Rita Black: Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illnesses in the US and affect over 40 million adults today. My guest on the Thin Thinking Podcast is none other than Steven Diamond, the famed magician known for his participation in Tiger King series. Steve is now a master coach, helping many people who struggle with different forms of anxiety, recover and find a new path forward with his innovative approach. So join me as Steven walks us through his compelling life story and journey with healing his own anxiety and OCD and found his calling in helping others as well as doable tools that we can use every day to help us manage anxiety. So put your feet up and come on in. Warning, there is a graphic description of a murder scene in the podcast. So if you have young children within your earshot, or if you may be triggered yourself, please refrain from listening to this episode.

Rita Black: Did you know that our struggle with weight doesn’t start with the food on your plate or get fixed in the gym, or 80% of our weight struggle is mental? That’s right. The key to unlocking long-term weight release and management begins in your mind. Hi there, I’m Rita Black. I’m a clinical hypnotherapist weight loss expert, bestselling author, and the creator of the Shift Weight Mastery Process. And not only have I helped thousands of people over the past 20 years achieve long-term weight mastery, I am also a former weight struggler, carb addict and binge eater. And after two decades of failed diets and fad weight loss programs, I lost 40 pounds with the help of hypnosis. Not only did I release all that weight, I have kept it off for 25 years. Enter the Thin Thinking Podcast where you too will learn how to remove the mental roadblocks that keep you struggling. I’ll give you the thin thinking tools, skills, and insights to help you develop the mindset you need, not only to achieve your ideal weight, but to stay there long term and live your best life.

Rita Black: Hello, all of our podcast friends from all Over the World. Take a nice deep breath in and just be present with me here for a moment. Hello, welcome to your day, and thank you for having me in it. How are you? Well, I hope you’re ready for my guest today.

Rita Black: Mr. Steve Diamond, who has so many tasty tidbits, starting with his fascinating life story and leading us into some very actionable tools that we can use to calm the mind and body both when we are under stress. So before I have Steve take it away, I wanna remind you that there is a graphic description of a murder scene in the podcast. And if you have young children or if you yourself think you might be triggered, just please refrain from listening. Steven Diamond has performed magic and illusion for the past three decades around the world, appearing in England, Germany, Korea, Brazil, France, Chile, Argentina, Columbia, Puerto Rico, and dozens of other nations. And as he performed before large crowds, he left hidden his greatest secret.

Rita Black: He suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder. He reveals his story in a new book, OCDA Life Among Secrets. Diamond knew he wanted to be a magician ever since his father took him to his first magic show at an amusement park at the age of seven. By the time he was 12, he was a hit on the corporate convention circuit raking in hundreds of thousands per year. In high school, he was performing and touring his own two hour illusion show that included real lions and tigers. Today, Steven is a keynote speaker and a corporate trainer on the topic of stress in the workplace with his popular multimedia presentation entitled What The Tigers Taught Me, where he captivates his audiences with his wild stories of working with exotic lions and tigers. He now demonstrates the life lessons these endangered beasts and surviving OC cult taught him. Please help me welcome Mr. Steven Diamond.

Rita Black: Well, hello, Mr. Steven Diamond. I’m so happy to have you here on The Thin Thinking Podcast. You’re a popular man, and we’re excited to have you here.

Steven Diamond: Thank you so much, Rita. I appreciate it. I’m here live talking to you from Las Vegas. Where are you at?

Rita Black: I am in Los Angeles, California. And it’s cold. You would never know. It was Los Angeles.

Steven Diamond: It’s a beautiful day here in Las Vegas. Sunny! I just came from outside and it’s not too bad and it’s kind of on the verge of warm and cool, but it’s really nice outside.

Rita Black: A quick question about Las Vegas in the winter.

Steven Diamond: Sure!

Rita Black: It does get really cold there in the winter time, right? Because you’re the –

Steven Diamond: Sometimes. Yeah, sometimes it does get cold at night. During the day it’s kind of mild, you know, it seems like it’s really strange. It seems like our winters are getting milder here. So this past winter, this winter right now has just not been all of that severe it seems to me in my, maybe a lot of other Las Vegans may disagree with me, but it just doesn’t seem as cold as it used to be.

Rita Black: Yeah, I mean, that’s interesting because it’s kind of been a flip story for LA. I’ve talked to other people about this. I think we’re getting colder and other places are getting –

Steven Diamond: Yeah, yeah. Things are definitely changing, for sure.

