130: Fix Your Process and Goals to Undo the Past and Create the Future with Personal Growth Innovator Matt Powell

Robert Plank: After over two decades of teaching thousands around the world, Matt Powell know how to teach and motivate, think better under the stress of every day life, improve and grow, and create success. He has his latest book out called Undo: How to undo the past and plan your future. He has a website as well called pastless.net. Matt welcome to the show. I'm glad to have you here.

Matt Powell: Hey I'm glad to be on. I appreciate it Robert.

Robert Plank: Heck yeah. I understand that you have a lot of things to say and you have a lot of hobbies and you have this martial arts stuff, so can you kind of tell me a little bit about who is Matt Powell and what it is that you do, and what makes you unique and special?

Matt Powell: I know what makes me unique and special. My mom might say something different. About 20 years ago, I started learning this strange martial art no one had ever heard of, and that lead me to spending time in Russia training at their schools in martial arts in the early 2000's, and then coming back over here and teaching over here. Over time, we built our own organization called Pramek. That's P-R-A-M-E-K. We have a website, pramek.com. That started off as just guys in a garage, and I built it online and then in real world into an international organization with teachers all over the world.

The whole time I was doing that, I was also working my way up the corporate ladder into the corporate board room. I was starting online businesses. I was doing everything that I could possibly do. I'm not one of those people that sit still for very long. Over time I've published five books that are on Amazon, hundreds of videos on youtube, two dozen instructional videos for sale in the martial art world, as well as teaching seminars around the world. I learned a lot from that side of teaching, and teaching all those people in the system that we developed and the way that it developed. There was also the lessons learned of being in the corporate world and being an entrepreneur.

I decided about a year ago that I would start to take these and combine them into more of a, kind of do what Pramek did for martial art, pastless and Undo what do for the personal growth sector. I started to focus on taking the concept that worked so well for teaching people, everybody from the special forces to soccer mom, and starting applying it to personal growth. It's a very methodically laid out system based on what we saw work teaching people under the most stressful situations that they could apply towards personal growth, personal success, and the happiness side of the world, you might say.

Robert Plank: That's kind of interesting. Can you kind of tell me about this whole undo book and just basically, what are the steps, what's it about, how it all relates to the martial arts, the success and all that kind of stuff?

Matt Powell: We developed this learning system in martial art that we called the CLM. I developed it with a couple of PhDs that had PhDs in adult learning and psychology, because we found that the way that we were taught didn't translate to the way that people learned very well if they were learning mental and physical skills. We developed over time this learning system that now all these other schools and systems have adopted as their learning system. We found that people were learning skills faster than they were learning in other skills by using this.

I said okay. Let me look at ... It's all about the human brain. It's all about how the brain works, it's all about how the brain processes memories, how the brain forms habits. Let me take that over to the success side because whether you're learning to punch or whether you're learning to operate as an entrepreneur, you're going to develop physical and psychological habits to go along with success or failure. Life is a little like quicksand day to day. You can't unstick yourself until you stop moving and take stock of the situation around you. What Undo the book is is that Undo is ... We're undoing the past. It means that we're recognizing the why we fail, not what we fail at. A lot of people confuse that. They focus on the what they're failing at. People set goals, but then they don't consider if they're setting the right goals. They end up with a decent process to achieve goals, but they've set the wrong goals that weren't attainable. They kind of circle for a while.

What we do with Undo, is we try to break these cycles. We break that cycle. Then you're set up to where you can start setting goals because you've taken care of the underlying reasons why you're failing. Now you're able to start setting goals. What we do is then we have a workbook that goes along with Undo. It's a 40 page workbook that take you step-by-step through the whole process. It starts you at the goals that you had last year, the failures that you had last year, looking at those underlying reasons to why and not what, then setting up a process to fix that day to day so that you break that cycle of failure that's been going on, but there's the habits that you've picked up over time.

Then we do this long process of setting attainable goals all the way from the very beginning of free-writing out your goals to how you set your life on auto pilot using the book, to basically make goal achievement a habit. It's really about the book is kind of a, I don't want to say colloquial, but it's a very ... My editors hated it because I wrote it like I was speaking to somebody. I didn't write it like I was writing a book. Then the workbook follows along with it. Page by page, as you go through the book, you're going through the workbook at the same time. It's a very interesting process to kind of develop habits for people, to get out there and achieve the goals that they want to achiever.

