His motto is “talk is cheap” and his unique ability is getting people to take “action” in the real world to produce real success.

Eker is the author of the best-selling books, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind and SpeedWealth. He has also developed several highly-acclaimed courses such as The Millionaire Mind Intensive, Life Directions, Wizard Training and Train the Trainer. He is also the producer and trainer of the world-famous Enlightened Warrior Training. Here we are pleased to interview T. Harv Eker.

phenomeNEWS: This is a fabulous book and title. The concept of it, the millionaire mind makes us think they have something we don’t. Perhaps they have a different cellular structure. That’s not exactly what you meant, is it?

T. Harv Eker: They have different files in their mind, absolutely! I’m well known for making the following statement: Give me five minutes with anyone and I can predict your financial future for the rest of your life. How? By identifying what’s called your money blueprint. Each of us has a personal money blueprint already ingrained in our subconscious mind and it’s this blueprint more than anything and everything else combined that will determine your financial life. What that means is that you can be the best business person, the best marketer, the best at real estate, the best at stocks or other investing, you could be the best at your job or a real expert at anything, but if your subconscious money blueprint isn’t preset for a high level of success, you’ll never amass a large amount of money. And if by chance you do, you’ll somehow manage to lose it. Can I give you an example?

Sure.

All right. We all know the name Donald Trump. Here was this multi-billionaire who loses everything and more than two years later he’s got it all back again and more. Why? Because his money blueprint is set for high. On the other side of the coin we have lottery winners. They win 5, 10, 50, 100 million dollars. Five years later, virtually half of them of them are right back where they started. Why? Because their money blueprint is set for low.

The thing that most people don’t realize is that we’re all taught how to do money. Nobody comes out of the womb doing money. We’re all taught how to do it. Unfortunately, most of us were taught by people who either didn’t have a lot of money or they had a lot of emotional issues or non-supportive habits around money or weird ways of thinking about it and their ways of being and thinking and acting imprinted on us and became our natural ways of thinking, being and acting. Then we just go along with this automatically, thinking that we’re doing the best we can – and of course we are – but the choices we’re making are coming from a very limited scope of options. Those options are coming only from what has been in the files of your mind. And what is in the files of your mind only can come from what was installed there. So literally we are making current and future decisions based on programming from the past and we don’t even know it.

Were you born with a good financial blueprint?

No. My parents came to North America with $30 in their pocket and $6 of net worth, most of it was bread and food. They had nothing. Money for them meant survival. So that’s what they ingrained in me, if you don’t have money, you die. It wasn’t about enjoying yourself. You worked to have money so you could live and eat. Of course, I wanted more, but that’s not what their blueprints were like. They passed on their blueprints. What happened for me is that, because of that conditioning, I wanted to be a millionaire. All my friends wanted to be astronauts or baseball players. I just wanted to be rich. So I left school after the first year of college to find my holy grail, I was in such a hurry. I was sure in a couple of years I’d make my millions, but I struggled for the next 13 and literally went up and down and up and down. Finally I focused on one business and I became a millionaire literally with a $2,000 credit card loan in only two and a half years. But here was the problem.

The problem was that a couple of years after that I had basically lost all my money. It was all lost or spent. I don’t even know what happened to it. I looked and I was right back where I started. Now here’s where the serendipity comes in. Here’s where the “woo woo” universal intention and no accidents comes. I had made my money in the fitness business. Every day I talked to people about something called a set point when it comes to their weight. People understood that it’s where you’re metabolically set to where your body feels comfortable and that’s the weight you stay on. So no matter what happens, you keep coming back to that weight. That’s why people who go on diets generally come back to the same place, because their body is used to that. As I was looking through my bank book, I having an instant insight, “Wow! In the same way you have a set point when it comes to your weight, you must have a set point when it comes to your money and this is mine.”

Also, serendipitously, I happened to be working on myself very heavily on the personal development side of things, really on my own belief systems and my own past programming because I was trying to be a good father. I had a newborn son and one of my biggest goals in life was to be a great dad. I realized that I had a lot of issues around that because of the messages I had heard when I was young. I found myself coming up with those messages and giving them to my son unconsciously. I didn’t want that. I really was working on myself around that, with some very unusual processes and techniques. They were working really well, so I began using those same methodologies and mental strategies on my money.

