The Warrior's Edge Is Mental First: Sifu Edward & Sifu Julliana Armstrong Sit Down With Brain Trainer John Assaraf

Adapted from the recorded conversation; the guest's words are verbatim. The questions are reconstructed and voiced by Sifu Edward and Sifu Julliana Armstrong.

🎥 Video podcast coming soon. The complete interview will play here once published. The full conversation is transcribed below, and the audio edition will be available on sifuarmstrong.tv.

In a new Sifu Armstrong interview, the brain researcher and NeuroGym founder argues that self-talk is a rep, belief is a muscle, and most people never realize how much control they actually have.

Most people know what they should be doing (eat well, sleep well, save money), and don’t do it anyway. That gap between knowledge and action is what sent John Assaraf, CEO of NeuroGym and bestselling author, down a decades-long study of the brain, and it’s the subject of his latest Warrior Intelligence Series conversation with Sifu Edward and Sifu Julliana Armstrong.

Assaraf traces his own turning point to a mentor who taught him the mechanics of self-talk after he left high school believing he “wasn’t smart enough.” The lesson stuck because the science backs it up starkly. “80% of the average person’s thoughts in a day are negative,” Assaraf said, noting that if those thousands of daily negative thoughts get repeated “90% of each day, day after day after day,” disempowerment becomes automatic, and so does the failure to act.

The fix, he argues, isn’t willpower. It’s deliberate repetition, the same mechanism that builds muscle in a gym. Rewrite a limiting belief and repeat the new version daily, he says, and the brain treats it exactly like added resistance on a barbell: “As soon as we start build a new neuro muscle or reinforce one, it starts to build,” Assaraf said. Eventually, the new pattern moves out of effortful thinking and into automatic habit, a shift he described in one line built for repeating: “the habit starts to build you.”

That compounding logic extends past mindset into his book Having It All, which asks whether it’s realistic to pursue health, wealth, and relationships simultaneously rather than sacrificing one for another. His answer starts from yes and works backward to the daily actions that make it true, rather than starting from a list of reasons it can’t be done.

For anyone wanting a starting point, Assaraf offered a specific three-minute morning routine: a minute of gratitude to activate the brain’s reward centers, a minute visualizing an important goal already achieved, and a final minute writing down three concrete actions to take that day: repeated daily until it, too, becomes automatic. “Now you teach yourself that you’re an action taker versus somebody who just hopes and prays and dreams,” Assaraf said.

Underneath the exercises is a claim about time itself. Assaraf points to the law of compounding effect (the same math behind a dollar doubling daily rather than a flat payout) to argue that small, consistent mental reps outperform any single burst of motivation once enough days stack up.

It’s the missing half of physical training the Armstrongs have long insisted on: warriors condition the stance and the strike for years, then wonder why they stall, when the edge was always mental first.

In This Conversation

Why 80% of the average person’s daily thoughts are negative, and what that does to behavior
Rewiring a limiting belief the same way you’d build muscle in a gym
“The habit starts to build you,” how repeated action becomes automatic
What Having It All answers that his Innercise work alone doesn’t
The three-minute morning practice for training the brain like the body
Where to find his books, app, and events

The Full Conversation

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Every new student who walks onto the mat thinks the hard part is the body, the footwork, the strike, the form. I let them believe it for a while. Then they hit the wall every warrior hits, the one that has nothing to do with muscle and everything to do with the voice in their own head. I've watched gifted athletes quit and ordinary people become unstoppable, and the only difference was what was happening between their ears. So when I found today's guest (a man who has spent decades proving that the inner game decides the outer game), I knew our warriors needed to hear him.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: I'll add to that. I've competed at the world championship level, and I can tell you that there is no performance problem I have ever faced that wasn't a mental problem first. The technique was there. The conditioning was there. What would either collapse or carry you in those last seconds was always what was happening in the mind. So this conversation is personal for me, and I think it's going to be personal for every warrior reading it.

