Mark & Crystal Hansen

LASTING TRANSFORMATIONS

Crystal is an international speaker, researcher, corporate consultant, author, and entrepreneur. Her expertise is in the Field of Human potential. Through her years as a transformational life coach and a wellness nutrition expert, she has seen people experience profound and lasting transformation. People tap into their inner resources in relationships, careers, health, and wellness.

Having personally guided people from seemingly impossible states of depression, anxiety, and hopelessness, to triumph, freedom, and happiness is what drives Crystal’s conviction. All people have unlimited potential for greatness if they only understand how to access those resources. Her book, Skinny Life: The Secret to Being Physically, Emotionally and Spiritually Fit, is available on Barnes&Noble. Amazon has it as well.

CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL

She travels the world with her husband, bestselling author and entrepreneur Mark Victor Hansen. Together, they wrote a book in 2020. Called, Ask, The Bridge From Your Dreams to Your Destiny. Mark Victor Hansen is best known as the co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul. It’s a book series and brand setting a world record and book sales.

I’m stumbling because this is just an astonishing number, with over 500 million books sold. Just get your mind around that. Mark also worked his way into the worldwide spotlight as a sought-after keynote speaker and entrepreneurial Marketing Maven. He is creating a stream of successful people who have created massive success for themselves through Mark’s unique teaching and wisdom.

Mark has spoken to over 6,000 audiences worldwide. He’s also a prolific writer with 307 books, authored or co-authored. Such as A Power of Focus, The Aladdin Factor, Dare to Win, and One Minute Millionaire. Mark has appeared on Oprah, CNN, The Today’s Show, and National Print. Media would be Time, US News, World Report, USA Today, and the New York Times. He is a recipient of 10 honorary doctorates and countless awards. His favorite is the Horatio Alger Award for distinguished Americans. You are a Distinguished American.

ASK TO GET WHAT YOU WANT

Dr. Daniel Leman was our neighbor and friend back in California. We now live in Scottsdale, Arizona. He did the brain exam on both of us. He’d done 165,000 of them. He looked in there and said, “Hey, it’s all healthy. You’re not ever going to have Alzheimer’s and all that.”

I said, “That would make my mommy and daddy so proud because they used to say, “Do you have a brain in there?”. We travel literally around the world, 80 countries, and meet all kinds of wonderful, educated, talented, and smart people. The difference between somebody who succeeds a little and somebody who’s vastly successful is one thing only, we discovered.

That is, they learned how to A-S-K to G-E-T what they wanted. We discovered everybody who was coded with destiny by God at birth, and most people have never looked at it. They said, “No, you don’t understand. I’m an engineer. I’m a doctor. I’m a garbage man.” Oh, that’s what you do. That’s not who you are.

We said, “Look, there are three avenues to ask. Ask yourself, ask others, and ask God.” What we did is, we’ve unfolded it. As we’ve done that since the book came out during the height of COVID, our publisher asked us to push it back. And we said, “No.”

THE SCIENCE OF ASKING

Once I’ve worked this hard on making a great and inspiring book, it will outsell Chicken Soup for the Soul. Just watch. It is what’s happening, but it’s doing it worldwide. Because of Zoom and podcasts, we’ve talked to 10 million people one time in Vietnam. It’s something that could never have happened, Lee or Monica, ever before in history.

I’ve always thought you’re either leading edge, cutting edge, double edge, or trailing edge. I only want to be leading edge. The book is about learning the art and science of asking. Like Mark was saying, we looked at other people. Still, as we started exploring this topic of asking to find the answers, we found that there were three channels through which we all need to learn to ask.

Those are, ask yourself, ask others and ask God. Each of those channels is equally important to find your way forward and continue to become the best expression of yourself. When we look back at our own lives, it’s interesting. When you’ve achieved a certain measure of success, people look at you and think that everything’s been good in your life. I wish that they could have that kind of life.

