Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Everything in the universe expands or contracts, and everything in nature grows or dies.

Growth normally comes through stress, and expansion comes through pressure.

What fulfills you when you work really, really hard towards something, and you gotta go find that thing.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Ndlela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

We are currently looking for professionals or entrepreneurs who would be willing to discuss their communication challenges on this show.

All the details of booking a spot with me are found on the show notes.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify, and leave us a reading and a review.

Now let's get communicating.

Now let's get communicating with Michael Mojo, hailing all the way from the south of Australia.

Talking about real down under.

Michael is a mindset and mental performance coach who helps people raise their standards, gain momentum, and leverage the life they have always desired to live.

Now, if one thing we can agree on is so many of us attend seminars, listen to speeches, try to get motivated, but something always goes missing because we don't seem to change.

And Michael is going to help us with that.

So before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hey, Michael.

Thank you for having me.

I really appreciate it.

Great intro.

You actually gave it to me.

So I appreciate you.

It's my pleasure.

Welcome to the show.

So tell us a little bit about what it's like there down under in Australia.

Apparently, we have kangaroos everywhere, alligators, the most deadliest animals.

But where I'm from, down the bottom of South Australia, it's part of the wine region of Australia.

There's about an hour from the central hub of Adelaide.

There's multiple wine regions that Adelaide is famous for or South Australia is famous for.

You're from South Africa, so it's probably the same there as well, where we have some amazing great white sharks, some of the biggest in the world.

Normally, South Africa and Australia have those too.

But yeah, it's a beautiful place.

I love living here.

Sometimes you can go driving, and you may not see a person for four, five, six hours.

Right, the outback, as they call it.

Sort of, yeah.

Yeah, speaking of being from South Africa, the funny thing about Australia is we have a lot of communities, but at the same time, we're very competitive, especially with rugby and cricket.

Yes.

Please give us your background and how you eventually get started on the work that you do now.

As a young kid, I wasn't that bright.

I was put into special classes, told that I had, you know, learning difficulties.

The word dyslexia was thrown around, attention deficit.

You know, I just really struggled at school.

To cut a long story short, around 15, I was expelled from school, fell into this downhill spiral, I guess, of depression, and then wanted to end my life.

And it was in that moment that I realized that I couldn't please everybody else.

I'd spent a lot of time internalizing my own thoughts, but I just didn't have the tools to be able to deal with them.

Hence why I led to that position.

And the night I was going to end my life, I realized that I couldn't please anybody else, that I was here to look after myself, and that I just had to do what was right by me.

So I ended up going back to school, finishing off high school.

Didn't really know what I wanted to do.

I wasn't smart enough to go to university, so I went into a skills-based career, working in the mining industry on heavy machinery as a mechanic.

When I was there, though, I was always told this myth.

And that was that if you work really, really hard, you can make good money.

If you make good money, then you can buy a house and a car, and you can get married and have kids.

You can go on holidays.

And then from there, you sort of made it in life, and life is happiness.

Yeah, I brought into that myth all through my childhood.

And then when I got into the workforce, I realized that there were all these people who were making what I thought was large sums of money going and working in the mines here in Australia, which is our mining industry is huge.

Another commonality with South Africa, yeah.

Yeah, and there's a lot of money in Australia in the mining industry.

So probably, you know, triple to quadruple the average income.

You know, I thought, I'm going to go into this industry.

I'm going to set myself up for life.

When I got in there, I found that the majority of people who were in there hated life.

They would come to work on Monday.

They would complain about their partner at home.

It was a male dominated industry, so they would complain about their wife.

They'd complain about having to be at home with the kids.

Most of them would drink a lot, use drugs recreationally as well.

It just was a really toxic place to work in a really poor environment.

And I started realizing that I didn't want to go back to that place that I was when I was 15.

So I decided to start looking around for maybe a different career path.

And I came across an ad and it said, become a personal trainer.

And this was 20 years ago.

So there wasn't the gym culture that there is now.

It was sort of a bit of a joke of an industry.

It wasn't taken seriously.

The medical industry or the health industry didn't really take it seriously at all.

So I thought, you know, this is what I love to do.