Rita Black: Yeah. So I love your background and I know our listeners, maybe if they have not heard of you before, we’d love to hear more about you because you, I are an anxiety guru professional coach. But you started and are you still a magician? Like, tell us your background because it’s so fascinating.

Steven Diamond: Sure. A lot of your viewers may recognize me from the hit Netflix television series, Tiger King, and that covers a 15 year period of my life that actually happened 35 years ago. And so who knew at the time, I certainly didn’t that someday a documentary would be made on Netflix about a period of my life. But I’ll explain to you how it all began.

Rita Black: Yeah, please.

Steven Diamond: So I was kind of a child prodigy. I started performing when I was about eight years old. My father took me to an amusement park. I saw my very first magician, and I just looked up at him and I’m like, daddy, that’s what I want to do forever. And so he fortunately said to me, you know, if you want to be a magician, you certainly can be. And that was like getting your dad’s stamp of approval. So the next thing you knew, we were at the Magic Shop. He was buying me some tricks to practice, and I realized I was really good at it. And when I took the tricks to school, I was blowing people away, you know, at like nine years old. And so, by 10 years old, I had an act and I was doing birthday parties and I was doing just little festivals and fairs and anything that I could get booked at, my dad was billing me as the world’s youngest magician and –

Rita Black: That time, was he your, was your dad, was he your like manager agent at the time then?

Steven Diamond: He was kind of loosely, he really didn’t know what he was doing. Neither of us did. We were all playing it by ear at that time. But very quickly I got discovered by a professional manager who saw me at a shopping mall. And I was about 11 years old, I guess, when I met Bobby and Bobby Mc Lamb who’s a well-known agent and producer on the East Coast. And he saw me and said, you know, you’re gonna be incredible someday, and I would love to nurture you along and help develop you. And so he signed me to, at that time, his company was called B&R Entertainment. Today it’s Artist and Attractions Management, but we signed up with him and the rest is kind of history, you know, and we started performing at corporations and I sort of started getting passed around from corporate event to corporate event.

Steven Diamond: ‘Because the corporations thought that it was really cool. There’s this 12-year-old kid that was so professional, had a professional polished act, and they’d never seen anything like it. And so it became kind of a little sensation on the East coast. And so Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and then on up to New York that kind of area is where I would do all my shows. And then when I was about, I guess I was probably about 15 years old or so, 15 or 16, I was performing for Longwood College in Virginia, which at the time was an all female college. And they did this big fundraiser every year where they would rent the town theater, they’d block off the main street, and they would have this big festival, and it was a big fundraiser for the college sorority. And they would always hire me to perform in the theater, and I would sell it out. I would do like three or four shows over the course of a weekend, and it, all the tickets would go instantly. And it became just this yearly thing that was really popular. Well, one day the curtain went up and they’re sitting in the front row was none other than Bhagavan Antle, who is in a Tiger King with me. The actual story is about him and his the cult that he had developed.

Rita Black: Exactly. It’s fascinating.

Steven Diamond: I, yeah, I was a part of that. And of course, when you’re in a cult, you don’t know that you’re in a cult. So I had no idea at the time really what it was. But I had the magic show. He had the Lions and Tigers, and we both came up with the idea, let’s join forces and produce this bigger version of my show and let’s tour it around the world. And that’s what we did for 15 years.

Rita Black: Unbelievable.

Steven Diamond: That’s how it all got started.

Rita Black: That is amazing. So how did that all dovetail into anxiety and, you know, how did your story, I, I mean, were, were you anxious working with Tigers to start with? I I don’t know if that was the root of your anxiety, but it would be the root of mine.

Steven Diamond: I get that question a lot. You know, and it’s really funny, it’s fascinating to me that when people find out that I teach people how to manage their stress and anxiety, of course, they instantly ask me about the, the tigers. And they’re like, you know, what, is that where it came from? No. I never had any fear of the animals. I just was fearless. I think I still am to a large degree in my life. Working with exotic animals that early on, and especially working with them, with the psychology and philosophy of animal training the way we did, we had a no harm policy. We didn’t hit the animals, we didn’t beat them. We, we used a different modality of training that is psychology based. And so when you learn that methodology of, of caring for raising and breeding these animals, it kind of passes onto you and you start living your life in that modality in a certain way.

