Life may not be fair to you, but you can always do something to make it better. In this episode, business mentor and life coach Cliff Ravenscraft shares his insights on why there may be a disconnect in your life that keeps you from fulfilling your dream. Overcoming the gap between where you are and where you want to be, Cliff talks about changing your personal blueprint according to your life conditions where you learn how to manage your expectations and take action against limiting beliefs. Once you have understood Cliff’s formula, you’ll find that you are actually free to dream. Whether you are a hunter or dreaming of becoming one, you will learn a lot of wonderful insights from Cliff in this life-enhancing talk.
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Free To Dream with Cliff Ravenscraft
I’m sitting in an absolutely gorgeous place on the backside of Grand Teton in Idaho at a friend’s ranch, which they manage. I’ve been bailing hay for the last three days, so I’ve lost a few pounds. I am so excited to have Cliff Ravenscraft. Cliff has been a friend of mine for some time. I found Cliff and he helped me tremendously with my podcast and I had some questions about launching my course. Cliff reached out to me because he’s on a mission to change people’s lives and that’s what this is about. If you want to know more about a guy that’s been extremely successful, changing thousands of people’s lives, then read on about Cliff.
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Cliff, welcome.
Bruce, I am excited to be here. Thank you so much for this opportunity.
It’s a little payback. We spent about an hour on the phone in the past and then you got me set up so I could launch my first course and get my first course built. You came back and said, “I have a mission to help people understand how powerful dreams are.” That’s what this about. If you’re hunting and dreaming, you’re a hunter, you’re reading this and you haven’t set your goals, Cliff can help you do that. Even more important, you need to frame out the rest of your life starting right now. Cliff, there’s no better man than you to do that for my audience. Thank you for being on.
Where do you want to begin?
I want to begin with the beginning with Cliff. How many years ago did you start with Podcast Answer Man?
I started Podcast Answer Man one year into my podcasting journey as a hobby. By then, I wonder what it would be like if I could find some way to become full-time self-employed so I could be in charge of my own schedule. I would be able to have the opportunity to build relationships and facilitate online communities that have a profound and positive impact on people’s lives on my own schedule. I didn’t have to actually worry about what hours of the day I’m spending doing what. I get to choose all of that stuff. One year into my podcasting as a hobby, which I started as a hobby in December 2005, I launched a show called Podcast Answer Man. I said in episode number one, “I want to build this podcast as a place for me to answer your questions related to podcasting. Quite frankly, I think it would be cool if within the next three to five years if I could actually make a living as a podcast coach and consultant and leave my career as an insurance agent.” Long story short, it didn’t take three to five years. Nine months later, I put my 90-day notice in and one year after that, I was full-time self-employed.
It wasn’t easy. One thing Cliff won’t tell you or maybe he will, but it wasn’t easy that journey because what was the first year’s income?
My first year as a full-time self-employed person was a total of $11,000 net income, which was significantly less than I was making as an insurance agent after more than twelve years and being one of the most successful insurance agents in the United States. What I will tell you though is that financially I struggled because of all kinds of beliefs that I had about money and about adding value to people’s lives. The belief that you had actually to hate what you do or what you did. The harder you work, the more money you should make or the more you hate your job, the more money you should make. The thing is I’m now full-time self-employed doing something that quite frankly I love to do. In a way, my biggest struggle for the first several months of full-time self-employment was sending somebody like Bruce an invoice. Bruce, we knew each other back in 2008 and you weren’t one of my first clients. Bruce, you would say, “Cliff, can you help me launch a podcast?” I’m like, “Yes, I’d love to help you do that.” Here it is. You asked me a bunch of questions over the phone and at the time I thought I was charging a lot of money at $50 an hour, which that’s a whole other story for another time.
The thing is after the call I’d be like, “I can’t send you an invoice. That’s the most fun I’ve ever had.” I had this belief at the time that I shouldn’t get paid to do something that quite frankly doesn’t feel like work. That was too enjoyable. That was easy for me. I may have completely radically changed your world and helped you accomplish something in one hour that maybe you couldn’t have even done in a few months on your own. None of that really registered for me. All I knew is that I loved what I did for the last hour. It feels weird for me to actually have somebody pay me for something that was probably one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had in a long time. That’s why I only made $100,000 in my first year. I do want to say this. My business was profitable from day one. I didn’t leave my career as an insurance agent without having some validation. I was already making $3,000 to $5,000 a month just doing it part-time for the year before I left my career in insurance. When I became a full-time self-employed, I created a business. The business paid for our family’s health insurance. The business paid for a CPA. The business paid for new computers. The business paid for a lot of software. It paid for all its overhead. For the first few months, the business did not pay payroll to the only employee, which was me. Finally, I figured out a few things. By the final few months of the year, I drew a paycheck in October, November, and December of 2018. The net income total was $11,000.
Nobody has a magic wand for you. We’re going to get into this about desire and framing your life. I want you to take notes. Personal blueprint equals life conditions. I want you to talk about that, Cliff, because when you shared that with me when we chatted, I went, “Wow.” I used that with the family that I’m visiting. There’s a situation coming up and then I said, “Here’s why there’s this disconnect. It’s because your personal blueprint doesn’t equal life condition.” Let’s camp on that a little bit because I know every single reader has some frustration or it’s not going exactly the way you thought your life was going. Be it you’re eighteen or be it you’re 60. Let’s talk about that.