As a kid, I was chubby.

I was overweight.

I got picked on by bright red hair, freckles and white pasty skin.

So I used to get picked on quite a lot.

And the gym was the place that made me feel good about myself.

So anyway, I started studying after hours, even though it scared me to death having to go back and study, because to me, school and study was being picked on, being told that you weren't smart, being put in special classes.

So it was a really scary moment.

But what I knew was that if I didn't confront that, push into it, that I would never improve.

I started studying after hours.

So I would work for a 10-hour day.

Then I would go and study after hours.

When I did that, I was a straight A student, loved it, was extremely gifted at it.

That's where I found my love for learning and studying.

And I realized that I wasn't as dumb as what I thought.

I just didn't like studying the stuff, the curriculum that I was given at school, but I love studying things.

And then so from there, I got into the personal training industry, worked in there for about eight or nine years.

I ended up working in medical centers doing physical rehabilitation.

And that's why I realized that almost everyone knows what to do.

They just don't do it because of what happens in between their ears.

And so I realized that this thing here is the most powerful thing, and that's what led me into this path.

And I've been doing mental performance for about 13 years now.

I was doing it in the personal training space as well.

About 13 years, I've been doing just mindset, all together about 20 years.

Based on your story and the path that it has led you to, would you say that when we are sort of comfortable, and there's nothing wrong with being comfortable, when we are sort of comfortable, we don't have this innate thing of looking for a different direction or for something more.

Because you had such really negative experiences in school, that's why you were constantly on the search for something else.

Yeah, it's a great question.

I study a lot of ancient philosophy, Aristotle to Plato, right through to some of the modern day philosophers as well, and then a lot of sciences.

I'm not sure if you've ever watched The Matrix.

I know about it.

I never sat through an entire thing, let alone all three of them.

But yeah, I know snippets.

The first one has a great part in it, and it's the woman in the red dress.

I think his name is Neo.

Someone will correct me on Instagram, I'm sure.

He's doing some training.

The other person standing next to him, his teacher, his mentor.

Yeah, he's training him how to watch things that are going on around him.

And he's watching all these people walk past, and it's busy.

And then the next second, this attractive woman starts walking past and grabs his attention.

And as she walks past, he looks at and watches her, and she smiles at him.

And then the next second, he turns around, the two guys in the black suits with the sunglasses are standing right there.

And his lesson was that he got distracted.

Now, I think in life, we're given these distractions.

And I'm not sure whether people call it God, the universe, universal energy.

But it seems that we're consistently given these distractions within our own life to pre-occupy us.

But essentially, they're the woman in the red dress.

And I think comfort is the woman in the red dress.

Because like you said that, you know, we can stop our growth or we can sort of hinder ourselves because we get too comfortable.

And I think comfort and discomfort are a double edged sword on both sides.

They both have good and bad.

This comfort is great because people change.

You know, I have a lot of people reach out to me and they say, I've lost everything.

What do I do?

But that's the first time that they've taken control and responsibility for their thoughts, their emotions and potentially their behaviors.

Sometimes people just won't do that their whole entire life.

They'll blame everything else outside of themselves because they're just, they're sitting in a space that's not comfortable, but it's not uncomfortable.

And so they just sit in this midpoint that it sort of becomes so familiar that nothing really changes.

And most people are really predictable.

And so what I think is that sometimes challenge and pain and the most painful situations are the greatest opportunity for change.

They were for me and they were for tens of thousands of people, I guess, that I've coached and mentored and, you know, had come to our events.

I just think that it's comfort, ease, simplicity.

Sometimes they can be the woman in the red dress, so it's got to be controlled.

It's like anything in life, you know, too much of a good thing can not be a good thing.

The growth part.

Absolutely.

And now let's go back to what you were told when you were young.

All the dyslexia, he's in special class, he cannot be like other kids.

At that age, especially, what did you do with those voices?

Oh, now I got to go back.

That's a good question.

Because we still get them.

I'm 48 and I still have voices where I have to, you know, I'll be alert and say, block out the noise or something like that.

But I think that a lot of the time we don't know how to silence those voices because they become the woman in a red dress in a different form.

