Sam Tuuta: The Incredible Power of Self Talk

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of How to Be a Real One Percenter. This is a podcast where we're redefining what it means to be successful. No longer the incessant drive for one form of external success, but really living the life that we were truly born to live—which means having all the success that we want and, foremost, just being who we genuinely are and living our genuine lives.

I've really been looking forward to this episode, and before we go anywhere, I'd like to welcome Sam Tuuta, our guest for the podcast today. Sam, firstly and foremost, thank you for making the time to be here. This work is a lot about the power of the mind, and I think people don't understand a lot about what the mind can do when it's not running us or when we're not buying into its stories. I’ve been looking forward to having you share your story with what you've done with mindset and just what it can do in many areas—particularly in the beginning on your physical health and things.

Firstly, what brought you to our conversations? I'd love to hear your story about what you accomplished. I think we'll all love to hear it once we know what it is.

SAM TUUTA: Basically, I was referred to you by two very good friends who work with you as well. It was a point in my life where it was spiralling. I was probably at the bottom of everything. My work, I'd just had a work injury, had issues with my back, I had a relationship breakdown. Things weren't going great with my relationship with my family. Just an all-time low. And I had a great friend recommend you. He saw it. He was like, "You need to go see Shridhar."

To be honest, in the beginning, I was very sceptical. I was like, "Oh, how's this guy going to help me? All this woo-woo stuff." I thought, "Right, I’ve got nothing to lose, so I’ll get on here." And to be honest, I found the work at the start really confronting and I probably had my back up and I probably wasn't open to the work at the start. I don't know if you felt that. But as we kept going, I just really leaned into it and learned to love it.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Yeah, I could see that at the beginning you were there, but there were reservations. But you still showed up and did it enough. Something that you haven't mentioned there is a health, a weight thing—can we talk about that? It's quite a significant thing that you reached a point where you didn't look then like you look now.

SAM TUUTA: Yeah. So, I gained a lot of weight over a very short period of time. Now, when I look back at it, I think it was to do with the way I spoke to myself and how unhappy I was in my life. You don't realise the impact of your mental wellbeing, how it transforms you physically as well.

When I saw you, I was the biggest I had ever weighed. It was 106 kilos. And the scale, every week when I was getting on it, just kept creeping up and up and up, and I had no idea why it was doing that. It was just mind-blowing to me. I remember looking down at the scales and seeing 106.3 and I was like, "Wow. How did I get here? And how do I get out of here?"

I think when I saw you, I was talking about having a gastric bypass. My friends who recommended me to you, they were like, "You're crazy. What are you doing? Like, this is... you're going to take some drastic measures to lose weight, and you don't need to do this." And I'd seen the surgeon. I had the costs. I was ready to go. I'd spoken to my family about it, and I had pretty much made my mind up. And I thought, "Well, I'll just give this a go before I cut my body open and do this." And I met you, and we started working on basically dissolving stories that I had made up about situations and myself. And it was absolutely mind-blowing.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: And I remember contacting you. It was a very short period of time. I was keen to find out, because it was a very short period of time, and I said, "How are you going?" And we touched base and you said, "I’ve lost 23 kilos." It was a very quiet, short period of time. You just switched over.

Every episode I talk about gold, Sam, because that's why I'm doing the podcast—there are hidden nuggets of gold that each person brings to the work. The gold of you just coming in and saying, "This is the way it is for me. This is the way it is for everybody." All the conversations you had in the past with family members that just said, "This is the only way out." And then, as you started questioning that and really looking into the heart of that, you started coming out.

SAM TUUTA: They didn't know either. A lot of people don't do this work on themselves and they don't seek out advice from people like yourself. So, they're unaware. They're just giving the best advice that they know. And sometimes I think that can be really dangerous, because they are not educated enough or don't have the knowledge enough to pass on those... almost like it's an acceptance or something. Like, "Oh, yeah, no. That's fine. You should go and do that because that's the only thing available."

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: That's your only option that you can have. And one of the things for me that brought me to what I do is all the things that I did in my life that just didn't give me the result that I was looking for. You know, I had a turnaround moment early on with coming out of the drug addiction. When I had that moment, I just had a momentary vision that life could be anything, you know, it could... there would just have these infinite possibilities and I got a glimpse of what my life could be—not the one that was on the streets and all of that. And I just wanted that.

