Copywriter, coach and expert marketer, Ray Edwards is our guest for the 174th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. In this wide ranging conversation, Kira and Rob asked Ray about his business, how he got started, the changes he’s making in his business and life, and what he does to accomplish more than most other people… even things he thinks are impossible. Here are a few of the things we covered:
•  how Ray went from radio host to copywriter
•  the experiences he had working in radio that help him in his copywriting career
•  his tattoos… what they are and why had has them
•  what has happened in Ray’s life and business over the last few years
•  what can happen when you remove the fear from your life
•  why it’s important to let your hidden personal beliefs influence your work persona
•  the power of impossible goals to set off a quantum leap in your life and business
•  why worthy failures are critical for achieving your impossible goals
•  Ray’s two-word counsel you need to hear—especially if you’re not operating at your best
•  the unspoken part of the law of manifestation and how to manifest things into your life
•  the things that have made the biggest difference in Ray’s business
•  what he would do today if he had to start over with nothing
•  drag racing rental cars when he travels
•  what’s next for Ray and where you can reach out to him

If you want to accomplish more than you ever thought possible, you’ll want to listen to this episode. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. Or download the episode to your favorite podcast player.

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The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Full Transcript:

Kira:   This episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Club In Real Life, our live event in San Diego, March 12th through the 14th. Get your tickets now at thecopywriterclub.com/TCCIRL.

Rob:   What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Kira:   You’re invited to join the club for episode 174 as we chat with master copywriter, coach and consultant, Ray Edwards about his rise from radio personality to A-list copywriter, the relationship between his struggles and his success, the business and mindset shifts he’s made in the past year and how he creates so much content every single week.

Welcome Ray.

Rob:   Hey Ray.

Ray:   Hi, thank you.

Kira:   It’s great to have you here, Ray, because you are one of my mentors and I was lucky enough to be in your mastermind group last year and went through a lot of different .. my own mindset shifts just by joining that group and spending time with you. So I’m glad that we’re able to dig in and ask you a bunch of questions today. I’m also surrounded by all the books you gave me because you gave me so many books from our time together. I’m still working my way through them, but they’re all surrounding me right now. So I’ve got some Ray vibes in my office right now.

Ray:   That’s what happen with anybody who hangs around me, I’ll actually have a book for you.

Kira:   I loved it. So let’s kick it off. Many of our listeners know who you are, but let’s just share your story, how you ended up as a copywriter.

Ray:   Well, I started in the radio business when I was 14 and I loved being on the radio. I loved storytelling. I hung out at my grandparents house a lot during those days and I used to read the National Enquirer and I was fascinated by the ads. I actually thought they were articles, I was a bit younger when this was going on. I thought they were articles, they were actually ads by Eugene Schwartz. And I just remember being fascinated by them. And later I learned that they were advertising, I learned about copywriting. So I started using that in my radio career to write ads for our clients, the stations, to write ads to promote the stations.

And I did radio for over 25 years and I wrote tons of copy and I felt like I had the secret weapon because I had Jay Abraham and Claude Hopkins and Dan Kennedy and John Carlton backing me up. And nobody in radio knew who those guys were. So they were like my secret team of superheroes to make me look brilliant. And then Steve Jobs came out with this invention, the iPod and it was a thousand songs in your pocket with no commercials and no annoying DJs. And I said, oh, we’re in trouble, radio business is in trouble. So I ended up getting out of radio. I figured out that people would actually pay me to write copy outside radio.

And in the radio business, this is a little known fact, in the radio business, hardly anybody gets paid specifically to write copy. It’s always a second job or something that you do for free. Often it’s the DJ’s. So think about that the next time you’re making a big ad spend on radio, make sure you ask who’s writing the copy. But I learned that copy was valued outside radio and so I hung out my shingle, I put up a webpage and just through fate, time, God, good fortune, I got linked up with some great clients in the very beginning.

People like Armand Morin and Alex Mandossian and they began to recommend me to their friends. And so I ended up writing for Jack Canfield and Frank Kern and Tony Robbins and the list of illustrious folks I’ve had the privilege of working with goes on. And also people you’ve probably never heard of who are making lots of money. So I’ve had the chance to work with lots of different kinds of businesses and it’s just been a really fun ride.