Yes, as a kid, and I guess having studied a lot of how the brain works, like from neuroscience and psychology and so on.

When I look into those fields, when you're young, the part of the brain that's getting developed is that emotional, fear-driven, pleasure-seeking, impulsive type part of the brain, known as the limbic or the emotional system or the amygdala.

There's lots of different words that people throw around.

So when I was a child, I didn't really have the self-awareness to realize that this was going on.

I just thought that I was a victim of circumstance.

I think though, as I got a little bit older and having those situations happened, I woke up a little bit and realized that maybe I had some impact and maybe I could control some things in my life.

Now, I don't believe that we can control all outcomes, but what I'm 100% sure about, I actually did a video this morning on my Instagram about this, and it was that the first thing that happens is you become emotionally reactive to your day.

You've already lost the day.

And so the first thing that we have to control when the alarm goes off is our energy.

So when the alarm goes off, we can control our energy.

Then we can control our thoughts.

That means that then we can control our emotions so that throughout the day we can control our behaviors.

But what normally happens is that most people on a Saturday or on a weekend, they have completely different emotions and feelings and a different thought process and a different energy than they do on a working week.

And so when that happens, they have these volatile emotions that are going like this all week.

And then they will come to me and say, but I make money and then I lose money, and I make money and I lose money, or I lose weight and then I gain weight, I lose weight.

Their results in life follow the volatile emotions and the volatile energy that they always have.

So I can't control my outcomes, but I can control the work that I put in.

I can control the energy, the thoughts, the emotions and the effort, but I can't control the outcome because things change.

You know, politics changes, economics change.

There's a whole bunch of different variables, but what I do know is that if I can keep controlling myself, I've got the greatest potential of controlling an outcome.

Let's go back to the matrix a little bit.

You know how people use the expression, you plug into the matrix when you described, you know, go to school, get a great job, have kids and a picket fence and a big house.

Do you think those clients of yours who have that up and down emotional pattern, do you think that they just plug into whatever they think is expected of them and feel like they don't have as much control over their lives and choices as they do?

I'll come back to the scientific stuff that I do know, and then we can talk about the philosophical stuff of like, maybe this is what's going on.

Thousands of years from a lot of the stuff that I've studied and researched, great philosophers, great religious leaders, they've all had these similar concepts of studying multiple different religions, not in depth as a scholar, but enough to sort of understand the basic principles.

And it's almost like there's this commonality of thoughts and ideas.

If I bring that back to science now, when we're a child, Sigmund Freud spoke about this, where he stated that when we're a child, we're fear-driven and we're impulsive.

And our brain is almost like this pendulum that swings back and forward.

So when we see things that give us pleasure, we chase after it.

And when we're fear-driven, we run away from it, because it signifies in nature a predator or something that could harm our life.

And so children are very impulse and fear-driven.

That's how they learn.

But the problem with that, though, is that they're highly volatile.

So their emotions are up and down, their thoughts are up and down.

And so in order to control that and govern and regulate it, we have something called an implanted value, which is where a parental figure or people around us who are older that potentially we look up to, they say things like, don't touch the hot stove, or don't touch the hot plate, don't touch the barbecue.

What's that?

The child will touch it, but then mom or dad or the parental figure reacts in a way where they're all upset and the parents are stressed out because the child's just burned themselves, and then the child feels that the parent's going through this chaos, and the child goes, wow, that feels really uncomfortable.

I better not do that again.

And that's how we start to learn progress.

So what I understand is when we're a child, we're driven by these pleasure principle.

But as we get older, our prefrontal cortex, a more evolved part of the brain, slowly starts to kick in.

It can govern and regulate our emotions.

It's a problem in this day and age because there's a lot of stuff in the field of psychology and personal development, and even spirituality, where it says we shouldn't think negative thoughts.

But the truth is, we do.

There's a term for that, Michael.

Toxic positivity, they call it.

Meaning at some point in the midst of all this, there's got to be something negatively I'm thinking if I'm going through.

You cannot tell me I'm not allowed to say that really sucks at all for the rest of my life.

Is that even practical?

