drdemartini.com, I have a value determination process that I developed over the last forty-five years, to help people discern what their life demonstrates is valuable to them, not what they think it is.
And many people have impulsive, seeking mechanisms or instinctive avoiding organisms and injected values of outer authorities in their life, confusing them about what's really deeply meaningful and purposeful to them.
And narrowing that down to what's truly most important and really, really a priority to them, I think is the first step in defining it and creating the life that you would like to create.
So much of us, we anytime we live with comparison between ourselves and other people and put people on pedestals, we distort our reality and confuse ourselves.
So when it comes to leaving a legacy, would I mean, this is multifaceted, and it's probably partly because so many people aren't clear on their values to be able to just continue that process to expand space and time to be able to leave that legacy. But it seems like today we're polarized in programming that, a, it's just all about me or, b, I give all of myself to everyone else. And to really leave a legacy, you have to have that balance. You have to have that fair exchange of that equal dynamic of self-love, but as well as loving humanity. That's it. If you if you go into pride and exaggerate yourself over your employees and your customer, You'll get humbled by rejection from the customer. You'll get humbled by the anarchy of the business, and you'll end up being an autocrat trying to control people and push them uphill, which raises the cost and lowers the margins. If we minimize ourselves and sacrifice for the customer and think, oh my god, they're more important, and we sacrifice, which people do. If they meet some celebrity or whatever, they do business with a celebrity, they'll sacrifice the profit. Don't, they basically subordinate themselves to employees and let them have anarchy. Both of those, then you don't keep the money. You don't make the money when you're narcissistic. You don't keep the money when you're altruistic. And so both of them will create symptoms because the narcissist eventually gets humbled, And the altruist gets frustrated sad deserve bitterness. And so those are basically bringing people into authenticity where there's a fair exchange. Jeff Bezos is a great example. Jeff studied, you know, Sony over there in Japan. And Sony was dedicated to a great cause of serving people and wanted to upgrade the standards and the image of Japan for not being copycats. In the marketplace, like China was, also. And so they decided he was gonna create a real company that was dedicated to customer service. Well, Amazon was, by Bezos, dedicated to customer-centric service, and he's done an incredible job doing that. And he focused on making sure that they have the greatest, most efficient service possible. And he did it, and he grew to enormous size, one of the biggest companies in the world. But then he was not paying attention to the employees. And so as this grew and grew and grew and grew, the employees eventually said, Hey, we deserve better. And it wasn't an equitable system, according to Equity Theory. And all of a sudden, they created a union, a teamsters union, to go against Jeff to try to get that back into balance. So this teamsters union was a symptom that he was customer-centric, but he wasn't employee-centric. It wasn't balanced there. So then all of a sudden, they got more income, and he ended up lowering a little bit of his profit margin. When he did, now he's customer-centric and employee-centric. Well, when that occurred, the margins going to the stockholders was a little less. So then he goes, well, if I have to give a little bit more to the stockholders that they're going to drop out, and we don't have continued investment. So then he brought himself down a bit, lowered his margins, brought the stockholders up a bit, got them a better yield when the process of doing it. Now all of the people that are involved are now centered. They're all involved. And now the business grows because of it, and then he ends up making more money in the long run, even though he's making less per unit, a service. So The whole thing went up because he maintained an equitable position with all the people that were primarily involved. And that's the lesson. And, when we see that in companies, and I see I've been consulting forty-one years in business companies. And I've watched the behaviors of people, and when they get things right, There's a maximum return on there. It's efficient, and it's giving symptoms until it gets there. And if you know how to interpret the symptoms, you'll realize it's it's trying to get people into sustainable fair exchange to the state of equanimity and authenticity. One of the questions that I have is that you said a couple of things. You were talking about pain over pleasure, we were talking about the inject of society and, you know, different programs, different belief systems, etcetera. What do you feel like is one of the biggest foundational reasons why the majority of the population don't know? What's important to them? They don't understand this concept of values. Would you say that it's just a multitude of things, or there's something at the foundation of it all? Well, imagine going back thousands of years ago. And, supposedly, we're a little bit nomadic. Although we keep finding more and more civilizations back there that were organized farther back in time. But let's just go twenty-five to thirty-five thousand years ago. And we got supposedly nomadic males and females out there and living in and little families or little communities or kinship. Eventually, that turned into a township, and eventually, you know, it went into a first city or town and then city and then eventually state nation. It kept growing. And as the numbers