Rob:   Yeah, we definitely want to talk about some of the clients you’ve worked for and the work that you’ve done. But before we leave your radio experience, I’m curious, Ray, are there things that you did as a DJ or that you learned in radio, aside from writing copy that you use today as a copywriter or that you use in the courses and the seminars that you teach?

Ray:   Well, I mean there are practical things like mic technique and recording techniques. Having a sense about what makes good audio, being brief. We often had to get across a very complex message in 15 seconds, so I became pretty good at that. Although to listen to me these days, you might wonder. So it’s really thinking about probably the key skill that I learned in radio that’s certainly well in copywriting is I came out of radio with a real sense of every time we wrote an ad or a promotional piece or we said anything on the air, it’s valuable time. Time literally is money on the radio, so we had to know what do we want to happen as a result of what we’re saying. So I had that peculiar focus on what’s my most desired outcome for what I’m saying right now. And that has served me well in copy, I’m sure.

Kira:   Ray, I want to talk about your tattoos. So I want to know what tattoos you have, what they say if you’re willing to share and what they … Everything, the catalyst for getting the tattoos and what they mean to you.

Ray:   Okay, that was unexpected, I did say ask me anything. So I started thinking about getting a tattoo a couple of years ago and I hired an assistant whose name is Tiffany Laughter. She co-hosted the podcast with me now and she had a few tattoos and we would go, when we traveled to different cities to go to events and whatnot. She’d want to go to a tattoo shop. And I just started thinking this seems kind of interesting. I think I’d like to get a tattoo. And so I ended up, I was fascinated for a long time with owls. So my first tattoo is on my right shoulder, it is an owl and to me it represents, the owl represents wisdom and eyes that pierce the darkness. So that’s why I got that tattoo and I got it … It’s rather large. It’s like the size of your open hand. I didn’t realize I was naive. I didn’t want to … Most people don’t start with a big tattoo.

Kira:   That’s very brave.

Ray:   Or stupid, but I endured and I was very happy with the result. Plus the other thing I did that was kind of crazy on that one was we’re just in Nashville and we were driving by this shop and we just pulled in and talked to the artists. And I said, ‘Well, let’s do it.’ I had no idea who this guy was or whether he was any good or … But it turned out well. That’s the first tattoo I got, the next tattoo I got was the Memento Mori tattoo, which is on my left forearm. And of course that phrase means, roughly translated from Latin, it means remember you are going to die and it’s meant to get you to contemplate your mortality, not from a sad kind of spooky way, but to realize you’ve only got so much time. So be aware that, that’s true.

So on the other arm, I have a Latin phrase that is Vita Abundat which means live abundantly. So to me, those two go together. And then I have on my left shoulder, I have, this is the biggest piece of artwork I have so far. It goes from the top of my shoulder all the way down to my elbow. I have a tattoo of a lion and underneath the lion is the petals of a Rose. And it represents a courage and beauty and grace.

Kira:   Yeah. And we can check out all those photos to anyone listening, if you want to check it out, check out Ray’s Instagram feed, they’re nice shots, especially that last one.

Ray:   Thank you. I have one more tattoo, the most recent one I got is just inside my right elbow and it says SOU and it has a date, 3/23/85 and it has a special meaning for me and my wife. The date is our anniversary.

Rob:   Very cool. And anybody who’s listened to your podcast, Ray, realizes that the tattoos are maybe part of a change that you’ve been going through, not just in life, but in business. You’ve changed a lot of things. Talk a little bit about that, what’s happened with your business in maybe the last 18 months or so that has changed the focus and the way that you approach things.

Ray:   Yeah, sure. Well I guess I have to go back to the Parkinson’s diagnosis, which I received in 2011 and it’s a progressive condition and it’s incurable. And so it presents a bit kind of a nugget of a problem. And so it’s forced me to think about what is important in life and how I’m going to respond to challenges. And I just decided that I’m going to respond by basically ignoring it or using it as a prompt to go do things that I want to do. Realizing that I’m not going to live forever and that, even if I do live a long time I may have less ability to do things five or 10 years from now that I do now. So I decided to get busy living and doing things that I’ve wanted to do for a long time and I’ve been putting off till someday.