What you’re talking about is what I call and what I’ve learned from other teachers before me. It’s called the formula for happiness. There’s a formula for how to be happy whenever you want to be happy. If you’re angry, if you’re frustrated, you’re sad, you’re anxious, you’re worried, you’re depressed, whatever the case may be, you’re not happy right now. I can tell you there is a formula for how to become happy. Happiness is where your life conditions, basically what you’re experiencing right now, equals the way you feel life ought to be. It’s that simple. If you want to be happy, all you have to do is make sure that your current life circumstances equal the way you feel life should be. By the way, the way you feel life should be or the way you feel things should go, that’s called your blueprint or your model of the world. Life conditions equal blueprint is your life conditions equals the way you feel things ought to be. We can call this the way you feel things ought to be or your blueprint.
Another easy word for this is the expectations you have. Do your life conditions equal your expectations? In every circumstance where the answer to that question is yes, you will be happy. For example, if my relationship with my wife, if I have this belief that things ought to go this way and when I have an experience or a conversation with my wife or whatever the case may happen and she lives up to the expectations. Her response to the situation or scenario or the conversation is according to what I felt it should be. If that is real, then all of a sudden now I’m happy. Have you ever had a situation where you and your wife have a conversation? You have your idea about how you think she ought to respond, but she responds in a completely different way? That response does not equal what your expectations were, but now all of a sudden, you’re not happy. You may be frustrated, you may be angry but you’re not happy.
This is financially as well. If you’re upset and depressed about where things are financially for you, that means that you have an idea or expectations of how you believe your financial situation should be right now. Your current life conditions don’t live up to that. Your life conditions don’t equal your model of the world in the area of the way you feel things ought to be in finances. Therefore, you’re unhappy. If you’re unhappy in your relationship with your spouse, if you’re unhappy in the financial situation that you have in life, if you are unhappy in the way that your physical body is. Let’s just say you’re 70 pounds overweight, you’ve got some tingling in the fingers and your toes and the doctor’s telling you you’ve got Type 2 Diabetes. You’re going to have to go on Metformin and these are all the side effects and you hear that news and you’re depressed. All of a sudden, your life conditions and the area of your physical fitness and health don’t equal the way you believe things ought to be the way they should be. You’re unhappy. No matter what area of your life that you find yourself unhappy with, all you have to do is fix the blueprint. All you have to do is look at this formula and fix one of the two sides of the equations.
Free to Dream - Yes, you can! Share on XOne, change your life conditions. You can do both potentially and/or change what you believe how things ought to be. For example, here’s the situation. Let’s just say I’m having a conversation with my spouse and I have this expectation it’s going to go this way. She’s going to respond like, “I think that’s a great idea. Let’s do that.” “No, I told you the other day.” My life condition is first of all, if it’s somebody else on the other side of the equation that’s keeping me from my having my life circumstances be what would get me to my ideal, then I may not be able to change my life circumstances. Some things are outside of my control in the life circumstances department. What’s never out of control is what I think about. I am always in control of what I think about and what I’m focused on and what it means and what actions I’m going to take. If I choose to, I can say, “I proposed this idea to my spouse. She responded this way. That did not meet my expectations.” It’s like I can’t change how she’s responding. How many times have we tried that before? That doesn’t make us any happier.
When the life conditions aren’t something you can change, then change your model of the world. Change the way you believe things ought to be. Instead say, “I don’t expect my wife to go along with everything that I say.” In fact, one of the things that I’m going to think about in my model of the world when it comes to my relationship with my wife is I’m going to realize that sometimes, as much as I may hate to admit it, there are times that my wife will not see things the way that I see them. She may not see the proposal that I make to be as advantageous for us as I do. She may disagree with how I’m viewing things and how I’m proposing things. Sometimes that’s exactly what I need to keep me in check because sometimes there is a perspective that she brings to the table that I’m unaware of.
I need to be open to the value that she brings to keep me from making mistakes or jumping into things too fast and too quick. Instead of this old model of the world that thinks everything I suggest to my wife, she should go along with, is almost always going to be a model of the world that will give you a formula for unhappiness for the rest of your life. Instead, what if I adjust the expectations of my relationship with my wife that there’s going to be a good percentage of the time she’s not going to go along with what I propose. I think that I need to be more aware of the fact that it could be an opportunity for me to see things from a different perspective. Yet there’s a vantage point that I need to be aware of that’s going to help me grow. That’s changing my model of the world or the way I think all things ought to be with my spouse.
When it comes to my financial situation. What if my financial situation, my mindset is this? I believe that I should be 100% completely debt-free. I will never pay my bills late. I will never have a past due balance on a credit card. I won’t even have a credit card balance ever beyond if maybe I have in my business some expenses, but I pay it off every month. I’ll never carry a balance on a credit card. I will never pay a utility bill passed its due date. That’s my motto of the world. That’s the way I feel things ought to be. What if my life conditions are something unexpected happened? Yes, we had an emergency fund, but this emergency wiped out the emergency fund. At the same time, something unexpected happened on the side of my business and now all of a sudden, I realized that there’s a shortage of income. It looks like we’re going to be able to pay all of our bills on time, but that means the credit card is going not to get paid. I’ll pay the minimum balance. I can afford that, but it looks like all I’m going to have to carry a balance. I’m “in debt.”
