Greg McKeown:
Welcome, everyone. I am your host, Greg McKeown. And I am with you on this journey to learn. So hungry to learn so that you don’t end up living a life that didn’t really matter, you know, where we left things out, we missed it, missed our mission, missed our unique contribution, didn’t fulfill the measure of our creation. So we have to be learning constantly, continually learning. And I’m so thankful that you’re here with me on this journey.
Today we’re going to get into part one of a two-part conversation with Doctor Josh Axe. He’s a certified doctor of natural medicine. He’s a clinical nutritionist with a passion to help people use food, lifestyle, and mindset, importantly, to heal, to prevent illness, to be healthy in the largest sense of that term. He’s a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and is. He earned a masters of science in organizational leadership. In 2008 he started a functional medicine center in Nashville, which grew to become one of the most renowned clinics in the world.
He founded the website draxe.com. That’s draxe.com , which is one of the top natural health websites in the world. Today he has a fast-growing show and podcast, The Doctor Josh Axe Show. He covers topics of health, mindset, personal growth, spiritual growth. He’s interviewed extraordinary guests, thinking people like Carrie Underwood, Dave Ramsey, Jaimie Kern Lima. But it’s more than that now because he’s written a new book, which is well worth your consideration. The book is called Think This, Not That. it’s about mindsets, or we should say mind shifts that can produce huge breakthroughs in your life. And mindsets and mind shifts are so underrated still, even for all that we know about that. There are ideas deep inside of us, frozen, that we don’t even know were there, lingering, shaping us, shaping how we see ourselves, other people, and the world at large.
So if you want to make incremental progress, that’s fine, too. Nothing wrong with that. But if you want to make quantum leaps, you have to make leaps in your mindsets. And that is what today’s conversation is all about.
Doctor Josh Axe, welcome to the podcast.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Hey, Greg. Thanks for having me.
Greg McKeown:
Can you tell me a moment when you had a mind shift that was really meaningful to you?
Dr. Josh Axe:
Yeah. Well, you know, have. I’ve had several. One of them is actually a very recent one. And this is about just. Just a little over a year ago. I went in for, in fact, to just start off almost. I almost died. And so this is about a year and a half ago, I went in for a simple medical procedure. It was a natural procedure called stem cell. I had a little bit of a back injury and I thought, hey, this is going to help it get 100% better.
And when they went in there, something went wrong. And for the next few months, I just felt worse and worse and worse. One morning I woke up, couldn’t walk, and I went in, had an ambulance come pick me up, went and got an MRI, and then sat down with the doctor afterward and he said, “Josh, you have a spinal infection. The infection went from your disc. It’s now in your bone. It’s now an abscess by your spinal cord. And best case scenario, you’re going to be in pain the rest of your life.” He said, “Worst case scenario, you’re going to be permanently disabled, or you could even die.”
And this is about a year and a half ago. And what was crazy, Greg, is I went from being in what I, you know, about the best shape of my life. I was running, swimming, squatting, deadlifting, just, you know, just great health. And to this, because of a medical mistake, I looked up on like, like one in a million chance something like this could happen.
And when I got that diagnosis, for a day or two I had felt emotions that I’d never experienced before. Despair, hopelessness, going and thinking of, “Well, what if I just wouldn’t have got this done? I would have been fine, probably. I could have healed in time. And was this even necessary in thinking, is what this doctor saying? Is this true that I might be permanently disabled?”
And I decided after about two days of feeling just miserable and like a victim, I thought, “You know what? This is not serving me. This is not helping me.”
And I know some of the principles, I know biblical principles, I know principles of science that talk about neuroplasticity and the placebo effect. And I realized that if I sit here and believe that I can only get as good as this doctor saying that I’m not going to be experiencing a breakthrough in my life, I’m not going to be able to experience the miracle. I’ve done the research on and read studies on people who weren’t supposed to ever walk again, and they did. Or they were diagnosed with a disease and told they had three months to live and they’re living 30 years later. And I realized I’m going to be one of those cases and I need to adopt the right mindset and visualizing and knowing I will get back to 100% again. And I need to start doing and acting in a way to make that a reality. And that’s what I did. And so I did everything in my power, everything from getting in a hyperbaric chamber for 2 hours every other day to taking the right vitamins and supplements to visualizing myself throwing my two-year-old daughter up in the arrogant, in the pool like it was months previous.