Someday I’ll travel, someday I’ll get a tattoo. Someday I’ll go zip lining. Someday I’ll … I have a whole list of someday things. And I’m making those today things, like doing them now. And I also began to explore my own spirituality more deeply. I’ve been a Christian for a long time and I say I still am a Christian, I think I mean something different than what most people mean by that. I’m not pretending that my interpretation of it is better or worse or right or wrong, it’s just right for me. And I’ve tried on lots of different ideas and philosophies and ways of thinking. I tried on the atheist hat for a while, which, I mean, all of this is very shocking to many people who follow me. I got lots of messages asking me if I needed deliverance or some kind of site intervention and I’ve politely declined.

But I just really got to the point where I could no longer pretend to be somebody that I was not. And it’s not that I was pretending in the past, but it’s that I just kept certain aspects of what was going on with me under wraps. And I felt like that was good imagery for my business, but I began to feel a certain disingenuousness when I would meet with people in public and they would talk to me about ideas that they felt we were probably in solidarity on. And I realized, well, I don’t really agree with that. And I just started telling people, hey, I respect your position, but I don’t really agree with it. And I realized if I feel disingenuous, I need to say what I believe is true to clearly communicate where I’m coming from.

So I started just being more me and that means I stopped wearing button down shirts and neckties and I started getting tattoos and wearing black and not being shy about the kind of music that I like and what I’d like to do in my spare time. And so that translated into my business because it’s just who I am, my business, it’s who I am. It’s been that way for a long time. And I’ve gotten a mostly positive response from my audience, some people didn’t like it and they went away, so that’s okay.

Kira:   Yeah. And I think it’s easy to look at it from a distance and say, oh, well it’s easy for Ray to change and to change his vision of his personal identity. It seems so easy for him to continue to evolve, but it’s hard for me. So how would you recommend other copywriters change their identity if they’re not happy with how they’re showing up and living and something feels off? Is there a process or is there something that helped you move along that journey? Because it is tricky, especially when you get pushback from family or friends, or it feels strange at first.

Ray:   Yeah. Well, you can always get a life altering diagnosis, that’ll do the trick. You can wait for tragedy or pain or betrayal on the part of a spouse or a disastrous collapse of your company. But I kind of feel like the best idea is why wait for that stuff. Why not do it when you actually don’t have a lot of those big problems going on and do it from a place of exploration and curiosity. So I would say if you feel conflicted about it, like you’re afraid to do it, you might start by asking what am I afraid of? What if I wasn’t afraid of what other people thought? What would this mean then? Would it be such a big deal that I was going to go take that trip or go to that meditation retreat or go hang out with Wim Hof in the Himalayas and breathe until I pass out? Or whatever it is they do.

Each person’s journey is their own. I feel like having talked to a lot of people, I feel like most people have inside themselves a kind of secret self they don’t want to show to other people. They don’t want other people to know what their doubts and fears and insecurities are and what some of their desires are. And I would look at those things pretty carefully and ask myself, why is it I want to keep that hidden and why don’t I explore that and see where that leads me? And I think that’s a good place to start.

Rob:   Yeah. I think in fairness, Ray, this isn’t a new thing for you. I mean, I’ve listened … I believe I have heard every single episode of your podcast over the last four or five years, maybe a couple of the first 20 episodes that were no longer available in iTunes, I may have missed. And you mentioned your change from radio to copy, but your business has also evolved over the last several years. I think you mostly started focusing on copy and then you were focusing on helping other people build their businesses even outside of copy and how to do that. For a while you had your son as a partner on your podcast and that changed the things that you were talking about quite a bit. And what you’re doing with Tiffany I think is different.

And as you mentioned, like you have always shown up as a Christian and been very true to the things that you believe. And so, it’s definitely not a new thing that you’re being true to yourself. It’s just maybe an evolution of where you’ve been in, in the past.

Ray:   Yeah, I would say that’s a good description of it. I’d definitely describe it as an evolution. Some people have asked me, are you going through some kind of midlife crisis? And I always answer by saying, no, I’m going through a midlife awakening. You should try it.

Rob:   Yeah. And again, that’s one of the things that I’ve really admired about you is as a Christian you show up as a Christian, you’ve let that influence your copywriting work, your pastor framework and all of that. Will you talk a little bit more about that? And how your personal beliefs or maybe our personal beliefs, can inform our business in a way that actually helps grow the business is because I think a lot of us hide those parts of us because we feel like it’s not going to grow or that it’s going to turn people off.

