The Legendary Bob Proctor on ”Social and Emotional Learning: Where it All Started”

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast. If you’ve been listening to our podcast and wonder what exactly we do at Achieveit360.com, go to our website and take a look.[i] We provide courses, books and tools for teachers to implement Character and SEL programs in the classroom along with other consulting services that can be used in the corporate workplace. You can watch this interview on YouTube, but you won't be able to hear the backstory, unless you listen through your favorite podcast channel. Listen to all past episodes here.  Here’s the Back Story behind the programs and services that were inspired by our guest today, Bob Proctor. You can go to our website’s About Us[ii] section to see an outline of the last 20 years, and you will see a picture of him at the top of the page, but first let me explain who he is.  In 1961, Bob Proctor started studying the book, Think and Grow Rich[iii] (right now it’s showing as #1 in Entrepreneurship Books on Amazon) and this book transformed his life. If you’ve been lucky enough to see Bob Proctor speak live, you’ll see this book and one look at it, you’ll know he’s been reading it every day. He listened to Earl Nightingale’s condensed recording of the book thousands of times, he said he would put this record player in his car and listen to it (back in the days that I can still remember when we had vinyl records before music and audio recordings became available online). He then created his own position that allowed him to work shoulder-to-shoulder with Earl Nightingale at Nightingale-Conant (that at the time was the largest distribution house for personal development programs). He worked there until 1973, before leaving to start his own personal development company where he’s been training people around the world ever since. Today, Bob has studied thousands of books, continues to read Think and Grow Rich every day, and is considered the world’s foremost expert on the human mind. I can personally say that Bob Proctor is one of the rare speakers out there who truly lives and breathes what he teaches, with full integrity—he walks his talk and inspires those around him to do the same. I was fortunate enough to cross paths with Bob in the late 1990s when I was a school teacher in Toronto, when I asked my neighbor, Mark Low, what he did for a living, and he didn’t say much, but he handed me Bob’s You Were Born Rich[iv] book that I read the next day in a staff meeting (hiding it behind my binder as I pretended I was listening to the meeting) and my life was never the same after that day. The book was not just about being rich financially, but was about being rich in potential, saying that we all have deep reservoirs of talent within ourselves, and that we have greatness locked up inside ourselves...everyone has reservoirs of great talent and ability within us and if we can bring it to the surface we can accomplish anything we want. I really liked that idea. That was 24 years ago, and it’s definitely been a journey that started when I quit my job as a teacher and went to work in his offices selling seminars. I want to share some of the top lessons learned from Bob, before we go into the interview. I will definitely do a deep dive into his content after this episode, as it’s so valuable, but looking back to the day I met him, here are my biggest take-aways. If you have some that you want to share, please tag me on social media when I post this interview and share some of yours. Lesson 1: I learned how to set huge goals that most people would say were crazy when Bob asked me “what do you really want?” When I told him, he told me that there were certain steps I needed to follow, that started with writing my goals down on this card he gave me, and if I did all the things he suggested, and believed in what I was doing, I could have what I wanted. I really believed him and followed what he told me to do.  Lesson 2: I learned how to be resourceful and make