Today, we are privileged to have John Assaraf join us. John is an internationally recognised entrepreneur, brain researcher, and expert in the psychology of success. Not only has he grown multiple multimillion dollar businesses, but he's also a bestselling author and the CEO of NeuroGym, a company that uses the most advanced evidence-based brain training methods to help individuals unleash their fullest potential. I brought John into this conversation because he does for the mind exactly what our 9 Combat Forms do for the body. He gives you a system, a set of reps, and the patience to let compounding do its work. John, thank you so much for joining us today.

John Assaraf: Great to be on.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Before there was a federation, before there was a single combat form on paper, I was a man who'd been burned. I left the franchise I trained under and a lot of people told me, quietly, that I'd never build anything that lasted on my own. I carried that doubt onto the mat every day until I learned the doubt was a habit, not a fact. So I'm fascinated by your beginning. What initially drew you into the field of brain research and neurodevelopment?

John Assaraf: I was fascinated with what we were discovering about the human brain, and specifically I had a lot of limiting beliefs. I felt like I wasn't smart enough. I felt like I was inadequate when I was a kid because I failed English and failed math. I left high school with grade 11. And so I just felt like I wasn't supposed to succeed because I was told if you didn't have a proper education, you probably weren't going to do well in life.

And I ended up meeting this one man who really understood the power of the mind, and he was a Napoleon Hill student of the book Think and Grow Rich. And so he started to teach me the power of self-talk, the power of visualisation, the power of developing the beliefs and the identity to achieve goals versus believing in my current beliefs and believing in what I thought I should achieve or not achieve because of my scholastic background and education. And so I got a healthy dose of what the human brain is capable of at a very, very young age. And because it helped transform my life, I've studied it now for 44 years.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: That word "identity" is everything. In our system we say you don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of who you believe you are. It's why we built Club Sabernet, our member community, the way we did: a warrior surrounded by other warriors starts to think like one before he can fight like one. You took that conviction and turned it into a company. What was the inspiration behind you founding NeuroGym, and how does that reflect on your personal mission now?

John Assaraf: I've been somebody who's exercised most of my life to stay in really good physical shape and to have energy and vitality and to look good and feel good. But I also was doing a lot of inner work, and I was looking to stay calm, reduce stress, have more confidence, have more certainty, have more personal power, tap into my fullest potential. And one of the things that I realised during my journey is there were a lot of people that knew what they should do. A lot of people know they should exercise and eat well and sleep well, but they don't do it. And a lot of people how they can make more money, and a lot of people know what they could do to have a better relationship, and a lot of people know a lot of stuff, but why weren't we doing what we knew we should be doing? Why weren't we doing what we already knew how to do?

And so I got fascinated with the neuroscience side of us, and I realised that the inner game determines the outer game. And I coined these terms, neuro muscles and innercise, for my own ease of understanding. And I realised that our self-image was either strong or weak. Our self-image was either constructive, building us up, or it could be destructive, tearing us down. I also realised that we have empowering beliefs, but we also have disempowering beliefs. And some of them are negative and some of them are downright lies.

And so I started to innercise a lot to train my own brain, and then I started to train my students' brains, people that were following my work that read my books or saw me in one of my movies that I was in. And they started to achieve the same results. And in essence, we were training their brains. So just like you go to the gym, maybe to train your body and cardiovascular system, I was helping people rewire their brain, strengthen their neuro muscles so that they felt confident, certain, unstoppable, and they started achieving their goals and dreams as fast as I was.

And so I knew there was something to brain training, and that's why I started NeuroGym. That's why I wrote my bestselling book, Innercise, is to give people the brain exercises, so to speak, to train the different aspects of the brain, which is a $100 billion tool that most people don't know how to use.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: "Neuro muscles." That phrase stopped me because that's exactly how I think about pre-competition prep. It's not just physical warm-up, it's a mental one. And I'll tell you the hardest thing I ever had to accept: I could out-train almost anyone in the gym, but if I didn't show up to a competition with my head right, none of that training mattered. So here's the question I needed answered. You talk about getting people to do the inner work with the same consistency they'd show up to a gym session. What were the steps you took to break this down and get people to truly buy in?

John Assaraf: I had to break it down for people to be able to really understand it. So I'll give you an example. When I ask anybody, how important is your self-talk to yourself? Whether you say, "I'm good enough to achieve this," or, "I'm not good enough to achieve this," when you say, "I'm too young," or, "I'm too old," when you say, "I don't know how to do this," you're giving your brain an instruction and your brain follows through with whatever self-talk you're using on yourself. So self-talk matters. Self-talk creates thoughts that are consistent with the self-talk.