Ray:   Yeah, and I think that is a mistake to hide those parts of yourself because those are the ways in which you can be unique. And uncopiable and you can become a category of one because there’ll only be one person like you. And so for me, the pastor framework was, I was just kind of noodling around with trying to come up with a framework for copy that reflected some of my personal beliefs, not necessarily spiritual beliefs, but I’d say ethical or the heart based approach to copy. And so I was thinking about the word pastor and I thought, well, this … To be a pastor is to be a shepherd. It’s not really about being a preacher, it’s about being a shepherd and caring for the flock and making sure they’re protected from predators and that they have food and water and they can rest.

And the cultural story that Christians and other people know so well is that the great shepherd lay down his life for the sheep. So I thought that’s a great attitude to approach your customers with. If you approached them as a shepherd, you’re going to treat them differently than if you’re a sleazy salesman. So then I used the word pastor to construct an acronym that describes the different pieces of big chunks of copy that are important. And so I developed that framework and I actually did it for one talk. I thought I’ll just do it for this talk and see how it goes. And it really caught on. I had a lot of people say that I really liked that and I wondered if it would be a problem with non-Christian audiences, and it really hasn’t been. It’s been pretty much universally accepted.

And so, it has allowed me to talk more about how I feel about certain approaches to copy about not being manipulative but being an instructor, about not only being interested in making a sale but also bringing value even in every piece of copy that we write. I want people to get value from everything they read from me, whether they buy or not, including the sales letter. So I worked really hard to include value in every piece of copy we write, because I want to be respectful of people’s time and energy and investment they make in reading it. So it’s allowed me to talk about things like my feelings about so-called covert persuasion and manipulation techniques. And I really, I don’t like a lot of that, but more importantly for most marketers, I think it doesn’t work as well as a more straightforward approach. It’s harder to sell without tricks, but in the long run I think it’s more profitable to do.

Kira:   So Ray, when I think of a year ago, I was visiting you in the mastermind group in Spokane and just thinking back to conversations we had back then, I remember the feeling was really like anything is possible. Anytime I hang out with you and that group, it just felt like anything is possible. So as we start this new year in 2020 and people are thinking about their goals and their dreams, can you just talk a little bit about why impossible is an option and how you face the impossible and even if you have a process for facing the impossible as you look at the year ahead and think about really big goals?

Ray:   Yeah. I came across this concept from Brooke Castillo actually, who talked about setting an impossible goal. And I thought, that sounds weird, so I’m going to listen. And I listened to her give this talk about setting an impossible goal. And her reasoning behind it was that when we set a goal, a really ambitious goal, automatically our brain goes into overdrive telling us why that’s not going to work. We set a big goal and your brain begins asking you questions like, well, who do you think you are doing that? You’ve never done that before? You don’t know enough people. You’re not well known enough, you don’t have a big enough audience. You don’t know what it takes to do that. You don’t have the capital to do that. Your brain will come up with all kinds of reasons why it’s not going to work.

And so she said, ‘I decided to set a goal that was clearly impossible, and then I could just tell my brain to shut up. I know it’s impossible, I’ve already said it was so you don’t have to bother with all this.’ And so I thought, well, that’s a unique perspective. It gives me a different feeling about setting an impossible goal and so then the rest of the process is to set for each quarter of the year I’m setting 25 worthy failures that I’m willing to endure in order to move closer to my impossible goal. So these are things that I think it would take to get to the impossible goal if are able to do them. It might be things like be interviewed on all the major television networks or publish a New York Times bestselling book or … It has to be things that also feel like I’m going to fail.

And the trick is that if you are going to attempt 25 of these impossible supporting tasks to reach your impossible goal, you’re willing to endure 25 failures, inevitably you’re going to succeed at some of them. And the important part of the exercise and reasons for doing it this way is not to achieve the impossible goal. The important reason for doing it is to become the kind of person who could achieve that goal. Because if you do what I just described, you can’t help but become a different kind of person because you’re going to be doing things you’re not comfortable with a lot. 25 worthy failures per quarter is a hundred failures a year you’re willing to endure and they’re not small failures, they’re significant ones and you can’t use an escape fail. Like an escape fail would be, well, I was going to get interviewed on all the major television networks, but I never contacted anyone in television to try to do that. It just didn’t happen, so I failed.