It doesn’t matter to me if it’s $200, $2,000 or $20,000 on that balance. The reality is the fact that I have any balance carried on that credit card, that life condition of carrying a balance doesn’t equal my model of the world. I get anxious. I get worried. I get upset. I may even be depressed because my financial situation doesn’t equal my current circumstances, does not equal what my model of the world is and my financial situation. In that scenario, I can change either side of the equation to be happy. Literally, I could continue to carry a balance on my credit cards and be happy. The only way I can do that is if I change the way that I think and feel and what meaning I associate to the idea of carrying a balance on a credit card. I may actually choose to change my standard and my way of thinking about carrying debt. The thing is I’m not up for that for me personally because that’s something that I feel so strongly about. I could change it if I wanted to, but I don’t.
The reason why I’m not even going to consider that is that I know I can actually work on the other side of the equation and get me happy, and that is the life conditions. One of the things that I’ve learned is that there’s never a lack of resources. I remember years ago when I used to hear people say this and it’s like, “Come on.” I would roll my eyes. We live in a world of an immense abundance of resources. Every resource we could ever need for what we want is there. It’s never a lack of resources. It’s always a lack of resourcefulness. This isn’t a case of can I change somebody else’s behavior so that my financial situation is that I’m not carrying a balance on a credit card anymore? No. It’s like, “I’m unhappy because I have this balance and I still have this belief about how things ought to be financially for me. This doesn’t equate. This makes me unhappy.” What I’m going to do is I’m going to instead focus on the life circumstances. The life circumstances are that financially I’ve got myself a little hole here and I need to dig myself out of it.
What I’m going to do is change my life circumstances. I am going to create some new opportunity to generate significant income so that I can get myself completely out of debt again. I’m going to do it quickly. I’m absolutely committed to this outcome. I’ve made the decision, I’m not changing the blueprint. I’m not changing how I feel about carrying debt. I’m still good with the fact that it makes me sick to my stomach to know that I owe credit card companies money and that there’s interest incurred. I don’t want to change that, but I am committed. I’ve made a decision. There is no other outcome. I will generate an extra $20,000 above and beyond what I would have generated this month anyway. That will get me out of debt before my next credit card statement comes in and now I just need to know what I can do to do it. It’s not a question of can I do it. I know I can. The resources are there. It’s just am I willing to change my life circumstances to be a little bit more resourceful than I would have otherwise? I’m like, “Maybe if I don’t come up with the answer in myself,” which we all have the ability to come up with some really resourceful ways to generate income or to change other circumstances in our lives.
If I can’t do it all myself, then I go to a friend of mine and I might call Bruce up and say, “Bruce, let me tell you what’s happened. I had this happen and now we’ve got a credit card balance. This is unacceptable for me. It’s too painful. I’ve made a commitment. I’m going to do this. Can you think of anything that I could do? You know a lot about me. Can you think of anything I could do where I could generate an extra $20,000 above and beyond what I normally would make this month?” Bruce might say, “Have you thought about doing a weekend workshop where you get twenty people to come to your next level studio and pay $1,000 apiece? You’ve done those before, haven’t you?” I’m like, “I have.” “When was the last time you did one?” “It was a few months ago.” “Do you think you could do one a few weeks from now and market it?” “I guess I could.” All of a sudden it’s okay. What I’ve done is I go and create a sales page. I reach out and I am absolutely committed. I will personally reach out. I will use whatever marketing methods and techniques and I will go and find the exact ideal customer for this weekend workshop. I will not rest either until the few weeks are here or I serve as many people that have come.
I went for twenty but I have twelve. That’s $12,000 I didn’t have before. I will serve those twelve or I will continue to do it. I will work relentlessly to sell the twenty spots and then I will be prepared for that. The thing is that’s how I changed my life’s circumstances. Because of the actions that I’ve taken over here on life’s circumstances, I’m happy. Sometimes you can actually do a little bit of a mixture of both. Sometimes it’s like, “I have this belief over here that I should never have a credit card balance. Over here I’ve got these life’s circumstances that I took some actions and I sold twelve spots instead of twenty. I could continue to be unhappy or I could say, “I will never carry a credit card balance for more than 45 days.” I could adjust my motto of the world on life on the blueprint side to help me bring that into alignment with what my new circumstance is in life. Being happy is a choice. That’s the message. That’s the blueprint of happiness.
A lot of you have your hit list and you’re getting frustrated because no deer are showing up on your hit list on your farms and going, “We’ve got too much water. The crops, my food plots suck.” You’ve got to pivot. That’s how I would call it. You’re going to change what your expectation is. “What can I do right now? Can I put in another crop that is going to germinate quickly? At least I’m going to have some food.” You have to talk to your friends, talk to the people you know and say, “What do I need to do now, so then in 60 days I have food for deer to eat so they’ll come in and then my life will be better? I won’t be frustrated because I’m a 365 hunter. I want to have those deer there. That’s who I am. That helps define me. I’m a hunter.” Take what Cliff just said and have it fit into your sandbox. I’d love to talk about sandboxes. It’s your sandbox. Are you going to take the information Cliff just gave you in the stuff that’s coming up and apply it? Cliff, why don’t people apply what they learned?