So if I'm negatively talking to myself on an ongoing basis, is it any wonder that the majority of my thoughts will be negative? And if the majority of thoughts are negative, which by the way, on a statistical basis, 80% of the average person's thoughts in a day are negative, and we have 6,200 thoughts as of the latest research last year. And so if we have 5,000 negative thoughts a day on average, and we repeat those thoughts, 90% of each day, day after day after day, the majority of our population is negative, is disempowering themselves. Negative self-talk creates negative or disempowering emotions. Negative or disempowering emotions create behaviours that we don't want. So when we talk negatively to ourselves, we feel the negative aspects of what we're saying, and then we behave in those ways and we wonder why we're not achieving goals. So I started to understand that self-talk has a direct correlation to how I feel. How I feel has a direct correlation to what I do or don't do, so self-talk is important.

Next is understanding the effect on how I feel based on what I do. And so for example, if I feel afraid of failing, if I feel that I might be embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, judged, rejected, abandoned, if I feel like I might disappoint myself or somebody else, what are the chances that I'm actually going to take action?

Well, the answer is very, very slim because what we've discovered about the human brain, we will do more to avoid pain or discomfort than we will to gain pleasure. And so there's some automatic processes in the brain that prevent us from taking action as a protective mechanism, not because we don't want to take the action. We're just making sure that we don't suffer the consequences of maybe making a mistake or of feeling embarrassed or ashamed, judged or failing.

So when we start to understand that self-talk matters, when we start to understand that feelings matter, and we start to understand that I am not my thoughts, I am not my feelings. I have thoughts, I have feelings, and I could learn how to actually have better management of them, and we start off with becoming aware of thoughts, becoming aware of emotions or feelings, and become aware of the actions I'm taking or not. And it's in that awareness through innercising that we can start to deliberately, for example, take our automatic negative thoughts and deliberately choose an automatic positive thought and replace it. We can realise like a Hollywood actress can change her feelings in a second from being really angry to laughing hysterically. She learns how to turn on or off specific emotions required for the scene. Well, can I learn how to feel something and say, "You know what? I want to flip from this feeling to a more empowering, constructive feeling and state, physiological state that will help me take action instead of staying in my comfort zone."

Well, of course we can, which then leads to the world of habits. And our brain automates everything that we repeat. So we repeat thoughts that are negative, it automates it. If we repeat emotions that are negative, it automates it. If we repeat being a procrastinator or a self saboteur, it just automates it in the form of a habit. So then we have to deliberately say, "Okay, a habit is nothing more than the reinforced loop to conserve energy for the brain. Can I deactivate or atrophy a habit pattern that may be not serving me? And deliberately now, using the latest in neuroscience, create and reinforce a new, powerful, empowering, constructive habit that will help me achieve my health, wealth relations, career, business goals?" And the answer is absolutely. So this is where we dive into the world of I really have more control than I think I have.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: What you just described is the single best argument for training I've ever heard. Here's the experience that proves it for me: I've watched a student spend years drilling the wrong defensive habit, flinching backward when they should plant and turn. You can't talk them out of it in an afternoon. The brain made it automatic for a reason. We have to do the patient work of overwriting the rep. It really is the opposite of the gym in the worst case: you can build the wrong muscle just as faithfully as the right one. So how do you break that cycle? What are the tips you'd give somebody looking to break out of that way of thinking?

John Assaraf: And I think we should also emphasise that it's not just negative patterns that we reinforce. We also reinforce the patterns that may be giving us some success right now, but we need new patterns if what we want to achieve is different than what we already have.

So the first part is to realise that you're not a tree. You can change. And the science of neuroplasticity basically says that we have 85 billion brain cells at any given moment, we can activate and create new patterns, new reinforced patterns. So let's say I have a belief. Let's just use a belief as an example. I'm too old to achieve this or do this, or I'm not smart enough, or I don't deserve to blank, right? Fill in the blank. Well, what if we wrote down that belief? And what if we just rewrote it in a different way that will actually empower the brain versus reinforce the pattern we don't want anymore?