Literally within another couple of years I had all of my money back and more and developed a program around this and started teaching it to others. The same thing happened for them and now I’ve been able to help more than half a million people completely and radically transform their financial and personal lives, because the personal life is very much ingrained in the financial life, too. If you’re not doing well financially, your relationships are not doing too well either, usually. This is a process that actually works for people. I’ve been very, very blessed to do that. But that’s how I got involved. It was almost like the whole thing was ordained.

So you had to experience what it was like to have the yo-yo of the finances first, before it finally occurred that there was a financial set point.

Absolutely. In fact, the yo-yo up and down was my dad’s blueprint. He was a builder. He would buy land and then we’d have no money. He wouldn’t have any more cash and he had to borrow money. At that point in time, we were basically broke. When I’d ask him for anything when I was young, he’d say, “Get away from me. Don’t you understand we have no money?” So I didn’t want to ask him for anything. Then a couple of years later, he’d sell all the houses and we had pretty decent money. Then he’d give me 100 bucks and say, “Go have a good time with your friends.” What? First you act like you’re going to kill me, then you’re giving me $100? What do I do here?

Well as it turns out, that became ingrained in me, the up and down habit and I didn’t realize that I was creating that for myself subconsciously. So when I worked on my blueprint, I worked to have much more steady growth. I learned to do that very quickly. You know what? Changing the blueprint is not hard. There are very specific methodologies to do it. In our program we’re blessed to have these methodologies and we change people’s blueprints right on the spot. We don’t teach you how to change your blueprint and send you home to change it. Why? Because you won’t. Why? Because we’re creatures of habit. What people don’t realize is that there are two kinds of habits. There’s doing habits and just as important, there’s not doing habits. What that means is that everything you’re not doing, you’re in a habit of not doing it. So what’s the use of sending you home with anything. You’re not going to do it because you’re not in the habit of doing it. You have the habit of doing other things.

So we do the processes and make the changes right on site. You can actually change the files in someone’s mind, the same as a garden. We’re connected to nature, so it’s the same as a garden. In the same way as you have some really nice flowers in your garden, some weeds in your garden and some bare spots. You can pull the weeds out and make room so they’re not suffocating the flowers. It will allow the flowers to grow quickly and flourish and be wonderful. Then, where those weeds were, you plant new seeds they root and will grow some of the flowers you want in your garden. It’s the same with the mind.

Our mind is nothing more than a big old file cabinet, the same as in your house or your office. Its job is to store information for you based on meanings that you created for that information. Based on the meaning, you placed it in certain files. So you have all the information you’ve ever heard about yourself and life. That includes information about money, success and wealth and rich people. They’re your money files and every time the topic of money comes up, you going to go to your money file to see what to do and see the right choice for you. But the only problem is that those files were put in there a long time ago. They may not be very supportive of wealth or success. So you’re operating from dysfunctional or non-supportive files in your own mind, but you don’t know that. You’re just doing the best you can do. How do you know if you have good files? Well if you’re rich, you have good files. If you’re not, the flowers aren’t growing to their fullest capability because they’re not the right flowers. They’re mediocre flowers or they’re poor flowers. In the book there’s a formula for manifestation. It says your thoughts lead to your feelings, lead to your actions, lead to your results. Even the most skeptical people understand how you create a result. You have to do something. So you take an action. What determines your actions? Your thoughts. So your thoughts are the source of those results. Yes? What most people don’t realize is what determines their thoughts. Why do you think the way you think? Why do you think differently than the person right beside you, especially if you’re married to them? The reason is because there’s something before thought. And what’s before thought is your programming or conditioning – information that was installed, especially when you were young. That determines what’s in your mind files and that’s the only thing you can think.

So here you are, running around, making decisions that you believe are the best of your ability, but that’s the problem. They may be the best of your ability but they still may not be very good or supportive towards wealth. We install mind files that are like hyper growth of a beautiful, wealth-based, flower. So those are files that rich people have. Rich people have files in their mind that create and support wealth. We know what those files are. We know how rich people think and it’s a very simple thing. If you think how rich people think, then you’ll do what rich people do and you’re probably going to have the results that rich people have.

