top of page
Search

Feel Ahead: The 89-Year-Old Performance Coach Who Discovered the Secret to Rewiring Your Mind

  • tbdomann
  • Jul 3
  • 7 min read

From Pro Mindset® Podcast with Host Craig Domann, featuring Bob Raybould, businessman, investor, performance coach, and founder of the self-improvement system, Success by Emotions (SBE)



Most people spend their entire lives trying to think their way to success. They set goals, build plans, repeat affirmations, and grind through the gap between where they are and where they want to be. And most of the time, something invisible keeps pulling them back to the same results.


Bob Raybould figured out why — and he figured it out over fifty years ago, sitting behind the wheel of a Volkswagen pretending it was a Porsche.


At 89 years old, Bob is a performance coach, author, and one of the most quietly remarkable guests to sit down with Pro Mindset® Podcast host Craig Domann. His story starts with struggle — a freshly minted MBA who couldn't sell life insurance, a stint at a large New York corporation that confirmed he wasn't built for that world, and a return to Salt Lake City where the same frustrating results were waiting for him. Nothing was working. Until one day, he heard a recording that changed everything.


Set a goal, it said. Then see yourself doing what you'll be doing after you reach it.

Bob didn't just visualize. He went to the Porsche dealership, sat in the driver's seat, and touched the steering wheel. "I felt different," he said. "I felt like I was a Porsche driver." For the next three weeks, every morning when he climbed into his Volkswagen, he touched the steering wheel and felt — not imagined, not hoped — that he was already that person. Two and a half years later, he was driving a Porsche, living in a new house, and earning four times his previous income. And then he doubled that income every year for the next four years after that.


What Bob had stumbled onto wasn't motivation. It wasn't positive thinking. It was something far more precise — and far more powerful.


The central insight of Bob's work is deceptively simple: your subconscious mind controls approximately 90 percent of your behavior. It runs on autopilot, executing the programming it's collected over a lifetime — beliefs about who you are, what you're capable of, and what you deserve. And here's the problem: it doesn't update based on what you think. It updates based on what you feel.


"Our subconscious mind is closed," Bob explained. "When we try to do something new, it fights us — because all the ideas we've collected are held in place by emotions."

This is why traditional self-improvement is such slow, frustrating work. You can read every book, hire every coach, and repeat every affirmation. But if the emotional weight behind your old beliefs outweighs the emotional weight behind your new ones, your subconscious stays put. You're trying to logic your way through a lock that only opens from the inside.

Host Craig Domann put it plainly: "Emotion is the fuel that allows you to go from a mindset to a mind shift into a new mindset."


Bob's response was immediate: "Beautiful."


So how do you actually change it? Bob's answer is both surprisingly accessible and genuinely different from anything most people have tried.


He calls it feeling ahead.


Instead of thinking about your future goal — planning it, mapping it, hoping for it — you feel the emotions you'll experience after you've already achieved it. You pick three to five words that describe those emotions. Words like gratitude, happiness, excitement, peace, love, trust. And then you say them. Over and over. Five hundred times if necessary. Not as a chant, not as a mantra to be checked off — but as a gateway to actually inhabiting those emotions in the present moment.


"The only slight change I'm suggesting," Bob told Craig, "is not think ahead, but feel ahead. Feel the emotions you're going to be feeling."


What happens when you do this consistently is nothing short of a rewiring. At first you believe you can succeed. Then you become convinced. Then — and this is the stage Bob calls the turning point — you simply know. Not hope. Not believe. Know. And once you know, your subconscious stops fighting the goal and starts pulling you toward it. Circumstances shift. People show up. Opportunities surface that weren't visible before.


"A whole bunch of things happen that are almost magic," Bob said, "because we accumulated enough emotions to put our objective inside our subconscious mind."


He describes it with a vivid metaphor: the onion. Traditional growth means peeling an onion from the outside in — layer by layer, grind by grind, until finally you reach the center and your mindset shifts to match your new reality. Bob's tool is different. You chop straight through to the core, change it first, and then work outward. The journey becomes easier because your mind is helping you instead of fighting you.