Robert Plank: I love that. I think that ... Yeah, I know that over the years if I'm ever trying to get out of a funk or I'm always trying to switch to some kind of time management system, it's always like if the underlying foundation or whatever you want to call it, if that's still messed up, it doesn't even matter what I'm building towards, or what kind of system I'm using. It's like if the insides aren't right, then what's the point of anything. I like that. I like the Tim Ferris or the Matt Furey kind of stuff where it's like ... I don't know a thing about martial arts or any of that stuff, but I like the idea of breaking yourself down and then building yourself back up and having the discipline and the habits and the repetitions and all that kind of stuff. I like how, kind of like you mentioned there, that people kind of learn the stuff, but they also go through the work books so that way it kind of avoids the foo foo, hippy sort of feel good stuff. Is that right?

Matt Powell: Yeah. What we found ... Matt Furey. God I haven't talked to Matt in probably a decade. I used to talk to him back in the day, in martial art, I guess back in the mid 2000's. Tim has done some great systematic methodology to kind of exposing people methods so that other people can pick them up. I think ... I differ a little bit when you ask what makes you different is that you can have the best process in the world, but if you don't have the right goals, you're going to consistently get into a funk. You're going to go after 2016 with a 2015 mindset. A lot of times people have all these processes. That's why I did Undo because I saw that was happening in the martial art world. I traveled and taught thousands. Personally laying hands on what they were doing. I was seeing that these people, they've got this process but what they're trying to do, they never really thought through what they were trying to do at the end.

Steven Covey says, "I'm going to begin with the end in mind." Look at the goal and work backwards. Page by page and when you look at the reviews on Amazon, everybody says the same thing, like "Wow. This book actually works."

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. I'm kind of looking through the reviews and things here. Could you kind of tell us about how this all happened for you? Was there a point where ... Was there a period of time before you discovered all this martial arts stuff, was there a period of time when there were specific things that were really wrong in your life and then kind of stumbling on this made you the person you are now? Does that kind of thing happen?

Matt Powell: There's nothing ever really ... I know a lot of times people have some epic moment or they have some type of challenge in their life or obstacles that they can't over come, and then they overcome it and it becomes inspirational. I love those stories ... A friend of mine that is a martial art instructor. He was born with half a heart, and he had steel rods in his back, and he's out there doing incredible karate stuff. I never had anything like that. I learned through kind of trial by fire between the martial arts and doing executive protection and law enforcement, and being under extremely stressful situations and then teaching other people extremely stressful situations.

What made me switch from martial art and move in this direction was that I did have a situation that really ... It's still tough to talk about a little bit. I had a childhood friend of mine, and over the years he and my brother stayed in contact, but I hadn't stayed in contact with him. My brother called me up one day and he said, "You know, he's got cancer, and he loves what you're doing with martial art, you really ought to give him a call." I didn't realize that he had stage four rare cancer and he was dying. We spent hours upon hours on the phone just talking. He was a business owner, he was an entrepreneur. We would talk at night and he would pass out for 30 minutes because he was under so many medications. He would come back to and we would talk and talk.

He passed away one day, and a few years later I was driving to Florida to the beach house and I've done it successful at what I've done. I just kind of said, "Man, I'm tired of teaching people how to punch somebody in the nose. There's got to be more." I remember those conversations with Barry because he would say, "You know Matt, I feel like you could do more. If you just took these processes and taught somebody about business, or maybe you talk to a new college graduate and give them some processes, that way they're not learning this 10-15 years into their career, when they could have done better at the beginning." I got down to Florida and I just started ... I pulled out all the notes and pulled out the Glenfiddich and really had a heart to heart with myself.

One of the things that one of my teachers told me one time was, "Only you look in your mirror." I looked in the mirror and I thought, "You know, I can do more than this, and I can help more than just teaching people this over here." A bunch of books were started. That was a couple of years ago. Out of the books that were started, Undo was a bit of a composite of the different books that I'd started at the time. I never really had anything that was a big challenge or obstacle.

I put myself into a lot of challenging situation through the decisions I made in my career. But the biggest obstacle that I really ever overcame was to take what was 20 years of an identity as a world class martial art instructor and developer and teacher, and to have to make that internal switch to saying, "I'm going to do something different. I'm going to do 2016 or 2015 with that year's mindset. Not try to do it with 2010's mindset."