And what if we said, "In the past, I used to believe I wasn't smart enough, wasn't good enough, or that I was too old to achieve blank, blank or blank." And now I'm deliberately thinking, feeling and acting as if I am smart enough, good enough, and worthy enough, and I am just the right age to achieve what I want to achieve. So now all of a sudden, we are giving our bio computer, our brain, new instructions that will actually open up the power of our brain's ability to take actions that are aligned with what we're saying. So instead of reinforcing, "I'm not good enough. I'm not worthy enough. I'm too old," why not change the script? In changing the script, we change the biochemistry of what's happening in our brain. In changing our biochemistry, we change the feeling because biochemistry is the chemicals that are released into the bloodstream that causes a feeling.

So all of a sudden, if I say, "In the past I used to think or feel this, and now I'm choosing to feel and think this," our brain says, "Oh, okay." And now the motivational circuit turns on for the new idea, the new emotion. And so now, if we did that for one day, it would be nice. We'd feel good. But if I did it for seven days, 14 days, 21 days, 30 days deliberately, the same thing would happen in our brain that would happen in the gym. Just like if you started today to lift, let's say, five pounds of weights or two kilos of weight, and maybe it wasn't that hard today, and then in a week or two you added more resistance, in a week or two, you added a little bit more resistance, in a week after that, you had a little bit more resistance, you would build the muscle. You would get stronger.

Well, that's exactly how our brain's neuro muscles work. So as soon as we start build a new neuro muscle or reinforce one, it starts to build. And then the science of habits kick in and our brain says, "Hey, since you've been doing this for three weeks, four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, let me just automate it so that it requires zero conscious effort," and I'm going to create a subconscious pattern and move it from this hard work and a lot of effort part of the brain into the a lot less work and effortless part of the brain, otherwise known as the subconscious, which is what most people do not do more of to condition, to train. And that's the power centre. So we start off with small, empowering actions, and those small empowering actions build a habit, and then the habit starts to build you.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: "The habit starts to build you." I felt that in my core. And there is a specific group of warriors I want to ask this next question for, because I think about them when I'm on the competition floor, the ones who've put in decades of work and still hear a quiet voice telling them they've run out of time. Your Ageless Warrior, Edward's phrase for the person picking up the Dragon Cane at 60. The lie they've been handed is that the brain is fixed, the window is closed. Your book Having It All is the direct answer to that lie. For the warrior who's done the inner work but still feels like something's missing. What does Having It All give them that Innercise alone doesn't?

John Assaraf: Yeah. With the Innercise, we also released an Innercise app that tens of thousands of people are absolutely loving with thousands of five-star reviews. So that's in the app store. Having it all was a body of work that I developed in asking myself this question many years ago. Is it possible? First, the question was, is it possible to be healthy, to be happy, to be confident, to have a great family, and be a great father and husband? And health, wealth, relationships, career, is it possible to have it all? And the answer is yes. When you focus on having it all, you can develop the mindset. You can develop the skill set. You can develop the habits to have it all.

Now, sometimes it's not possible to have it all at the same time, but the idea that can I be healthy and happy and wealthy in each year of my life, not just financial wealth, the answer is yes, as opposed to saying the answer's no and here's all the reasons why not, why not start with the answer's yes, it's possible and then ask, well, what would I need to think in order to make that a reality? What would I need to feel in order to make that a reality? What would I need to do every day in what order to make that a reality?

And here's what you quickly start to realise. Energy will flow to where your attention goes. So if your energy and attention goes to investing a little bit of time on your health and wealth and relationship and whatever it is that's important to you a little bit every day, everything gets a little bit better every day. And if everything gets a little bit better every day or every week, then over the course of a month, maybe there's not that much change. But over the course of a year, three years, five years, 10 years, things become surprisingly better because of the law of compounding effect.

And for those that may not know what the law of compounding effect, here's a little quiz for you. What would you prefer, a million dollars today or a dollar today but the amount doubles every day? So today you get a dollar, tomorrow you get $2. The next day it's 4. The next day it's 8. Now, some people would get really excited about the million dollars right now, but what they don't realise is on day 30, you have less than a million dollars. But on day 31, you have almost 50, 60, 70% more than a million dollars if you just wait that extra day, because the law of compounding effort, the law of compounding effect, the law of compounding behaviours have an exponentially greater return with time.