I don't know because I've never experienced these like beautiful blissful states all the time.

So what happens is these thoughts pop up like I'm driving my car.

Someone cuts me off.

The anger kicks in.

And then my brain, the prefrontal more evolved part of the brain kicks in and says, hey, it's not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.

It doesn't matter.

Cool.

Now I can calm down again.

If the moment kicks in, and then you regulate your emotions, like you said, your emotions, your thoughts, you have become aware that I'm really pissed off at this person who just cut me off.

And then you have the prefrontal cortexes.

You know what?

Because here's the thing.

I think that toxic positivity movement, when it started saying be positive all the time, maybe it was targeting people who would stay in the, I can't believe they cut me off for the next two hours.

And you go to work and you go to your wife and you still pissed off about somebody who cut you two hours ago.

Probably that's how that started.

But you cannot tell me I'll be positive all the time.

That's just not something I can say that for.

Yeah, that's part of that childlike brain though, right?

And unfortunately, the majority of the world still operate even as adults in this way.

And I see it quite a lot.

So you're exactly right.

The positive thinking movement came from a whole bunch of negative thinkers that thought if we can counterbalance that with being positive, that's great, which is true.

You can take a negative and a positive and it creates stability or balances itself back out.

But the problem is then is that now you've got a whole bunch of people who think they need to be positive all the time and convince themselves that they're positive all the time.

But what I find is that humans are still a lot of the time driven by pleasure or pain, and then there's inspiration.

And true inspiration is a balance between positive and negative.

So throughout the day, I know that everything I do has both a good side and a bad side.

If I'm out growing my business, I'm not doing other things.

That's a benefit and a drawback.

Fitness and exercise sucks.

It's challenging.

You got to push yourself if you want to get results.

But at the same time, there are benefits to it.

So when you do something that you love or enjoy in a way where it's not just a positive, it actually creates a greater future benefit.

And so what we're looking for is true love is the balance between positive and negative.

And so like if a parent loves their child, they know that their child, I always say it's their dream and their nightmare at the same time.

And a great relationship is a dream and a nightmare at the same time.

Yeah, like Chris Rock said, I don't know if you know this joke where he said, if you've never practiced your alibi in front of the mirror, you've never been in love.

If you haven't practiced for 45 minutes, how are you going to kill this person and bury their body?

You've never been in love.

Because one moment you're really in love with this person, the next moment you're going to kill them.

The positive and negative balance, like you said.

So I teach people like go do what you love, because it's a balance between both things.

When you can stay in flow throughout your day, you're doing a lot of stuff that you love, but it has both sides.

Passion is the woman in the red dress.

So if you actually study etymology, which is the history of words and language, it says that the word passion means to suffer.

And the great philosophers said, avoid the passions.

And they say this as well in some of Christianity, in some of the religions, avoid passions, because passion is a positive without a negative, whereas true love is both a positive and a negative.

Like you said about the parent, I love my child, but there's discipline if something goes wrong, the child does something wrong.

Because I'm wondering right now, we live in a time where everything is just, I need it now.

The internet has made us click and we get there now.

Amazon will deliver it in two hours.

What would you say when it comes to delaying gratification?

Like you said, gym is not fun, but you're thinking of the end result in the long run.

How do you get us to not want the pleasure now and work for it?

Because that's the growth stage, right?

Yeah, there's a place for pleasure and there's a place for pain.

But again, it comes down to that that's that amygdala limbic system, the emotional part of the brain.

It's more primitive in the way that it operates.

And so it's there because back millions of years ago, depending if you believe in the theory of evolution or not, millions of years ago when we were hunters, gatherers, and we lived in tribes, normally things that were pleasureful were good for us.

So we eat the berries and they taste sweet.

And so we want more of those because of survival.

We want to eat as much food as we can because we might not be able to get food for a couple of days.

So our pleasure response is a survival response, but so is the pain response, that when we're in pain, something's going on.

If we eat the food and it makes us sick, then we want to avoid that.

If we injure ourselves, we want to avoid that because it's a safety response.

The problem is that in the 21st century, most places around the world have grown out of just living in absolute survival.