But so many of the things that I did after that just didn't either feel right or they were misleading. I was fortunate enough to have some teachers show up in my life—profound people—that showed me this is all going on up here, and if you get that sorted, there's a whole lot you can do out here that you otherwise don't think you can do.

One of the things I'm so inspired about you being here is how many people are out there judging their bodies. We were just talking about it before the podcast.

SAM TUUTA: Every day. I’ve got three younger sisters and just some of the things they say about their bodies or what they see on social media... it brings tears to my eyes because it's really emotional for me. The social media and how we judge each other and what we think we need to be is just sad.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Yeah. It's sad because we are given this opportunity to edit our lives, right? That's what social media is. "Let me edit the portion of life. I can edit it five or six times if I want." But we've somehow come to believe that that's who that person is. But that's not who they are. There's so much doctoring up and everything going on. It's just a persona. It's an act really a lot of the time.

What you're talking about, it's about "how many likes am I going to get" and for that I got to look this way and I have to do this and that. And there's hiding going on, you know? There's surgery going on to look... It's not genuine.

SAM TUUTA: No, it's not genuine. None of it... a very small portion of it is. We've been trained to think that if we punish ourselves at the gym and we cut back on eating and we go get surgeries and we fill ourselves with Botox and filler, we'll eventually be happy when we get there. You'll never get there. I have friends that still go to the gym and kill themselves and they're doing these fad diets and stuff. I don't try and push what I have done on them, but I think to myself, "Wow. It's all here."

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: If you just got this right first.

SAM TUUTA: Yeah. It's all there.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Where do we figure it out from? Do we figure it out from, "I'm in terrible shape and I'm a terrible person and I need to do that"? Or, "You know what? I'm great how I am. But I'd like to look a bit different and feel a bit lighter"? And it's far more successful in that way, isn't it?

SAM TUUTA: It is. It's far more successful. And the way we speak to ourselves... I'm like, "Wow. If I spoke to someone else the way I speak about myself and to myself, I would have no friends." It's terrible the way we speak to ourselves and we punish ourselves.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: On the last podcast I remember saying that "I should have bottles here and when a piece of wisdom comes out that we just want to bottle it up and keep it." Yeah. That's one. If we spoke to others the way that we allow ourselves to get away with speaking to ourselves, how many of us would have any friends? But yet we think somehow, without realising it, that that's the way to go. "If I just beat myself up enough, I’ll improve." But it never happens.

SAM TUUTA: Because I think when I was at that stage mine was, "I'm fat. I'm a pig," or something. It was really awful and that is just... I'm like, "I can't believe I used to say that to myself."

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: It's the biggest thing that we have to get through. So when anyone wants to get through any kind of health things when it deals with weight, we have to deal with the belief, "I'm fat," because that's the baseline that everyone's dealing with. So it's like, okay, that's a fact. And if you look on social media or magazines or on the TV, you'll get how much reinforcement for that being true?

But it's just a word, right? At one point, I just said to you, "So, have you always been fat?" And you said, "No." I said, "Can you tell me the exact moment that it happened? What was the exact measurement that went from not fat to fat?" And you were just like, "What? It's just a made-up word." Right? And then you're just like, "I just am what I am." Okay. Well, would you like to feel... Do you want to change? "Well, yeah. I'd like to change because I want to feel better." And that's so different than, "I'm fat and I have to change myself and endlessly beat up."

This is something I was hoping would come out because it's what we do in every area, isn't it, Sam? To get better results at work we beat ourselves up... "If I beat myself up enough, I’ll do better at work. If I beat myself up enough, I’ll lose weight." And it just doesn't. You said something that is just resounding: You will never get there.

SAM TUUTA: No. You never do.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Because how can you get there when that's your basis? But if you don't have the judgment then we could go anywhere that we want to go.

So, tell us a bit more about the journey. You said you had that "fat pig" belief.

