Interview with Bob Proctor – His Secrets of Success

In October 2012 I had the huge honor of interviewing one of the living masters and teachers of Personal Growth and the Law of Attraction: Bob Proctor.

The 20 minute video interview is full of gems of wisdom and inspiration through which he reveals his secrets of success.  I did the interview on behalf of Greek news portal Elita.com.cy on the occasion of Bob Proctor’s visit to Cyprus to participate in Nik Halik’s Thrillionaire Revolution Seminar that I was organizing. You can see the full interview above on video and read the full transcript below. Enjoy! 🙂

Pavlina: Bob Proctor hello from Cyprus!

Bob: Hello Pavlina, how are you?

Pavlina: Great! It’s such a big honor to be interviewing you and thank you so much for accepting our invitation!  I have been following your work since 2006, when first saw the movie ‘The Secret’ like many people and I think its Law of Attraction now that I am interviewing you, because you have been on my list of people I wanted to meet, so Law of Attraction has worked for me!

Bob:And here we are!

Pavlina: For more than 40 years you have been changing the lives of millions of people around the world with your teachings based on your real life experiences of how you were able to go from a high school dropout and a pile of debt, to a very successful entrepreneur building a multi-million dollar business in very few years. You have an incredible story that you share with your students….can you give us some examples of what made you change and how you have used the principles that you teach today to transform your life back in the 60’s?

Bob: I think what happened Pavlina, was that I was losing. I had never done anything of any consequence and I was 26, I only had a couple of month’s high school, no business experience at all and I met a man that encouraged me to look at ‘Think and Grow Rich’.  And he got me to look at the results I was getting, I was unhappy, I was sick, I was broke and he said ‘You can change all that, you are thinking of why you can’t; start thinking of how you can’.

And he started to tell me what I can do, but I really didn’t believe it, my problem was I didn’t believe in me. And I think what changed me, I believed in his belief in me. He said ‘why don’t you do exactly what I am telling you, until you find out that I am lying or that I don’t know what I am talking about’ and I thought ‘well, that makes sense’. So I thought I’d do that.  And I followed his direction to the letter. I thought it was crazy, I never thought it would work, but just like that it started working.
And everything started changing and my income went from $4,000 to $175,000 in a year and then it went over $1 million. And I had been raised to believe if we are going to earn a lot of money we got to be really smart. I knew I wasn’t very smart but I was earning a lot of money.

So then I started to think of other things that I had been raised to believe. Like I had been raised to believe if you don’t go to school you can’t win, I hadn’t gone to school and I was winning. So I thought ‘I’m going to find out why I changed’ because a lot of people read ‘Think and Grow Rich’ and they didn’t change.

And it took me 9 years, I was studying with some really brilliant people, anyone that had anything to do with the mind, I’d go and I would study with him. I was like I was putting the pieces for a puzzle together.

And after 9 years I put it together, I learned how the mind functions.  I learned how we are programmed; we are literally programmed genetically and then we are programmed environmentally and most people never break out of that programming.

School teaches us to gather information, but it doesn’t show us how to use that information. So there is one part of our mind that is gathering information all the time, but there is another part of our mind that controls our behavior and our results. When I started to understand it, all I wanted to do was teach it. And that was back about 45 years and I’ve never stopped teaching and of course I work all over the world with this and I am looking forward to coming to Cyprus, I’ve never been to Cyprus.

Pavlina: Well we are looking forward to seeing you and in Cyprus you are actually sharing the stage with one of your students Nik Halik who told me he met you when he was 17 and went on to achieve some great things with his life. So we have the mentor and the student on the same stage. And I know that you actually went to work for your mentor Earl Nightingale who is considered as ‘The Dean of Personal Development’ in the US and all over the world, where you rose to the position of Vice President of Sales of the Nightingale-Conant corporation, before you started your own seminars company. So I want to ask you what was the biggest impact that your mentor Earl Nightingale had on your life?

Bob: It was a number of different things Pavlina, it wasn’t any one thing. I think it was, I worked with him for five years and I not only worked with him, I worked with his partner Lloyd Conant who was a brilliant man. Lloyd Conant was more of a business man and Earl was the visionary.

And I worked on the side of them so I got the opportunity to watch them work and watched how they lived. I think they taught me how to study more effectively. Earl taught me how to take a paragraph out of a book and really study the paragraph. He said ‘try and understand where the author’s mind was at when they wrote it’. What he was teaching me to do was get on the frequency that the author was on in the thinking.

