Ziv: Hey, I’m Ziv, and this is “On the Journey”. Every week “On the Journey” explores the intersection of awareness, spiritual inquiry, mental health, personal growth and purposeful living through the eyes of the people we interview.

Today, I’m happy to host Victor Dedaj and we’re going to talk about success. So, Victor, welcome. What do we need to succeed and what is success?

Victor: Well, number one, there are a lot of different ways to look at success. You could do something as simple as saying if “I made someone’s life better success and I’m successful”, “I am a successful father, then I raise my kids well, and they are really great children.”, I am a successful person.

It’s not just necessarily I made a million dollars and I’m successful. That’s just one way of looking at it. It’s really you prove yourself, are you doing something that you like? Are you happy with your life, with the things you’ve accomplished? If you are? I think in that way you say you are successful.

That’s what I think success is. It could be monetary. It could be financial. It could be health. It could be spiritual. There are many different ways of looking at success. And if you do the things you set out for, then yes, you are successful.

Ziv: Ok, so that makes sense. So, in a way to say if you accomplish, you’re achieving something that is important for you. That’s a success.

Victor: Yes.

Ziv: OK, great, so, we have like so many people, have so many other things that they want to achieve. How do we get the things that we want to get?

Victor: Well, I think the first thing you got to start doing is.

Take one should personal responsibility, one of my mentors, Jack Canfield. Many people might know him as the co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series. And the success of his first success principle is take 100 percent responsibility for your life. And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t like to do that because it’s so easy to blame someone else for your problems.

It’s your boss, your parents, your spouse, your kids, your friends, the company, the weather, the government, you name it. People look to blame it. Now,

And that’s where your power lies. You always have to remember you have the power to determine how you respond to a certain situation, which is why two people can have something happen them and different levels because they have different responses to it.

Number one, I will say, started by taking responsibility for everything that happens to you. And what that does is it shifts your focus from external to internal. You focus on solutions of how to solve the problems. When you don’t take responsibility, you expect someone else to take care of your problems, solved your issues, and you never take action on an act.

It taking an act is one the most important thing to become a success associate, take responsibility.

And number two, you need to really work on the mindset. A lot of people know what to do.

Ziv: Sorry, about number. I just want to make sure I understand. So when you say to take responsibility, do you mean take responsibility on the response, not take responsibility on the reason?

Something happened to me, it happened. And I take responsibility for how I respond to it, not for the reason that something happened to me. Is that correct?

Victor: That’s one of the things sometimes it is your responsibility, what you do, but sometimes you make something happen to you may be stuck in heavy traffic in the car and you have died. You have no control over, or there could be an earthquake, it could be something things happen that could be totally out of your control.

But, yes, you do have power and your response is how you respond. If you’re stuck in traffic, you could just start screaming and cursing, saying life stinks. Or you could try to do something productive with your time. Maybe you have some sort of a positive, inspirational subject to listen to in your car or, if you’re stuck in the car, maybe a book and a great read while you stuck in traffic with twenty minutes do something productive.

That’s why you respond relay in. And a lot of people don’t realize that. They just say, well, something bad happened to me. I can’t do anything about it. But sometimes things happen to you and realize what did I do to cause it. Sometimes it is what you did. So either way. But if you did something wrong, you can still change what happened to you.

You could say, what did I do to cause this to happen to me and how can I change it again? The power lies in how you respond to the things which either you did or you didn’t do. Sometimes it’s something I do, but sometimes it’s something in what you did. So either way, you have to take responsibility. Don’t necessary expect that everything’s outside.

Ziv: Ok, and the second thing.

Victor: Mindset is extremely important because a lot of times people have to act, they know what to do. They have the ability to do it. But there’s something in here in your unconscious mind that stops you from taking action.

For example, a lot of people want to lose weight. They know what to do to lose weight. You eat better quality food. You eat fewer calories, less junk, you exercise more people know what to do. But do they all do it? No. A lot of people don’t do it even though they want to lose this weight.

And a big reason is their minds that there’s something stopping them from taking action on it. And a lot of times it’s tough stuff from when they were children. Things happen to them when they were growing up, whether something interacts with the parents, with their teachers in school or whatever, and they were negative things. They were put into people.

And a lot of times you’re making the decisions of a six year old and you don’t even realize you can be a grown 30, 40, 50 year old person. But because the things you learned and a lot of us are trapped into back and it stop you from taking out a lot of times, it’s a defense.

It prevent you from getting hurt and you don’t even realize it. And once you learn and working on that mindset to get rid of a lot of the negative problem that was given to you when you were growing up, it could definitely change your life.