grew, a division of labor emerged. And the division of labor, instead of one person by themselves out in the middle of nowhere, doing everything, now you know, you're a builder of a house. You make furniture. You end up growing produce. You are making metallurgy. Everybody starts doing specialties, and you really can't function without their specialty as you get more and more specialized. So people can more and more depend on them. And if they're without them, they don't it well out there because they've not adapted to the generality of the nomad anymore. So what happens if people are frightened of losing their connection with society, they afraid of banishment and rejection and alienation and pushed away and having to do it all on their own. That'd be like me right now, doing anything but teach research and writing and traveling. I mean, I depend a lot of people. So they do all the specialties. So in the process of doing it, the fear of not fitting in and the fear of rejection, the fear of abandonment, the fear of alienation makes most people try to fit in and please them instead of learning how to communicate what they want and what they value in terms of those people They immediately subordinate themselves to those they depend on and look up to and need and couldn't live without. And when they do it, each they put people on pedestals and fear the loss of them, they automatically inject the values of those people in cloud, they clarity what they want, and their uncertainty and cloudiness makes them given a sense, decisions over to other people. The decision offload to other people and lose their own inner authority. And they lose their individual heroism inside. Instead of they go to a collective heroism, and they depend on fitting into the society and become sheep instead of shepherds. And this is a natural process of the development of numbers of people. And very few people are unbridled visionaries that walk the path of a you know, an original thinking process and have the courage to be rejected, in the pursuit of it, and then learn the skill of communicating it as a leader to inspire other people to do what their dream is. And that's an art. And it and it And I think that Emerson really helped me with a statement called, to be great is to be misunderstood. That's If you're not willing to be ridiculed and violently opposed and self until you're self-evident, be prepared to fit in instead of stand out, even though we all wanna make a difference standing up. I don't think I could have said that better myself. But that's, like you said before, just a part of that puzzle and part of the process as a feedback to give you that challenge to be able to gain that strength in your true authenticity. Exactly. All of the feedback, any error in life, we don't empower people overpower us. I say tell people, Unempower yourself in finance, we're told what you're worth. If you don't empower, like, Social Security, if you don't empower yourself in a relationship, you'll be doing honey do things around the house. You could be delegating a specialist. If you don't empower yourself socially, you'll be told what misinformation and propaganda campaigns are out there. If you don't empower yourself in health, You'll end up, you know, having organs removed and drugs taken. If you don't empower yourself spiritually, you'll probably live in a geocentric, antiquated model of cosmology. But if you empower those areas of life, and give yourself permission to originally think, as Munger says, take the time to think and reflect on your life and actually look at what what you're being inundated by. Is it really true or is it just opinions? You know, they say that opinions are the cheapest commodities on Earth and that which circulates the most usually has the least value. Are you willing to go and really go and educate yourself and expand your awareness and define what's true and objective instead of what's mostly taught and dispersed among the masses? So my question oh, go ahead. So this has been on my mind a decent amount lately because I'm always trying to, like, optimize my performance productivity. And I don't know if there if it's unique person to person or if there is, like, some ground, you know, what you've seen people But is there that percentage between putting the time into being, like, constantly increasing who you are and authenticity from using tools for meditation and journaling and just, you know, getting out and being yourself versus the doing aspect of life, kind of like the external versus the internal. Is notice, is there a delay sometimes between starting to do it before you start to see results? Is that what you're asking? No. Like, living your life, is there Is there like a percentage almost? A percentage to be, like, put this much of your time energy into the inner work and as much time energy into the outer work, or is that always back back to that fifty-fifty Well, you're I always say when the voice and the vision on the inside is louder than opinions on the outside, you mastered your life, But I see that the outer and the inner become one thing. My outer life and my inner life are really become more blended as you go through life. Because your integration and authenticity as you know yourself become stronger and the world around you, you prioritize and you delegate and you do the things that are most significant. So the external world that you in involved in is matching what you're envisioning So I find that that's that's automatically going up as to the degree of our congruency, to the degree that we are actually walking our talk instead of limping our life. Which I guess makes, like, chaos is just the perception of, you know, the opposites split and then getting back into order and unity. Bringing those two sides to one. That makes sense. It it's like a a rocket when it first takes off. It has a lot of correction at the bottom. And