We all have things that we have learned. Sometimes we’ll invest a lot of money, resources, time, effort and energy in learning new strategies to help us get us the things that we want. The reality is we all probably know a whole lot more than we’ve ever applied. We have this long laundry list of things that we know we ought to do, the things we should do, the things that we say we want to do. The reality is the fact that we are not doing them. There’s a gap between the things that we say we’re going to do and what we actually end up doing. The reality is that we might think we’re just too busy and all this other stuff and, “I don’t have enough time.” Those are generally excuses because we all have the same amount of time. The answer to the question of why are you not taking the actions to do the things you say you want to do or the things that you feel you ought to do? It all comes down to something called beliefs. By the way, a belief has nothing more than a thought that you feel certain is true. This is how I help people walk through this. I ask people, “Tell me what it is that you’re going after. What’s your biggest goal right now? What is the biggest dream that you have?” They will oftentimes tell me what it is that they’re excited about pursuing and what they want to do next in their life and all that other stuff.
I say, “How long do you think it will take you to get there?” Usually it’s at some point in the future because obviously they don’t have it in their life now. It’s always going to be some point in the future. It’s often far enough away that there’s really nothing that’s going to give them the pressure that they need to take some immediate action now. Oftentimes, it’s three to five years. It might be five to ten years from now to achieve this dream. Many times, it’s ten to twenty years. Bruce, I just talked to a guy who is 66 years old and asked him what his dream was. He’s already been putting his dream off for five years, every year for the last ten, twenty years. The thing is like, “You keep putting this thing off. You’re going to run out of time. This news button doesn’t last forever.” I always ask people that when they tell me, let’s just say it’s five to ten years from now, I’m like, “Why not next year?” The answers come. They’re called excuses, “Here, let me tell you all the reasons why it is not possible for me to have that dream fulfilled this time next year.” Bruce, in almost every single circumstance, what they’re giving you are what I call limiting beliefs. “I can’t do that because I have this. I can’t do that because of this.” All of those are beliefs. The one thing is what we believe is true. Believe it or not, we’re all people of integrity. Integrity doesn’t mean you’re a good person. Integrity just means your actions in your life are in alignment with what you believe.
Henry Ford was famously quoted and known to have said this, “Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re right.” If you believe that it would take you five to ten years for you to achieve your dream, you’re right. It will take you five to ten years. That doesn’t mean you’re going actually to get your dream in five to ten years. Chances are if you were asked again one year later, you’re still going to say five to ten years and you’re still going to believe it will take a minimum of five years. If asked again another year later, you’ll still say five to ten years because you’ve never changed your belief about how long it’s going to take. You can put it out so far that you’ll never feel the pressure of taking action now. What happens is they never take action and therefore actually it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy for themselves. They never achieve it, “I knew I couldn’t do it.”
Let’s just say I’ve got this guy. He’s 45 years old and he’s got a child who has a serious life-threatening illness. This thing is so unique and there’s only one procedure that has ever been proven to save the life of a child with this illness. That child has to have this procedure done within six months. The only thing is that the insurance that he has does not cover it. It’s also in another part of the world and he has to fly there to do it and it’s going to cost $5 million. The only thing is if you put the stipulation that this 45-year-old guy who has a child with a life-threatening the illness that needs that operation within six months, it’s going to cost $5 million. There’s a stipulation that the doctor will not perform the surgery if you borrowed money to pay the $5 million or if you had other people just give it to you because they felt sorry for you based upon the situation. You have to earn the money. I guarantee you, you put a guy in that situation who, let’s just say his desire, his dream is to become a millionaire and have $5 million in net worth within the next five to ten years or ten to twenty years. He says, “There’s no way I could do it within five.” You put him in that situation, I guarantee you he will earn $5 million within five months.
Life conditions equals blueprint is your life conditions equals the way you feel things ought to be. Share on XThe only thing different is whether he believes he can and believes he can. He will be willing to change his belief based upon what we call leverage. He has enough leverage. There’s enough pain associated with not achieving that dream. The problem with most of us and the dreams and the things that we say we want, we don’t have what we call neuro-associations to pain. The idea of somebody saying, “I want to quit smoking.” The reality is they’ve tried a couple of times and they always go back to it. They go to light up a cigarette and it’s like, “I know there’s a pain.” People develop lung cancer. They say, “George Burns smoked until he was 101 or whatever. Look at him.” It’s like, “You’re going to point to the 1%? You’re going to ignore all the perceptions of people who actually die from lung cancer?” The thing is even lung cancer, if you want to be able to change your behavior, you have to have what we call some hardcore hardwired neuro-associations. What we say is it’s got to be unbearable, immediate, massive pain.
First of all, the pain has to be massive. It has to be immediate and it has to be unbearable. If you take the 45-year-old guy with this ill child that needs this operation within six months and he has to come up with $5 million. If he does not come up with the $5 million, is that massive pain of watching his child die? The answer is yes. Is it unbearable? Yes. Is it immediate pain? Yes. That’s going to prompt him to take actions to earn $5 million within five months. Hands down, he’s got the leverage. Here’s the problem with the person who wants to quit smoking cigarettes, but he can’t take the action of committing to never putting another one in his mouth. For that person, is there massive pain? Yes. The idea of dying an early death, that’s massive. Is that unbearable? Yes. Is it immediate? No. That’s the missing ingredient. The missing ingredient is the fact that I know I might die an early death some point down the road. The thing is let’s just say, “I’m 45 years old and chances are if I was to quit smoking, I might live until my mid to late 80s. I might even make it to 90. If I smoke, I might actually end up dying in my 60s. I’m 45 right now and that’s so far off and that seems like a lifetime. Why bother? That’s why we don’t do that.” It’s what we believe about all of these things. It’s also what we believe about the amount of pain that we will experience if we don’t have what we have.