And Greg, it took me, I didn’t walk for a year. An entire, in fact, as the moment of this interview, right now that we’re doing this, I wasn’t walking this time last year, but I started doing everything I could to heal it is, it absolutely is. Even thinking about this, it’s just crazy. But I started doing everything I could. Now it’s nearly a year later and I’m back to almost where I was. I’m probably 80% better. I’m back swimming, lifting weights, throwing my two year old daughter in the pool, and better than the doctor even said I would be. And so, you know, for me, I think one of those things that I really had to do was go from, rather than dwelling on a mistake I made or a doctor made or living in that state of someone telling me, this is the best outcome for your life. I had to, myself, decide, no, I believe this is going to be the best outcome for my life beyond what he even thought was possible. And so I know that without something recent, that really was a lim, a mind shift I had to have.
I think there’s a lot of people out there, I’ll give an example of this. I think there’s so many people out there struggling with limiting beliefs they’ve had somebody in their life, at some point tell them, hey, you’re this, or you’re this, or you’re this. And the people believed them. It could be. Here’s an example. As a functional medicine practitioner, constantly when I had my practice, I had patients come in and they would say, well, my doctor told me I had to be on this drug the rest of my life. And some of the time these were 30-year-olds or 25-year-olds, and it was a thyroid medicine, birth control, or antidepressant or whatever. Or their doctor said this condition is irreversible, like type 2 diabetes.
And the reality is I’ve helped hundreds of people reverse type two diabetes or lose 100 pounds or help people get off their, whatever medication they were on. So the reality is we constantly have people in our lives telling us, you’re not smart, you’re not good enough, you’re not worthy. And if we believe it, it can absolutely put a cap on our life and who we can become, and what we can accomplish.
Greg McKeown:
You’re speaking about something that is, of course, not unique to the medical profession and experience, but it does seem so defining within the medical field, this idea, a sort of fixed mindset about health. Whenever you have that phrase, which it just happened to my wife. I mean, like a week ago, she was having struggles with dry eye, so she went to see, you know, one doctor, and they said, “Well, here you just have to take drops for the rest of your life. That’s it. You know, this is really what you can do.”
And as soon as she told me that, my instant reaction was like, that doesn’t sound right. You know, like, it’s not that. It’s not that that person is lying. That’s not right. They just know what they know. They have the specialty and knowledge they know. And so because perhaps I wasn’t right in the. Maybe because I wasn’t the one being affected or the person that had been with the doctor, I just immediately started searching, and, I mean, within 30 seconds, found a specialist, you know, in the state. And all they do is dry eye. And when I spoke to them on the phone, they’re like, “There’s, so many options. We need to absolutely just explore this, learn this, and see what’s going on.”
And she’s already had that. That appointment with the specialist now, and. And there’s so much that can be done. And this idea of “take this for the rest of your life,” that is an inherently fixed view, the idea that there’s nothing you can do about this to change it, that’s inherently fixed.
And so underneath the medical profession, where we, I think, are trained to believe what they’re saying is truth, maybe they themselves, in some ways, are trained to believe that whatever they say is truth and is credible and must be believed. There is this fixed orientation versus what you’re describing, the growth mindset. There are options. We can learn. I can heal. I can get better.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think that this is true for people in every single area of their life. It’s in the medical profession. It’s in our relationships. It’s in our careers. It’s in our faith. It’s in almost every area. And I think this is why you’re mentioning this growth mindset is so critical to have. I want to give one other example that I think would really relate to people. Now, my most recent really big mind shift, I just shared. Let me share my first one, please. And that was when I was in high school, a freshman in high school, I was not a very good student. And I had a teacher, my english teacher, her name was Miss Noble. She said at the end of class one day, she said, “Josh, can you stay after class?”
I stayed after class. And she said, “What do you want to do after high school?”