SAM TUUTA: Well, yeah. It was a fat pig and it makes me cringe saying that now. I'm like, "Oh, God. That's hideous." We did a lot of work. We unpacked that and I think a lot of it did come back from my childhood. We went way back and I had abandonment issues and an issue with my father and not being good enough—which was all not true. Once we started dissolving all these stories it was incredible where my life took me. You know, I started my business and I healed my relationship with my father. We have a great relationship now. So good, with my family.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: And you did that. You initiated that.

SAM TUUTA: Yeah. I did and I just didn't see the point of the back and forth that we used to do. I just had to dissolve stories that weren't true. And even when I speak to my dad about this before... I always thought he wasn't proud of me because he didn't show it or he didn't say it. And he always says to me, "Bubba, I'm so proud of you." It's just something I made up in my head. And I had this thing of not being good enough because he was really accomplished in what he did and I wanted to make him proud and do great things. And Dad was like, "You are. You all are. I love all of you guys and you're all doing amazing and I'm proud of all of you." It's just crap we make up.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: There's the bottle moment, right? It's just crap, but that crap really destroys our life and leads to a life of self-judgment. What you said is something I say a lot, Sam: it creates this big thing that we think we have to do to have some worth, but we can never get there because say we don't feel good enough because of that. We'll go, "Okay, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do the greatest thing in the world so I can be good enough." Then we do that thing. Maybe even we succeed at it.

SAM TUUTA: To get your gold star.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: To get your gold star. And even if we get the gold star, what's the next thing? "I'm not good enough again. Okay, now what do I have to do?" And we live our whole lives out of "not good enough." And I'm just going to use your word because it's the best word anyone has used so far. It's just crap. It isn't true, is it?

SAM TUUTA: No. None of it is true. And I feel like with the relationship, especially with my father, when I had the conversation with him, he was like, "That's just crap." Like, I had made up this big story in my head that he is this person that's punishing me and I need to do good. He was almost like, "What the hell are you talking about?"

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: And look at what it does to us though. If you think of the impact, what was the impact in that relationship with your dad all those years before you saw that?

SAM TUUTA: Oh, it was awful. It was a real love-hate relationship. I lived away, I lived in Sydney for a lot of time and he'd come over and things were good, but then I was always almost like on the defensive in the attack with him all the time. So he could never do any right. Every time he would try or say anything wrong or do something, I would instantly defence. And then it would start an argument and then we wouldn't talk for a longer amount of time. It was actually, when I look back at it, I think, "Oh my God, I feel really bad for treating my dad that way."

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Yeah. That's what happens, right? And in the beginning we start out by, "How dare they treat me that way?" Right? And it's just that full...

SAM TUUTA: Like a victim, yeah.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Next bottle moment. Right? Because that's what we all do. We create ourselves to be these victims. And it's not healthy because we're not that. I'm going to be really careful about this because I know real things happen to people, right? And real things happen to kids sometimes, so I'm not suggesting that. But I had a client recently, and something happened when she was a child—a serious thing. And she was just adamantly holding onto, "But they're wrong, they're wrong." And I said, "By the way, when's the last time it happened?" And she said, "About 30 years ago." And I said, "So who's victimizing you now?" And that's when she got it. She said, "I'm just carrying it, aren't I?" I said, "It stopped happening 30 years ago. You're carrying it still." And that's what we do.

But the thing I really appreciate that you're saying is the impact that that has in that relationship. But then when you realize that... I want to delve a little bit deeper if we can. If I'm listening to this and I haven't had these kinds of conversations, I'm saying to myself, "How did that change?" What stories got you from believing you're a fat pig—which is just so completely just a random story, right—to "You know what? I'm actually really great and okay, I want to lose some weight because it makes me feel better"?

SAM TUUTA: There was probably six months of my life from when I first met you to probably six months after when I had lost majority of the weight, which was in such a short time... it was a real pivotal turning point in my life where everything changed. It was a real shift. And I think we've just spoken about this recently too. I've had another big shift. I really feel them now when my life and my universe is moving.

