Unlocking a Billionaire Mindset: Crushing Limits with Brain Science feat. Dr. Shannon Irvine

Hello, future billionaires. Welcome back to another episode of the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. I'm your host, Ben Frazier, and today we brought on a very special guest. Her name is Dr. Shannon Irvine, and she has a PhD in neuropsychology. And so this is really fascinating area of science, and her whole goal is help activate entrepreneurs, investors to reach epic levels of success. So she has a podcast called Epic Success Podcast and just really, really cool, the intersection of, you know, where we have limited beliefs, but also the actual brain science about how to move past those, how to crush your obstacles and get to that next level of success, whatever that looks like for you. So this is a really long podcast. I go for nearly an hour diving into, you know, different stories that she has and then the actual specific 4-step process that she walks her clients through to get to these new levels of success. So this is something you really want to listen to. We all have these limiting beliefs, you know, even as entrepreneurs, as investors, and things that are holding us back from getting to that next level. So this is something I want to listen to a few times. I think I'm going to go back and listen to it again. And I think you're really going to enjoy this kind of unique episode in our podcast. And be sure to share this if you're enjoying it, leave a 5-star review. We appreciate that. And hope you enjoy. This is the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast where we uncover the alternative investments and strategies that billionaires use to grow wealth. The tools and tactics you'll learn from this podcast will make you a better investor and help you build legacy wealth. Join us as we dive into the world of alternative investments, uncover strategies of the ultra-wealthy, discuss economics, and interview successful investors. Looking for passive investments done for you? With Aspen Funds, we help accredited investors that are looking for higher yields and diversification from the stock market. As a passive investor, We do all the work for you, making sure your money is working hard for you in alternative investments. In fact, our team invests alongside you in every deal so our interests are aligned. We focus on macro-driven alternative investments so your portfolio is best positioned for this economic environment. Get started and download your free economic report today. Welcome back to another episode of the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. I'm very excited about today's guest. This is Dr. Shannon Irvine. And she has a PhD in neuropsychology. And one, that's just impressive right off the bat. But, but two, what I think is really going to be fun about this episode is, you know, this is Invest Like a Billionaire. We're big on investments and economics and doing due diligence and understanding how to invest like the ultra-wealthy. But what I've found in so many discussions with individuals that are investing passively, entrepreneurs, others that are trying to do this, investing in alternative assets, inevitably there's always some level of limiting beliefs and things that people just don't feel, you know, like they have the competence to do something or to learn this or, you know, even how to make the decisions. And so when I was talking with you on a mastermind together, which is really, really cool, and just hearing what your kind of expertise is on, I was like, oh, so be perfect for our listeners because so much of what we focus on is the kind of tactile, tangible— here's how you look at a deal, here's how you understand the macro— but not much on the kind of inner battle, inner challenges, limiting beliefs, the roadblocks that everyone faces, whether it's running a business or an investor. So way long, too long of an intro. I got to let the expert talk here. So, Dr. Urban, thanks so much for coming on.

Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to be here with your tribe because what you just said was so true. We, we learn from incredible people like you how to do the thing that we know we need to do strategically, which is amazing. And then there's this hidden piece of the puzzle that we were in a conversation in our minds around, well, I'd like this, or it'd be amazing. And, and they're probably, knowing your audience, they're probably binge listening to your podcast. They're doing You know, they're, they're learners. I'm, I know because they're hanging out with you and what you teach. And yet still we will find ourselves playing smaller than we want to, whether it be in business or investing. We'll find ourselves taking safe steps. We will find ourselves really in this place of I really want that. And even planning, yes, I'm going to do this I'm gonna, but yet that time frame never comes. And really, it's because our brain is wired to keep you safe, not successful.

Man, that, that's a powerful statement right there. So before we dig into it, I'd love to understand a little bit. So what, what is neuropsychology? I mean, I know what neuro is, I know what psychology is, but what's kind of that science related to?