So if you have a beautiful flower growing and you’ve weeded it once, what’s to keep the weeds from coming back?

They will come back. What you have to have is a process for ongoing work on it.

So we need to do weed control?

Sure. They come back, but they come back lesser every time because you’re garden’s not allowing that and you’re maintaining it. And you’re watching for that. Most people don’t even know they have a money blueprint. They’re not watching. The weeds are growing all over. When they come to the seminar, they get to see, “Oh my God! I never realized I had this many weeds in my garden. I thought I was doing pretty good.” How do you know if you’re doing good? Well look at your bank account. It will tell you. So we discover all these weeds that we have because of all these specific assessments that we do. Then they realize it. Now that you know you have those weeds, we make the changes on the spot and then you are now noticing what you are going to be watching for. “That’s what a weed looks like. It’s yellow and it’s got this brown stuff on it.” When you go outside in the garden, you can get rid of it. But if you didn’t know what a weed looked like, they could be growing all over the place.

So in essence you’re removing… could it be called unconscious blocks to your wealth?

That’s exactly it. You’re either going to have unconscious blocks or unconscious accelerators. Some files work for you and some files work against you. Everyone’s got flowers but they have weeds that suffocate those flowers and stop them from growing to their fullest capabilities. Some of them are really detrimental. All it takes is one weed to kill a garden, because that one flourishes. All it takes is one power weed.

How do we get our information? Number 1: verbal programming. What did you hear when you were young? Number 2: modeling. What did you see when you were young? Number 3: specific incidents. What did you experience when you were young around money, success, wealth and rich people? All it takes is one, one single incident to occur in a high-impact way in the past and that destroys you for the rest of your life. Let me give you an example.

One of my students comes in. He’s 54-years-old and he’s always broke. Every time he has money, he loses it. He gets rid of it. He never has any money, although he earns a decent income. He comes to the course and we realize through one of the processes that when he was young, every Saturday morning he would go to the store with his sister to get some candy. His mother would give his sister, who was a couple of years older, the money to hold to go for the candy and then come home. Every single Saturday he would plead with his mother and beg, “Can I hold the money?” And she would say, “You’re too young, let your sister hold it.” Finally, one day, the mother relents and gives him the money to hold. They go to the store, they get some candy, go to pay and guess what? He’s lost the money. The sister runs home, crying, screaming, goes berserk and tells mother what has happened. He gets up to the house and mom starts screaming at him because she was very upset, “What’s the matter with you? What’s wrong with you? I’m never going to give you money again because you’re irresponsible. You can’t hold on to money.”

What does that do to a young kid? That kid created a conclusion, so for 50 years he’s been doing his best trying to save but unconsciously he knows he’s incompetent with money. So he creates the reality of incompetent with money. He loses money or he doesn’t make much money, as much as he could. Your money blueprint, fortunately or unfortunately, will stay with you for the rest of your life unless you identify and change it.

Once you have changed your thinking around money, does it spill into other areas of your life?

It does. Your mind won’t usually put the two together. We have blueprints in all areas of our lives. We have a happiness blueprint, a relationship blueprint, a health blueprint. All those things come from the past, because we’re creatures of habit. It does spill over. A lot of those weeds about money are also weeds about who you are as a person or what you deserve, or scarcity issues, beliefs you have about yourself. All those are going to transfer because we’re holistic beings. You can’t affect one part without affecting the rest of us.

Gerri recently won an iPod and she knew beforehand that she was going to win. She felt like she was in the money mind.

That’s great. That happens sometimes for most of us. The good thing about that, what I recommend, is to always be in the money mind, whether you feel like it or not. That’s going to evoke certain feelings.

One of the things that people don’t realize is that we create our reality. We manifest our lives. You’re writing that book every minute of the day. You’re writing it by the way you think. The problem is that the way you think is guided by your past programming, the information in your old money files. So you really have got to get to the root. We deal with the root. The money blueprint is the root cause of financial success, mediocrity or failure. It is the root. You can work on your business skills and your communication skills and your job skills and your writing skills. At the end of the day, those are all branches and leaves but they’re not the root. The root cause of success is going to be your programming about money. It will start the ball rolling in all areas of your life.

And you mention in the book, that your outer world is a reflection of your inner world. For on a spiritual journey, recognize that phrase being one of the truisms of the world, how the world works.

