James Arthur Ray
speaker
113 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
James Arthur Ray’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I was supposedly worth north of $20 million. I had a 7,500 square foot estate in Beverly Hills. I had all the accoutrements and they were gone like that, just like that. And so what value do they have? They don't. Everything in this world is transitory. The only thing that has true and lasting value are those things which can never be lost or taken.
And those things are not ever outside, they're inside. If it can be lost or taken, it has use value. You can use them and enjoy them, but they don't have any intrinsic value. I got carried away with all the fame and the success to a degree, and I got sucked into the system. I had to step back.
When I was standing in the desert, homeless and alone and $20 million in debt in 2013, I had to do a deep dive and say, what's James Arthur Ray 3.0 going to be? Which presupposes there was a 2.0 and a 1.0, which are different stories. Who is he going to be? What's he going to be about?
Well, what originally drew me in the field, John, was that I grew up a very introverted, insecure, skinny, scrawny, bullied person. young man and I never fit in at school and never fit in anywhere. Quite frankly, I failed miserably at organized sports and those things are very important for a young individual.
And so I thought I sequestered myself in my bedroom and thought if I could figure out how the universe worked, that I could figure out how my life worked and maybe I could turn my life around. And that's what drew me to begin to invest in myself and learn about myself. And as that started to unfold, then things started to get better.
I mean, my career started to grow, my confidence started to grow and so many things started to unfold for me. And then I got a job, my formal career. corporate career was with AT&T School of Business. And I was a national sales trainer first for them. And then I became a C-suite consultant and I was teaching.
I started teaching in front of the room and it just felt like it was the right thing to do. It really like I had a God given gift literally to do that. And so consequently,
It grew from there and I left AT&T in 92 and started off on my own, my own adventure as a consultant, originally doing culture change initiatives, which Percival and I still do with businesses and then moved into broader and broader arenas, started doing keynote appearances and doing a one-on-one intensive coaching and all those types of things. So it grew organically from there.
Sure. I was on vision sandwiches and faith cookies for decades. It took me two decades to become an overnight success, quite frankly, John. And it was arduous. It was difficult. As an entrepreneur, any of your viewers will know that it's not an easy journey. And so I struggled and I scraped and I was really fighting and working for a long time and nothing seemed to be coming through.
And then I was invited. I was part of a mastermind group that I was a founder of at the time. And a producer decided to come to one of our meetings and do some filming, she had a vision. for a documentary, which ended up being The Secret, and talked about the law of attraction. Now, the law of attraction was just a very small portion of everything that I taught and talked about.
I really built my legs in business and consulting work and those kinds of things. And yet, I did talk a little bit about the law of attraction. I was invited to record, and they decided to only have a few of us be in that movie, and I was... blessed to be one of the ones that was chosen. And from there, everything really blew up in a good way for me.
I was on Larry King numerous times, on Oprah numerous times, Today Show once a month for multiple months running, and Good morning, America. Everyone wanted a piece of me. And so everything really took off. And that was challenging too, quite frankly, because Napoleon Hill says all the way back in the fifties, there's a difference between wishing for something and being prepared to receive it.
And I really wasn't prepared. The phone lines, I didn't have enough phone lines. I didn't have enough team members. I didn't have enough bandwidth for my computer systems. My server, my online server crashed when I went on to Larry King Live the first time. And so there was a lot of scrambling once again. Success has a lot of scrambling, a lot of difficulty that comes with it as well.
And many people don't know that. They think, oh, well, this is great. Well, it's great, but it's also very difficult. And that's one of the things I believe we have to embrace and understand is we grow exponentially in the way we want to grow. Well, our challenges grow with us correspondingly. And so that's really what happened for me.
And it continued to rise and continued to grow until I was involved in a horrible accident in 2009, which you may be familiar with, maybe a lot of your viewers are as well, because it went gangbusters on mainstream media.
How many of your guests can say that, John? You're the third. Oh, really? Well, I'm not the only one. So. Oh, there you go. Yeah.
Yeah. I wasn't a real attractive prospect when she met me and we, and by the way, we weren't a couple initially either, but she worked with me for three years before we started to get romantically involved. We have our five-year wedding anniversary next month, which we've been together 13 years though. And so she said, I want to work with you. And I said, well, here's the situation.
Basically, I was $20 million in debt. I was homeless. I'd just gotten out of prison. I was in horrible physical condition, John. And I was alone. I obviously wasn't with Bearseville yet. And And I was sleeping on mom's couch. So not a real attractive prospect.
And it's funny because we've done a lot of podcasts and some of them are about relationships and we've had relationship specialists say to bears, but why tell women don't go for that guy. But she saw something in me that I really didn't see in myself at the time. I, I was really broken and I was really angry and,
I had been on the brunt end of the weaponization of the legal system, which we're seeing happening in our world now today. And so consequently, I really wanted nothing to do with the industry that I had come from because they were the most hateful, quite frankly.
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