And that was one of mine. It was, I lost the weight. I had... well, I think we were seeing each other weekly at that stage. Resolved the issues with my dad, like, well, dissolved all the stories. I actually reconnected with my sister, my half-sister. That was something that always troubled me. And from this work only good came out of it. It was almost like every week something good and better was happening. Work started to take off. And now, like, I'm in a position where work's amazing. I’ve dissolved lots of stories. I'm open to so many more things. I'm seeing things in different lights. I just can't explain how this work just... it has changed my life. It really has changed my life.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Yeah, yeah. Well, that's what I'm... thank you for saying it. Because that's really what I'm about. If I think of myself and I was at that Space Needle moment and I saw just how much my best life looked different than the one that I was living... I wanted that. And that's really the people that I'm here for, is whether they know it or not, they've got that hunger to just get to that best self. And it requires some transformation, doesn't it?

SAM TUUTA: It does. And it's confronting at times.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: It can be, right? I say it's courage. I end up saying this on every episode. But I say it's because some amazing people like you are sharing these stories that we just don't hear about every day. This work here for me is about that whole-scale transformation. If it's in a relationship or if it's in our work and changing the way that we feel about our work, if it's about changing the way we feel about us. It does take a lot of courage to do that.

But there's a popular saying, "he or she who dares wins." And to me, the greatest dare you can take is looking in the mirror. "What are those things that are going on up here that are limiting me? What are the judgments that are going on?" And let me face them. Let me question them. Let me find out how this even arose in the first place? And most importantly, is it actually based in truth? And you found what... believing you're a fat pig?

SAM TUUTA: It's not true.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Not true. What did you find out about your dad? Didn't think... wasn't proud of you.

SAM TUUTA: Yeah.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: And another thing, if you don't mind if we delve into it, because I remember your relationship with your work was something we discussed. Do you remember how it was back then?

SAM TUUTA: Yeah, you can share. Yeah.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Oh, look, it was just... you were driving yourself mad to please people. You weren't looking after yourself. You were like working, I don't know how many hours a day. And if somebody would ask something of you, you didn't think about what you'd already had on the plate, you just go, "Yes, I’ll do it." And you ended up in an overwhelming stressful place.

SAM TUUTA: Yeah. Look, I think starting a business, it's not for the faint-hearted. It is a lot of hard work, there's a lot of effort put in. You have to work more than your 40-hour week when you're wanting to start something. But I think I had... I don't know. It's almost like I felt like I had to busy myself or feel like I had to take everything on in order to feel like I owned a business. It was really weird. You've got these preconceived ideas that a person who's running around doing all these things and busy and working 50 hours a week... And don't get me wrong, yes, on the weeks you have to, yes. But I probably took on too much. I was stressed out.

And to be fair, I'm probably coming around a little bit, because like, this work is always ongoing. You never...

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: You never fully get there.

SAM TUUTA: No, you don't. And I'm probably coming into a bit of a circle with the work thing now. I have another mentor who I do speak with, and he has spoken about this and even like last week, he's like, "You need to put some more structure around," because I'm getting to that point where I'm working a lot again. But it's just being aware of that and like, right, what can I do to kind of not be in that space again.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Yeah. Well, I said to you today when we just met up before the podcast and you said some things were going on in your life. Because I moved away, right? So I'm not... I think this is the first time I’ve seen you physically for three and a half years. You said there was quite a bit of things going on, but I said, "Yeah, but you wouldn't know it." Like in the past, when we first met, you knew that you were going through stuff. And I'm like, you know what? So I wouldn't have known you were going through that because you're just so different. You're just dealing with it. What'd you say to me? "Um, just get on with it."

SAM TUUTA: You just got to get on with it.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Just got to get on with it. Where in the past it was all the...

SAM TUUTA: It was bringing me down. And, yeah, I’ve just got to be aware of that, because I am still probably learning how to deal, because I'm still a new business. I know I’ve only been in business for four years, but I am super... I am getting very busy at the moment and I'm lucky and very grateful for being in this position. It's a good problem to have. But I’ve just got to be aware that it doesn't bring my vibe down, you know? Like, I know how to deal with it.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Well, you'll know what to do if it does, right? It's a good point that this is alluding to which is that we've got patterns of thought. We move significantly. I think that you're easily demonstrating that. We have significant movements in that. And I know for me, when I think back, I still get stories that come to me. But if I think about how they are now compared to how they used to be... night and day. Like, they don't run my life like they used to. But they do resurface.