I mean, you could change it but it takes work, but you can definitely do it. There are a lot of different exercises you can do. It’s sort of a positive successful people and work kind of mindset will definitely change a lot.

Ziv: Ok, that’s that’s very interesting because I think that’s one of the things that we all experience.

We all know who what we should do and we all do other things. So can give give us an example of an exercise or something that will help us to change the mindset.

Victor: The variety of things you could do. Number one.

Look at the people around you. Are you surrounded by a lot of negative people that are complaining all the time? We just talk about other people behind their backs that are negative about life. And if you are, that’s probably one thing you need to change.

Jim Rond was a very famous motivational speaker and he used to say, “You’re the average of the five people you spend most of your time with.” and we’re surrounded by negative people. It’s very hard to have a positive.

Number one, surrounding several more positive people surround yourself with more successful people. That’s going to help.

The exercise, I recommend is visualization. And when you visualize something, you could do it with your eyes closed, your eyes open, but you’re imagining the kind of life that you want to have. And you did that for 10, 20 minutes every single day.

What happens when you visualize the kind of life you want? There’s a structural tension between what you’re the kind of life you actually have now and the kind of life you design and a subconscious mind goes to work to help you figure out how to get the life you are that you truly desired.

Your mind cannot tell the difference between a real event and an imagined. It so visualisations very powerful. I recommend also doing meditation, spending 10 to 20 minutes every single day, meditating. Tim Ferris, who wrote the book “The Four Hour Work.”

We did a survey of the top leaders of various different fields, and he found that 90 percent of the top leaders in these various fields and professions did some form of meditation on morning mindfulness. This is something very powerful going to be in the top of your field. And I would just say listen to a lot of positive motivational stuff.

You can just go to YouTube or other kind of videos and listen to it every day, read a lot of good, powerful motivational books. And in the long run, these kind of things will help change your mindset.

Ziv: It’s very interesting. So in a way, I believe that what you become, what you eat, so if you eat positivity, become positive and it feeds itself, it makes sense.

About the meditation. We all know how powerful meditation is, but how is it connected to to change the mindset? What’s the connection between meditation and changing our mindset?

Victor: Well, here’s what it is when you’re meditating, number one, you’re you’re taking a break from everything. Number one, your mind’s being bombarded with things day in and day out. And we take 15 to 20 minutes, minutes in the morning. You’re clearing your mind.And it’s incredible. It’s and they’ve done tests with the brain changes when you meditate.

It’s like a mental thing is certain ways. You come up with a lot of good ideas, things the way we things change when you’re taking that break because you notice things when you’re meditating, you have the quiet to yourself and just really work. Your brain starts changing because you’re not focusing on all the things are being bombarded at you.

They say we think about up to fifty thousand thoughts a day. We’re being bombarded with things day in and day out and we need to take that break. It’s like sometimes people do fast for food for a few days and it’s like certain things. It’s like a cleansing.

And I could say from meditating, I come up with a lot of great creative ideas because it’s there in the subconscious mind, because we’re bombarded so much with so many things hitting us. We can’t get those great ideas out of us because they’re lodged in our subconscious mind.

And meditation, I think, allows those creative ideas to come out because we’re taking that break and we’re just in tune with ourselves more because we’re in a quiet place. Anyone that does not seem to get great results from it, a lot of great creative ideas come from that stillness, from that quiet time of 15 to 20 minutes a day.

Ziv: Wonderful. Let’s try to summarize it. For us to succeed, to achieve what we want, we need to do a few things and I guess more. But from this conversation, one is to visualize what we want to become, what we want to tweak our subconscious and our minds into it.

We need to surround ourselves with the things that we want to become because what we eat is what’s become. If we are surrounded with positivity, we become positive about it and it moves us forward. Taking a break, meditate and taking a break from all those internal thoughts and maybe also this meditation, because we said we have 50000 thoughts a day. So maybe, taking the break helps us to rest from all those negative thoughts that we have and to be able to get a distance from them.

And did I forget something?

Victor: I think you pretty much got everything now. Well, I think I just want to add was if you think about a lot of the great religions, they have a Sabbath day. They ask you to take a day of rest.

And a lot of his to spend time with God, but also to give you a body rest and to take a break from all the work, because we work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, your body breaks down. We take that. They arrest you. Come back. We charge the next day.

Ziv: Wonderful. Victor, thank you so much for this conversation, for helping us understand a bit more what we can do to achieve the things that are important for us. That in a way, that’s what we want in life, to understand what we want and then discover how to do it. So thank you so much for your knowledge, experience and sharing with everyone.

Victor: My pleasure. Thank you. Is great being here. They’ve had a really great time today. Thank you.