when it goes up higher and higher and higher, it gets more stable and steady. The corrections are at different angles and eventually booms. And so I think that's our life. We go through them. We learn about who we are. We think we know, and then we have refinements, then we get more clear about it. We keep polishing it, and eventually, we know who we are. We're on our track. Unless we've been subordinating, unless we keep subordinating and keep trying to please everybody. And, you know, people who do that, And people that are looking for a one-sided world and trying to get living other people's values will automatically self-depreciate as a mechanism to guide them back to what is authentic and what is true and what is a priority? Well, that's kind of my question. Is that for the individual that's listening that is resonating with this, but they are being honest with themselves? I've been pleasing a lot of people for a really long time, and I don't even know what I want anymore. I everything is about what I have to do or what I should do. So when someone like that embarks on doing the values of termination, they learn their values What does it look like for them to start to live in their values? Do you find that in in your own situation or other people you've worked with they end up doing it in phases or they're they're able to just get that clarity and start living in their values? Well, I think there's a whole spectrum of sponsors. Some people, you know, it's like, they just get up and ride the bicycle the first day. And others take a while before they get the bicycle understood. My observation is if you were to take any human being and let's say that they were to, sit and meditate for twenty minutes in the morning. And contemplate what is the highest priority. They already know their values. What's the highest priority actions they could do today that can help them fulfill their values on planet Earth? And they sit and contemplate that. And they write down what are those very highest priority things that I could do today that would increase the probability of the fulfilling of what is most meaningful to And let's say they write seven things down. And then they go and knock those out and check them off, knock the next out, check it off. And at the end of the day, they had an extra hour or so. They knocked off one more, and they got eight major high-priority actions done that day. Their gratitude for that day will be up. They won't be proud. They won't be cocky. They'll be grateful. If they come home, even if there's chaos at the home, they'll be able to manage it and not react to it. And be able to bring order to the chaos. But if they go to work, let's say, they don't take the time to meditate. They don't look at their values. They don't look at what's priority. And they just go in there, and then there's fires to put out all day. And there's all this stuff going on next time, because I learned a long time ago by Parkinson's law, and the law of entropy, that if you don't fill your day with high-priority actions that inspire you, it is going to fill up with low-priority distractions that don't. If you don't put your money into the shit, it's gonna go into unexpected bills. If you don't target the people you wanna associate with, you'll end up being distracted by opportunists. It's a basic law of entropy. So the second you prioritize it, you end up coming on top of the world and have a broader view, and less reaction, and more unconditional appreciation for life, if you're doing lower-priority things, you're a bear when you get home. You're ready to have a fight. You're going, what a freaking day? What a hell of a day! A hell of a day means you're down in the dumps, you might say. And, a heavenly day is when you're on top of the world. So there's a different perspective when you prioritize. When you live by the highest priority, your self-worth goes up and you become more stable. When you live by lower priorities, your self-worth goes down and you become more volatile. And when you do, you tend to have more subjective bias misinterpret communications, have alternating monologue instead of dialogue, you pay the price, and that's essential that you pay the price to associate the pains and suffering of not being authentic and not living by priority. It's a way of getting you back on the priority. Well, I think that was a beautiful example of the inner and outer work that Dr. Nick was talking about. You know, the meditation, you know, the reviewing of your values, the meditation is that inner work, but then creating that action plan for the day is that outer work. And I think that was a really key thing that a lot of listeners are gonna take away that it's not one-sided it's really about bridging that together, and that's really where the magic happens. Yes. If some people think that they can just sit and meditate into great achievements. I don't know about you, but I had to work my butt off a bit, and I got a small butt because I work I put the hours in. I don't I don't know of anybody. I don't know of anybody that's achieved something great with doing, you know, little activity. Most of them work Most of them have a work ethic and they put the hours in. I had a lovely gentleman about, oh, April this year, who is one of the greatest pianists in the world. I mean, he he played in almost every major city of major countries around the world. He's eighty years old. I had lunch and dinner with him plus. I went to a performance and watched him rehearse. And as we're going to dinner and talk, and I said, you know, when did you first how did you start on this? He said I was three years old. I picked up the piano. Started playing a piano at three. At nine, I started doing concert piano performance. From there on out, it just kept growing. I said, well, how much hours do you put into it? And I was expecting in my mind a certain number, but