John Graham
speaker
114 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
John Graham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I would have already chugged a ton of water to make sure I had to pee like the moment I had to memorize. I would put a podcast in my ear as loud as I possibly could push it. And it was a podcast that I actually wanted to listen to that I hadn't heard before. So immediately, like, I got to pee. My heart's racing. I'm out of breath. I got the podcast mirror.
I got my own voice in my head saying, what are you doing? Your score sucks. You're already behind. You already can't focus. So I had all that going on and still trying to bring my attention back onto what I was doing and let the training kick in, let the habits kick in. And I would train that way. That is my secret for how I won training.
my three championships, how I performed in front of 400 million people in China, like you saw, that training is what I did. But here's the thing, that helped me get to the point where I realized what's the real root of this pressure. I realized, and everyone does this, every moment of your life that you've ever pushed away that you couldn't handle, something that was embarrassing, a breakup.
Every moment of your life that you could not handle in that moment, it's still inside of you. It's suppressed. And so when we get poked by life, you know, like you're in the board meeting or, you know, you're under pressure, those moments get poked inside of you and they come up, they arise. anxiety, some people depression, overwhelm is a good one. Overwhelm, what is overwhelm?
It's you're being poked by all kinds of things. You can't handle this. You can't handle this. You can't handle this. You don't like this. You don't like this. Overwhelmed. The voltage is too much for you to handle. So all this stuff comes up in that moment. So what do most of us do? We do the exact opposite of what we should do. And this is what I teach people now.
Because this is how I overcame my anxiety is instead of meditating to calm yourself down, Instead of going for a walk to clear your head, instead of listening to podcasts or anything to feel better, eating, drinking, smoking, and no judgment, right? Because we all do it because the voltage is so intense. We sit with that energy because that energy...
The suppressed emotions is your suppressed potential. When you open up to it, relax into it, feel it, and allow it to surge through you, it processes out like it should have 30 years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago when it happened. So you process it out and you start increasing your capacity to handle more voltage.
So how can I go in front of 400 million people and memorize 700 different things without collapsing to the ground? It's because... I've increased my capacity to handle life's voltage. And those moments don't bother me anymore.
The crazy thing is, so I had to memorize 100 different items that were placed in 100 different lockers, and each locker had a four-digit code that they locked to them. So pretty easy. The hard part for me was three days before the event, they told me, hey, you're going to have to memorize two things at a time. We're going to give you two things like a Rubik's cube and a picture.
At the same time, we're going to put them in the lockers. At the same time, we're going to put the numbers on the screen at the same time instead of one at a time. So on top of it being like with the language, with all the people, I had to do two at a time and multitask. And that was like, oh, shit. That was intense for me because I was like, I've never done that before. I don't know.
But to answer your question, yeah, I'm on the stage and I'll be 100% honest with you. I've done all this internal work. But when I was on the stage, I felt the lights. It felt like 90 degrees in my suit. I felt the adrenaline surge through me because I realized I'm in front of 400 million people. I heard all the noises of the crowd. I saw the cameraman in front of me.
I saw the models walking in front of me, holding stuff. I heard the translator through my earpiece that was, I actually draped it over my shoulder because I didn't want to hear them in my ear. I felt and I heard the voice in my head, right? All this stuff, all this stuff that every normal human being experiences. But with the work that I've done, I was able to handle all of that. Here's the thing.
Most people resist it. They don't even realize they're resisting it. That's where anxiety comes from. That's where pressure and all these things is because we're like, oh my gosh, I don't want to feel this. Put it away. Stop talking, stop voice, like you try to halt it. If you halt the voice in your head or you push it away, you're resisting it. And that actually strengthens it.
So I've learned how to allow it, which sounds super simple, but it's not. You have to allow all of this stuff, all of this voltage, all of this voice to happen, to do whatever it wants to do. You can't do that in that moment. Like you have to cultivate that. And so all of this stuff's happening.
But again, I'm bringing my attention back into what do I do so that I get right back into the zone and I know exactly what to do with these numbers and with these items and how to memorize it. It's no problem. It's just if I get distracted in my mind, in my body and resist it, it's going to create problems. Yeah.
Well, I can tell you it's not a puppy wagging its tail. It's highly uncomfortable when emotions show up, the real wrong ones. But you're exactly right. They will come up stronger. It's like kicking a can down the road. You kick the can down the road because you have anxiety, but you meditate it so you feel calm and you feel, okay, distracted. But really, you just kick the can down the road.
The next day, you're going to have two cans in front of you. It's going to get louder and louder and louder. For me, it got to the point where I was having panic attacks. I was having panic attacks every single day, multiple times a day, just completely debilitating because I was resisting so much. And really, that's what anxiety is, is you're resisting the flow of life.
At the deepest root, I had all of this suppressed emotion. There's not one moment in my life that caused all this, right? It was just an accumulation. It was a pressure cooker where I wasn't letting anything out. I was resisting it all. Just like you said, I was upstairs up here where I am now laying in bed with my daughters outside playing in the yard, wanting daddy, but I couldn't handle it.
If you've never had a panic attack before, There's a range. There's a spectrum. They can go from a surge of adrenaline. Oh my gosh, what's wrong with me? To I'm going to die. I know I'm going to die. One of the times my arm went numb or constricted. I thought I was having a heart attack and I started getting busy. I started feeling my heart rate go up.
One time the left side of my face went completely numb and I thought I was having a stroke. So people who think like you're in your head, it's just anxiety. No, it's like It mimics these physiological things. It's terrifying to believe you're going to die. So there was a time I was at the chiropractor office to answer your question, and I started feeling a panic attack come on.
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