It’s just not true. Mark and I have, individually and together, been through all kinds of issues, problems, and adversities. We discovered when we started exploring our journey as we were writing this book that we could ask our way forward. That was what got us out of the problems, issues, turmoil, and onto the next answer, solution, and breakthrough. So, we shared some of those stories.

FACING LIFE CHALLENGES

I think one of the most profound situations for me was when I was very young. I was one of those kids who found high school easy and boring. I accelerated my curriculum, graduated myself at age 16, and married the first guy, my boyfriend, who was five years older. It turned out not to be a very good life plan.

I found myself divorced two and a half years later. I have a baby on my hip, in a new city, no family, and no friends. Honestly, no idea what I was going to do with my life or how to make any money. I applied for food stamps. It’s the only thing I could think of doing.

I remember standing there that day at the grocery store, getting ready to turn those food stamps over for groceries and diapers. A question dropped into my mind. I had this instant epiphany. The first question was, how did I get here? Followed by the second question that was so profound coming from my Higher Self or God.

ARE YOU DOING YOUR BEST?

It was just like, are you doing the best you can to get out of this situation? Or are you taking the easy way out? The second my mind asked that question, I knew the answer. I knew I wasn’t doing the best I could. I didn’t even know what that meant, but I knew there was more inside of me.

In that instant, I had this pivot where I said, “This will not be my future.” As I turn over those food stamps, I go home to my little apartment, where I’m getting eviction notices every month. I suddenly have this awareness that I have questions even though I don’t have answers. So, I keep asking, who would hire me tomorrow? How can I earn money tomorrow?

The second I asked those questions, bam, the answer’s there. I remembered hearing on the radio, “Kelly Services, start work tomorrow, earn money tomorrow.” I call them and I applied. They’re sending me out suddenly on all of these jobs. I could say yes or no.

I’m filling in at attorney’s offices, setting up booths at malls, working at conventions, and doing sales. I learned so much about myself. I learned that I loved small businesses. I learned that I loved the idea that someone could start fresh, from their own idea and start a whole business.

BE FEARLESS OF THE TRUTH

I decided at that point to put myself through real estate school. A year and a half later, I worked at the top realtor, this top home building company in our valley. I became the top realtor for our company. I had also got signed by a talent agency, a modeling talent agency. I made residuals that gave me the best screen actors and skilled benefits.

I often thought back on that moment because I saw my life literally do a 180-degree Shift. I thought back to that moment when I could have just cascaded further into my misery. But it was the question. That ability to ask, and that a question, are you doing the best you can, or are you taking the easy way out?

I think that’s the type of question that often comes up for people. Our Higher Self, God, is always talking to us. But are we paying attention? Are we listening to the answer? And do we have the courage to answer those questions truthfully?

YOUR INNER WISDOM

For yourself, how do you then use that question? Ask, is this the best I can be doing for myself? The secret is to be able to listen to the answers that come to you. What kind of tips or techniques do you have for people? How can they get better at the art of asking and receiving the answers?

Like Crystal said, each of us has inner wisdom. When we fell deeply in love long ago, we were in Costa Mesa, California, at Mother’s Restaurant eating a nice green meal. A man of the cloth was sitting next to us, and he couldn’t help saying, “I can see how much in love you two are. Do you mind if I share what causes a happy, lasting marriage?”

I didn’t want to talk to this guy, but I said, “Yeah, sure.” The question gets an answer. So he said, “Well, I’ve been head of Billy Graham Ministries, and I’m 92 years old. For 70 years, I’ve run marriage counseling. There’s one thing only that works. You pray out loud together with your beloved in the morning and at night.”

I thought, “Wow.” We prayed in church. We prayed in Holy Man jams. We prayed in public at funerals and all that stuff. But we started doing that, and we asked each other questions. When we start in the morning, we do our spiritual work, and at night before we go to sleep, we do it out loud together.

