I had the honor of interviewing Noah St. John about his bestseller The Book of Afformations® and how we can use them to get what we want. We discuss the
difference between afformations and affirmations, including the subtle differences that help us achieve and overcome many selflimiting beliefs and habits.
If you have ever wanted to make more money, lose weight, quit smoking, and much more, you will want to read on.
Let’s jump in!
Brian: Thank you so much for being here today.
Noah: It’s my honor. Thank you.
Brian: You bet. Tell us a little bit about your background, what you overcame, and what brought you on this journey.
Noah: Well, it’s really been a very long and interesting journey, Brian. I started this whole thing because I grew up poor in a rich neighborhood. I know that sounds funny to some people, but it’s really true. I grew up in a small town called Cabot Cove, Maine which just happens to be one of the wealthiest communities in New England, but my family was dirt poor, and I mean that literally. We lived at the bottom of a dirt road in a drafty unfinished house that my parents ended up losing to foreclosure. We knew we were poor, because our mother reminded us every day that we were poor.
I was very painfully aware from a young age that we didn’t have, and meanwhile literally across the street, there were just people with lots of money, wealth and abundance. From a very young age I just determined that I really hated that life of poverty, lack, and fear. Even though my parents worked really hard, they struggled and sacrificed but they could just never seem to get ahead. So I just said I want out of that life, I hated it.
I discovered that I really enjoy learning about human behavior and motivation, and what causes people to behave the way that they do. I started reading books about that just to try to get out of my lousy situation.
I started reading all the classics of personal growth and spiritual growth, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Stephen Covey, and then many years later I had on my own epiphanies. I really realized what was missing in traditional success literature that they really weren’t telling us. So I came up with my own systems and in the intervening years, I’ve helped my clients add millions of dollars in new revenues, increase sales, and also help people lose weight, quit smoking, find love, and fix their marriages. One of the things that we do is help people install what I now call the power habits of unconsciously successful people.
Brian: That’s fantastic. I really, really like that a lot. So let me ask you, what defines success for you?
Noah: On our campus, at successclinic.com, we actually have an answer for that question. When you look at what is called success, we look at four areas: time, energy, relationships, and money. And if you look at those four areas, we look at them like those circles that meet in a Venn diagram, and so if you were to draw four circles where they all come together in the center, and you label them time, energy, relationships and money.
That is where we start with our coaching clients. We ask them, “How are you feeling in the area of time? Are you feeling overwhelmed? Are you feeling like you’re always behind? Are you feeling like you’re stressed out and there’s just never enough time?” Of course many people feel that way nowadays. One of the things I advise people to do is rate themselves one to ten in the area of time. Then do the same with the areas of energy, relationships, and money.
When you look at those four areas, time, energy, relationships, and money, you really get a good sense of where a person is. What’s very interesting is that many people are doing well in one or two of those areas, but usually we find one or two other areas that are out of whack, that the person does feel stuck or frustrated, or just not at the level that they want to be, and so that’s where we help people to focus.
Brian: That’s fantastic, great. How did you decide to write The Book Of Afformations®?
Noah: That was one of the epiphanies that I had in 1997. I was in the shower one morning thinking about why I had been using all the things that they said to do in all those books and I still was struggling. I realized that there was something missing that nobody had ever told us: the human brain works using questions. Now, that wasn’t anything new but what I realized is that if you start asking empowering questions, it actually has to change your brain, and your beliefs, and then it can lead to a change in action, which will lead to a change in results, which will change your life.
In my book I call it “the shower the changed everything”, and that’s when I invented the process of “afformations”, which is really a new technology of the mind. It’s a new way to use your brain to manifest and attract the results that you want. And as I mentioned, we’ve helped people in the areas of money and overcoming addiction, quitting smoking, sleeping better, just lowering their stress, and feeling happier. I didn’t know any of that was going to happen back then, I just thought it was a cool idea, and so I wrote my first book which was called Permission to Succeed, and I self published it back in 1998.