Steven Diamond: And you can’t work with these animals if you’re afraid of them, because they will pick up on that and they’ll sniff that out right away, and they’ll take advantage of it. But I just instinctually and naturally never had a fear of them. I never saw them as predators. I never saw them as adversaries. Just the opposite. Actually. We were a team and it was my job to bond myself with certain animals so that we could communicate on a deeper level and we could get the results on stage that we were looking for. And so, it’s a very long process, but and which is why a lot of people don’t use it, because it, it, it does take a lot of time and effort and training you get out of these animals what you put into them.

Rita Black: So, you know, if you put a lot of love and attention and care into these animals, that’s what the, you’ll get back from them. And so it’s all about developing the right relationship. And that set me up in a great way for my future. So I had a lot of trauma in my early childhood. I’ll give you a quick story. I’ve told this many times on television, but maybe some of your viewers haven’t heard it. When I was about eight years old I walked into a room and found my babysitter dead, and she was actually hacked into pieces. And her head was over here, and her body was over here. And it’s a long story I tell in my book, OCDA, Life Among Secrets. But basically what happened was her drunk ex-husband showed up at the house one night and propositioned her, and she refuted him, and he went crazy, grabbed a kitchen knife and hacked her up. And so, in the chaos of the ambulance and the police and everything being at the location, my dad and I who lived in the apartment across the street, we saw the noise.

Steven Diamond: We actually thought the building was on fire. And we ran out to see what was going on. And in the process of that, I slipped away from my dad, went around the back, went up the stairs, and went right into the apartment and found myself standing in a three foot diameter pool of her blood. And in the blink of an eye, I just looked over and I saw her head and I realized what had, or I realized where I was and what was going on. And in that second, it seemed like, it seemed like 30 minutes to me, but I was probably only standing there for a second or two before a fireman grabbed me and yanked me out of the building, took me back to my dad. And so that was my very first experience with trauma. My first experience with stress and anxiety.

Steven Diamond: And I was forced into a situation that I had no emotional intelligence at that age to be able to process or handle. And that kind of trauma that young sets you up for a lifetime of issues that you’re gonna have to deal with eventually. And of course, you know, the people in my Facebook group hear me say quite a bit, if you don’t deal with your issues, your issues will deal with you. And the the problem with that is that it gets to decide when, where, and how it’s gonna deal with you if you don’t take care of it first. So that came back to haunt me in my later teenage years and all of that. At the time I was dealing with Bhagavan and the cult and, and all of the animals, and I was touring around the world at the time. And so I began to have all of these emotional internal struggles inside of me that I just didn’t have the emotional intelligence at the time to be able to process and handle, didn’t know what to do with.

Steven Diamond: And it manifested itself in an OCD way, obsessive compulsive disorder. And I began checking, and I began counting, and I began worrying and overthinking and ritualizing and all kinds of different OCD related type modalities that I adopted and became as a coping mechanism really is what I was trying to do. I was trying to figure out how to deal with this beast, this deep, dark beast that was living inside of me. You know? Many decades later, there would be a TV show on I believe it was on Showtime, and it was called Dexter, and it was about a serial killer who worked at the Miami Police Department. Do you remember that? And he used to call, he used to call the psychopath that lived in his head, his dark passenger. And that rang true with me because when I saw that series and heard Dexter talk about his dark passenger all throughout the series, it reminded me of that dark passenger that lived within me.

Steven Diamond: I called it the Beast. And it, it lived with inside of me for so many years, and it grew angrier and angrier and angrier as I grew older because I hadn’t dealt with it. So finally, flash forward a couple decades later, I’m in my twenties. I’m about 28, 29, somewhere around in there. I’m on stage with the Osmond brothers. I’m actually touring with them at the time and we were at their theater in Branson, Missouri doing a Christmas version of the show. And I was their opening act. I was also at the same time, the opening act for Tony Orlando.

Rita Black: I love that.

Steven Diamond: And I was performing with the Osmond brothers, and I collapsed on stage.

Rita Black: Oh my.