That is an escape failure. That’s not really a worthy attempt. So you have to actually try and I just find this a compelling framework for setting goals and at first I was a little reluctant to not set any other goals just to set this one impossible goal, but I realized, well it’s going to force me to set all the supporting goals I would set anyway because I have to be fit in order to carry this out, I have to have energy to carry this out. I have to have a clear schedule to carry this out. There are things I would’ve set as goals anyway, that has to be part of this overall impossible goal that I’m pursuing. So that’s the reason for choosing a goal that’s clearly impossible and impossible just means I don’t know how to do it yet.

Rob:   Yeah. I love thinking about this and I’d actually like to go a little bit deeper. Like, is the impossible goal a financial goal? Is it a health goal? Is it overall across your entire life? Will you share your impossible goal?

Ray:   I will. It can be any of those things. The exercise to do is to sit down and brainstorm as many possible impossible goals that you can think of. So it might be health, fitness, relationship, travel, some kind of house. Maybe you want a jet, maybe you want a yacht. Maybe you want to make a million dollars net personal income to yourself. It could be any of those things. So you make a big list, I recommend write another at least 50 of them, maybe a hundred if you can come for that many. And then look for the one that A, is most pivotal. It’s like the one … Stick with the one thing. One of those goals, it’s likely to be one that if you achieved it, it would make all the other goals easier or unnecessary for you to set. So you’re looking for a goal that’s like that.

And also one that excites you the most, the one that gets you jazzed, you say, wow, that would be so cool if I could do that. And then if that doesn’t do it for you, just pick one. It doesn’t really matter. But I’d really recommend picking one that excites you and mine is to have 3000 students in our Copywriting Academy coaching program by the end of the year. And for me, that currently feels impossible because I’ve never done it before. And if I was able to do it, I would’ve done it. But it’s made me think at a whole new level. I’m already doing things that I’ve never done before, I’m moving in directions and circles that I’ve never moved in before because I’ve realized I’ve got to become somebody different who shows up in a different way, not a fake version of myself, but a more evolved version of myself to make this happen.

Kira:   Can you share some of those examples of what those worthy failures might be for you with that impossible goal in mind?

Ray:   Sure. One of them is, I have a lot of, I would call it relationship capital that I’ve never tapped. I’ve never gone to many of my clients and friends who are very well known and just asked for a favor, would you promote this for me? Yes, because it’s worth promoting, but I’ve never asked you for this before, would you be willing to do it now? So I’ve begun doing that. I began having those conversations. I told myself I was waiting for the right day in the past, that’s what I told myself. I realized I was just afraid. I didn’t want to have people that I think of as my friends and colleagues say, no, I didn’t want that rejection. So I’m not really that different from most anybody else I suppose, but that’s been a stress for me. And it’s been interesting to see the people who’ve stepped up and said, absolutely, I’ll help you. And there are also people who’ve said, I’d like to, but I can’t and I’ve survived both answers with no problem.

Another example would be one of my impossible worthy fails is to publish a book that’ll be a New York Times bestseller. So there’s a lot of steps involved, but I’ve made a lot of progress that I never made before. And right now I’m in the process of working with an agent to get the proposal in front of several major publishers who are, have already expressed interest and they’ve already been talking about numbers that are blowing my mind, I’m like, I’ve never heard numbers like this before, just as an advance for a book of mine. So those are a couple of examples and it’s just stepping up in realizing I’ve got to show up playing a much bigger game and it’s working.

Rob:   So as you think about the goals then that you’re trying to reach. And I’m thinking now I’ve got to get bigger in my own goal setting and thinking, but how do you organize your day so that you’re actually focused on getting that stuff done? Because I imagine you’ve got so much stuff going on with your podcast, the content that you put out, in supporting your courses, I know you do some daily video casts on YouTube and then in other channels, how do you organize your day so that you can get the goal stuff done and still get everything else done?

Ray:   Well, I’ve got a team, that’s one of the things I realized I had to hire more people because there was things I was doing that I could no longer do. Somebody else had to do them. So I have a team that I rely on and I organize my day using Michael Hyatt’s Full Focus planner. So I basically sit down the night before and I pick my three big items for the day, my big three, the things that must be done for the day and I decide what they are ahead of time. I map out my schedule with paper and ink, I also keep a digital calendar, but there’s something about the paper calendar, writing it down with a pen that makes it feel more indelible in my consciousness. And that’s a slow process for me because I’m not the world’s fastest with handwriting, if I want it to be legible, but it’s worthwhile because it helps drill into me the importance of what I’m committing to do that next day.