And then late 1998, I met Jack Canfield from Chicken Soup for the Soul, and he recommended my book to the Chicken Soup publisher, and they ended up publishing my first book. That’s what really started this whole journey.
Brian: The Book of Afformations®, really is about the miracle of positive self talk and that is so important. What is the difference do you think between afformations and affirmations as we know them.?
Noah: Well, affirmation is a statement of something you want to be true like, I am rich and then your brain says, “Yeah right.” You don’t believe it. And we were taught, of course, to repeat it a thousand, million, billion times and then sometimes that works, but for many people it doesn’t work. So I invented a process called afformations, which is using empowering questions rather than statements. So an afformation might be, “Why am I so rich?” And your brain looks at that and it says, “Huh, I don’t know. Why am I so rich?” You start to answer the question, you start to search for the answer.
And by virtue of the law of sowing and reaping, your brain actually starts to search for the answer and by virtue of using that law, people have had incredible results. And I just got off the phone with one of my clients who said she’s been afforming for closing on her house that was really stuck and now it’s just going through very smoothly. I talk to people every day who use our afformations and it’s really exciting to talk to people who are using it.
Brian: Absolutely. And what do you think is what keeps us stuck with affirmations? A lot of people teach that.
Noah: That’s what was taught for decades, Brian. And it’s very easy thing to just say, “Well, say these positive statements.” The problem is, for most people they just don’t get any results from it. Many of my clients described it as banging their heads against the wall for years. When you start using our afformations, your brain is wired to answer questions. Psychologists call it the embedded presupposition factor, and you realize that it doesn’t have to be so hard.
Brian: Can you give us an example of people who were very successful in utilizing this technology to change their lives?
Noah: Absolutely. And by the way, when folks get The Book of Afformations® from Hay House, there are over two dozen different real life success stories from people who have used afformations to get amazing results in all areas of life from work, career, money, relationships, overcoming addiction and so forth. It’s really powerful. One story that comes to mind is one of our students named Susan from California, and she had spent over $60,000 on every self-help personal growth program out there from all the big name gurus and everyone.
She thought she tried it all, and she was about to declare bankruptcy, and was about to lose her home and her marriage. Her husband said, “I can’t take it anymore. You’re buying all these programs and nothing’s working, we’re not getting better, we’re getting worse.” Then she heard me being interviewed and decided to go to our website and get the Afformations® program. She started afforming and within a period of about six months, she was offered her dream job as a television producer. She’s now an Emmy Award nominated TV producer, and in fact has just written her first book.
It changed her life so much that she became one of our power habit certified coaches. That was a dramatic real life success story, and that’s just one of many that we’ve seen from around the world.
Brian: Noah, you discuss a four step method to help us with this. You talk about ask, afform, accept and act. Can you elaborate on that for us?
Noah: Absolutely. People ask me all the time, “This afformations method sounds amazing, so what do I do? How does it work?” I walk you through that in the book and I can just outline it here for everybody. It comes down to four words that start with the letter A. So the first A is to ask yourself what you want. So in other words, what is it you want to create, manifest, experience, be, do, have? Now, when I say things that doesn’t have to be like a material thing like a car or house.
But it could just be a feeling, it could be just, “I want to feel happy. I want to have more peace of mind. I want to sleep better.” And also things like, “I want to quit smoking, I want to have a happier relationship” and so on. As Stephen Covey talked about, you want to begin with the end in mind. So that’s the first A, is to ask yourself what you want.
Now, what you notice is that in traditional success literature they stop right here. They say, “Write down the things you want and then say that you have them.” So let’s say your goal is to make an extra $10,000 a month. You say, “Well, I’m making $10,000 a month now.” And your brain is going, “No, you’re not.”
And so the traditional affirmation method is essentially trying to bash your brain into submission for most people until they believe it. For some people that work just fine, and yet for millions they’ve been even more frustrated.