SAM TUUTA: They do.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: And it's important to know that, right. It's not like a one and done. "I'm never going to have that again." It's how do we navigate it, right? We're all getting those thoughts. We're all getting self-judgments. It's like; what do we do with them? Do we buy into them? Do we drink them away? Do we stuff them down or do we actually go, "Oh, here's the next thought. Let me sit with that one." Treat it like a friend, not an enemy. But see it on its way, connect again.

And that's where for me, that transformation thing comes into it. Life is just this precious experience. I spent like 30 years dedicating... because I knew that if I was going to fulfill my potential, I'd have to find out like, what is all of this about. So I’ve been on a journey. I went down the purpose track and "we got to find our purpose" and tried to find a bunch of people to help me do that. But in the end, the conclusion I’ve reached is life is just simply... once we get out of the stories, there isn't anything to prove. It's just an opportunity. It's like we go to a theme park, just an opportunity to have some fun. Well, life is an opportunity to have joy. There's challenges in it, but it's just an opportunity. And the one that I would love to take is I want to love the experience.

SAM TUUTA: Is that it does, definitely. And I think it's really important to share that your work that we do... like we caught up just before Christmas I think and it was like, I was like, "Right, I’m going through this shift again and I'm wanting to do some goals," or we don't call them goals, we call them creations. "And I need to kind of get my clear on what I'm needing." And so it's important to share that the work never stops. It's not like I’ve seen you and it's a doctor and you've put a band-Aid on it and, "Okay, I'm fixed now." It's we... you're constantly... you have to keep working at it. And there's always things that arrive that you need to deal with. It's just I have learned techniques now to be able to deal with them.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Next bottle moment. Yeah. It's about practice. Everything's about habit and practice. What are our practices in life, Sam? And for most people, our practices in life are self-judgment or blaming others or hiding ourselves away. These become our practices. Every day we're practicing them and don't even know it. And you just said something that's absolutely gold: this is just about changing the practices, right? But there are some that can be profound shifts.

When you said about your father and that would have happened when you were really little that you decided, "oh, he's not proud of me, that must mean I'm not good enough. Now I need to live my life to make sure he's proud of me, so I can be good enough." We form that identity over the course of your life. Those patterns even neurologically are in the brain. They're recorded, even though they're not true. They're just on repeat because they become a survival mechanism.

So, the reason that it's an ongoing thing... well, there's two reasons. We just became somebody that we're not, didn't we? When you came in and said, "I'm going to go and get that bypass," whatever, that wasn't you. That was some identity that said, "I'm not good enough." And so how long does it take to connect to who and what you are? And as you do it, you see it's an ongoing thing, because who and what we are isn't fixed. You're discovering new aspects of you, right?

SAM TUUTA: Oh, 100%. Like, I felt like when we first started, I had a big shift in a very short amount of time and a lot of things started to move and change. And then I went stagnant a little bit for a while and then I felt like I came through another shift. Like, it does... yeah. It moved really fast and it went really slow and then it moved really fast. But that brings me back to the point as you're always working on it and you always got something. But we changed what we talk about now. Like when we first met, it was dissolving stories. Now it's about "what can I do" and the creations. Like, when we sat down and did the creations, it was more planning about, "Okay, cool. I'm here now. I'm really excited to put something into place and this is what I want out of my life."

Like yesterday when we had the financial freedom course... I walked away from that with so many gems that I was like, "Right, cool. This is exciting. This is what I can implement in my life now." And I said to you even yesterday and today, I was like, "When I was on this course, because I was so open to financial freedom that I had six new inquiries come through." While I was in the course. It was incredible. And I can't explain that, but it was all about the energy and putting out into the universe that I want to make more money to be able to gain financial freedom.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Again, next moment of absolutely gold. Because it is one of the most difficult things people say, "How are you changing this?" Because one of the things we talk about is that: how you change your mind and then things happen. And people go, "What do you mean by that? It doesn't sound right." But you see it happen, right? And it's creating that space.