Here’s what I will tell you, anybody who says, “This what I’m going to do,” but doesn’t do it, they don’t believe that there’s enough pain that will be introduced into their life if they don’t achieve it. In fact, a lot of them, they know what they want to do and then they say it’s a dream but instead they actually believe that it will cause them pain to go after it. Because they believe that the pursuit of what they want, the actions they will take is painful, they choose not to do it. For example, I used to weigh 300 pounds. If I had gone to the doctor, I probably would have been told that I had Type 2 Diabetes and I need to go on Metformin. That was painful to me. The reason was how did I get there? I knew how to reverse this years ago. It’s simply being very conscious about the types of foods that I’m eating. It’s saying no to the bags of chips at night. It’s saying no to the entire pints of ice cream during my binge television watching. It means going to the gym.
In my mind, “Why did I put off going to the gym? Why did I put off eating healthy?” Because my belief was that it was more painful to go to the gym. I go to the gym, I lift some muscles and I get a crack in my back. All of a sudden, I’ve got so much pain. I didn’t know this thing about the onset muscle soreness or whatever. I didn’t know about that stuff. You just need to work through that. I had this belief that I hurt my back. I didn’t hurt my back. I used my muscles for the first time in 35 years. Get over it. Keep going. I didn’t have that belief. I had a belief that I injured myself. That kept me from taking action.
Cliff, I sit here listening to you and I’m looking at the Grand Teton, the Idaho side of it. I think the people that set out to climb the Grand Teton and its iconic peak to climb and it’s not that difficult to climb. The climate, physically you’ve got to be in shape but to climb any mountain, and I’ve done some fourteeners, you have to be mentally prepared that when push comes to shove, you hit the barrier, the pain becomes so much you’re not going to crunch. I think that’s what I hear from you. The pain is going to be so significant that you say, “If I don’t do this, then I’m not going to the summit.”
That’s exactly right. In my mind, for whatever it is, whatever dream that I have set for myself, whatever goal I have set for myself. The pain of not achieving that dream or goal has to exceed far any pain associated with any obstacle that I’m going to have to get through to get there.
I like to say the heart of the matter. That’s really it. Let that sink in. Let that grasp you. We’re going to roll into the dream session. Everybody has a dream. Every single kid that’s ever grown up and played baseball dreams about hitting a home run in the World Series, the bottom of the ninth and they win. Every kid has. People have these things and they see it and say, “I want to attain that,” and they start building towards that. There’s this disconnect that comes in that.
The thing is there are all kinds of beliefs about what it would take to be that, “Do you know how many days a week, how many hours a day I need to train to be able to get in a place where I have the skill to do that? Nobody has got time for that. That’s too painful.” They didn’t want it bad enough. The pain of what it would take to get to that level, that pain exceeds the pain of not actually fulfilling that dream. If you want to fulfill that dream, you have to be like my friend, Kris Pavone. Kris Pavone was this guy who quite frankly, as a kid, had a desire to be a professional WWF pro wrestler. The only thing is that they changed the name from WWF to WWE. That’s a different story for another time. He pursued that dream because the idea of not living the life of a professional WWF or WWE wrestler was way more painful to him than any obstacles that stood in his way. Because of that, he was able to say, “What’s it going to take for me?” He started lifting weights. He was a scrawny kid. He started to lift weights and those weights hurt. He lifted heavy stuff and he built himself this massive physique, but he also needed to train. He needed to learn the skill and the art that is professional wrestling. He’s like, “How do I do this? You’ve got to find a wrestling school. Not just any wrestling school. You’ve got to find one that’s reputable where people will farm talent from.”
He lived up in North Central Ohio, but the closest school was in Louisville, Kentucky. He drove. He wanted the support of his mom and dad. His mom and dad say, “We’ll support you in wrestling, but you can’t give up on school.” School is up here. Wrestling school is down here and it’s on the weekends, two or three days on the weekends. What he did is he went to school in North Central Ohio all throughout the week. He would commute every week four-and-a-half hours to Louisville, Kentucky, do his wrestling training and skill and all that other stuff and literally crushing him physically. He would commute all the way back home four-and-a-half hours and go back to school that next week. That was a lot of pain, but that pain was not worse than the pain of the idea of not living his dream of being a professional wrestler. Kris Pavone became Caylen Croft. My friend Kris Pavone is a former professional WWE wrestler. As a matter of fact, you can go look up Kris Pavone. Do a search for Kris Pavone on YouTube. You’ll see him. There are tons of videos of him wrestling. He was on MTV, some celebrity game show because he became a celebrity. He lived his childhood dream. How did he do it? The pain of not doing it was more than the pain of all the things he had to go through to get it. That’s how you achieve anything in life is you get the right neuro-associations.
Cliff, how do people reach out to you? If somebody says, “I want to find out more about Cliff Ravenscraft, how would they do that?