Robert Plank: It's kind of interesting. Could you kind of tell us about, aside from the book, what is it that you do now? Do you have products? Do you have a blog? Do you have a podcast? What are you up to these days?

Matt Powell: A couple of different things. I do security consulting as a day job. I've always kept a day job. I remember my primary teacher a long time ago said, "Always have a day job, because if you have to do your hobby to food on the table, you'll end up hating it, and you'll sell it out and you'll water it down." I've always kept a day job, and I've worked my way up the corporate ladder. Day job I do that. It allows me to go wherever I want. Live how I want. I really built my life around what my goals were, which was to have a very free life to be able to explore and do things. Then you have pastless and you have Pramek.

Pastless.net is the home of Undo. Yeah, you can go to pastless.net. We have the free eBook over at pastless. It's called Open In Case of Life. It's a concept that I've learned over 20 years traveling the world learning from different teachers. It's eight things that people said that really stuck with me. I put them in format that you can just, here it is. In case of you feel like you're not communicating correctly, in case you feel labeled, in case you're feeling anxious about the future, and here's the wisdom behind it. Then you can also pick up Undo over at amazon.com if you just type in Undo, I think it's like the second thing that pops up on amazon.

Then over at Pramek, that's a whole different animal because Pramek is ... It has four books that I've written about it. It has, I think we're at 201 videos on youtube, two dozen for sale instructional, and that's very martial arts, fitness, movement. Yeah, there's movement videos. How to increase your movement, get your range of motion. There's combat intimate videos. There's videos on how to develop habits. We've done a lot of different things with Pramek. That's pramek.com. P-R-A-M-E-K.COM.

Robert Plank: Cool. Do you ... I mean in all your writings and your adventures and talking ... What do you think is the place where everyone is going wrong? Is it that people aren't awake or they're not disciplined or they're not self aware or they're backsliding? What do you see where everyone is going wrong it seems?

Matt Powell: I think, if you're talking about people in general, I think everyone focuses on the what and not the why. That is one of the most ... There's two things that most people do wrong when it comes to achieving success for their life.

The first thing is you have to stop being right. If every time you interact with somebody, you're making assumptions on the way that the interactions going to go, then you're living in the past. Everything that's ever happened in the past is the way that your brain is designed. It's catching up. You want to be right. You want to show them that you're right. You don't really find out what they offer for your future, what they can bring you, how you can work with them ... That if you just stop being right and you start being in the moment and really taking a look at it and thinking about it and changing your anchor point for your thoughts to your future instead of right now or the past, you're going to start viewing people and situations and obstacles or whatever it is as moving you towards somewhere in the future. Then you're going to see how you can use that interaction to get there.

I think the second thing is is that we live in a transactional world. Physically, mentally, spiritually, it's right now, right now, right now. People focus on the what. The what is the thing that you can go and tell your spouse about. The what is the thing that you can go the bar and complain about. But if you focus on the what, then you're just kind of in this linear timeline of a bunch of whats that you failed at. If people take a book like Undo and go through the process to find their failure theme, they're going to find that most of their whats, they never even ... They are forced through a way that they develop their habits over time to consistently fail. You have to start looking at that why. Why did that happen? Why did that happen? Then you can really start to stop the whats from happening.

If you stop being right and look at the interactions that you have as how can they get me somewhere instead of how can I make sure that I'm the person that's coming ahead in this. Also to look at the why you failed through, like I said, a book like Undo instead of what you fail at, you're about 90% of the way to getting more successful than you've ever been.

Robert Plank: I love that message. Not only to stop being right, but to kind of live in the moment. I think that maybe 5-6 years ago someone quoted Dr. Phil to me. There was a situation where I was just kind of, I needed to change my thinking. He quoted Dr. Phil and said, "Would you rather be right or be happy?" Kind of along those lines, with these days with all the ... It's so easy to get distracted. The latest Facebook pop up, the phones blowing up, and even ...

Maybe 14 years ago or so, when I transitioned from high school to college, when there was the orientation day, they kind of had to ... There was something that they said that was along the lines of, "Well, when you're in high school mode, when you're in the high school mindset, you're only really paying attention about 30-30%." And he's like, "Well when you're trying to actually be an adult, being a grown up, you kind of have to be 80% there or higher." That was just kind of like all the things you've been talking about today. All these really simple concepts, but it's so simple and yet it seems like a lot of people are missing the boat and kind of need to readjust, right?