And I said, “I want to be a doctor.” And the reason I said that was my mom was diagnosed with cancer the year previously. She went through chemotherapy. And seeing my mom suffer like that, going through those treatments, it just broke my heart. And it made me say, “I want to help people like my mom. I want to find a better way.” And so that’s why I shared. I said, “I want to be a doctor.”
Well, this teacher laughed out loud, and she said, “Josh, listen, with your GPA, you’d never get into med school.” She said, “My own daughter had a 3.8 GPA and she barely got into med school.” She said, ”Listen, I’d pick a different major” or she said, “I’d pick a different profession you want to do in the future.” And she said, also, “Listen, you got an F on this paper. You’re getting a D minus in my class. You need to try harder.”
I walked out of there two weeks later. My mom brought me to a physician who talked about me like I wasn’t in the room. And then he diagnosed me with ADHD, and he told my mom, and I remember hearing this, “Listen, your son has a learning disorder. He’s going to have trouble learning his whole life.” And I got prescribed a drug called Ritalin.
And so what I took away from that, Greg being a freshman in high school was, well, I’m not smart. And also I’m like, I’m medically not smart. There’s actually something wrong with me. I have a learning disorder.
So I really stopped even trying in high school. I graduated, but barely with a C- GPA. The only reason I graduated was I know my motivation was my dad is going to be irate if I don’t graduate. So I applied to colleges. Got denied by most. One school, though, sent me a letter back and they basically said this, you’re not in, but if you come and take summer school classes, with an average above a 3.0, we’ll let you in.
So I went to this school and I thought, you know what? I’m really going to try because I don’t want to be the kid who doesn’t get into college and has to stay home and live with his parents. So I went, and the first class I had to take was English 101. And first big assignment was a paper. So I got the paper. I had this paper. I tried really hard, turned it in, and a few days later, I had the teacher. Her name was Miss Williams. And she said, “Josh, can you stay after class?”
And my reaction inside myself and my mental narrative was very much, oh, no. Dea vu. Not this again. I failed. And she said, “Josh, what’s your major?”
And I said, “I haven’t chosen a major.”
And she said, “Well, I want to let you know, I think you should consider being an English major or journalism major.” She said, “Because I think you’re a really talented writer. You got the highest grade in the class, and I think you’ve got a real gift.” She said, “You know, great job.”
And for me, Greg, it was like. I’d call it a mind-shift transplant. Like, I went from believing I wasn’t smart for four years, that I had this learning disorder. I just couldn’t do it. To finally have one teacher tell me, “You know what? You’re gifted. You can do this. You’re great at this.” And I thought, I can. And then after that, doing well, I averaged above a 3.0. And then I eventually said, I do want to be a doctor. Eventually went to John Hopkins University, had a 3.9 GPa there, wrote some books, and started a supplement company. Have been really blessed in my life.
All that being said, one of the things I realized recently was if I would have held on to that one single limiting belief, if I would have just stayed fixed on what that first teacher told me, that, “Josh, you’re not smart. Or, hey, there’s no way you could do this.” Then you, like, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today. None of these good things would have happened. And there are so many people that are still holding on to it. It could have been a parent, a teacher, a coach, say one negative thing to them, and they’ve allowed that to be the narrative for their entire life and keep them from ever fulfilling their dreams.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. It’s such a powerful story to think of the two parallel lives that you could have lived.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Yeah.
Greg McKeown:
And what one would have looked like always, by the way, reinforcing the idea itself, evidence to support it. Every struggle that you had. Well, yeah, that’s just, you know, having ADHD and a learning difficulty, because those aren’t actually the same thing. And one of the things that. That makes me think of is that everybody listening to this has limiting mindsets. Everyone. I do. You still do. Everyone listening to this does.
So it’s not even that we should be saying, okay, let’s look for better mindsets in my life. It’s just believing as a presumption. You already have mindsets that are keeping you back. They may have been keeping you back for a long time, because where do we get our mindsets from? I mean, you get them from almost from birth, like, just growing up and somebody says something as someone compares you, and you’re just gathering all this data and information from around you with very little context. Often you have a teacher who you think they’re speaking the truth, where really they’re just speaking an opinion based on their own experience and pushing their mindset onto you as if it is the truth.