I remember years ago, I've gone through a few incarnations of this business name. And I remember sitting with my wife, Susanna, and I'd been kind of pulling out my hair going, "What should we call it?" And she just said, "Well, what do you do? What do you want to help you do?" And I just, without even thinking about it, just said "Expand." Which is our company now.

But when you say that you don't ever stop... if you think about it, expansion, if you drop a pebble into a still lake, you watch the concentric circles. How big do they get? You can expand out to the size of the earth, the galaxy, the universe. If you think about this expansion, when does it stop? How big do we get? Wouldn't it be dull if we got to a point where we just thought, "Okay, I've done it. There's no more growth." But that's not the way it works. There's always that next wonderful thing. So, you mentioned the financials. So that's your next amazing journey to create financial freedom for yourself.

SAM TUUTA: Definitely. I think I've dissolved what I needed to dissolve and I've now moved into a big shift in a mindset where it's like, "Okay, let's go, let's make this life cool. Let me kind of gain that financial freedom." There was a real gem yesterday which I liked was the chart that you had. And it was like, "Where do we live a lot of our life out of?" And it was the "have to, should do to." And I was looking at that line that was in there... it was like "love to, like to, choose to" up the top. And then it was like "have to, need to."

And I was like, "Where am I living a lot of my life at the moment?" And it was below the line. It was like, "I have to." And I was like, "Right. I went home yesterday and I was like, okay, I have to change that." And so after this, I told you I'm going home and I've got a lot of planning to do. And that's what I will do today.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: I mean, the thing is before that got presented to me, I had no idea. I was just living. And no one had ever asked me, "Hey, are you loving your life? Are you doing things primarily because you think you need to?" And once it was posed to me, I was the same. I'm like, "I'm just doing everything I think I should." And it's not very fulfilling. And then I realised I had a choice.

I'm pleased that you went away and did that and asked and looked. When you consciously ask that question, "Where am I living my life out of?" You get to then change it. That's as I just hope everybody does that. Where am I living? And what if I lived a life I love, what would it look like? And then the courage is to dissolve the fears that are in the way of that.

Because one day it's going to be done, Sam. But it's not just at the end. It's all along the way. We know if we're doing it or not subtly inside, we just have that lack of fulfillment. But isn't it different? Like to now go, "Hey, I'm going to live forward loving it." It's just a whole shift.

SAM TUUTA: But it also proves the point. Like, like I was saying, I'm still doing the work. Like I went home last night and I was like, "Okay, how much of my life am I living below that line? And I have to, should do." And I was like, "I live in that from Monday to Saturday. I live 'love to, like to, choose to' on a Sunday." I was like, "Right. I don't want to do that anymore. How am I going to do it?"

And I had this... and I, again, thought about this last night, this fear of, "Oh, but if I don't ring these clients today back who rung me yesterday, they won't want to walk with me." Well, that's not even true. Like it was just... and I'm like, "They can wait till Monday. If they really want to work with me and I'm supposed to work with them, then if I ring them Monday, it'll be fine."

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: And then you'll find the people you really want to work with are way happy to wait till Monday. And it's not anything to them. And it's a great relationship. Whereas the ones you go, "I'll call them anyway"... I found for me in the past, those were the ones that were the hardest work.

When you're true to yourself—this is what I'm hearing a lot in your conversation today—when you're true to yourself, then life just starts showing up for you. And this is one of the hardest concepts. It just works, doesn't it?

SAM TUUTA: It does work. And you know, you can't... you can sit there and be like, "Why?" And it just does. And I just leave it at that.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Yeah. It's a good, good idea.

SAM TUUTA: Yeah. And just leave it at that. I meet people and I hear their stories and they haven't done work or there's certain things in their life. I'm like, "Oh, I wish you would do this work." But so I think this is a great idea with this podcast because it's showing them. Cause a lot of people, like I said, I was sceptical when I first started, I was like, "What is this woo-woo like stuff?" And I wasn't a true believer, but now, like I said, it has changed my life and it will continue to change my life. And I am so thankful for my friends who recognized when I was in like a really dire situation to pass on you to me. And I hope to be able to do that for other people. This work is super important. We put all this time and effort and money into going to the gym, making ourselves look good. And because we can see it all, but it all starts here. If you just put the money here, this will work out.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Works out more effortlessly, doesn't it? That's the thing. It's like, we don't create the struggle. You know, you've said a lot about stories. That's what they do. They set up life as a big struggle. So everything we're trying to do, whether it be weight loss, whether it be having a better time at work, whether it be relationships... everything becomes harder. And when we realize, "Hey, I'm just projecting a bunch of stuff onto that" and really get face to face with that in a way that we go, "I don't need to do that any longer or not to the same degree at all," then it becomes more... you know, that's the key to it.