Steven Diamond: In front of a thousand people. And, and my body just hit the reset button and said, you’re done. And that was the beginning of me deal of coming to the point where I have to deal with all of this in my past. And so, for the very first time I went into therapy, and for the very first time I heard the words Obsessive Compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and all of these other disorders that I had, and I was dyslexic. Didn’t even know that, didn’t really have a term for it. I knew I had problems reading, and I knew that my brain would reverse numbers particularly, but I didn’t really have words for all of these things. And so we figured it all out. I got into therapy and I went through the whole therapeutic trajectory, I guess you would call it. And literally went through every modality of therapy that there is. And it was through that process that I became obsessed with learning how the brain works, how people process information, what makes people think the way that they do, why do they do the behaviors that they do that are sometimes self-sabotaging, all of those kind of things.

Steven Diamond: I became fascinated with how the mind works. So I began studying that. And what I realized was that I had actually created, unbeknownst to myself, I had created my own program, my own way of figuring all of these things out, and my own way of dealing with all of these things. And to my own surprise, these little tricks and tips that I had created were actually very effective. And my therapists were really impressed, and they were like, you know, this is kind of like your own little system. You should package this, put it together and, and share it with people who are the mirror reflection of yourself. And that really resonated with me. So I wrote a book in 2003 called OCDA Life Among Secrets, and it was about my journey as a magician who has all of these magical secrets.

Steven Diamond: But all of those were irrelevant because the secret that I was hiding that I wanted to share with no one was the emotional disaster of a human being that I was off stage. And I went to great links to hide it to every, you know, from everyone. And when I wrote my book in 2003, it somehow got into the hands of Jane Polley at NBC. And at the time, Jane Polley had a daytime talk show called the Jane Polley Show. And she called me and said, I would love to do an episode with you and Howie Mandel, and I’d love for you guys to come on the show and tell your story, your individual stories, and I’m going to reveal to the world for the very first time that I have a diagnosis of bipolar. And so when she did that we, I flew to New York, we filmed the show.

Steven Diamond: I also ended up on the Today Show. And the next thing I knew, I was getting tens of thousands of emails from people all over the world who had seen the show, and they related to my story. And all of these emails had one common red thread that ran all the way through it. And it was, please help me. Can you please gimme some advice? Help me, show me what to do. And I started realizing that people were looking to me for, I’m, I’m a bonehead. I don’t have any answers for anybody. I don’t need to be teaching anyone or giving anyone any kind of advice. I’m as screwed up as the rest of them. And so I was kind of confused as to why they were looking to someone like me to give them answers when I didn’t have any. And my therapist said to me, you need to produce a course and teach these people everything you know. And so I did. And in 2004, I released the very first version, which was an audio course. I actually have it right here. This was the very first version of Life Skills Masterclass, and it was called when Anxiety Attacks. And it was for, you’re gonna Laugh. And so your viewers, they’re gonna laugh when they see a four CD audio set CDs. What are those? No one even knows what they are.

Rita Black: I, I, I know I have a similar box set of my own CD that I can chuckle with you on this. But that’s fantastic. And, you know, something that you’re just saying that resonates and I think probably resonates with my audience, is that, you know, who, who are you to be a teacher when you, you know, like you think that, like, who am I to teach people? I don’t have a degree in psychology. I don’t have you know, fancy letters behind my name, but you are further down the path of recovery than them. And people just want that immediacy with anxiety because they’re so in pain. They just want the, the, the lip of the switch. They want that access, not, they don’t wanna sit through months and months and years and years of therapy. They wanna be feel better now.

Steven Diamond: They want the fastest path from point A to point B. And that’s really what that course did, was it answered every question that you’re going to have. And that’s how I built the course, was what questions are these people asking? And I literally went through all of those emails that I got from the Jane Polley show. And, and just highlighted every question that I thought was a question that everyone would want to know the answer to. And that’s how I built the original course. And so when I did, it’s still for sale today. I still sell this on my website, the, the audio version on stevendiamond.com. And it’s a great course. It’s, it, it still is as relevant today as it was all those years ago because the information is really powerful. And it just, it’s just me sharing my story and teaching you what I learned in hopes that you may find something in there that resonates with you. And so that’s how it all, that’s how it all began. And you know, I’ll tell you something that’s really interesting. A lot of people don’t realize this, but as a magician, I was uniquely preparing myself to do this later in life. Because as a magician, you have to learn how people process information in order to fool them.

