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Matthew Ferry, is a Spiritual Teacher, Songwriter and Best-Selling Author. For the last 26 years, Matthew Ferry has coached thousands of top performers to achieve Enlightened Prosperity™.
His books, videos, audios, songs, meditations and seminars all utilize his street tested methodology called The Rapid Enlightenment Process™. Among his many projects, Ferry manages a blog, hosts the podcast “Daily Enlightenment with Matthew Ferry,” spearheads The Ignite Mastermind, and teaches his unique process via Muscle Testing School.
Matthew Ferry is also the author of Quiet Mind Epic Life, an Amazon Self Help and Spirituality best-seller in the US, Canada, Australia and Japan. Matthew and his family live in Southern California.
For more information visit https://matthewferry.com
Podcast Highlights
Who is Matthew Ferry?
Matthew’s story begins at the age of 9 years old where he had experiences where he felt like he was floating out of his body and had a sense of peace and joy. He was getting an intuitive hint that the rules we follow are lies, and it wasn’t until Matthew started working for his father who was a personal development guru did he find his way back to the experience of peace.
It was through that process that Matthew began teaching people how to experience more joy, more peace, and more flow, while kicking ass and having a great life. At this point Matthew has been helping people with their development for over 30 years.
Skeptics
Matthew was born an optimist and believes everything will work until he’s proven wrong.
The personal development industry is disappointing most of the time. Most of the things that people wrote about or taught, they didn’t experiment on themselves or really put in the work to make sure it was a universal principle. Matthew considers himself to be the crash test dummy for his teachings. His book, Quiet Mind, Epic Life, was 15 years of personal experience and experiments in the making.
What’s the difference between Matthew’s approach and other personal development gurus?
Matthew wrote two albums around affirmations and found that affirmations, while useful, actually created resistance in himself and his clients. The affirmations didn’t create the results that were wanted, the changes we want in behaviour ultimately come down to context.
Most people will read a book and may adopt the recommended actions, but the underlying beliefs will still be there. This will lead to some level of failure and eventually moving on to the next thing you believe will fix your situation. You have to correct the imbalance in your thinking first.
Feeling at ease is a contextual framework and has nothing to do with what you’re going to learn. If you don’t solve the underlying illusion of “I’m not okay.” then no amount of training will ever reduce the feeling of “I’m not enough.”
Identify what you think your long term goals will accomplish and then begin to be that now instead of thinking that you need to change yourself to get there. You will never be successful enough to make yourself happy.
How does kindness improve a business?
Matthew worked with a client that made kindness the lens through which they analyzed their business decisions, instead of just the usual business KPI’s. Instead of making hires just based on a skill set, they started making hires based on the quality of the existence they wanted to have.
Motivation always fades and false urgency only creates stress. 73% of Americans said they experience psychological stress on a regular basis in 2019, that number has only gone up. This is a big problem for leaders.
How do we get to a quiet mind?
Practice total and complete acceptance of every person and situation in your life, including yourself. Our mind is hardwired for survival, and a quiet mind is one that has transcended survival. Realize that you are no longer trying to just survive.
Experience frustration, stress, anger, anxiety and upset all indicate that something is wrong. That’s a contextual framework that ineffectively modifies your behaviour and has you be reactive instead of inspired.
The simple first step to a quiet mind is to admit that your mind is not your friend. Matthew refers to the mind as the drunk monkey, it’s something that is addicted to negativity and only cares about survival. If you can identify the hidden motives that drive the drunk monkey mind you can let them go and embrace a more enlightened perspective.
Recontextualize your situation by describing your life situation in a way that’s empowering. You have agency over your life and can choose not to be diminished by it.
Motivation assumes you don’t want to do a particular action. There is another level that you can ascend to where you are inspired to do something instead. Inspiration leads to deeper states of logic and removes the emotions. If you’re using the carrot and the stick, you are get the worst of people, not the best.
Urgency drives the corporate world, is urgency good?
Urgency is great, as long as you admit that it’s not real. Urgency can actually create a diminished survival state that works against your goal. False urgency is your mind making up a story about the consequences of not meeting your deadline.
Coming at things from the present is how you create the conditions for inspiration so bust the framework of the drunk monkey mind.
A person can achieve this kind of state in 90 days, for an organization it can take longer. The key is to let go of the urgency to make the changes to actually make them happen faster.
What’s your biggest success story?
One of Matthew’s clients was working on a cryptocurrency investment fund that initially struggled for years. He had to keep the client in the moment to keep them engaged and inspired about why they started the business in the first place. Once the pandemic hit the conditions were right and being in the right mindset put them into a position to thrive.
It all starts with the leader. If the leader is not constantly practicing acceptance, appreciation, kindness, honoring people, and acknowledging different perspectives, they will be arrogant and pride filled.
Matthew’s Takeaway
We don’t really know anything. Everything we know we were told by somebody else or observed through our biased senses. If you take on that perspective you become curious and interested, which is fertile ground for innovation and energy. When you open yourself up to the ideas of other people the opportunities for creativity and collaboration explode.
The world is getting better and it’s going to take the creative rulebreakers to take it to the next level.
Links:
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https://www.youtube.com/matthewferry