During the production of Beyond Belief, Becky Hays and I had the opportunity to interview International best selling author Jack Canfield, (star of The Secret and Author of Chicken Soup for the Soul) in his beautiful home in Santa Barbara, California.
I asked Jack Canfield about the role of beliefs in the law of attraction and manifestation process. He shared some tremendous insights about how limiting beliefs can stop us from creating what we want.
The following is an out take (not in the movie) from our Beyond Belief documentary interview with Jack Canfield in Santa Barbara, California.
Jim Holzknecht: What role do beliefs play in the law of attraction and the manifestation process?
Jack Canfield
Beliefs can support you in getting what you want but they can also get in the way of getting what you want. Let me give you an example.
One of my favorite stories is about a guy named Cliff Young. Cliff Young is an Australian who at the age of 63 decided he wanted to run a long distance race. This race that he wanted to run was about 875 kilometers, I think 675 miles, something like that and I believe it was from Sydney to Melbourne. And it was a race where most people who were in this race who showed up to run it were in their 20’s and 30’s, elite long distance runners.
Now Cliff had never run a marathon before, never run a 10K, never run anything and they said ‘well what makes you think you can do this?’
He said, ‘well I believe I can’ and they said ‘why?’ He said ‘I’m a farmer. What happens is I have sheep that i raise. I don’t have a tractor, I don’t have a horse so if there is a storm coming in and I have to gather up all my sheep from the fields and get them into a safe place, I might be up for 36 hours running around with my sheep dog to heard the sheep in. So I think I can do that. I eat healthy food, mostly organic stuff that I grow on my farm. I’ve always wanted to run a race.’
They said, ‘well why did you start with this one?’
He said, ‘well I looked at my calendar and all the races that were available, it was the only one that overlapped with when I had free time.’
They (racing organizers) didn’t want to let him run. They thought he would die of a heart attack or something. Well what happened was the race starts and they let him run and everyone takes off and they are all dressed in their Nike, Puma, Asics running gear, they are all elite runners.
Cliff is wearing Osh Kosh overalls, a T shirt, construction boots with galoshes over them because someone said it might rain and he wanted to keep his shoes dry and he had a baseball cap and sun glasses.
Now all these guys take off really fast and Cliff is doing something they call the ‘Cliff Young shuffle.’ He is moving fairly slowly but consistently and by the time all the first group of runners who were way ahead of him went to gosleep that night, Cliff didn’t ever catch up to them. He didn’t know he was supposed to go to bed. So they were asleep and up and running again before he got there.
Now, see Cliff had an advantage that nobody knew about and the advantage was this ‘Cliff didn’t know that when you run a multi day race, you’re supposed to sleep 6 hours everyday and then run for 16-18 hours and then sleep for 6 so he just ran non stop for 5 1/2 days and eventually while they were asleep on the 4th day, he passed everybody. Everyone was asleep no one told him to go to bed. He just kept on going. He completed that race in 5 1/2 days, breaking the record by 12 hours.
The next year, everyone was doing the Cliff Young shuffle. Nobody slept and in a field of 70 runners Cliff only came in 12th.
But the point of the story is, sometimes what you believe isn’t true. You believe you have to get more sleep. You believe you have to do X, Y and Z, or be connected or have a PhD in order to achieve your goals and the point is, is that none of that is true. I could give you a story on a million different topics of people where you would say ‘there is no way they could have done that but because they believe they could they did.
I have a story of an eleven year old kid who by the time he was fourteen, he started his own business at age 11, and by the time he was fourteen, he sold his first business for a million and a half dollars. A black kid in the inner city, without a high school degree.
So if Cliff Young can run a race, and a 15 year old can become a millionaire who is black, living in the inner city of Chicago with no education, you can do anything if you believe you can.”
end of part one..continue to part two…
Jack Canfield is one of the transformational leaders featured in the groundbreaking documentary Beyond Belief – produced by Jim Holzknecht and Becky Hays