Steven Diamond: And so, I didn’t realize that, you know, when you’re standing on a stage and you’re sawing a lady in half, the audience sitting in front of you, they know that deep down inside, you’re not really cutting this person into, yet all the evidence is there before you, that what you’re seeing is actually happening. So in order for me to create that illusion, I have to become a master at fooling your senses, your sense of sight, your sense of hearing, your sense of smell, touch, taste. All of those play a part in convincing you that I’m really sawing this lady in half. And so I never realized it, but that experience and that training would really help me understand how people process information, why they think what they do, why they choose the behaviors that they do, all of those kind of things. And it uniquely positioned me in a way that gave me some expertise to be able to help these people understand that there’s a very simple formula for changing your behaviors. And once you learn this simple formula, it allows you to effectively change anything in your life that you want to change for the better. And that’s what I do today.

Rita Black: That’s amazing. I have a question for you, a couple of questions. So one is, how have you seen, because I have seen in my own practice that, you know, you started this all before the iPhone and the digital world. How do you see the world of the digital world, the social media, the, you know, the access to information. How do you see that impacting people’s minds and their anxiety levels?

Steven Diamond: Well, you know, it’s funny. I talk about this a lot in my speaking engagements. The world is shifting. And there is a new world order that is coming our way, whether you like it or not, whether you want it or not. It’s happening. It’s already happening. And we’re see, we’re beginning to feel the tension and the stress of change in our world. You know, we all seem so divided right now in so many different ways. And we all feel the tension, and we all feel the stress and the pressure of what’s going on in our society today. And we start to view people who aren’t like us or have different thoughts or opinions, we start to view them in different ways. Negatively, sometimes, positively, sometimes is just this whole melting pot. And it seems like no one’s getting along. And it seems like no one can afford anything.

Steven Diamond: The housing market, the grocery store, gas tank, it’s just affecting everyone negatively. And everyone’s like, what’s going to give? And what I’ve been explaining to people is that the pandemic was the catalyst for a shift, a collective consciousness shift. Because for the very first time, the world came to a complete stop. And for the very first time, people had a moment, a breath, a pause in their life where they could actually think and they could actually feel, and they could actually resonate with their own present moment awareness. And a lot of people have realized that the crazy train they were living, they needed to get off of.

Steven Diamond: And when you’re on that crazy train, and you’re going down the track at a million miles a minute, because you’ve got kids, you’ve got a wife, you’ve got a husband, you’ve got families to take care of, you’ve got pets, you’ve got, you know, work, you’ve got all of these pressures and all of these responsibilities that you have, you’re going down that track at a million miles a minute. And there’s no real time to process, to think, to reflect, to meditate, to find your center. And the pandemic gave us all that collective breath, that sigh of relief where we could just sit and think about our lives for the very first time. And as a result of that, it has shifted the collective consciousness. And people are now realizing that working 40 hours a week just to pay your bills is an unsustainable lifestyle. And they’re beginning to realize that there’s more value in living than there is in working.

Steven Diamond: And they’re beginning to realize that the trajectory that the world is on is just simply unsustainable. So something’s got to change. And those changes have already been triggered and they’ve already began to occur. So all of the stress and the anxiety and the tension and the negativity that we are feeling in the world today is as a result of the changes that’s happening for all of us. So we’re in a transition period right now, and the next big change, just like what happened when the internet first came about back in the nineties, we’re about to undergo another massive shift right now with AI, artificial intelligence. And that has already started, and that shift has already begun. So the world is in a flux right now, and it is ever evolving. It is ever changing. And there’s gonna be a lot of people, unfortunately, that are gonna be left behind because they’re not willing or too afraid to open their mind and embrace the new changes that are coming.

Steven Diamond: They’re going to plant their feet in concrete and go, Nope, this is the way I am, I’m not going to change. And those are the people who are going to be left behind. And so I encourage my followers to open their minds, embrace new technology, embrace new change. I was at a business function yesterday at a mixer, a business mixer. And I was speaking to a lot of the members there, and they were asking me, you know, what does the future look like? And these, the the particular person that asked me about this was in his eighties. And I noticed that he reached in his pocket when it came time for me to exchange phone numbers with him. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a flip phone.

Rita Black: Oh, I love it.

Steven Diamond: And I, and I asked him, I said, this guy’s a CPA, he runs an accounting firm. And I asked him, I said, wow, that’s interesting. You have a flip phone. And he goes, yeah. He said, I just like to keep things simple. He said, I find out, I find that my life is more, is better when I just keep things simple. I don’t care about texting, I don’t care about the internet. I don’t care about any of that stuff. I just like things to be simple. And I thought to myself, that’s great for you and that’s great for, for your world. And if it’s working for you, I support it. But I also see the other side of what’s going to happen to people like him. And I see that those people who just refuse to change, they’ve drawn a line in the sand and they’re like, this is where I’m at.