And then we just have this very corrupted mindset lens through which we see ourselves, our potential, and other everyone around us. What’s your reaction to that? The idea that we already have limiting mindsets, literally all of us, and still.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Well, you know, one of the things that I realized, because after I had these epiphanies and I was able to change some of my mindsets, I became very, very aware of this. And it’s interesting, when you look at some of the statistics on this, 95% of our actions every day are via the subconscious mind. So it’s because we heard something once when we were kids, or our parents did something a certain way, or we’ve decided, and then everything is just sort of done on repeat.
And what this makes me think of as this is one of the things I started trying to do is, rather than me saying, “What’s my current, what’s the right mindset? What celebrity or person that’s popular has the right mindset?” What I started doing was saying, “Okay, I want to change my mindset in all areas, but how do I know what the right mindset is?” And it’s based on this sort of idea. It’s actually biblical in that by their fruits, you will recognize them, or it’s just by their results.
So, if I want to be successful financially, if that’s a goal in my life, I’m not going to try and say, “Well, hey, Josh Axe knows everything, or, I’m smart. Or even the guy next door who’s got a little bit bigger house than me, he knows.” I’m going to say, “How did the top 1%, the top 1% of the 1%, what do they believe about money? What is their mindset about it? What does Warren Buffett think about finance or Ray Dalio?”
So, what do they think? I’m going to go and try and adopt their mindset. If I want to grow spiritually it doesn’t really matter what I think spiritually or Joe Rogan or whoever. Who are the people that are the greatest world? Here’s another one. If I want to change the world and I want to have the greatest impact on society, that rings true for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Well, who are the people that have had the biggest impact?
You. I think about people like Moses and Jesus and Galileo, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Junior, and Mother Teresa. Those are some, just some random people thrown out there. What do they all have?
Greg McKeown:
Not just random people. That’s the point.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Yes, exactly. It’s exactly not random. You’re right.
Greg McKeown:
Yes.
Dr. Josh Axe:
It’s not random. It’s what are the overlapping patterns that all of them had in common. One of the things you’ll find with most of these people, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, these big world changers, almost all of them were very faith-driven. I think that’s pretty interesting if you think about it like Michelangelo, here’s an example. When Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel, there was a man who asked him, this is a well-known story.
He said, “Why did you spend all the time painting that corner that nobody will see?”
And his reply was, “Because God will see.” It’s a really interesting mindset in terms of if you read his biography, you’ll see he labored and did everything because he had this divine identity and thinking his work was going to reverberate through eternity. Was this really interesting mindset. There’s a quote by CS Lewis I love, and he said, “The people that do the most in this life are the very people that think most about the next life.”
My whole point there is that it’s not that I wanted to have a faith-driven mindset, it’s that that’s just the people that did the greatest things had the people that did the greatest good in the world. And I’m not talking about just the greatest things because you’ve got someone like Hitler, but the greatest good in the world, that’s what they did. And so for me, I think the way that I really try and adopt mindsets now is what are the top 1% believe in health, in wealth?
The top 1% of people that have great relationships with their spouses and kids. Like, I’ve got a friend who’s got five daughters. So you and I both know Michael Hyatt. He’s a great example of this. Mike Hyatt told me this. What an amazing guy. He’s a person. He’s got great fruit in his life, great results. Still an amazing relationship with his daughters. You know what he told me? Even thinking about this makes me want to tear up because I’ve got two daughters myself right now.
He’s got five daughters. He’s got daughters in his forties, and he still does a date night with all of them. Once a month, he brings his 40-year-old, and 47-year-old daughter on a date night still, and he’s in his sixties and has an incredible relationship with them. So for me, it’s like, well, okay, I want to know, “Michael, how do you think about family? What’s your mindset about family and your relationship with your kids?”
And so that’s something I’ve really tried to grab, ah, hold of in terms of how do I model and grow in life.
Greg McKeown:
I love that idea of not just saying, “What do the 1% do within the field that I would like to or the area of my life I’d like to improve? But what are the mindsets of the people in the 1% within that field?” You know, that’s a more. It’s a very particular part of the question.
So there’s two paths I want to take. Michelangelo and also more and Michael Hyatt, but back to Michelangelo for a second. So there’s this great story, because, of course, he was a sculptor by training, and then the pope said, “Well, I want you to paint the Sistine Chapel.