So that’s why we go to the second step of the afformations method which is to afform. You would create an empowering question that assumes that what you want is already true. Let’s use the $10,000 example again. You would ask, “Why is it so easy for me to make $10,000 a month?” And your brain says, “Huh? What?” Your brain still doesn’t know what to do with that.
But what’s so cool about afformations is that when you ask a question, your brain has to process it, and it has to search for the answer by virtue of the embedded presupposition factor. You’re now using your brain in a way that it was intended to be used all along. So that’s the second A.
Now, the third A is to accept. Accept the truth of your new question—essentially, give yourself to the question. So what I mean by that is there are four modes of human communication: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. What I recommend to my clients and my students is to use all of those modes of human communication to really accept and give yourself to the question. I recommend that you read your afformations. And in The Book of Afformations® for example, I give you over 400 unique afformations in all the 10 major areas of life from health and well being, to money and abundance, relationships, overcoming fear, releasing bad habits, and being happy. We go through all those and I give you literally hundreds of affirmations you can read.
Then you should write your own and also say them out loud. We have lots of married couples, for example, who say them out loud to each other, and kids love afformations. Kids love saying afformations, it helps them to get better grades and improve their self-esteem, self confidence. It’s really, really great.
And then, we also have something called I Afform audios, which you can listen to, pre-done afformations. You can listen to them anytime, day or night. So people can listen to them while they’re eating, or exercising on the treadmill, while they’re driving to work, or even while they sleep.
Then the fourth A, and this is the most important one, Brian—this is the one that really trips a lot of people up but it doesn’t have to—and that is to act. Take action based on your new assumptions.
Most people, of course, have very negative assumptions about life and their relationship to it. They assume, “Well, I can’t do it because I’m too old. I can’t do it because I made too many mistakes. I can’t do it because I’ve failed in the past. I can’t do it because I didn’t graduate from college. I can’t do it because I don’t live in the right neighborhood,” or whatever your excuse might be. A long time ago, a mentor of mine said, “Noah, you can have excuses or success, but you can’t have both so pick one.” And I said, “Well, I really want success.” And he said, “Well, then you’ve got to give up your excuses.”
And isn’t it true? We all have our excuses and we really defend them. So if you want to have this new life, you are going to have to take action. This isn’t magic, it’s science. You’re already using afformations, but most people are using afformations against themselves and keep themselves stuck. Again nobody is doing this on purpose, but it’s happening anyway. So what we’re inviting you to do is using the afformations method, is use your brain for yourself rather than against yourself.
Brian: That raises a really interesting question, why do we self-sabotage things in our life?
Noah: There are two main reasons for that, Brian. And the first reason is what I call your head trash. Your head trash is that guy in your head that says “I can’t do anything right, I’m not enough”. I’ve had the privilege of coaching and working with thousands of students and clients from all around the world for the last 20 years. What I’ve seen and observed, and experienced in my own life, is that the default human belief is, “I’m not enough”. As I mentioned, I grew up in poverty, fear, lack, and not enoughness, and so I was told, and shown very clearly that I wasn’t enough.
In fact, I made a decision to commit suicide at the age of 25 years old. I decided to take my own life because I was told and shown that nothing I did was ever good enough. It was only through a miracle at the very last moment that I decided not to do it. And so after that experience, I really made a commitment to use the rest of my life to serve a higher purpose, to help people and to make a difference as best that I could while I’m still here. And so I’ve devoted the rest of my life to sharing afformations, to sharing power habits with people all around the world.
The number two reason is we self-sabotage is because of habits. Self sabotaging behaviors are certainly not conscious thoughts, they’re based on subconscious habits. I read every book that I could on how to stop sabotaging yourself. And you know what that cure was?
Brian: Stop focusing on self sabotaging.
Noah: Yeah, they said stop doing that. That was their treatment program. So it’s basically like saying to an anorexic, “Well, why don’t you just eat.” Well, that’s idiotic. There’s got to be a better answer than this because nobody’s doing this on purpose. So that’s why I really do the work that I do. Everybody wants to succeed, whatever success means to each individual. And so that’s why we do the work that we do and it’s really been so rewarding to see the results from people around the world.