I agree with that, but let me also say, Number 12 in my book, rich people think “both.” Poor or middle class people think “either/or.” As in, “I’m rich or I’m happy. I’m rich or I’m generous. I’m rich or I’m kind. I’m rich or I’m compassionate. I’m rich or I have my health. I’m rich or I have time for my family. I have money or I have love.” Either/or. All of that is scarcity-based thinking. Scarcity-based thinking is based in fear, which is all ego based and protection based. So the answer to all those things is both.

One of the things about myself and my company is that we have this really beautiful blend of both, meaning that our philosophy is that you can be rich and generous, rich and kind, rich and spiritual, rich and loving. The goal is to be generous and loving and compassionate and spiritual and really, really rich. They go together beautifully. Who said you can’t have one without the other? Rich people believe you can have your cake and eat it, too. Middle class people believe cake is too rich so they’ll only have a little piece and poor people believe they don’t deserve cake so they order a donut, focus on the hole and wonder why they have nothing!

Harv, do you meditate?

I do meditate. I meditate as a tool to clear and quiet my mind, but I don’t meditate as a substitute for action in the real world to create my success.

Because action comes out of thought and thought comes out of the inner world to you have cultivated by removing your weeds.

Removing weeds and installing brand new seeds or roots that you actually want now, based on who you are today and who you want to be in the future, vs. the ones you got 25 years ago.

We especially love a quote in the last part of your book, “The mark of true wealth is determined by how much one can give away.” That was very meaningful for us in being a steward of the world, also, once you have the message.

Most people don’t realize they have negative thoughts around money. And yet, the point is that there are certain things that money buys for people and allows you to contribute to people. What I find is that when people are able to take care of themselves, they’re much more apt to be able to give and help others. It’s when you’re struggling yourself that it’s pretty hard to devote the time, energy and money to help other people who are even more disadvantaged than you are.

One of the things we say in our seminar is that one of the goals is to commit to giving away $100,000 a year to help other people. People go, “Wait a minute! I don’t even earn $100,000 a year.” That’s right. That’s now. But if you’re willing to give away say 10 percent of your money to help people, how much do you have to be earning? Well, a million dollars. That’s when people being to realize how powerful that blueprint is because when I say the goal is to learn and we teach how to do it, you’ll learn how to earn a million dollars a year. Some people can’t even fathom that. Yet that’s very feasible. It’s got to be a balance. You’ve got to earn money for yourself, but your intention also needs to be to earn money to be able to help others. So a lot of people in our community flourish by having an intention to earn enough money to give away $10,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 a year to others. And then their income goes up dramatically to validate that intention. It feels really good to them.

We totally agree!

The reason the live seminar is essential is if you want to make a change on a permanent level, you’ve got to work with the cellular part of the memory. In other words, the cells of your body have to be involved. Otherwise that’s how people go back to their old ways. They just hear the conversation or they just read something. But your body has to be involved so that those cells that you have now are transformed and they generate new, similar cells in your body. So it’s a mind-body connection type of thing. That way it stays permanently. You can purchase a special edition copy of the book, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind and in this edition there are two complementary tickets to the entire three-day event. This a happening, intensive event, an experience, like the Woodstock of personal financial development. (For information on the Detroit event go to www.millionairemind.com/pn use reference #232294 to buy the special edition book and register.)

That’s an amazing offer! We have a number of friends who have been through the seminar and say it’s changed their lives.

It has to. You have to change those roots, which we do. That’s the technology and the methods that we use, then the plant and the flower changes.

If you had a last bit of wisdom for our readers, what would that be?

Rich people are willing to learn and grow and most other people think they already know. Once you get to a better place in your life, you’re going to have to do something different than you’ve been doing. You need to educate yourself in this arena. But not much is going to make a difference until you work on those roots in this manner.

When people can finally let go of those money issues and they stop struggling and stop worrying about money and they’ve got it handled, it transfers to all other parts of their lives and at least they’re free enough to live the life they want to live instead of being slaves to their finances.

If enough people realize this, we can change communities. We can change entire states. I believe we can change the world. The world isn’t better when everyone’s broke. The world is better when people are not in struggle.

Thank you!