So I do that. I didn’t have a list of secondary tasks that if I find myself with weird time in between, I can get some other things done and I’m getting much better at delegating. In the past I sort of delegated, or what I realized I was actually doing was abdicating. I just say, here, go do that. And then have no criteria, no reporting mechanism, no checkup mechanism, no quality control. So we’ve changed all that where we’ve systemized the delegation process. And I’m really getting focused on making clear boundaries around my working hours and having less of them. Because I find the more that I compress the time that I’m working, the more I get done in those hours and the more I get done overall. So it doesn’t make sense that I get less done by working 60 hours than I do by working 40, but it’s true.

Kira:   And Ray, what would you say to someone who struggles with those boundaries and even maybe has an assistant too, but just, I don’t know, just really struggles to set those boundaries and uphold those boundaries along the way?

Ray:   I have a two word counseling process. Stop it. I mean, there comes a point in time where we know what we need to do and there’s a moment of personal integrity where we have to decide am I going to do this or not? And if you’re not willing to do it, you have to ask yourself, well, why am I not willing to do this? Why am I not willing to stop this behavior? And it pays to dig a little into that process. There’s something that you’re thinking that’s causing you to experience a certain emotion that you associate with this problem, that your emotion then controls your behavior. And it turns into a habitual process. I believe we get habituated to non-productivity, to depression, to anxiety. These are habitual states that we find ourselves in and we can unhabituate ourselves, if that’s a word. We can break those habits and form new habits, but it takes conscious effort and work.

Rob:   Yeah. Well, as long as we’re talking about managing our day and these big goals, can we also talk a little bit about failure? I think that recently you started a membership group and pulled back on that because it wasn’t right for various reasons, but you’ve obviously experienced some failures in your business. Will you talk about some of those, the things that maybe have been setbacks and how you got through them.

Ray:   Yeah. The most recent one was that membership group, which, I mean in a lot of ways it was successful but it felt like we were very off course. And the more we worked on it, the more I realized this is not where we should be focused right now with the main focus of our company. So we’re going to set this aside for now and we’re going to focus on what we’re good at and what we’re best at, what we’re helping the most people with. And so that’s what we did. And I guess, I’m trying to think of another example. A couple of our earliest live events were not profitable. They were really expensive, you guys put on live events, you know they’re really expensive.

Kira:   Yeah.

Rob:   Yeah, and non-profitable.

Ray:   And it can be easy to put them … To do them and realize I didn’t make any money. In fact, I lost money. So I did have a conversation with Michael Hyatt at one point about that, and he said, you can look at it like this. This is an opportunity for you to brand, to deepen your brand with the most loyal people you have, the people who showed up for your event. So if you look at it as a branding opportunity, it doesn’t feel so painful to think you didn’t make a profit on that particular event because you have more than one purpose in doing it. It’s not just about making a profit, it’s about making an impression.

Kira:   So Ray, I don’t think we’ve talked about this before on the podcast, but I would love to talk to you about manifestation because I feel like its something that people get wrong quite often and they think it’s one thing, but I know you have a unique way of looking at it. So can you just talk through your process for manifesting?

Ray:   Well, I don’t know how unique my process is, but I’ll tell you what it is and you can decide.

Kira:   Or I guess also where we get it wrong too, where we don’t hopefully understand what that actually means.

Ray:   Yeah, I do think I know what you’re talking about there and I feel that there’s the movie The Secret and there’s a lot of books and material that have sprung up around that idea of manifestation. I think the idea that people get is if I just visualize something enough times strongly enough, it’ll happen. It’ll just come into my life. If I visualize a Lamborghini, one will show up in my driveway somehow. And it might be I win a prize in a lottery or I get an inheritance or somehow it just shows up miraculously and all I have to do is visualize it and want it badly enough, put it on my vision board and I just don’t think that works usually. Maybe it works sometimes, I don’t really think so. But it’s possible.