As a matter of fact, I would encourage them to go to MindsetAnswerMan.com/free. If you go there, there’s an opportunity for you to get a free one-hour opening keynote address to a conference that I did called Free The Dream. There’s a 90-second video clip at the top of the page to give you an example of what you’re going to get inside of that talk. If you watch the 90-second clip and you’re not interested, just forget about it. If you go to that website, you watch the 90-second clip and you say, “I’ve got to see the rest of this talk,” put your name and email address in there and you’ll get immediate access to this full one-hour talk. At the top of the page it says, “Give me 60 Minutes… And, I’ll Show You How to Live the Life of Your Dreams…” That’s a bold promise. Bruce, I think you could probably attest because I’ve worked with you, that I can do a lot in 60 minutes. Wouldn’t you say?
Guaranteed. There’s no question about it. Absolutely none. A lot of things had changed in my life just because of our talk whenever it was. You’re flat out not selling anything. The thing that amazes me most about you, Cliff, is that you’re highly compensated, but that has nothing to do with what you do with people. I can attest to that personally because you took that 60 minutes and poured everything that you could to answer my questions and help me get from part A to part B. You could have come in and said, “You need to do this,” and I wasn’t ready. You have to be ready. You have to be at the right place at the right time, and then when the student’s ready, the master will show up. You have to understand that if you’re not ready to absorb, to learn, be coachable and to change, don’t waste your time. You will be wasting time. If you will submit to somebody else and say, “He’s already done what I want to do. He can help me do that.” I look at our relationship as priceless because you gave into my life.
The cool thing is that my own time, effort and energy is not limitless. There’s a finite amount of time and number of people that I can work with in a relationship like I’ve worked with you one-on-one personally. I certainly have this philosophy I do for some but I wish I could do for everyone. You certainly were one of the some and it’s an honor. The cool thing is with the Free The Dream message, this online video that I give away for free. Over 1,000 people have downloaded that video. I get emails every single day from people that tell me, “I did not realize how many limiting beliefs I truly had.” I get follow-ups a couple of weeks later. I’m still at a place where I can still read all of the emails that come in. I know that my days are numbered as far as when I’m still going to be able to keep up with that.
Every single email I’ve sent to Cliff about some things about my journey and some things, “Here’s some information.” Cliff has taken time to respond personally and that’s pretty incredible.
The harder you work, the more money you should make. Share on XI do that for you and several hundred people per week every week. I’ve been doing that since December 2005. I’m actually working towards the dream of filling stadiums with tens of thousands of people per event that I host.
Cliff, is that your platform, the Free The Dream, filling the stadiums?
Yes.
Let’s jump into that. Talk to the people and bring them up to speed and why you decided to do that and then how they can get involved?
The thing is I decided to do everything that I’m doing and leaving my career in insurance back on January 1st, 2008. I decided to leave that career so that I could do what I feel is my greatest ministry in the world. I have a heart for serving people and helping them break free from anything that keeps them from living the life for which they were created. I hate to see people suffer. I hate to see people depressed. I hate to see people who are 180 pounds overweight and they’re literally killing themselves physically. I hate to see people struggling, living paycheck to paycheck. Every single time their children come into the room, their heart drops because they’re like, “Now what? How much are you going to cost me?” I hate seeing people live this life because that’s not the life we were created to live. We have so many resources and you’re not living up to the potential that you have.
I was that guy. There was a reason I was 300 pounds. There’s a reason I only made $11,000 working around the clock. That was not the life that I was called to live. I had to learn the hard way, unfortunately, to figure out why I am doing the things that I’m doing. Why do I refuse to do the things that I know that I should do and I want to do and I say that I’m going to do? I went through all the hard work of figuring all this stuff out by studying the experts who had gone before me. Once I applied what I learned from them to my life, I realized I didn’t have to struggle for ten, twenty years with my health, like my weight. I didn’t have to struggle for five years financially. I didn’t have to have a terrible relationship with my kids or my wife from time to time. I didn’t have to be depressed for six or seven weeks out of the year. I could literally snap out of some of this stuff that was holding me back in a minute if I just apply a few simple techniques.
What I did is I discovered that in six one-hour talks, I could train and teach what helped me completely lose over 100 pounds and keep it off for more than a few years. I made a commitment in November 2014. I said, “I’m going to work out six days a week every week for the rest of my life.” I’ve lived up to that. I made a commitment couple of years ago, Bruce, that I said, “I will never in my life again eat a sugary snack like a Kit Kat, candy bar, cupcake, any of that.” I have lived up to that. I will never eat a sugary snack again in my lifetime. I promise you, it will not happen.
The thing is I learned what it takes. There are six talks that I can give to teach you exactly how I’ve been able to make a significant, massive, immediate change in my life that will last a lifetime. I will not stop working out. I will not go back to eating sugar. I will not go back to living in debt. I will not go back to just surviving financially. I will not go back to the way that I used to think about my marriage. I will not go back and treat my kids with the mindset that I had previously. I have used these six tools and techniques for changing my life forever. Also through podcasts, coaching and consulting, I spent a decade teaching more than 40,000 people on how to launch a podcast. Through that, what I was doing is they were asking me questions, “Cliff, how are you working out six days a week? How do you not give up? I see you in the gym every single day. You exhaust me. How do you do it?” I said, “Do you want to do it?” They said, “Yes.” I said, “Do you really want to do it?” They said, “I do.” I said, “Will you give me permission to ask you some questions that are going to be the most difficult, challenging questions you’ve ever been asked?” They said yes.