Steven Diamond: I don’t need anything else. I’m just gonna stay right here. They’re gonna find that their life gets more difficult, it’s gonna get harder for them. And, and it’s by their own choosing. And that’s their journey. So you have to let each person choose their own journey and let them travel where they want to go. And, and you can offer to show them the path, but you can’t make ’em walk it. So you have to let them, you just have to meet people where they’re at and respect them. But there is going to be a, a cliff that a lot of people are gonna fall off of because they’re just refusing to walk across the bridge. They see the bridge, they know where the bridge is, but they’re just refusing to walk across that bridge, either out of fear or, or confusion of, because they don’t understand that technology and they don’t know what it is. And they don’t know. They have a negative viewpoint of what is happening to the world. Yeah. And those are the people who are really gonna suffer. And, and it, it’s a shame, but it’s a part of the evolution that needs to happen on planet Earth as a species in order for us to evolve and continue on.

Rita Black: Yeah. I have, so, so that’s fascinating. And I know that a lot of people get, can get stuck in those worlds. Right. And I, and I know anxiety is kind of you know, our, our brain is negativity biased, right? Like, and so, It’s so fast, is so fascinating that, you know, you’re the master of illusion and our brain is kind of the master of illusion. ’cause It will present, you know, very false scenarios to us. And again, like you were saying with that man, it’s like that was his reality. That was cool for him. It all worked good until it doesn’t work good. How does our inner communication with ourselves and other people, like, how can that improve when we improve anxiety? And I don’t even know if I’m asking this question right, but like, how does communication with others, with ourselves, how can we use communication to start to take steps towards Im improving your, or calming ourselves down or, or managing our anxiety?

Steven Diamond: So the very, that’s a great question. The very first thing that I tell people is, you need to learn to find your center. Find your center and learn how to be present moment aware. Many, many years ago, I stopped living in the past and stopped living in the future. And I taught myself because a mentor taught me how to live in the present moment and how to focus on the here and now. Because that’s really all we can control. We can only control what is in front of us right here and now. Tomorrow hasn’t happened, yesterday doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant.

Steven Diamond: The only thing that matters is right now. And when you learn to find your center and you learn to live in the present moment, you find that you actually reclaim your control in life and you reclaim your control over your life. And what I find most often is that people have identified themselves with their thinking, and they believe that that’s who they are. And they believe that every thought that goes through this gray matter between our ears is a, a reflection of who we are. And that is a lie that we convince ourselves is truth.

Steven Diamond: And just because you have a thought doesn’t mean that’s you. And it doesn’t mean that that’s you thinking that thought. It is just a thought that randomly went through your head. Now this is getting into some really complicated areas, but suffice it to say that, that when you learn to live in the present moment, and when you learn to separate yourself from your thinking, and you learn to identify yourself as the thinker, not the thought, you then have a foundation from which to change the way you think. And when you change the way you think, your behavior will also change.

Rita Black: I agree with you a hundred percent. Oh, absolutely. And we actually talk a lot about that on this podcast. So Absolutely true. I was interested, and, and I don’t know if you have the answer to this, but I have a feeling being the smart lover fellow you are, is that because this is a, we the Thin Thinking podcast, I, I was wondering if you had any opinion on how body image and self-esteem relates to anxiety?

Steven Diamond: Absolutely. I mean, it all, you know, addiction is, addiction is addiction. What your, what your addiction is, is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether you’re putting a, a needle in your arm or you’re feeding your face with food. It’s all related to your particular addictions. And so I always tell people, you know, I’ve worked with tons of drug addicts over the years, and I’ve worked with tons of rape victims, war vets I have a lot of war vets that I’ve dealt with, young people who have been deployed 2, 3, 4 times. And they come back with all of this post-traumatic stress disorder and everything. I work with a lot of those kind of people very successfully showing them that thoughts become things. And it all goes back to how you think and what your internal dialogue is. The way you see yourself in that mirror, whether you’re fat, whether you’re thin, whether you’re somewhere in between the way you see yourself in that mirror all goes back to what you think.