I think what is happening when we manifest properly is when we focus on a future outcome that we want and we do it intensely enough and vividly enough and repeatedly enough, and we start experiencing those feelings of actually experiencing that moment in the future as if it were real. We really feel the joy of experiencing that change, like one thing that I’m working on manifesting is being free of Parkinson’s disease. And I realized when I started this process, I was going through the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza and he was walking us through this meditation about being in the moment when you achieve the thing that you want to achieve. And I realized, I don’t even remember what it feels like not to have this problem in my body every day. So I had to work really hard to get to a place where I could remember it or I could remember how does that feel?

And when I did, in the first meditation that I was doing, where I had that feeling of being in that moment and being overjoyed that my gosh, I feel free from this. It was incredibly impactful and very moving and I just felt gratitude well up from inside me, joy, well up from inside me. I didn’t have to work it up or chant a mantra or anything like that, it just came from the inside and I realized this is it. I have to cultivate this feeling because our neurochemistry, when we end up habituating to a certain chemical cocktail in our neurochemistry through repeated use of those drugs that we make in our own head, we don’t have to go take drugs from the pharmaceutical company. We make our own, and most of us get addicted to the drugs and stress, the hormones of stress. But it’s possible to get yourself addicted to the hormones of gratitude and joy and that’s, I think that’s a big part of the secret of actually manifesting and yes, I think that those feelings then cause you to seek out in your environment things that will help you get there.

So I’m doing all the other things I can think of to make this happen. I’m working on my nutrition, on my fitness, on my diet, on my supplementation, on any treatments that may be helpful to me getting to that place of being free from that disease. And still, I do think there’s something more going on because I’ve just seen too many examples in my own life and the lives of other people where the manifestation happens, but it can’t be explained by the efforts of the individual alone. There’s something else happening. And some people would say it’s the universe. And I would say it’s God and other people may have another explanation, but I’m going to go with God. And that works for me. You don’t have to agree with me, I don’t have to make you wrong for me to be right, so that’s okay.

But I know there’s something happening that cannot be explained merely by the logical sequential actions that we take to make our dreams come true. And part of it, I think may have to do with the fact that our brains give off an electromagnetic signal. And when I first heard this, I heard Joe Dispenza say that, and I thought, that’s BS. That’s not true. So I went and did the research, which means I Googled it. And it turns out apparently the human brain does give off electromagnetic signals.

So we’re signaling the environment around us and we don’t really know what effect that has. There’s a lot of dispute about that, a lot of debate about it. But it’s fair to say we don’t really know what difference it makes, but I think if one particle on one side of the universe in the world of quantum physics can affect the state of another particle on the complete other side of the universe instantaneously, it’s just possible. It’s something we’re doing in our head can affect our outside environment in a way we don’t yet understand, so that’s about as deep as I can go down that rabbit hole.

Rob:   Yeah, it’s definitely a cool principle to think about. So Ray, as you look back at your business, certainly since you transitioned to being a copywriter, are there two or three things that you look back and say, oh yeah, those are the things that made the biggest difference in my success?

Ray:   Yeah. And my podcast is probably the biggest single thing I’ve done that’s made the biggest difference because I’ve done it consistently for 425 weeks in a row now. Never missed a week. And I don’t think it’s the greatest podcast on the internet, but it’s certainly one of the most consistent and I think that has huge value. I think being as much myself at whatever given point I was in the journey was an important contributor to the success I’ve enjoyed and my relationships with my clients. I always enter into those relationships wanting to serve them at the deepest and highest level I possibly can. And I’m devoted to excellence in that way. And I think that’s earned me the trust of some key people who have referred me to their friends and other companies. And it’s made a huge difference.

I mean, if I didn’t have the referrals that I get from some of my earliest clients, I wouldn’t have the business that I have. And so I value those relationships deeply. I didn’t enter into the relationship with the thought of using them for that purpose, but that’s what came from the relationship as a result of how deep it went.

Kira:   I know we only have a couple minutes left, but there’s a question I really want to ask you about … I read on the interwebs about how you race cars at fast speeds while you’re traveling is it true and if so, what cars, how fast are you going? Can you just paint the picture of what this looks like?

Ray:   It is true. So far it’s only been, like I think we’ve had a few Mercedes, couple of Mustangs, a Dodge Charger. We just discovered we can get these high end super charge cars when we rent cars wherever we go. And I don’t do the driving, Tiffany does the driving, she likes to drive fast and I like to go fast as well, so it’s possible we’ve been involved in a couple of drag races.