Yeah, so neuropsychology is really the study of how the brain affects how we think and what we do. And honestly, I would like to say I'm super smart and that's why I did that, but I'll be really, really honest. I was just— I say the doctor stands for desperate enough because I was so frustrated with this glass ceiling I saw above me. Like, I knew everything to do, all the strategies. I could teach the strategies if I wanted to, because that's how much I had learned. But yet still I couldn't get past this level in my business. And if you don't mind, man, I'm going to tell the story because it applies to investing, it applies to entrepreneurship just the same, where I could do only so much and then somehow I would sabotage, somehow I would procrastinate, somehow I would find some reason And that number for me was $200,000. I could get my business to $199,999. I'm not joking. Somehow I would cool the temperature back down underneath that $200,000 level.

And was that a conscious awareness or just looking back? Absolutely not. No.

What— in fact, it was kind of this culmination where I hired a mentor, drained my savings account at the time, told my husband later, "Love you, babe. Sorry about that." And started working with a mentor because she seemed to be just like me. She put her family first, she put God first, but yet she had 3 multi-billion-dollar businesses with a B. So I figured I was gonna mentor with her, she was gonna tell me the secret strategy that she had that I didn't. And in the time with her, I figured out or discovered that I was doing everything she was doing. There was no strategy that she was doing that I wasn't. But she thought differently about money. She thought differently about time. She thought differently about her worth. She thought differently about her impact in the marketplace. And that's what made me start to really go in and think about why does she think differently than me? And she gave me a challenge. She said, Go and drive in a neighborhood, you know, multimillion-dollar home that you'll buy when you— which— when you get to this place. And I said, okay, I've done that many times before. I love doing that. So I was driving around. She says, no, no, no, go make an appointment with a realtor. Walk in, act like you're going to buy it. And all was good as I was cruising around the neighborhoods. But as soon as I got out and shook the hand of the real estate agent, I heard it. My dad's voice on the backs of good people that make $200,000 or more. One of my core values is to be generous and to be a good person and honor God. And, and so it makes sense. My brain was doing everything it could to have me simmer down when I was getting across that $200,000 level. And whatever it is for you, you've got one too. And It's only because as I was growing up, this belief was repeated so much around me that my brain saw it as such a threat to pass over that threshold. It meant I would become a bad person and start using people. And so that's the hard right turn for me that said, I've got to go figure out how to train my brain differently and open up this door to studying thinking and success. And that led to an obsession around, well, how do you change it? And then I was just the one desperate enough to go and study under a PhD, which was a fun experience too, honestly, Ben, because I was the only entrepreneur in the room, only believer in the room, and I was solving mine. So I was trying to combine things as we do as entrepreneurs to solve the problem. And my professors could not wait to get me out and get my dissertation approved because they were so tired of trying to solve how we think. And it was in that time that I created this brain-based model to remove limitations and build a success pathway or success switch that you can flip in your brain to actually allow that next level to happen.

Man, I'm very excited to keep going here. Um, so with the limiting beliefs, do you find— does most of it come from like the environments that we're in, or what, what is usually the source of these things that become, I mean, really subconscious ceilings that we put on ourselves?