LIFE’S METAMORPHOSIS

We’re living in the question, and the question predisposes the answer. Remember, ask, and you shall receive. But nobody ever defined it until we wrote this book, so I can’t even believe the letters. There were stacks of letters and emails we were reading from people saying, “Wow, that has just transformed my life, because of the line, and Pastor Paul said, “Be transformed by the self-renewing of your mind.”

Notice the word self and renewing. Our corporate symbol is a butterfly, and you cannot look at a caterpillar and predict a butterfly. You can’t predict it because the question determines what the butterflies of your life will be. We’ve all been in this COVID confinement cocoon now for two years.

THE SOUL DESTINY

A breakthrough is that the size of your question determines the size of your result. People have come to my seminars for the last 47 years and said, “Well, I want more money.” I pull a quarter out of my pocket and give it to them. They said, “No. That’s not all that I want.” I said, “Well, that’s what you asked for, money. You got what you asked for.”

I said, “Everybody in the room, write down; I’m so happy. I’m on schedule to become a millionaire by doing X and then signing it. Get your spouse or business partner to sign it.” It really will come to pass. But you’ve got to ask yourself, who do I want to be? What do I want to do? What do I want to have?

It’s not just like being a garbage man or a school teacher. There is nothing wrong with any of those, but we all have a higher calling. I know you guys all watched Mel and Thomas Benedict, who died and returned. He said, “Every one of us has this soul destiny.”

If you die early, like he was gone for an hour and a half, he returned. It’s just amazing with near-death experiences. Everybody’s saying the same thing, “You’ve got a soul destiny.” We just want people to find it without having to die and come back.

YOUR REFLECTIVE JOURNEY

I wanted to circle back to the specific questions because I think it’s important to talk about. So, we say that the asking yourself part is that reflective journey. You can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you are. We say there are three phases to the ask yourself, reflective journey.

Those are, where am I now? Because you need to sit with yourself. I don’t know how much you guys see this, but few people take the time. I saw this again and again in my coaching practice. It is to take the time with themselves and a journal and ask these questions.

They’ll keep hurling through life, and life’s coming at them. They’re trying to keep all the balls in the air. They’re taking all their cues from their external world rather than sitting with themselves and going deep within. That’s where all the answers are. That is the first phase; where am I now?

What’s really working? What’s not working? What are the things that are unique to me? The things that call to my heart that I want to be doing? When we sit with ourselves and start to figure out, where am I right now with this? We start things to come up. We’ll start to answer those questions, and it’ll take us in a different direction.

HAVE NO LIMITS

Then, the second phase of that is, where do I want to be? Mark and I say, “It’s so important to ask that from the nth degree of your highest and greatest imagination for yourself.” People are afraid to dream big like this. Like Mark said, “The only limitation comes from our self-limitation.” We say, take all the limits off, go to the stage of your mind and ask yourself.

Who do I want to be? What do I want to be in my career? Then, ask the questions backward. Who am I serving every day? What are my products? What are my services? What do people love about what I’m sharing with the world? How does that look in its ultimate form?

Then in that way, you can start to engineer your perfect life backward. It works in a career, relationships, and everything you want for yourself and your higher purpose. The final phase of that is, what specific action steps do I need to take? When we start asking ourselves those questions, I guarantee you’re going to get answers. You’re going to start to get ideas, and a solution will come to you.

THE POWER OF SILENCE

You’re going to think of a person or something that will come up that you haven’t thought of before. It’s time to pick up the phone, write that plan down, or take action. We do live in this physical world. We have to put these ideas, dreams, and visions into physical actions to manifest things. That’s important to remember.

She wrote a whole book called Pure Thoughts for Pure Results. And chapter seven is exactly that silence. The line is, be still and know that I am God. Most of us don’t take any time for stillness. So back to our personal practice, if you don’t mind my waxing on a little bit about it. Once we do our little prayer and meditation and have read some spiritual literature to uplift our state of consciousness, we literally go into silence.

