Mike Pisciotta

Yes. Let’s do it man.

Mike Pisciotta

There’s a lot of ways we could talk about it. I was there for 10 years. The first 18 years of my life, I grew up in an extremely dysfunctional home. There were drugs and all the wrong things. So I was never exposed to anything good and positive. All I saw was negative, and there was no possibility one could learn how to free your mind. Not only seeing the negative but also my mindset, the way I viewed was life so negative, so down in the dumps. I was in prison long before I went into a physical prison, no one was there who could help you how to free your mind.

At the age of 18, I was addicted to pills. I woke up one day in a jail so I had no idea what I had done. It was real wake up call to me that allowed me to get myself of a sight and actually looked at life from a sober perspective. Separated from families, separated from the world, the streets, the place I knew, and it allowed me to start getting exposed to things that I never would have been exposed to even though I was in a jail. So, in a prison environment, you would think that it would just carry a person further down. It becomes so hard to learn how to free your mind.

So, I wake up in a cell and they wind up giving me 10 years. I was 18 years old at the time and you could imagine probably what that might have felt like. I felt like somebody just handed me this huge boulder and said, “Here, carry this up that mountain.”

Mike Pisciotta

No, that’s it. I was only there one time. I was sentenced to 10 years at the age of 18.

Mike Pisciotta

I did the entire 10 years sentence because of the way that the sentence instruction here in the State of Florida was the need to do the entire 10 years. So there was like no get off or good time. I went from 18 until I was 28 years old and that was it. During this time I learnt how to free your mind-set.

I think one of the most pivotal moments that I really want folks to hear and what I think really allowed those 10 years to be probably some of the most valuable years of my life is I found myself in a prison cell where I learnt how to free your mind. It was probably about a year and a half in my sentence. I was up there, exercising, having a conversation with God and with myself, analysing and processing what was ahead of me, and what I had to do ahead of me. I made this internal commitment and it shaped the entire way that I spent my time.

I made this commitment inside of me recognizing that the choices I had made are why I was where I was. I said to myself, “I chose to give them 10 years of my freedom. I did it. It was my fault and my choices but I’m going to choose to not give them 10 years of my life.”

So, that choice shaped how I spent my time in prison. I spent from the time I woke up to the time that I went to bed immersed in everything. Business marketing, self-help, spiritual in the bible, exercising, using every moment that I had. I spent every second there in learning how to free your mind. I learned how to read, write, and speak 5 foreign languages. I used every moment that I had to prepare for myself for opportunities that would present themselves when I walk out of those gates.

Mike Pisciotta

That is extremely true. Unfortunately, that’s about 99% of the case. I think it was a combination of things. I think being in that cell when I first woke up, there’s was this realization of who I had become and the effects of my choices. Just starting to see that really breaks a person. It really makes you like, “Wow. This is what you’ve done.”

I wasn’t a dumbed kid growing up. I was just involved in all the wrong things and I was unaware how to free your mind from all this. When I was in school, I was in gifted classes so I didn’t really have excuses to kind of go that route other than the environment and my family upbringing and the drugs that got involved led me that way.

So waking up in that cell and seeing what I was facing and the sentence and all of those things just break a person and make me see, “Wow man, you have to change this. You cannot be one of this guys that just, this is becoming a revolving door for you. You can’t be a guy that walks out and just continues to come back over and over again.” I knew the only way to do that was to change the way I thought about life and to change my perspectives and expose myself to just a different things in order to learn how to free your mind like things that I’ve never been exposed to before.

Mike Pisciotta

Probably, there were a couple of ways. I think one of the things that fuelled me and allowed me to continue to press in throughout and like you said earlier, the environment is so negative, it did not teach me how to free your mind. The more that I immerse myself in good things, the more that the inmates would make fun of me, and the guards would go out of their way to try to just dissuade me, “Oh, you’re going to come back. You’re not going to apply. You’re just a loser.”

I think one side of me kind of just the way that I’m built like those things fuelled me. Like, I’ll show you and I’m not going to be what you think that I’m going to be. That side fuelled and at the other side, there are tons of days where you kind of feel beat down. You wonder, “Am I going to be able to do it?” I think throughout the time in prison, probably the number one nagging thing that I always had to just deal with and faced was that I knew I was going to be leaving a prison and step out into a world that did not wait for me.

I would be 28 years old and everybody my age would be years ahead of me in their careers and they’ve got families. Knowing this it becomes so hard to teach oneself how to free your mind. I’m barely even going to be able to get a job and that was something throughout my time that I always had to deal with and bring in the perspective, and I think keeping that in the forefront of my mind was one of those things I think that motivated me to be better. I knew I had a huge disadvantage and knowing that internally is what spurn me on to continue to add things to my portfolio of what I knew, what I was capable of, my skillset, opportunities that I could cease upon because I knew that the depth was stacked tremendously against me.