That's not everywhere.

Some people definitely still do.

There's a vast range.

But in a lot of countries around the world, people who are seeking immediate gratification all the time, most of them won't live in a survival response.

They could be above the survival response, but they keep pulling themselves back down because that's a woman in the red dress, and it says, hey, here's something you want.

And if I react to it and I can't control it, then the next second, I'm reinforcing that pattern, so I want more of it.

If I can train the more evolved part of the brain, which is our prefrontal cortex, or the executive center, there's lots of different names for it.

But if I can get that and say, hey, just because I want it, if I can put it off for a little bit, and there's a right time and a right place to have that thing, you know what?

I can still have it.

But I just have to make sure I'm a bit more planned out, I'm a bit more thoughtful and not just reacting to my emotions.

If we can do that, I mean, I see that happening quite a lot in our society now, where people are just reacting to things, people are emotionally driven, they blow up online about the most ridiculous stuff, and all of that has consequences.

If you're more controlled in this day and age, and you can actually think through things, or you can use other people's emotional levers, your chances of achieving great things in life are way, way higher than most other people.

Speaking of consequences, that's what my mom used to say when she was raising my brother, and I should say, you're not just making the choice right now, you are automatically choosing the consequences that will come eventually from making this choice.

I love that.

I'm making the choice to eat the chocolate, but you're choosing the consequence of gaining those pounds in the long run.

So don't just look at it as the chocolate.

Think about the fact that, do I want that consequence?

Because that's essentially what I'm choosing.

That's beautiful.

Your mom was a wise person.

Thank you.

I'll tell her.

That's good.

I like that.

I'll tell her.

Thank you, Michael.

And then if anybody is listening and wondering, is there something I can do on a daily basis to start to control my emotions, to not react immediately, to have ways of starting to delay gratification?

Because I think that's the reason a lot of us don't change, no matter how badly we want it.

There's a couple of really important key things that I've learned.

I actually created a whole event, which I've got an event called Thrive Time that I run here in Australia.

It's online as well.

But what it is, is it's about creating a success map for your life.

Having worked with tens of thousands of people, I find that most people actually just don't know what they want.

And so I have a framework, which is clarity times by standards plus environment equal your success.

So the first thing we have to do is we've got to get clear, because if we don't get clear, we can't create standards.

And our standards then start to create our environment, because we can't control our environment.

If we don't have standards, we just fall into whatever's around.

So the first thing is, is when we create clarity, I call them the three key pillars, the three success pillars.

You've got fulfillment, drive and direction, and then you essentially have performance psychology or a bunch of tools that you can use to then keep you on track.

When you have fulfillment, you're probably likely to do something for a longer period of time.

Now, fulfillment comes from effort.

It doesn't come from, I'm sure your listeners and yourself have gone through this, when you have a really productive day where you're working on something and you're pushing yourself, and maybe you've got times where you're a bit tired, but you keep going.

At the end of that day, you feel really proud of yourself, but you get a sense of achievement and fulfillment.

From all the hard work leading up to that, yes.

Yes.

Whereas I think our society, you mentioned it before with the immediate gratification, going through that challenge, a lot of people these days just go, I shouldn't feel like that, it shouldn't be hard.

And then so they go to the easiest path, but the easiest path is often the hardest path in the long run, because it leads you off of the cliff and you will eventually hit rock bottom.

So the first thing that we want to do is find out what fulfills us in life, and it normally comes from our values, our purpose and our lifestyle balance.

Then if I can do something that's fulfilling, like I've been working with people now and coaching for almost 20 years.

I love this.

People say all the time, like I go on holidays and I'll have my laptop and I'll be working.

Someone comes up and they go, what are you doing?

And I'm working.

And they go, but you're on holidays.

Like, yeah, my every day is a holiday.

Like I love what I do.

I just travel around the world.

I don't change my lifestyle too much.

Like I love exercise.

I love hanging out with good people.

I love working.

So why wouldn't I do that every day?

Why would I change that?

Most people, though, have it the other way around, where a holiday them is escaping the nightmare that that every day.

Yes.

Yeah.

Whereas I don't have that.