I can say unequivocally that there’s never been a time when either one of us has come out without new awareness and new decisions. Sometimes, she comes out so articulate. I said, “Wait for a second, let me just pull out the cell phone and record everything you’re saying. We got to be videotaping.” It’s profound, and you don’t know what is dangerous to say to two wonderful people like you who have only wisdom thought leaders.

BRILLIANCE AT BIRTH

None of us know all that we know, because we’ve got this DNA that is so comprehensively brilliant. We need to let it out. When I was with Bucky Fuller, I said, “We’re all born geniuses and get de-genius. We get unplugged as we go through life.” We’re trying to make sure we acknowledge our respective geniuses.

But then, hold up a mirror and get everybody else to see theirs. What all these people are telling us. They don’t buy one of our books, as they buy two. They go over every question. Then, they do what Crystal said; they start writing it out.

We’re just amazed at where they want to go. How far they could go and what they could accomplish. Now, they’re awake to their heart’s desire. That is so beautiful. It’s been out for nearly two years now. 2020 was when you had asked your bridge from your dreams to your destiny.

A STORY THAT CAPTURED PEOPLE

We have pages of stories. I mean, it’s interesting because the book starts with The Fable of Micaela, and we love fables. People learn so quickly from stories. We learn from stories because all of those emotions and experiences that you read about in a story become metaphors for our own lives.

What’s been amazing is many people have been blown away by the fable and see themselves in Micaela’s journey. So just really quickly, Micaela starts off, it takes place in the time of Kings and Queens. She has virtually lost everything. She lost her mother and father.

THE FABLE OF MICAELA

The bill collectors took her away from her home because her parents had been sick. She’s sleeping in a grove of trees. She falls into an exhausted sleep one night and the bean comes to her and says, “Micaela, come with me.” He takes her on this journey and takes her to this beautiful bridge.

He admonishes her that the key is to start asking and never stop. When she wakes up from that dream, something has changed inside her. Something has transformed. She realized she was giving a precious message. So she writes it down.

As she goes to work that day, everything looks and seems different. With that admonishment to start asking, she starts to wonder more. She starts to look around her more, wondering about the people around her. She starts to get curious. She starts to ask them questions.

Little by little, day by day, her life starts to change, and she becomes happier and happier and more hopeful. Micaela’s life has changed 180 degrees by the end of the story. She started her job by lifting those heavy rocks every day from one place to another. I think that’s how a lot of people feel about their lives.

KEY TO SELF-REALIZATION

Especially going through this COVID thing. It’s been challenging for people, and they don’t know what to do or where to go. They don’t have a mechanism, skillset, or toolset to get them out of it. When people would start reading The Fable of Micaela, we had grown men cry. We’ve had guys say, “I never cried in a book before, but I saw myself in Micaela’s journey because that’s how I felt. I felt out of hope. I felt like I was lifting heavy rocks every day.”

This awareness comes to Micaela. The story is really beautiful. She keeps having these dreams, and they keep revealing to her, what to do next. The gifts that are seated are already seated inside of her. If she just stays open to the asking journey.

If only she was willing to ask those questions, see those gifts inside herself, expect, anticipate, and wonder what those are, and wait with excitement for the next revelation. That’s been really fun for us. It’s been life-changing for so many people. In fact, we have a couple of groups that are filmmakers looking at The Fable of Micaela to do as a movie. They think the message inside that story is so important.

A HERO’S JOURNEY

Have you read The Alchemist? I’m sure, and so is everybody cry on. The Alchemist is the only book to sell 150 million copies of one book. I sold 19 million Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, but that is just off the Richter scale. They’re making a movie in Morocco, saying, “Hey, we want to make this movie with you.”

Then, today we’re talking with a guy I consider one of the top screenwriters. I’m sure you’ve had him on the show. Jim Stovall, who’s blind. He said, “I write books that I can’t read, and I make movies that I can’t watch.” Like The Ultimate Gift, $100 million on it.