And he didn’t want to do it at all. And so he leaves, he escapes, has something like a vision because when he comes back, he is willing to devote himself in that particularly obsessive way that he seemed able to do, you know, for, I think, four years. And anyone who’s seen the Sistine Chapel, I mean, of course, just to be obvious, the ceiling is extremely high, and so he had to paint it lying on his back.
And he painted one of the great, not exactly wonders of the world, but one of the great creative achievements of, you know, of a thousand years. And there’s something in that, too. Something in the idea of running away from what we’re being called to do, and that there is a price to be paid when we are not being. When we’re not operating at our highest point of contribution, we’re living good.
In one sense. In one sense, we could argue, oh, everything’s fine, it’s good. But there is a price, because when we’re not operating at our highest points of contribution, when we’re not doing what we feel called to do, just think of the consequence to the people around us, you know, to our family, to our friends. Everyone pays a price for that. The gap between who we could be at our highest point versus who we’re choosing to be right now.
And I felt some. I don’t know, some call around that recently, you know, to do, to reach. To reach, to be better and to make a higher contribution. So there just. Just didn’t want that to be missed. That story of Michelangelo, and again, the paths his life could have taken differently at that juncture.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Well, yeah, I think one of the things that’s so important, too, is when I think about, and this is something I cover in my book a little bit, I have this graphic that I created for this is that you know, because I’m wired this way, too, Greg. I know you are. It’s like I want to get to the end of my life, and I want to have had the greatest impact I had for the good of this world. And so in order to do that, what needs to be true? Like, we talked about, growth. Well, how do I need to grow? Where do I need to grow? What does that even mean?
I think there’s really two key things for everybody in this. If you want to become the greatest version of yourself and have the greatest impact, you need to take your character to the highest level possible. Become more virtuous, more wise, more generous, more loving, more hopeful, more just more courageous, all of those things. Take that to the highest level of growth possible. And then you also need to take your unique gifts and skills, those things that you are uniquely gifted, to do those talents and take those to the highest level possible.
And when you do that, you maximize the good you do in the world. Because if you only maximize your talents, well, those can be used for evil. We see that all the time. People can become great orators or communicators. People can become great, even artists or musicians. But if your song is about something that is totally depraved and negative, you’re actually leading people’s lives in the wrong direction. There’s a lot of music, there’s a lot of film, a lot of movies, a lot of books like that today.
And so that’s why you have to combine it with character towards the greatest good. And so that’s what I think about with Michelangelo, who’s a person that was virtuous. And so even people today, if you look at his art and really just sit in that, it’s emotionally moving and touching because there’s meaning behind it. This is something we’ve lost in the world today. So much art and writing and music is no longer inspired by the divine. It’s like meaningless nihilism. And so this is like a deep. It could be a different type of conversation. But my point is that I think this is so important for everybody. I realize for myself, I need to fight.
You know, there’s this parable in the Bible about talents, you know, and God gives one person one talent, another two, another five. Now, talents are often referred to as a sort of wealth in this parable, but also many rabbis will also correlate that with your actual God-given talents of being a great writer or parent or customer service representative or whatever it is. And the person that takes their talent and buries it, doesn’t use their talent for good. God says, “You evil and wicked servant.”
The person that takes his two and grows in it doubles. It gets better at it. He says, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Like, you’ve run a good race, you’ve done your best. I’m going to bless you and give you even more than you already have.”
And so to me, that’s such an important concept to know of what we’re called to do in our lives. And even as parents, I think about this like, I have a daughter right now. I’m called to. My top goal as a parent is to help my daughter grow in character, not just one type of character, not just compassion or not just courage, all those qualities of virtue, and find out what her unique God-given gifts are and help her take those to the highest level possible in order to serve humanity. So that’s generally what, you know, the way that I think about it.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. I was just listening to someone explain this, that sort of the God of the Old Testament seemed to have two. I don’t know if it’s quite right to say two personalities, but two manifestations, and one is manifested in conscience and one in calling. And I think that’s a very nice tension that conscience is. Maybe conscience never really tells us what to do, but always what not to do, you know, re like, yep, don’t go down that path. Don’t do that thing.