Brian: Noah, I want to talk to you about boosting income and self confidence without using willpower. And talk a little bit about how willpower doesn’t really doesn’t do it.
Noah: That involves my power habit system. So if folks are interested in that they can actually get my free video training series at powerhabits.com or again at Noahstjohn.com. But basically, we do teach how to boost your income and your self confidence without using willpower. Let’s look at what willpower is first, and then why doesn’t work very effectively. Your mind is like an iceberg, it’s got about 5% that’s visible above the surface like an iceberg, that’s the conscious mind. The vast 95% is below the surface, that’s the sub-conscious mind. But when you look at the conscious mind, that means choice. In other words, if you think about something or you have some cognizance of it, you have a choice about whether you’re going to do that thing or not.
Meanwhile, the sub-conscious mind, the bottom part of the iceberg is no choice, that means if you’re not aware of something how can you be expected to change it? Well, the answer is you can’t, and so what willpower really is, is fighting the 95% with the 5%. Now, when you’re fighting 95 with five, which one do you think is going to win?
Brian: The 95.
Noah: The 95 every time. So that’s why willpower can work for a very, very short time but it really is very ineffective to make long term changes for most people. And a great example of this is New Year’s resolutions. It’s funny because on January 2nd, the gyms are full and by January 30th, they’re empty again. And why is that? Because people are trying to use that 5% of their brain and they’re fighting the 95. Meanwhile, the 95% is eventually going to win. So what we do with power habits is we really break down what a habit really is. So a habit really comes down to five areas: the cue, the routine, the reward, the craving and the belief.
So when you look at the cue, that’s the trigger. So a great example is somebody who is smoking, and the cue for that could be they feel stressed, or they talk to their spouse, or their boss yells at them, or it’s 5 o’clock, or they wake up. Any of those things can be cues or triggers.
Then the routine is the thing that you do when that cue is triggered, in this case you pick up a cigarette. And the third thing that happens is called the reward. Now, in the brain there’s actually a reward and anybody who smokes will tell you that smoking really feels good— to the smoker anyway. Then the brain literally gets addicted to it and that’s what leads to the craving.
The brain literally craves that nicotine, and no matter how much willpower you use, you just can’t fight it. And then you have the hardest thing, which is the belief. The belief is that subconscious part that says, “Well, I guess I’ll never be able to quit smoking.” I’ve had students who quit smoking using my power habits method after years of trying to quit smoking using the old willpower method. It doesn’t have to be about willpower, and in fact, willpower won’t get the job done.”
Brian: Fantastic. And how can we get your book for free?
Noah: Just go to
www.Noahstjohn.com. My new book is called,
Your Six Figure Business Machine. You can download it, I’ll be happy to send it to you for free. And of course, if you want to get
The Book of Afformations®, just go to Amazon, Barnes and Noble or anywhere books are sold.
Brian: Fantastic. Any final thoughts you’ll like to share with us?
Noah: Well yeah, absolutely. I would like to share these five words that have really made a huge difference in my life. Those five words I’d like to share with folks is: Give yourself permission to succeed. When you do that, you’ll create an amazing ripple effect, and you will actually give others permission to be their best selves as well, and that’s how we can really change the world and make a huge impact for future generations.
Brian: Fantastic advice. I love that. Thank you for being here, Noah.
Noah: Thank you Brian. It’s been my pleasure.
Noah St. John helps people make money: Since 2009, he’s helped his clients add over half a billion dollars in sales.
He is also the only author in history to have works published by Hay House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Mindvalley, Nightingale- Conant, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul publisher.
A highly in-demand keynote speaker and workshop leader, Noah is famous for inventing AFFORMATIONS® - a new technology of the mind – and creating millionaires from the inside out.
He’s the author of 14 books that have been translated into 17 languages. Get Noah’s new book Get Rid of Your Head Trash About Money FREE at www. SendMeaBookNoah.com/now 