We put his story in our book because Jim Stovall is our dearest friend. I talked to him on a phone even today. He just is eclectically wise. If I come up with a problem, I can call Jim. This guy listens at five times the speed of normal on audio. He reads a couple of books a day because he can’t see anything.

We, every single Human on the Earth, are going through our own Hero’s Journey. It begins with that sense of openness, that childlike questioning. You’re right; we lose that from when we start getting told what to think, say, and wear. We lose that individual expression of self. Not only that, subconsciously, we’re always told that we’re not going to get ahead or we have punishment at the end of our journey.

BE THE CHILD IN YOU

This is what the asking journey, the asking tools are. It’s your mechanism, and it’s your toolkit. It’s a mechanism that’s inside of all of us. Once we become aware of it, we can use it with everything, like asking yourself, asking others, asking God. Just do what you said about children, we all come into this life as these beautiful uncorrupted children.

We want to know everything. We’re wildly curious about everything. We want to know who, what, when, where, why, and how. We also are not afraid to ask for more. We come into this world quite entitled, knowing that we deserve the best.

Depending on how you were parented, what happened in your school years, or your jobs. You were told, “Stop asking questions. I’m so tired of you. Don’t ask me any questions until your hand’s raised.” Then, your opinion’s not valued at your job. You try to contribute, but no one cares, and just life beats you up.

Suddenly, we are standing here as full-grown adults, afraid to ask anything. We are afraid to ask anything of anyone. We are afraid that we’re not good enough. We are afraid that we don’t already have all the answers. That is sad to us because we’re here to learn.

ASK YOURSELF, OTHERS AND GOD

We’re here to explore. We’re here to be in this bonding journey with one another. The asking others, ask yourself, ask others, ask God. The ask yourself is the reflective journey, asking others is your bonding journey. We need to be able to ask one another. But in the book, we talk about the seven roadblocks to asking. We found that people have these seven roadblocks with almost everybody we talk to. Some of us carry all of them, our entire lives.

Some people are struggling with one or two of them at any given time. It’s really important to look at those roadblocks in the book. We have these great stories around each one. We tried to make the book relatable to everyone in every area. The stories will help you understand the real application to your own life.

But when you can identify those real blocks, just that awareness alone is like this huge gate opening up. When you thought you would come to a dead end. Right? Think of that gate of possibility, just swaying open. It’s really miraculous.

TOGETHER WE LEARN

We like everyone to go to Ask The Book Club. Here, what we’re trying to do is we want to make everybody or facilitate everyone become what’s called a master ask. So they have the fulfillment of their destiny and the joy of their soul.

I just want to remind everyone that you can join that book club for free. It’s a website. So simple, just type in askthebookclub.com. That’s all one word. I’m sure there will be lots of beautiful, juicy, delicious things on that website.

Everyone will get an invitation to a free webinar because we want people to keep going. We want you to highlight this book and refer back to it and move with us on this journey. We need everybody on Earth right now to be at their best. We need everybody to understand what that means because we all are a part of the source.

ASK: ASK, SEEK, KNOCK

We’re part of our Creator. Whatever you think of the Creator, you are a piece of the Creator himself. I say himself because it’s hard to describe the Creator. How do you describe God? So you’re a piece of that beautiful creation.

You are a star of that original light. We want you to keep searching and keep moving forward. The only way to do that is to ask and answer. It says in scripture, ask and you shall receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened. It’s interesting when you look at the ask, seek and knock, what is it spell? Ask, A-S-K.

I just want to tell our listeners that no mechanism will reveal what is hidden from you, like asking. When you feel stuck, deploy that skill, art, and science of asking. I promise you, it will take you to your next place because your journey is waiting for you. Your destiny is waiting. We just need to pull those dreams out of your heart, through this journey and keep you moving across that bridge.

Life’s not a dress rehearsal. Asking is the way to fulfill your life, destiny, future, and fortune. We appreciate both of you so much, and thanks for all your doing. Thank you for having us on the show, and God bless you for all that you’re both doing.