Kira:   Oh my gosh.

Ray:   Because it turns out when you have a car like that and you pull up beside somebody at a stoplight and one of you raises the engine, the other one will look to you with a big grin and there’ll be a nod and then you know, the race is on.

Kira:   That really happens?

Ray:   Oh yes. Oh yes. So we’re actually going to formalize it the next time we go to, there’s a couple of places we’ve discovered we can go and actually rent a race track and get like a Maserati or some of the more exotic fast cars and get some actual race car driver training. We’re going to do that on one of our future trips.

Rob:   Yeah, I can’t wait to hear about that on the podcast. So Ray, if you lost everything, you don’t have the clients, you don’t have the cloud, don’t even have the podcast and had to start over as a copywriter, what are the first couple of things that you would do now to get that client or to rebuild your business? Hopefully cutting out some of the time that it’s taken to get back to where you are today.

Ray:   I’d write a sales letter about myself, about my skills, what I can bring to your business. And then I would start looking for the clients that are my perfect client. So I would define who my perfect client is. And I love the way Frank Kern describes picking your perfect client. He says, pick a client that you would, whatever you want to charge them for the work. If you want to charge them $100,000, you would do the work for them on spec and only get paid if they actually made the hundred thousand dollars back and you believe they could do it. And if they would do it and they would pay you, that would be your perfect client. Yeah? And I thought yeah, that would be a perfect client. That’s your perfect client that you want to try to find.

It’s not that you’re not going to get paid by them in advance for your services, but you want to pick somebody who you would trust and you believe they can actually achieve the success it would take to justify them paying you, that they would actually pay you. So that actually if you think about it, it’s a pretty stringent set of criteria. But I would figure out who my perfect clients were and then I would approach them with a value proposition that it’s all in favor of them. Just getting started out and starting from scratch, I lost everything, I probably would offer to make a deal just like the one I just described. I go to them and say, look, you don’t have a lot of reason to believe that I can do what I say I can do, but I’ll give you a reason. You only pay me if it works. Let’s roll up our sleeves and do it.

Kira:   All right. So Ray, we want to know what’s next for you and where our listeners can find you, especially if that big impossible launch is coming up, where can copywriters go to find you?

Ray:   Just go to rayedwards.com and sign up for my email list where I will send you a lot of email, I promise. I won’t let you down and you’ll hear about opportunities to enroll in the Academy. We’ve taken the Copywriting Academy and taking it from just being a course and we’ve turned it into a coaching program. We actually have coaches that work with the students that coached him on copy and on mindset and help them get better as writers. And we walk them through a year long curriculum. We’re serious about this, we want to turn out the best copywriters in the world and the most count audible copywriters in the world because that’s an issue in the industry, and we have a certification program, which is not open right now, but for those who are interested in getting certified, just come join the email list or listen to the podcast, you’ll hear about it when it’s available. And that’s it. That’s what we’re focused on right now.

Rob:   Yeah, there’s a lot of gold in the past episodes of your podcasts with more than..you’re.almost 500 episodes, it’s hard to get through them all in a short period of time, but if you’re willing to dedicate the time, there’s a ton of value there. And I’ve appreciated what you put out in the podcast, in a lot of your video stuff. I’ve been in the previous iteration in the course that you had and it’s all good stuff, so we highly recommend to anybody who’s looking for that kind of information.

Kira:   Yeah, and I recommend following you on Instagram because I love how you show up on Instagram. I think it’s an example of how you can show up in an authentic way. And it’s a great example for all of us. So Ray, I know we have about 20, 30 more questions for you, but we’d love to have you back to ask you more questions whenever you want to come back. And it’s just been an honor to speak with you today.

Ray:   I’d love to do that. I’ve really enjoyed hanging out with you guys. Thank you.

You’ve been listening to The Copywriter Club Podcast with Kira Hug and Rob Marsh. Music for the show is a clip from Gravity by Whitest Boy Alive available in iTunes. If you like what you’ve heard, you can help us spread the word by subscribing in iTunes and by leaving a review. For show notes, a full transcript and links to our free Facebook community, visit thecopywriterclub.com. We’ll see you next episode.

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