Steven Diamond: So when you learn to change your internal dialogue, you effectively reclaim control and allow yourself the ability to affect change in areas that you might not have been successful in the past. And so, really take a look at your internal dialogue on my podcast, I have a whole episode about your internal dialogue. And I, you can, my podcast is called What The Tigers Taught Me. You can find it on Spotify, apple, Google Play, anywhere that you get your podcasts just search Steven Diamond, what the Tigers Taught me, and it’ll pop up. And that episode is really critical for a lot of reasons, because your internal dialogue affects every cell in your being.

Steven Diamond: Because thoughts become things. So when you have a negative thought or two, that doesn’t affect too much, but when you have a consistent line of thinking that is negative, that affects everything even down to a cellular level. So I always teach people that your thoughts are like commands. You know, I’m a hypnotist. I, I was a hypnotist from the age of 18 years old. I used it in my magic show. And in hypnosis, we have something called embedded commands where you will embed a command in someone’s subconscious. You know, let’s say that you’re, you’ve hypnotized someone to help them sleep more, sleep better, or lose weight, or stop smoking or something of those natures when, when I’m talking to their subconscious, I’m embedding commands. I’m using words that are designed to trigger a certain way of thinking. Right? And we do that to ourselves every second of every day because every thought that you have is literally an embedded command for your brain.

Steven Diamond: Your brain is listening, and it’s listening to what you are telling yourself, and it does what you tell it to do. So if you internal dialogue is all negative, well guess what? Your, your brain is going to create negative situations for you. Now we can get even deeper in another conversation and talk about it and talk about energy and frequency and vibration and how every thought is frequency and vibration that you’re putting out there and how that affects your, your world. But for right now, just to keep things simple, let’s just say that when you have a negative internal dialogue, your world is going to manifest in a negative way. And if you learn to change that negative dialogue over time and through skill sets that you can easily learn, this is not rocket science. It’s very simple stuff. It’s just people don’t know how to do it because no one’s out there teaching them, which is what I’m all about.

Steven Diamond: So when you learn how to change this negative dialogue in your mind, you have now given yourself the skillset to bring about any type of change that you want in your life. And I have, I have changed people’s lives in so many ways by simply teaching them a simple method that I teach in my course with a rubber band of how to break that negative thinking. And I, I’ve seen it do incredible things because sometimes a person isn’t aware that they’re thinking negatively. Right. And so when you just simply bring about the realization that it’s their own way of thinking and processing information that is causing the all of the bad things to happen in their lives, they get it. A light bulb comes on and they go, oh my gosh, I’ve been dooming myself to, you know, from day one. And then they’re able to make all the changes in their life, and their life gets better when that happens. It’s like a miracle. And they often think of it that way. And I always tell them, it’s not a miracle. It’s not magic. Nothing paranormal or psychic happened. This is simply the way the brain is designed. And so it, it, it’s something I call GIGO. Garbage in Garbage out. GIGO.

Rita Black: I love it.

Steven Diamond: You put garbage into your brain. And when I say that, I mean, the TV shows you watch, the books you read, the magazines you consume, what you look at on the internet, you know, whatever information you choose to allow into your mind is going to directly reflect, reflect the quality of life that you produce for yourself.

Rita Black: Absolutely. Well, this has been very enlightening, Mr. Steven Diamond. Tell us, I know you had some things for us too. If you have some lovely something nice for our listeners to open up their minds.

Steven Diamond: Absolutely. You know, the number one thing that people ask me everywhere I go, people literally will stop me in airports and they’ll, they’ll ask me, how do I get more sleep? I can’t relax. I just can’t turn my mind off at night. And, and I just can’t find that peace and quiet that I need to drift off to sleep. So about 15 years ago, I created a self hypnotic audio track that is designed to make you fall asleep or relax at will. You don’t even have to do anything. All you have to do is put it on at night when you go to sleep. And you are going to find that you not only get the best sleep of your life, but you get that deep restful REM sleep. We all need 15 to 30 minutes a night of REM sleep rapid eye movement, which is what allows your brain to rest, relax, and reset.