I just learned so much from them, there was no one thing, it was a series, it was like a process that I was learning. I think the biggest thing I learned was that what we are teaching works for everyone, there are no exceptions. I’ve gone into prisons, I’ve gone into schools, I’ve gone into corporations, all over the world. It doesn’t matter where you go, people are essentially the same.  Our culture is different, but culture is nothing but group habit, culture is paradigm and when you get past the culture, people are essentially the same. Nik Halik is a brilliant guy, I am looking forward to seeing him again.

Pavlina: And thank you for accepting his invitation to come to Cyprus, it will be a great event for sure!You said it doesn’t matter who you are, the information works on everyone, but many people go to seminars, they read books or take courses to improve their life, but they walk away with the information and they never put it to use to change their life experience. Others on the other hand, take the information and go on and apply it like you and create something amazing with their life. What is it that separates people who actually take action on their goals and dreams and become high achievers, with those who do nothing, they have the information but they do nothing and remain miserable or unhappy with their life.

 Bob: Well Pavlina, I believe that most people gather information through the same process that they gathered it in school. They think that if they hear it and they can repeat it, they’ve got it. We have to understand there are two parts of our mind, there’s the conscious and the subconscious. It’s the subconscious that controls our behavior. It’s the conscious mind where the intellect is resident. So the conscious mind is understanding information, but it’s not internalizing it.

And we have a paradigm, its like a program in our bio-computer that controls our behavior. And if that paradigm isn’t changed, our results don’t change. Well, I don’t believe too many of the programs, teach you anything about paradigms. I have spent the last 40 – 50 years studying one thing: how paradigms control us. And Nik understands that, so he used it. I understand it, I use it and I taught it to a lot of people. Anyone that comes to the meeting in Cyprus and really pays attention, I am going to show them how the one part of the mind works, how the other part works and what you have if you are going to change. And if you don’t do it the results don’t change. When you do it, bang like that, the results change.

Pavlina: We are looking forward to this information, it can help a lot of people! 

You are 78 years young if I am correct and you keep travelling the world and teaching people, while you could easily retire on an exotic location and enjoy all the wealth you have build …. So my question is what keeps you motivated, what keeps you going and what is your secret for staying so young and vibrant and energetic?

Bob: Well the thing that keeps me going is that I love what I am doing. And I stay young because I don’t hang around old people, if you hang around old people you are going to become old! The mind doesn’t know anything about age, your subconscious mind knows nothing about time or space.  And so, I am hanging around young people all the time and I operate like they do. I don’t think of myself as being old.

I am very excited about what I am doing, I am enthusiastic about what I am doing…see all the energy in the universe is evenly present in all places at the same time. We don’t get energy, we release energy. And the triggering mechanism to release energy is desire. When you have a strong desire to do something, you will always have the energy to do it. Age has got nothing to do with it. Emerson said: ‘Do the thing and you’ll get the energy to do the thing’. He’s right.

Pavlina: Excellent, thank you. Most people today in my country and all over the word right now, are affected by the financial crisis and they are in a state of fear and worry constantly about their future and about their finances. What is your advice to people who are going through financial challenges right now?  

Bob: Well first of all, if you are living in fear of something, it’s going to happen, just like it’s going to get dark tonight. If you go to the bible, the great sufferer Job said ‘Lord the thing I Fear has come to visit upon me’. Fear is emotionalizing negative thinking and if that’s the vibration you are in, that’s what you are going to attract.

I don’t pay attention to what’s going on in the world, I pay attention to what’s going on between my ears. We can create our own economy. We don’t have to get involved in the economy of the world. In the worst economy in all of history, there were people earning millions of dollars. Not everybody participates in the world’s economy.

We have the ability to choose, we are God’s higher form of creation, we surpass all other forms of life and we don’t use the mental faculties we’ve been given. We don’t even understand what we are capable of doing. School doesn’t teach us anything about ourselves. So the more we learn about ourselves, the more we take control over our life. I am not having a bad economy, I am having the best year in business I have ever had this year! But I chose that. Don’t choose to be involved in what’s going on in the world.

Pavlina: So we need to learn to control our thoughts and our feelings and learn about the power of our mind and then nothing else around will affect us. But do you see that the world is moving in a positive direction of development and growth or a negative direction of destruction? Because we hear every day about war, pollution, poverty….how do you see things moving, I mean how can we improve this situation in the world that is happening today?