Everybody has given me that permission, they’re working out six days a week, every week for the rest of their life. The people who said, “Cliff, how do you go without eating sugar?” I said, “You have to make sure that you’re willing to change your beliefs about what it means for you to eat birthday cake at your six-year-old girl’s birthday party. If you’re going to say you’re going to give up sugar, are you going to give up sugar all the time? You’ve got to tell me what you want. What is your dream?” “I want to give up sugar forever.” “Are you sure you’re willing to give up birthday parties and cake and ice cream or do you want to give up sugar all the time except for one time a year? You’ve got to tell me what you want because what you want, you have to really want it.” Some of them say, “I just want to give up sugar except for on birthday parties.” I say, “We’ll work with that.” They give up sugar. They have not eaten sugar except for a birthday party. I joke around. Some people are looking for birthday parties to go to. I know it. I’m on Facebook. Tell me. I’m adding everybody as a friend.
What I found, Bruce, was I was having far greater impact and influence in people’s lives through The Mindset Answer Man stuff than I was the Podcast Answer Man stuff. The thing is there’s no question in my heart that God has put this message. He’s given me the life that I’ve had, the experiences, all the trials and troubles and all the pain and suffering I went through. Now to learn how to get out of it, he’s given me that in the platform of hundreds of thousands of people around the world, through all the podcasts that I’ve had. He’s given me this opportunity to teach this. Bruce, you and I had the privilege of working one-on-one. I can’t do 300 one-on-one calls in a single weekend. In Franklin, Tennessee, September 13th through the 15th, 2019, I can have 300 people in my audience and I can give them the six one-hour lessons that will radically transform and change their life forever.
How do they get that information? “Cliff, I’m in.” Where do they go to?
FreeTheDreamConference.com, that’s it.
How many days?
It’s Friday, Saturday, Sunday. It is September 13th through the 15th 2019. It’s all day Friday, all day Saturday and it starts at 9:00 AM on Sunday and ends at 12:30 in the afternoon on Sunday. Here’s what I will tell you. On Friday, I will be the opening keynote speaker. I will speak in the middle of the day and I will be the closing keynote speaker for Friday. I will do the same thing on Saturday. I’ll be the opening keynote on Saturday. I will be in the midday on Saturday and I will close out Saturday evening. I also do a bonus VIP session for the VIP guests on Friday evening. On Sunday, I will do an opening keynote and then all of the spaces in between my talks are filled up with some of the most amazing, influential, most powerful communicators on this planet. They’re going to give talks that will show you what’s possible in life.
The pain of not achieving your goal or dream has to exceed the pain of any obstacle that you'll need to get through to achieve that dream. Share on XThat’s going to be recorded. If I would come, then I’ll get the recording, the DVD or however you’re going to save it so I can refer back to it digitally. Is that correct?
Yes. As a matter of fact, if you buy a ticket to Free The Dream 2019 at FreeTheDreamConference.com, you’ll instantly get all of the recordings of this event from the Free The Dream 2018 event. You’ll get it instantly so you can start listening to it and be introduced to the concepts before you even come to Franklin, Tennessee event. If you have a ticket to Free The Dream 2019 and you came to the event or if you happen to have missed the event, then probably about six to eight weeks after the Free The Dream 2019 event, you will then have access to all of the recordings from this year’s event as well.
Franklin is close to Nashville.
It’s twenty miles south of Nashville and it’s the most beautiful part of Tennessee I’ve ever been to. That’s not true. I love the Smoky Mountains as well. In all fairness, I love the Smoky Mountains a whole lot more than I do Franklin, Tennessee. Franklin, Tennessee is a beautiful place. It’s authentic and transparent. The Smoky Mountains is a much more beautiful place, but Franklin Tennessee is awesome.
I’ll just share this. I get up to go to the bathroom at 1:30 and it was a full moon and I went out into the deck and the Grand Teton was illuminated because there’s still snow in the mountains, a lot of snow in the rocky. I’m going, “This is magnificent.” You had to be there. You had to be up at 1:30 in the morning just to gaze at that. To have the privilege to do that, that’s a big part of my life being in wild places and to be here and to look at this. This place is what people dream and I’m very fortunate because I’ve been able to live a lot of my dreams.
You’ve been extremely fortunate. We’re all extremely fortunate. Every single person reading this is extremely fortunate.
They’re extremely important. We all have warts. We all have fine-tuning. Some of us need major overhauls. Get around people like Cliff and listen to what he’s saying and then say, “I can do that.” Cliff told me, “What you have to do is after our whole conversation is done, you’ve got to give me 50 things that you’re going to do.” One of the 50 things, I think it was 48 or whatever it was, was take Cliff and his lovely wife out to dinner in Franklin, Tennessee. I’m working on those goals. Forget the age because I just hate with 20 and 30-year-olds. That has no bearing. I don’t care how old you are, I don’t care how poor you are, I don’t care what your gender is, I don’t care what your nationality is. A person like Cliff Ravenscraft can help you transform yourself if you want to do that.
At Free The Dream 2018, the youngest person there was seventeen years old. The oldest person there was in their 70s. Every single person’s life, including my own, was transformed that weekend. We had people from France, Germany and all over the United States. In 2019, we have three people coming from Australia, one person from France. We have one person come from Switzerland and one person from New Zealand. It doesn’t matter where you’re from. Come to Free The Dream Conference. It’s going to be the most incredible experience of life transformation you’ll ever imagine.
