Here is the full interview with New York times best selling author, Pam Grout. (for the ones who are interested in Pam, here is link to my previous blog about her.

Ana: Pam, we’ve met in 2014. in your first ever 2 day workshop in Bern, so I decided this would be a good start for our talk. What is the thing you remember the most about this seminar?

Pam: I really enjoyed that workshop. I don’t know if I had changed the name yet. At some point, I started calling my workshops „playshops“.

Because we did a lot of silly things, playing, feeling joyful. That’s the best way to get what I believe to be an important spiritual truth: joy is our natural state. This, to me, is what life is all about.

I learned a lot during that workshop. If you remember, it was my very first all-weekend workshop.

A: When you started the workshop, I remember the story you opened with. It was about a young boy that insisted that he stayed alone with his baby sister. When he finally did, he came to his sisters cradle, leaned over and asked her: Tell me about God. I started to forget. It was really a powerful story. Why did you choose that particular story to start with?

P: Kids know. They come in knowing. They know the connection, the joy, the power. That little boy knew his „job“ was to create, play and have fun. Every kid does. Sadly, after some period of being in this world, we learn the proper cultural paradigms, we learn the rules and we forget who we truly are.

A: Bob speaks about paradigms too. After about the age of five, the border between your consciousness and subconsciousness is closed and everything you absorbed about yourself and world you live in – is stuck there. That means all the information you receive from the outside at a later stage in life is already in accordance to what you already believe world is.

P: So true. I talk a lot about quantum physics concept of collapsing the wave. When we come to this world, we are in the state where everything is possible. And as long as we stay in the possibility state, we can do anything, we can be anything, we can have whatever we want.

But as we start growing up, we collapse the wave. We forget that everything is possible and we accept that what we have, what we’ve learned is all there is. A Jesuit priest said once, if I get a kid by the time they are five, I have them for life. And that is what Bob Proctor is saying about paradigms. So we end up staring at the creation someone else made instead of creating ourselves.

We also learn the rules of our culture. We learn what is and isn’t fun. For example, we learn that vacuuming is not fun and going to a movie is. We learn what is allowed and what is not. In reality, fun—including vacuuming—is possible. It’s our minds that make these decisions.

A: Now let us get back to your first bestseller, E-squared. I remember when you said that this book in the beginning had a different title. Could you tell me more about it?

P: Today I get daily emails from people all over the world and the book has become internationally successful. But I wrote it 10 years earlier, it was published under a different title. It was named: „God doesn’t have bad hair day“.

It quickly went out of print. Instead of getting upset about it, I started working on my own frequency, getting happier and feeling more joyful. I could have been upset about it but I decided to go ahead and do something else. I started traveling and I wrote 3 other books for National Geographic and after some time I decided to get back to this book and rewrite it.

Changes were minimal. I made a switch from calling the power God to Energy in the quantum sense of energy. In the end, it is all the same, God, Energy – I even called it Divine Buzz in my book. All roads lead to Rome, right?

So I sent it to Hay House and it became a huge bestseller. Maybe the new title was more compelling and there may have been a few other factors but I believe that the biggest cause for the success of the book was that my frequency changed. I became happier, open to possibilities. My frequency was ready. When you stay in a possibility state instead of a problem state, this is where things shift. I believe I played a big part in that process.

A: After some time came E-cubed…

P: I loved that book too. It’s still one of my favorites. It tells stories about some of the things we talk about here.

A: Both E-squared and E-cubed talk about Law of Attraction. But then your next book, Thank and Grow Rich went into gratitude topic. Why the shift?

P: After I wrote E-squared I got so many mails about people manifesting miracles. They would start the email with: „you are never going to believe what happened to me.“ Of course I would believe it.

Every now and then I would get a mail from someone saying: This stuff does not work. It’s a sham.

What I came to realize is: most of the people that did not get results were stuck in a not grateful frequency. I realized that was a missing element. Everything changes when you get on the gratitude and joy frequency. It really is what makes all the difference in your life.

A: Bob is talking a lot about being grateful and he also has these gratitude pads where you get to write each day 10 things you are grateful for and also send love to 2 people that bothers you.

P: I love that idea. That makes a lot of sense. When you feel grateful, you give back. And when you give back you recognize you have everything you need. And everything you need, you can get. That is the powerful feeling, the feeling of freedom.

A: The book Thank and Grow Rich (in your own words) was a take off from the book Think and Grow Rich. This is the Book on personal development, and the one that Bob reads every day for the past 56 years. What stuck for you from this classic of Napoleon Hill?

P: I loved the part where you define your desire, put a deadline on it and describe what you will give in return. This was a powerful idea.

The other part that made a big impact on me was when Napoleon described his mental council that he held every evening before going to bed, the one with Abraham Lincoln, Emerson and other big thinkers.

And last but not least, I remember the story of his deaf son prevailing over his difficult challenges. He interviewed a lot of powerful people, who supported his theories and that made this book a great read.

A: Thank you Pam for this wonderful interview!

Pam Grout is the author of 19 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her new book, Art & Soul,Reloaded: A Year-Long Apprenticeship to Summon the Muses and Ignite Your Daring, Audacious, Creative Side. She can be reached at www.pamgrout.com or at @pamgrout on Twitter or Instagram.