Steven Diamond: And this audio was specifically mastered for that. It’s called, I actually have it right here. It’s called the Deep Relaxation Audio cd, and it’s a digital download. You can download it, put it on your phone, listen to it at night, or listen to it anywhere you want, except in a car. Don’t listen to it while you’re driving or operating any kind of heavy machinery. But if you go to stevendiamond.com and on the homepage, scroll all the way to the bottom and you’ll see it, it’s really big and obvious there. Just put in your name and email address in the form right there, and I will email you a free copy of Deep Relaxation. And you’re gonna love this. I have people that use it at work on their lunch breaks. I’ve had women, it’s so funny, I get the craziest emails, especially when I’m on national television, but I get women that send me emails that say I feel like we know each other because I go to sleep with you every night. Because every night they’re listening to me gently talk them into deep sleep. And it’s it’s really a great cd and I’m sure your, your listeners will love it.

Rita Black: Well, that’s such a great gift. I can’t wait to listen to it. And drift off to sleep and to a nice deep sleep. If there was just one, like step one for somebody to, you know, that first step to take, to manage anxiety or to start their path forward, what would that first step or first couple of steps be?

Steven Diamond: You know, it might surprise you, but the very first thing I always ask people to do is to make a commitment to themselves. And the commitment is to release all fear, to let go of fear. Because there are two things that will block you every step of the way. Fear and forgiveness. You need to let go of fear, and you need to forgive everyone that you perceive in your past as having harmed you or done something against you. When you release fear in your life and you just decide, I’m not gonna be afraid anymore, I’m not gonna let fear hold me back one second longer from achieving my maximum potential. And then you forgive all of those people and all those situations and events in your past that you feel like have damaged you in some way, you now create space in your life for new information because you’ve let go of all that baggage that you were carrying. And so I think that is the place to begin.

Steven Diamond: I think that’s where I start my coaching clients. When I’m coaching people who, I have a lot of CEOs and executives and high powered, high pressured positions that I coach and mentor because they’ll, they’ll call me right before a big presentation or a big meeting, and they’re, I, I just, I’m so afraid of, you know, what I’m about to do because if, if it doesn’t go well, it could negatively affect so many other things. And I always tell them, make peace with letting go of the outcome. When you detach yourself from these outcomes in your mind that you think you have to have in order to get to the next place, you free yourself and you open up a world of possibilities that maybe you couldn’t even see. And they will reveal themselves, they will present themselves to you, but only if there is space inside of you for that information to live.

Steven Diamond: And that requires you letting go of fear and letting the forgiveness or giving forgiveness to all of those people in situations in your past. Let go of all of that. And then once you’ve let go of that, you now have this feeling of being lighter. You feel better, you feel lighter and more energized. And what that feeling really is, is space that you’ve created inside of you, that you can now choose what new information you want to fill that space with. And that is really the impetus for creating any kind of change in your life. Does that make sense?

Rita Black: I love that! Oh, absolutely. I, I think forgiveness is huge for taking a hundred percent responsibility for your life. And when you do that –

Steven Diamond: It’s mission critical

Speaker 3: Creating a complete empty canvas to start creating something powerful.

Steven Diamond: No question about it.

Speaker 3: Thank you so much. This has been so wonderful and valuable and I’ve, I’ve loved talking to you and I love your backdrop. And our listeners who aren’t seeing what is behind, he has a huge smiley face to the right of him. So, I I love that.

Steven Diamond: You know, it’s really designed this backdrop that you’re looking at. You notice the right here, I have a neon sign that says Live on the air. And then you have the smiley face right here. What those are designed to do is subconsciously remind people to be present. You’re alive. You’re alive right now. And then to smile and enjoy the present moment.

Rita Black: Yeah. Well, I have enjoyed all the present moments I’ve had with you, Steven. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here on the Thin Thinking Podcast and we’ll probably take you up on your coming back and talking to us about vibration and energy. That sounds great. Thank you.

Steven Diamond: I would love it. Thank you so much for having me.

Rita Black: Thank you so much, Steven. And please make sure to grab that Sleep Self Hypnosis Off Steven’s website. The link is in the show notes. And thank you listeners for showing up week after week. If you are new to the show, do not hesitate to subscribe so that you can always have access to our show. Have a good week, and remember that the key and probably the only key to unlocking the door at the weight struggle is inside you. So keep listening and find it.

Rita Black: You wanna dive deeper into the mindset of long-term weight release, head on over to www.shiftweightmastery.com. That’s www.shiftweightmastery.com, where you’ll find numerous tools and resources to help you unlock your mind for permanent weight release tips, strategies, and more. And be sure to check the show notes to learn more about my book From Fat to Thin Thinking. Unlock your Mind For Permanent Weight Loss.