I want to come to Free The Dream. How do I do that? Where do I go? On my smartphone, on my laptop, how do I do that?
It’s simple, FreeTheDreamConference.com. Go buy your ticket.
How much does the ticket cost?
The ticket cost is on the page. If you wait until the day before the event, the VIP tickets will probably be sold out by then, but they’re $19.99. The standard ticket full price is $9.99. Bruce, it depends. I know how podcasting works because I’ve been around a podcast or two. I know that some people are reading this way beyond. They’re reading this episode in 2022. FreeTheDreamConference.com, go there and the ticket price is on the page. Click the Click Here To Reserve Your Seat Now button and that’s going to pull up the ticket options and it’s going to show you the price. If you get it a couple of days or weeks before the event, there’s always going to be a discounted price. What I will tell you is that the price is going up every Tuesday and every Friday until September 13th.
Take action now because if you do that, you’ll be transformed, not changed. There will be a transformation that will happen in your life.
Bruce, have you experienced transformation in your life as a result of a one-hour conversation with me?
No matter what area of your life that you find yourself unhappy with, all you have to do is fix the blueprint. Share on XYes. I’ll give you a perfect example. The people I’m visiting, they manage this ranch for this gentleman that is a billionaire. His personal blueprint didn’t equal the life conditions. The family had a huge discussion about that. All of a sudden they said, “You’re right.” When he shows up, he flies in a G5. They want this to be above his expectations. Because the gentleman, his expectations exceeded, but it doesn’t give them the tools to meet his expectations. Do you see the disconnect? You can see that disconnect.
He needs to change the life conditions, which is giving them the tools to meet the expectations or to adjust the expectations. That’s it. It’s that simple.
I said, “That’s what’s going to happen.” I think that was one of the reasons I ended up here. I’ve been mentoring their son since he was in high school, now he’s in his mid-twenties. He and I have traveled and hunted and done a lot of neat things. We’ve done a lot of things for God because he said, “You two guys go here and do this.” We go, “Okay,” and we did it. I look at this family as an extension and when I showed up at the ranch, I never spent a lot of time with mom and dad. I just hadn’t. It’s just the two boys. The mother said to me, “Thanks so much for coming because I don’t have a dad and the kids don’t have a grandfather. He died.” I almost cried. That’s one of the reasons I’m here because, for her to say that, it was huge. Those words are coming because that validated who I was for the family. I already knew that, but I didn’t know it was transferred to the mother and father. This is personal stuff. That’s how you can be transformed. Cliff Ravenscraft got me to this ranch a piece of him. Some of his words did. He transformed my life.
Bruce got himself to this ranch. All I did was help Bruce eliminate some beliefs that he had about whether or not he could get himself to that ranch.
I have 50 things and that’s between Cliff and me. That’s the only two people that are going to see it. My wife saw it. She goes, “Really?” I go, “Why not?” That’s how powerful a person like Cliff Ravenscraft. There are other people out there in the world.
By the way, there are very few things that I teach that I didn’t learn from Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn, Napoleon Hill or Dr. Maxwell Maltz. Everything that I teach came from them.
That’s the same thing. That’s where everybody comes from. They take it and their belief structure is so good or so strong that’s to say, “I’m going to apply it and I’m going to change people’s lives.” To me, that’s who you are.
Bruce, I’m excited and thank you for this opportunity to connect with you. Thank you for this opportunity to share this message with your audience. I hope they’ll come to Franklin, Tennessee. If they’re reading this in 2025, just look at what stadium we’re in because we’re growing. FreeTheDreamConference.com is where you can go buy your ticket. If you don’t buy a ticket now, go to MindsetAnswerMan.com/free at least and watch this one-hour talk. It will transform your life. Bruce, I really appreciate you.
I’ll send out a couple of emails. You can have an opportunity to spend a day with Cliff. Is that an email or do you have a distribution list?
It’s on my website. If you go to CliffRavenscraft.com or MindsetAnswerMan.com, either one of those two, there’s a Work With Me tab and it tells you all the different ways you and I could work together.
You’ll never regret it. Thank you. If you’re reading this a few years from now, look up Cliff because I think he’s filling stadiums.
Important Links:
- Cliff Ravenscraft
- Podcast Answer Man
- Kris Pavone
- MindsetAnswerMan.com/free
- FreeTheDreamConference.com
- MindsetAnswerMan.com
- CliffRavenscraft.com
- Work With Me Tab on Cliff Ravenscraft’s website
- https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=GNMUDSLPQc0
- https://www.YouTube.com/channel/UCu9KR3xI4OpjvKhXQg8R7eQ
- https://www.CliffRavenscraft.com/free-the-dream
About Cliff ravenscraft
In December 2005, Cliff began podcasting as a hobby. One year later, he launched the Podcast Answer Man brand where he invested more than a decade helping tens of thousands of individuals and organizations successfully launch a podcast through one-on-one coaching and online courses. If you were to look at the top 100 podcasts in the business category of iTunes, more than 50 of these shows were created by clients who have been trained by Cliff.
Today, Cliff focuses on his role as a business mentor and life coach. He mentors coaches, consultants and thought leaders through the transition from their unfulfilling day job to their own responsible and profitable online business so that they can live the life of their dreams and do the work they feel most called to do in this world. Be sure to check out what Cliff has to offer at CliffRavenscraft.com