I have delved into trying to figure out how it works. And what I've come to is that we just live in a world that is so much more amazing—and I'll just use the word "magical"—than we think. Once we understand our true relationship that as we think about it, it happens, or as we project things, we're blocking it, we just start to realize how powerful we are. It is easily demonstrable because you can see the amazing things people have created.

You know, I think about a story that I share sometimes: when I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. But I went a little bit farther. I was just like, "What do you have to do to be an astronaut?" In those days, you had to join the Air Force and get to NASA. Now it's not long before there's a space hotel being built into space, right? We know that there's at least three companies taking civilians to space. So it won't be long for anyone to be able to rock up, pay your money, go to the space station, stay overnight in your hotel, and then come back the next day. Someone thought that up and created it. We're not limited. We just limit ourselves, Sam. And I think that's what you're doing such an amazing job of illustrating today.

SAM TUUTA: Yeah, yeah, we definitely do live in a mind that limits us. And if we just broke free of that, the things you could accomplish is just... if I look back at where I was five years ago, I would never think that I would be sitting here with you doing a podcast, talking about my journey, having a flourishing business, and having a great relationship with my family. I never would have thought I would be here. So I'm... and I think we get ashamed or a bit embarrassed to say how proud of ourselves we are. And I find that can be quite confronting for people. But why? Like, I am super proud of myself.

I just had this conversation with my sister this morning, she has bought her first house and with her partner, and they're about to have a baby. And she said, “I did this on my own, I didn't do it without any help." And she's like, "I'm proud of myself." But I can say the way she said it; she was a bit sheepish. And I was like, "Don't be afraid to say you're proud of yourself. You've done that. That is so cool."

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Well, you've been on both sides. So this is a great opportunity to ask this question. You've judged yourself until the end of time, right? And you've been proud... you're being proud of yourself. Which one's working better for you?

SAM TUUTA: Being proud of myself.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: When we stop and think about it, it's absolutely ridiculous that we don't think we could say nice things about ourselves or think highly of ourselves. What a terrible concept that's ruining people's lives.

So well, I guess on that note, Sam, that's probably like... I think what else could we say on top of that? I knew when we started talking about you being on here, I was like, "This is going to be a really good one." And it's really exceeded what I even thought.

So, I do have one last question. There's people out there watching. They haven't... they might not know me or the work like we do. And but they're interested in having some sort of change or transforming something—whatever it be, their relationship, their physical health, the way they look, their business, money, anything of it. What was the one thing you'd say if somebody's saying, "I want to start it now?" What's one thing you could say to them they could do today that says, "Hey, I could go forward in that whatever it is that I want to do?"

SAM TUUTA: What's the one thing I'd say? Just put it into action. Just do it. Just do it. Like, just don't think about it too much. Do it and give, give things a chance. Like I gave you... like I gave our time a chance, give it a chance because magical things can happen for sure.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Ooh, I'm now tingling.

SAM TUUTA: Did I give you the tingles?

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Well, look, all I can say is thank you. Thank you for making not just making the time, but for opening yourself up to share. It's not the easiest thing to do to have the courage to do this kind of work in the first place. It's definitely as courageous or more to share it. And I can't tell you how valuable it is. People are coming to me and saying how it's making a difference to them. I know your story is going to make a difference to a lot of people. So, thank you heaps for being here and sharing.

SAM TUUTA: It's been great. So, thank you.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: All right. And well, and thanks for watching. This is another incredible episode with an incredible person, Sam Tuuta. Thanks for watching How to Be a Real One Percenter and we'll look forward to seeing again.