he kinda just went blow past me. He said thirteen hours a day. And I said thirteen hours a day, he said I have eight thousand classical songs memorized verbatim. I don't have to look at any piece of music of any classical piece of music by any of the great, you know, composers. I have them all done by heart. I can recite them and repeat them. And I practice them hours a day, and I still do it. And Here he was, eighty years old in the we have four grand pianos here on the ship, and he was in there working on one of them. If there was somebody in that area, he would move to another one. And he just practiced piano. And then when he performed, you could not be in that performance without tears in your eyes. It's like, but Bocelli Andrea Bocelli singing somewhere in the moment, when he's singing, you're gonna get tears in your eyes on some of those notes, some of those sections. That's the way it was when he was playing. So here's a master in operation, but thirteen hours a day added up. I had a gentleman who came to my program in the break to experience, and, he was twenty-nine years old. He'd spent I asked him, you know, he's a concert, violinist. He's going all over the world himself, and I asked him how many hours does he has he calculated his practice. So he started calculating, I mean, looking and estimating it was. It came out just under forty-four thousand hours. He was twenty-nine years old, that he'd already pre already practiced. So Gladwell says ten thousand. I've been teaching the breakthrough experience. That one program, twenty-five hours times one thousand one hundred and well, one thousand two hundred times now. And, you add that up. Times twenty-five hours. That's thirty-something thousand hours just presenting one program. So if you put the hours in, you'd be surprised what you get. You get major outcomes if you put the effort in. So I'm I'm not a I don't wanna teach people a fantasy, though. You just just visualize it, and you'll end up with all this. I'm I'm a firm believer that most people who do extraordinary things put extraordinary effort into it. But do you have a question, Nick, before I go to mine? I was gonna say, but that's just honestly obeying the laws of the universe. That's that's the the balance of the inner and the outer, the the energy, the transformation, the the alchemy, you know, going from a low vibration to high vibration, non-physical to physical. It's just that's just part of creation right there. That's it? My comment is that You have a you have more padding on your butt than you do on your shoulders. I think that's because you need to get your button gear. I don't know about that. No one you John. No one you John, I was a little nervous you're gonna say something else. You need a good wallop in the butt sometimes to get back here. Pat on the shoulders. Get you don't need but a little bit of padding on the butt, but you need a little padding on the butt sometimes. But I've I find in people that are really inspired by what they do. They put the hours in. I have a gentleman now that I've known for almost twelve years now. When I met him, he was, you know, he was involved in music performance and stuff. He's got three Grammys now. He'd been a student for twelve years. Three Grammys. And the guy is busy. I mean, he is out there doing it. And that's why he's achieved what he has. He's putting in the hours. And I the same thing for Marshall best that I know, and a sports point o, they put in the hours. So I don't wanna promote the idea. I'm not against the idea of visual and affirming and focusing. I'm all for that, but you wanna put the hours in, and that's where the work comes in. That's why I spend as many hours as I do teaching, researching, writing, and traveling. I think the story about the PNS, your own story is everything. It's the perfect wrap-up for this podcast and the reason being is because you're able to give that much effort time and energy because you want to because it's in alignment with your values. And that is what is going to lead you to leave that legacy. Somebody asked me one time, you know, You don't have to work. You're financially well off and everything else. I said, I know, but I don't care. I didn't I didn't wanna have financial independence to sit in luxury and just do nothing. And I had a desire to do financial independence so I could do it. I love because I can do it, not because I have to. Do it because I love to. There's a difference. And so, they go, well, why do you put so many hours into it? I said because I'm so inspired that somebody will listen. I think that's a great, story that would because so many people are looking to acquire, you know, money, financial abundance, but they have no idea what they're gonna do with it. Or they're gonna use it on material things. If you don't know what you're gonna do with wealth, you know, I just I'm working on a book right now. Nine steps to financial freedom right now. And, one of the subchapters just yesterday's editing was that. If you don't know what you're gonna do with it, why would you expect the world to bring it to you? You know, what are you gonna do with your with what exactly is wealth and what are you gonna do and how you're gonna, you know, it's like getting an Uber. I don't know where I am. I don't know where I'm going but take me there. It's a great point. I know those little examples, you're just like, yeah, that makes sense. Well, this was amazing. Simple. I think this was huge. Our audience is going to gain so many pearls of wisdom from this. And guys, if you didn't get it yet, you need to know your values. It's the foundation of everything. And especially if you are a growth-focused individual that is looking to leave a legacy in any area of your life, it starts with knowing who you are as a person good. So true. Alright. Thank you guys for being here, and we are excited to have DeMartini on again.