 Bob: Listen Pavlina, I’ve been at this for 50 years, I have seen a lot of things change. Fifty years ago you and I couldn’t be talking like we are right now. You are sitting in Cyprus, I am sitting in Toronto, I am looking at you, while I am listening to you, you are looking at me as you are listening to me and this is all been recorded. That is positive growth.

The whole world is communicating, what we want to do is quit competing and start cooperating, work together, work in harmony. We need to go out and get rid of these crazy borders that we’ve got, that say this is one group of people, this is another group of people and this is better than that group. All the borders in the world are man-made  There are no borders, we are all hooked together. Everything is connected. There is no line of demarcation. We are hooked together like the colors of a rainbow, our problem is ignorance, we don’t understand that.

I believe there is a great spiritually transition that is taking place in the world, I’ve seen many wonderful changes take place just in the last 50 years. But you know, all the problems that we see, that’s chaos and out of chaos comes order. And it’s a higher degree of order than that which existed prior to the chaos.

So things are getting better, we communicate much freer today than we ever had, there is no ‘closed societies’ like there used to be. And we have the ability to jump on planes and fly all over the world. Like I am living in a couple of weeks, I am going to Tel-Aviv, then I am going to Cyprus, from there I am going to New Zealand and then back to Toronto. I’ll do all of that and speak at all these places within a week. That would have been unheard of just a short period of time ago.

So there is great positive change taking place in the world. If you listen to the news broadcast, its all negative. So that’s the world you’re going to live in. Quit listening to that broadcast. Start reading some self-help book, get involved in inspirational writings and readings and get involved in helping someone else. The law says ‘Give and you’ll receive’. We have to willingly give and graciously receive. Having problems we are thinking just of our self. When we are winning we are thinking of helping others.

Pavlina: Thank you, you covered my question and of course, we have all these tools today, that people didn’t have in the past and we can use them to bring change very very fast. We just need to put our mind to it.

And a last question, you tell people ‘Tell me what you want … and I’ll show you how to get it’’. Many times when you ask people ‘what do you really want’, they don’t know what to answer.  So what is the best way for a person to find out what is it that they really want in their life to be happy?

 Bob: Well, getting what you want doesn’t make you happy, growth makes you happy, raising your level of consciousness. The problem with most people, they don’t know what they want because they start at a very early age being programmed to think that they can’t have what they want. They’ll say  ‘mummy, daddy I want that’ and they say ‘well, how are you going to get it?’. And because we don’t know how to get it, we abandon the dream.

And so that carries on and we become adults and the same process evolves, we think of what we want and we let it go because we don’t know how to get it.

First of all, anyone who has ever accomplished anything of any consequence, didn’t know how to get what they want, they only knew that they were going to get it. You don’t know how to do something, until after you’ve done it. Our problem is, we set goals to do what we think we can do or what we’ve already done. There’s no inspiration in that.

We have to realize that wants come right from the center of our consciousness. Our spiritual DNA is perfect. The essence of the human being is perfect. And that perfection flows into your consciousness ‘want this, want that’ – go after it, nail it! Sit down and write it down with a pen and then make up your mind you are going to do it. Don’t spend any time thinking of why you can’t. The fun is not in getting it, the fun is in growing. Goals are to help us grow, goals are to help us get. The getting is a site benefit; the growth is the real benefit.

Pavlina: Thank you.Well many of us, many people in Cyprus are very looking forward to seeing you in Cyprus on the 27^th of October at the Hilton Park in Nicosia for the Thrillionaire Revolution event,  where the subject of your talk will be  ‘Create your Own Economy’ – Thinking from the inside out’. Anything last you would like to say to close this interview, to the people who are coming to see you in Cyprus?

Bob: Well I would encourage anyone to come, to bring a pad and bring a pen and take some notes. And come with the idea that I can show you how to get what you want. I actually can. I’ve been doing it for a long time. There is no secret to it, you just have to learn how to change the paradigm and I am going to teach you that. So make sure you are at that meeting and don’t come alone, bring a friend with you and you will be glad you did! Pavlina I want to thank you for taking the time to interview me and I look forward to seeing you there in Cyprus.

Pavlina: And thank you for this honor, have a great day there in Toronto and see you soon!