Here's what nobody tells you about this process: right before the breakthrough, your brain will try to stop you.


Bob has seen it every time. You've been saying the words, accumulating the emotional weight, moving through the stages from belief to conviction. And then, just before you cross into knowing, your inner voice turns hostile. This is stupid. You're wasting your time. Stop saying these words.


"You just have to gut it out and keep saying them," Bob said. "And then suddenly — you know you'll succeed."


This isn't a sign that the process is failing. It's a sign that it's working. The old programming is making one last stand against the new emotional reality you're building. The athletes and performers Bob has worked with who understand this don't let that resistance knock them down. They recognize it as the final wave before the shore.


"Once you know you're gonna succeed," he said, "those waves become learning experiences. Maybe it takes you a day to recognize it — but it really opened my mind. These experiences are there to help us."


Bob spent years working with athletes at the University of Utah, including kickers under Urban Meyer during the team's undefeated season with quarterback Alex Smith. He worked with players over the phone during bowl game preparations. Four of the five players he coached in an off-season group went on to play in the NFL. The results were real and measurable.


But he also identified the single biggest blind spot he sees in performers at every level.

"They don't know how good they are," he said, "because their subconscious mind keeps them from seeing that."


He points to a fundamental asymmetry in how humans process experience: we remember our losses more vividly than our wins. Failure carries more emotional weight than success, which means the negative beliefs stack up faster and run deeper than the positive ones. Every mistake, every doubt, every time someone told you that you weren't good enough — all of it is held in place by emotion. And it takes consistent, deliberate emotional work to outweigh it.


The good news is that the programming that's limiting you isn't permanent. "When we were born, we could do anything," Bob said. "We've picked up false ideas along the way that keep us from seeing who we really are. What we're doing with this tool is removing those false ideas so we can see more of who we already are."


Craig drew a straight line from this to athletic performance: "You can't outperform your subconscious programming. I don't care what your ratings are, what the scouting reports say, what your coach tells you. If you don't believe you can make the free throw, you can't."

One of the most compelling parts of Bob's story is how far beyond sport this tool reaches. He's used it to lose weight without dieting. To overcome childhood trauma. To transform his performance in sales. To build and exit a business that gave him financial independence.


The emotional rewiring process doesn't care what category of goal you're working on — it works the same way whether you're trying to hit a 90 percent free throw rate or become the person you always believed you could be.


He also offers a practical framework for how to sequence goals: focus on one thing at a time first, like burning paper with a magnifying glass. Get to the knowing stage on your first goal, and then — without even needing to reach it yet — you can begin applying the tool to a second area of life. "You can have two or three mindsets changing simultaneously," he said, "helping you move forward in multiple areas at the same time."


The vision Bob carries is enormous for a man approaching 90. He wants to reach tens of millions of people with this tool. When Craig asked him about it — half-expecting a joke about the audacity of dreaming that big at this stage of life — Bob answered without flinching.


"I want to reach tens of millions of people with this tool. Are you laughing?"


Craig wasn't laughing. Because he understood something that anyone who has sat with a person of deep conviction eventually understands: mission doesn't have an expiration date.


"When people retire and don't have an active mission," Domann said, "the expiration date kicks in. When people are driven, they're really living."


Bob Raybould's message is not complicated. It's actually one of the simplest things you'll hear on this podcast, and also one of the most radical: stop trying to think your way to a new version of yourself. Start feeling your way there.


Pick three words. Say them five hundred times. Feel what it will feel like to already be the person you're working to become. Do it consistently enough, and your subconscious will stop being the obstacle and become the engine.


You were born with everything you need. The tool isn't adding something new — it's removing the false ideas that have been covering it up all along.



Listen to the full conversation with Bob Raybould here or here and connect with Craig for coaching opportunities at Craig.ProMindset@gmail.com. Find Bob at https://bobraybould.com and follow along for resources built for athletes, coaches, and the parents who support them.



Follow Us On:

For more information about Craig and his keynote speaking, coaching, or athlete representation, go to www.CraigDomann.com 


 
 
 

Comments

© 2023 Pro Mindset

bottom of page