I had a moment just like that in the middle of Storm Ida. I was stuck in an airport. People were starting to lose their minds. I mean, there was just water coming right through the ceilings, people trying to sleep on the floor. It just. It was just. It was a mess. No one was getting it or out. And I could see a hotel, and I had been in situations not dissimilar to this before, where I knew early, forget trying to get on this flight, just get to a hotel, you know, we’ll sort out the rest later.
And I wanted just to get there. And as I, you know, it was. Everything was closed down. And so I was still being persistent, pushing like, no, this is still a good thing, a good thing, and really sort of ignoring that conscience pull “Don’t do this.” And then right at the end, where I was, the only option left to get there was to walk what would be about ten minutes to the hotel. I took a few steps and felt that conscience pull. “Do not do this.” And then I still ignored it for just a couple more steps and heard it louder. “Do not do this.” And I didn’t. I reversed. Went all the way back. And this isn’t a story of, you know, of course, I’m great in this story because I didn’t hear it, or at least I didn’t listen to it properly until it was louder. But that to me is conscience.
You know, Socrates used to say that if he was the wisest man in the world, which he said he didn’t think he was, but he had gained the reputation. He’d been named that by one of the leaders at the time. He said, it’s because I have this daon with me that never tells me what to do, but always tells me what not to do. I think all of that is the conscience, right? The don’t do this. And when it says don’t do it, don’t do it. But then there is this other force, the calling, the this is what you want to do, or this is what you need to do to become a better version of yourself, to stop hiding from that responsibility, to do better and be better and make a higher contribution and stop messing around and whatever that is for us. And I just think there’s something beautiful about the idea of those two forces trying to steer us and orienters in what is often a disorienting or even destabilizing life.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Yeah, I love that. You know, I think too, also, how do we feel and know we’re doing the right thing? There’s this level of consciousness, you know, Aristotle, in a similar vein that we’re talking about, he uses this word, eudaemonia, and along with that, the summam bonum. Well, he doesn’t use that. That’s more the later saints, based off of some of his ideas. But, you know, basically, it’s this.
The way that I describe it is, you know, somebody could go out and drink a lot of alcohol or go to a fun party and whatever and feel this sense of pleasure. But really, I think the idea of knowing you’re doing what you’re called to do there is this level of fulfillment. Like, you just finished a good workout and you feel proud of yourself, you feel good in a certain way. I think that’s another thing that is important to know in terms of, hey, are you doing the right things? Are you moving in the right direction?
I don’t think people listen to the voice enough, whether that be our own conscious or the still small voice of God as it’s talked about in the Bible. But I do think that conscious and calling, we are so. And by the way, this is why I love your work so much. And I remember when I first read your Essentialism and I resonated with so much, because today, one of the things that is really keeping us from being our best selves is busyness is just crowding out all the greatness.
Greg McKeown:
Noise.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Yeah, it’s all that noise. And so what’s so noisy? We can’t hear it. We’re not hearing the conscious. We’re not hearing the calling. And so that’s why it’s so important that we create that space and that silence and that awareness to be able to actually even hear the voice in the first place and ref, reflect on these things.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I really think that that’s a good place to kind of wrap part one of this conversation, but I think that’s such a poignant challenge that we are so inundated with noise, with inputs, and with easy distractions, that it really is much easier to hear those, to hear that noise than is to listen to what is really being said to us within, what we’re hearing within. And I hope for those of you who are listening, I hope that as you’re listening to this conversation, you’ll just pause and say, well, what is something that you heard?
Prioritize. Not anything that Josh and I have said to each other, but what you heard, what are you feeling, your conscience saying, “Do not do this.” What are you feeling pulled towards that is good and higher and a better version of you that that would help you to become something that would make a difference to all the people around you and all the people that you haven’t even met yet, but need that version of you to be able to impact them? And what is something you can do about it right now? What is one thing you can do to not waste this moment, this opportunity to make a difference choice and to listen to those, that orientation, and who is someone that you can share this conversation with so that this conversation in your life continues and gets richer now that part one of this conversation has come to a close?