So when we develop and reinforce what I call our constructive patterns in the brain, self-talk, emotional and behaviours, then we have a compounding effect over the course of our lifetime. And then we can start to say, "Oh my God, yes, having it all is possible and having it all is probable when you lay out the foundations for actually making that a reality.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: The compounding effect is the whole secret of the warrior's path. Nobody becomes great in a weekend, but almost anyone becomes great across a thousand quiet days nobody's watching. That's exactly the long game we're playing on the World Games Pathway. For the warriors reading and listening who want to go deeper into your work, where do they need to go, John?

John Assaraf: Sure. I'm on Instagram every day. I'm on Facebook every day. They can go to the johnassaraf.com website. They can hop into one of our events that we have at brainathon.com. It's great. We have an event with myself and a whole bunch of world renowned brain and success experts. And they can start following our work at myneurogym.com.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: Before we let you go, in our world, insight without a rep is just entertainment. For a warrior who wants to start tonight, what's one thing they can implement right now to start training the brain the way we train the body?

John Assaraf: Yeah. I'm going to give you two things that I want everybody to do. Number one is I want you to write out a vision for your life that would really excite you around health, wealth, relationships, career, business. Write that out. And then I want you to write out some goals of things you are going to do, things you want to achieve in the next 30 days, and then create a little plan of what you're going to do every day to move closer towards those goals. So that's part one. So we're going to get a vision, some goals, and some action plans.

But part two, for your mental fitness, what I want you to do is take three minutes every morning. First minute, come up with as many things as you are grateful for, that you are grateful for. It could be, I'm grateful for breathing. I'm grateful for waking up today. I'm grateful for my best friend, my dog, my cat, my water. Oh my God, water, the sheets on my bed. Start with one minute to activate the reward centre of the brain because dopamine will be released and you will feel really, really good being grateful.

Number two, I want you to just sit there and I want you to visualise yourself already achieving something that's important to you. A health goal, relationship goal, career goal, business goal, financial goal, whatever, it's just visualise yourself, see yourself, and feel yourself achieving that goal, and do that for one minute.

And then the next minute, so this is three minutes. Gratitude, one minute. Visualise the goal you want to achieve and feel it, next minute. And the third minute, take out a piece of paper or your mobile phone and write out three action steps you commit to taking today, today to move you closer to that goal you just envisioned.

Now, we have just set up a pattern in the brain of gratitude, a pattern in the brain for feeling and visualising what we want, and a pattern in the brain for writing out three things that we're going to do to achieve that goal, and then take action that day to do those three things no matter what. So keep it simple at first. Simple, simple, simple. It doesn't matter if it's one little thing. Now you teach yourself that you're an action taker versus somebody who just hopes and prays and dreams.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Amazing. John, thank you so much for your time today. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thanks again.

Sifu Julliana's closing word: The three-minute morning practice John laid out is a pre-match ritual for daily life. I know what it feels like to step onto the competition floor having done the mental work, and what it feels like when you haven't. The brain automates whatever you practise, for you or against you. That's not philosophy, that's biomechanics of the mind. Start the reps tonight.

Sifu Edward's closing word: John handed us the missing half of the warrior's training. We spend our lives conditioning the body (the stance, the strike, the form), and then wonder why we stall. The answer was always above the shoulders. Self-talk is a rep. A belief is a muscle. Stack the quiet days, and let the compounding effect do what it always does. The warrior's edge is mental before it's ever physical. We don't entertain warriors. We create them.

John Assaraf, CEO of NeuroGym, brain researcher, and bestselling author of Innercise and Having It All. Find him at johnassaraf.com · myneurogym.com · brainathon.com, and on Instagram and Facebook daily.

ILLUSTRATIVE RESULTS. Any revenue, enrollment, margin or retention figure in this conversation is either a documented result from one of our own operations, a figure the guest reports about their own business, or an illustrative example, never a projection of your results.

Nothing here is financial, legal or tax advice.

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