Welcome everyone! This is Your SuperPowered Mind and I’m your host Kristin Maxwell. In this show, we explore the process of transformation and give you the tools and strategies that you can use to transform your own life.
Today, we are going to be talking to James Purpura about shifting perceptions to tap into unrealized potential so you can evolve and grow. And we were going to be talking to both James and his wife Steph, but Steph is unfortunately sick today. But I have kind of a more involved biography than I usually give just because their story is so interesting and it’s going to apply to both.
James and Steph met 15 years ago when their lives had hit rock bottom. They were both financially, emotionally, and spiritually bankrupt and were united by a shared vision of creating, as they started working on themselves. After 15 years of working on themselves and many ups and downs, Steph and James built and sold one of the world’s largest construction software companies, had five children, and began to live extraordinary lives.
Through this journey of self-creation, they developed a personal philosophy centered around perception, which they believe determines how someone’s life will turn out. Together, they started Powerful U to provide a roadmap for people to master their perceptions and their emotions to become the conscious creators of their lives. They’re also the authors and producers of the book and film Perception: Seeing is Not Believing.
James, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind.
Well, I love Your Superpowered Mind. Thanks for welcoming me to it. Lets evolve and grow.
Yes, and I’m super curious to talk to you because the stuff you do is right up. It is what I’m thinking about all the time too.
So my first question is always: What superpower did you uncover as the result of mastering your mind?
So for me, one of the things you didn’t mention, our bios that just before Steph and I met about, 18, 19, 20 years ago, I was sitting in a jail cell and I had an epiphany when I was there. I’d been a drug addict and been homeless and all these other things. And because I had a very victim mentality at that point in my life, one day, I was working on myself and I was writing this long list of people. I felt like I’d harm me and I was trying to offer those people forgiveness.
And I looked down at this list and I had this epiphany and the epiphany was the only common denominator between all of these such these people and these situations are me.
What if I somehow created all of these situations? And so I really thought about what those two things thought of met, and I’d never really considered the fact that I was creating my experiences. And I thought, “Well, I couldn’t have created some of them and not all of them, so I either created all of them or none of them.”
And what it meant was, if I was in fact created over my experience, because I was sitting in jail, I had a lot to own and take responsibility for, but I also meant I could create something different in its place. The other thing that I just thought about was if I wasn’t, I met the world really was a terrible place and I probably didn’t want to play anymore because I had a pretty rough life to that point.
And so it was on that day that I took my power back and I didn’t know I was taking my power back. But it was that day I took ownership so I could change life and I decided that I was the creator of my experiences even if I didn’t know what that meant back then and I was going to figure out which principles dictated how I create my experience. And I landed on the true principles of perception and emotion and it took me about nine years from that point in a jail cell to get to my first million dollars.
That is a huge perception shift to come to and to realize about yourself. When you got to this point of, “Okay, I am being a victim and I can choose not to be a victim.” How did you go about changing your beliefs? What happened then?
So I had to consider what that meant, right? And so I had to really consider that the idea of what is the creative element in my life? Because what most people don’t understand is that it’s true, life is not fair. Everybody listening to my voice right now has every reason in the world, there’s enough hate and distress and pain and sorrow in the world. If you focus on that, you’d ever reason you needed never to get out of the bed but you also have every reason to enjoy and experience a wonderful life because there’s enough love and beauty and treasures and miracles in the world as well.
But the question is, what are you focused on? And so I had to decide what were the creative element in my life was. And so I had a really abusive situation when I was young and so I had to ask the question, did the abuse define me? Because when I took when I said I take responsibility for everything, that’s everything I had control over. And so when I asked myself if the question, if abuse defined me, the answer I came to, well, couldn’t have because not everybody that has been abused in their life has allowed it to destroy them.
So it wasn’t the abuse that defined me, thank goodness, because if it did, then I couldn’t change because I can’t go back and change the abuse, it’s a part of my past. So what defined me, what created my life. And it was what I chose to believe about myself and the world around me because of experiencing that abuse, right? That’s what defined my life, that’s what put me in jail was my beliefs around that situation.
And so I don’t need to own my abuser’s experience because that had nothing to do with me that was based on their experiences and their beliefs. But I did have a choice in that moment, even though I was very young to believe something different but I didn’t and that’s what created my experience.
Right. And so for example, just very kind of specifically and I have no idea if this is what you brought. So correct me, is perhaps one of the things you thought while being abused was while the world is unfair, so I am going to go out and cheat people because it’s not fair anyway.
No, that’s an element of it but that’s disconnected and that goes into a different topic. So here’s the situation that I incurred and it’s in the book and it’s in the movie, but I was in my kindergarten class and I’m so excited to go to school because my brother was there and I couldn’t wait. But when I got there, it became very apparent that I had some pretty severe learning disabilities. And on the first day that I was supposed to go into the special ed class, that’s what they called it back then. My teacher called me up in front of the room and she said, “Jimmy, you do know that only stupid and retarded kids go to special ed?”
I was paralyzed in that moment and I remember just standing there like, “What happened?” And she told me to leave the classroom and as I was walking out, she made the entire class call me stupid on the way out the door and make fun of me.
I made the most logical choice based on the situation, but that’s all we ever do but it was still my choice.
Wow.
So of course, I ran home at night and I told my mom what happened and my mom had undiagnosed manic depression bipolar disorder. My step dad worked 15 hours a day so he couldn’t deal with it, and my biological father was off doing drugs. So I had no defense in that moment, my mom just said, “The world’s a crappy place, you’re just going to have to get used to it.”
The next day, I go into class thinking, “I’m sure this was just a one-time thing,” and it was every single day she would call me up in front of the room and she would tell me that I was stupid and then she would make the whole class tell me I was stupid on the way out the door.
The belief that I fostered, that I was not smart enough, that it was not smart, that I was not good enough, that there was something wrong with me. That was the belief that I chose which is a really important distinction. I made the most logical choice based on the situation, but that’s all we ever do but it was still my choice. That belief is what created my life, what created, what justified the decision, what justifies people’s decision to do harm is something totally different but it’s based on a similar experience.
Right. Yes. Thank you for that clarification. I am really curious to go more deeply into how you see perception as shaping and emotions is shaping how people show up, but before we go to break, can you tell people where they can learn about you and your work?
So yeah, my wife and I, after we sold our technology company and started a company called Powerful U. Our website is powerful-u.com. Essentially, what we did when we sold our technology company was we wanted to recreate the personal development space to be less egocentric and more group-based and we want to make it affordable for all. And so we have a book, we have a movie, we have assessments, we have coaching, and we have all these different things to help seekers move their life forward.
Great. Thank you. So powerful-u.com. We’ll be back in a moment.
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