That creates a big pendulum swing in a person's life.

And so they tend to self-sabotage and self-destruct on holidays.

And then when they come back to work, they're trapped.

And so they're always trapped.

So they seek freedom.

When trapped and freedom are the same thing, you win.

So every day, I'm both trapped and I'm free at the same time, because I'm trapped by the mission.

I'm trapped by my vision.

I'm trapped by my goals.

But at the same time, I'm completely free because I chose them.

I win the game of life.

That is so beautiful.

I have never heard of it before.

Put like that.

Thank you, Michael, for that.

And is there anything that I should have asked you that you were hoping to share with our listeners today?

That's a really good question.

I've never been asked out of podcasts.

Not really.

I think everyone is gifted an amazing life.

And I believe that that life is different for everybody.

And it doesn't matter where you start from.

We're gifted this amazing gift of life.

From what I've been able to understand, is that everything in the universe expands or contracts, and everything in nature grows or dies.

Growth normally comes through stress, and expansion comes through pressure.

So I believe that it is so important for all humans to really assess what their success map of life is and find out, first of all, what fulfills you when you work really, really hard towards something.

And you've got to go find that thing, and then do it long enough to reap the rewards.

The second thing is that when a person wakes up in the morning, I really believe that the first thing that you have to do is you have to control your energy.

Because for some weird reason, the majority of people that I've spoken to, interviewed, researched about, when you wake up, most people start to think about the fears and the worries of not enough money, not enough time, got to go back to the job.

And so our brain, I think, tests us.

It's the woman in the red dress immediately in the morning.

So we have to then start to control our thoughts, our emotions, and then our actions throughout the day.

And that woman in the red dress is going to keep appearing to see if we want to stay on our path or if we're going to be tempted to be pulled off of track.

It's sort of like the angel and the devil on the shoulder.

Those two are fighting off all day long.

The more you can keep the angel winning and not the devil, the better our life becomes over a longer period of time.

It's harder at first, but bigger rewards at the end.

On the other hand, if we allow ourselves to be rewarded immediately, our life becomes more of the devil as we age and we get on.

So I think that it's just so important for everyone to really spend the time to ask some important questions, which is like, where are my gifts?

Where are my talents?

How can I give them to the world?

Am I prepared to go through the challenges, the sacrifices, and all the hard work to create the visions that I have that keep popping up in my mind?

And then finally, am I prepared to control that angel and the devil every day and just stay on my path and keep growing and expanding?

Because like I said, growth comes through stress and expansion comes through pressure.

So if we want to grow and we want to expand as people, we have to take on pressure and stress.

It seems that every other field of science knows this, but human behavior.

So just find something you love to do, keep doing it.

When I say love, I don't mean a passion.

My life is extremely challenging, but it's extremely rewarding at the same time.

So I have the best of both worlds.

Thank you so much, Michael.

Words of wisdom from Michael Mojo.

All the way from Australia, the Mindset Coach, Performance Coach, who helps people design the lives that they desire.

This has been such a pleasure and very educational.

So thank you for being here today.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for having me.

My pleasure.

Before you go, would you like to share with us where we can reach you?

Yeah, so you can go to my website, which is michaelmojo.com.

So it's just michaelmojo.com.

Really simple.

My website's there.

There's a whole bunch of information on there.

Some free stuff you can have a look at.

If you just Google my name or go to any social media platform and type in Michael Mojo.

I normally have the blue tick apart from on Facebook on my business page because they won't give it to me.

But on all other platforms you can normally find me.

And please feel free to reach out.

I'm on Instagram every day.

It's sort of like my platform.

So if anyone's got any questions or anyone wants to reach out and send nasty messages or nice messages, please feel free to reach out to me on there and send me a message.

Because you know how to work with both, right?

Yeah.

Excellent stuff, michaelmojo.com.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for joining us on the Speaking and Communicating Podcast once again.

Please log on to Apple and Spotify, leave us a rating and a review and what you'd like for us to discuss on the show that will be of benefit to you.

We encourage you to continue to get communicating and let us know how communication skills continue to improve your life professionally and personally.

And stay tuned for more episodes to come.