Matt Powell: I think that there's so many options out there, there's so many things that people ... I'm going to try Tony Robbins stuff for a little while. Oh, I didn't get to where I wanted to go, I'm going to go visit Zigler. Oh, didn't get there. I'm going to go to Tim Ferris. Oh, I didn't get it there ... That people are just constantly moving. I tell people if you really want to live in the now, and find out how far off you are from being in the now, take 30 minutes a day, get a book, and read it aloud.

What you'll find is that your brain is so all over the place, that you can barely read aloud. If you go to a zoo, if you go to a museum, you'll find that you don't even read the placards. You kind of skip around real quick and then you look back up because we just don't have attention spans anymore. We're taking in too much information and if you start to ...

That's what we found in martial art is that if I want to something, if I have one thing and that's the only thing that I'm going to try to do, and you have ten things that you're going to try to do, I'm going to win 90% of the time because I'm always focused on one thing. A lot of it is just kind of bringing it back to these useful skills of picking up a book and reading aloud. If you're in your office at work, and you need to read a report, close the door and read it aloud. Train your mind.

Meditation is great. I've been doing meditation for 20 years. I've done it all over the world. You can't sit in the office and meditate all day. What you can do is is you can focus the brain on things like reading aloud. You'll find that you start to, okay there's a whole lot going on in my mind right now. Let me just focus on this. Your communication skills get better. Your memory retention gets better. Your voice annunciation gets better. All by reading aloud. These are the types of little things that we found in the martial arts that we bring over. Then we teach people how to work under stress and duress, but reading aloud is one of them.

If I take somebody and I make you go out and I make you run and sprint and do everything as hard as you can, and I bring you back and your heart rate is really elevated and I make you read aloud, you'll be amazed how much that duplicates what happens in public speaking. You can train yourself for public speaking by reading aloud when you exercise. It's all about just focusing the mind, focusing on the why, not the what. Focusing on being in the moment, not trying to get ahead and assume the conversation. It's just that little bit of focus that ... Just something as simple ... Getting Undo and reading the whole book aloud and you'll find after a little bit of time, you've changed in a lot of ways.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. I love that messaged I think that I'm going to be doing that today. I'll read aloud. I hereby promise to you, Matt Powell, that at some point today I will read aloud 30 minutes to find out what all the fuss is about and to regain my focus and kind of reset and stuff.

Great. I like all the things that you have to share today. Not only just the ideas, but also just kind of these little exercises, these little step by step things. I think I mentioned earlier that there's a lot of self help mindset stuff out there that's just ideas, right? Just clutter, just more stuff to kind of gum up the gears, right? Kind of like you were saying a few minutes ago that a lot of people just kind of dabble and sample and just kind of get a little taste of all these little things, but they're kind of become a jack of all trades, master of none.

I really like all the stuff that you had to share with us today, and I think that as you were talking, I was kind of thinking to myself, "Well, all these ideas but how do I get more focused," so perfect. Little 30 minutes of reading something aloud. Could you tell us one more time to make sure that everyone knows where to find out about you, where to find your book, where to find your website, just one more time for us.

Matt Powell: You can go over to pastless.net. There you can get a free book, you can also get the link over to amazon. If you're on amazon once a day like everybody else is and you're a prime member, then just type in Undo. You'll find the book. If you're amazon prime, you can pick it up for $2.99. If you're not amazon prime, you can get the paperback or the ecopy. Both of them are under $10.

You can always hit me up if you're on Facebook. It's Facebook.com/iammattpowell. Instagram is the same thing. On Instagram it's iammattpowell. And twitter, iammattpowell. All of them are the same. Just remember iammattpowell for social media. I do my best to communicate through email or whatever. If people have questions about the book, if people have general questions about anything they want to contact me about, you can go to pastless.net or you can go to social media, and I'm definitely there to help out anybody that needs a little bit of a boost.

Robert Plank: It seems like we all need that. Maybe not everyday, but we all get to the point where we need a little bit of help. Cool. Thanks, Matt, for stopping by the show and sharing what it is you have to share. I appreciate you and I appreciate everything that you have to say. Thanks again for stopping by.

Matt Powell: Hey I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. You've got a great show.