So I knew that when I walked out, I had to be tip-top, ready primed, and just able to cease any opportunity that presented to me. So I think that was one of those things that continued to fuel me and then, I think the other side was seeing the negativity. It was kind of disgusting. I mean, to be honest with you, being in that environment, I would just see the way that these guys think wanting to become better criminals and I would be like, “Wow, do you not want to be a free man? There’s so much out there that life has to offer and this is all you’re thinking and seeing all that you want to be exposed of.” So, it internally disgusted me and it just created this indignation that rose up. I’m so against ever being that again that I’m just completely dedicated to moving in this direction and on the journey to learn how to free your mind.

Mike Pisciotta

The number one most successful thing is that I have the ability to wake up and both of my kids are here with me and I can spend any time with them that I want. We can up and go anywhere we go. My wife and I created financial freedom but out of the gate, when she and I first got started in business, in what we were doing, we only had one goal and that was freedom that also includes how to free your mind.

We wanted the ability to live our lives on our own terms and do what we wanted and not be constrained or confounded by people’s opinions of us, by schedules, by jobs, by busses, by any of those things. We knew that we wanted to be able to raise our kids in a certain way.

The biggest success for me now is that I and my wife created the ability to just do whatever we want and actually be part of our kids’ lives. I do not want to be like those parents that are partly involved and they see us for an hour at night or in the morning. We are there involved daily with them and I think that’s hands down, probably one of the most successful things for me.

Mike Pisciotta

We have a program called Funnel Fanatics. Obviously I would definitely recommend that. My wife and I poured a lot into it. It’s a living, growing training program where we cover all things funnels. I think probably as well outside of the program itself, one of the things that guide everything I do is my wife and I are involved in multiple things. Our main business is in the coaching or the consulting space but we also have multiple e-commerce businesses where we deal actual physical products in a wide variety of niches and we apply the very same things that we do to sell information and that we do to sell physical products.

Mike Pisciotta

I see a lot of folks get caught up in spending thousands of dollars on a website and thousands of dollars on a logo, colors, photo shoots, and all of these different things. Yes, those things have a place but until you’ve proven the concept and until you’ve proven that people are willing to spend money for whatever it is that you’re offering, whether it’s a physical product, a solution, a transformation, whatever it is. You need to prove that concept first.

My wife and I started very small in the e-commerce spaces that we’re in. We may have an idea for a product and let’s just say it’s in the fishing niche. Instead of us going out and spending all this money to put up a website and fill it with products and do all of these things and spend thousands of dollars on Facebook ads, we’ll start with maybe 1 or 2 products that we think are going to be hot sellers. Put it out there to an extremely hot audience that we would know if this folks don’t buy it, then nobody’s going to buy it and put it out there. Then, if we see that we’re getting a good response, we know we can scale this and move forward and it’s something that I’ve applied to everything I’ve done.

I’ve got a book coming out soon and my concept with the book was instead of sitting down and writing this 300 page book that’s probably going to take me 6 months to a year to write and I don’t really know what pieces people want to hear. I don’t know how well it would even sell and that’s a huge commitment. I said, “Let me start small. Let me do something that’s small like a kindle book.” That’s a 15,000 – 20,000 words. Something I can put out there a little bit faster. Put it out. See what kind of a response the audience gives me and then, take feedback from folks and apply that to moving forward. Starting small, proving the concept, and growing govern everything that I do. Even if you are learning how to free your mind, always start small.

Mike Pisciotta

It’s like what you would say. In the information space that we work when we coach clients that they have an idea for a product or a program, there’s a couple of things.

Put out a really good freebie around the topic and on the back side of that, offer something that’s congruent, right in line with the freebie and the idea of a product that you want to sell. I think its one thing to get people to give you their email address for free than it is to get people to actually take out their credit cards and give you money.

Mike Pisciotta

And so, in information space, when we work with folks like around programs and stuff, instead of having them spend all this time creating this product and program and going through this intricate launch sequence to get it out there without ever knowing if it’s going to be successful or if it is what the audience wants, we’ll have them start really small. Something like a freebie that is like right in line with the product and then create something that they can sell after the person opts-in so that we can prove that people are not only willing to give you their name and email address and get some free stuff, but that they’re also willing to pay for whatever that solution would be.

Mike Pisciotta

Yeah, definitely. For everybody listening, I think my story illustrates probably one of the most dramatic from struggles to successes. So, I think the story illustrates how to free your mind. For the folks that are listening and maybe they’re in that spot. People struggle with either their ideas and too afraid to get them off the ground or seeing things online and comparing themselves.

I would definitely say that take away from this and if it does, like make it walk out of a 10 year prison sentence and to just give context to that. The 10 years that I spent in prison were also the 10 years when we saw the emergence of things called “Google”, “Facebook”, “iPad” and “Smartphone”. None of those things existed pre-prison. And so, I walked out of this world and initially it was definitely overwhelming at first. So, for the folks listening, I was able to come out of that and I was able to create successes, you can do this as well, you just need to free your mind.

It’s really just about getting started, pressing through the fears, and executing. Execute, execute, execute. Put your all efforts to learn how to free your mind.