Yeah, one of the best questions I've honestly ever been asked, because first of all, 90, 9-0, 90% of your daily current actions, decisions, and results are coming not from your thinking mind, not from your prefrontal cortex, but from your subconscious automated pre-programmed patterns that are in your subconscious to help you. Your subconscious does this because if we had to think all 60,000 thoughts per day, we would not get out of bed. So the system itself is meant to help you. It's meant to use less glucose, which is the energy we use to think with. However, it doesn't look at our vision board, and it does not look at what we have business goals or investment goals. It looks at what gets repeated. And here's the key to what you just asked. The part of our brain that can call BS on something like— that's the thinking part of our mind— doesn't fully develop till we're 21 for women and 24 for men. So every limiting belief that you have, it's not your fault. You actually didn't create it. It was created either in your family of origin, environment of origin. I just gave you a story of one of mine then I had this part of my brain that could say, that's not right. These are good people. They're generous. That part of my mind was not— nowhere near entering into the equation. And so what got repeated over you, whether you had the best family, the worst, or somewhere in between, you don't have to go back there, which is great news. But it's been repeated over you so much that it just became an automation, a belief. That went into your subconscious around money, spending, worth, investing, all of it. So it isn't your fault. You actually didn't create it. But how— now, after this interview, I hope you get a passion for going in and uncovering what is running in automation so that you can then choose if you want to keep it or not. So really, environment of origin, family of origin, plays a huge role on what limitations are there and what also positive beliefs are there that are helping you to— that you're doing. All of it is there. And so obviously the things that are working for you, you just keep doing. But you really— more important than any strategy or tactic is getting super uber committed to knowing what is running the show 90% of the time so that you can choose if you And you kind of alluded to this earlier, but the reason that we have these, or our brain creates these, is a safety mechanism, right?

So it's, it's focused on protection, it's focused on keeping things stable, keeping our organs working and us, you know, out of danger and other things that are just kind of innate. But then when you kind of come up to these, it's, you know, it's, it does the downside of it, which is the limitations. Am I thinking about that right? Like, is it 100% right?

Yeah, because here's what we do as investors and as entrepreneurs. We— our brain's job is to keep everything aligned with what's in subconscious automation right now. Every limitation and every positive.

It's—

that's what it's protecting at all costs. And so here's— here we come along as entrepreneurs and investors. We're wired differently, right? And so we want these big visions, these big dreams. And so we've got an automation running 90% of the show. That's saying, stay safe, don't invest, don't take risks, don't move from this place. And then you've got our thinking mind saying, I want a billion-dollar investment portfolio, I want to be wealthy like billionaires, I want to have this successful business. And we put our brain in a, in a bind. And the good news is, when you do that, you can actually uncover some of the stories that are no longer serving you and get rid of them.

Man, I'm reading a book right now and I feel like it kind of applies to this. It's called 10X is Easier Than 2X. Are you familiar with Dan Sullivan?

Yeah.

And he talks about like creating the frameworks for growth, right? And making the argument that 10Xing your growth is actually easier than 2Xing. And the whole kind of simple process of doing this is looking at the Pareto principle of, you know, 20% of your efforts, your inputs are creating 80% of your outcomes. And the flip side of that is 80% of the things you're doing are only producing 20% of the— of what you're doing. And so the more you can continue to do more what works, right? And it conceptually, that, that sounds simple, right? I'll just do more of what works. But what he talks about is that 80% is a crutch for most people because that's the comforting thing. I, I know what I can expect if I continue to do this. 80%, at least I know what the result's going to be, even though I know in the back of my mind it's not actually getting me where I want to be. It's helping me stay safe in this, in this place. And it takes courage, it takes, you know, bravery to go and say, you know, I'm gonna just cut out 80% of what I'm doing to do more of this, right? And sometimes it actually requires a step back. It requires a total rewrite of the things that you're doing in a new evaluation. So it's just interesting hearing you talk about that. That's the first thing that's come to my, my brain, because I'm in this process right now evaluating like, how do I go to that next level and get out of the safety of the things that aren't really producing what I want to produce?

Yeah. And as typical driven, ambitious people, We have a belief, and I know your listeners are just like you, and so we have a belief that somehow we can outperform it, outfigure it, figure it out. Like somehow we're gonna muscle our way, hustle our way, do whatever we can do. We'll figure it out. We'll figure out ours, right? However, this is the imagery I want to give you, and I hope this helps somebody really get acceleration today, no pun intended, because like you, myself, most entrepreneurs, most investors, we're constantly learning, doing. We've got our foot on the gas of our business or of our investing. We, we don't have to be encouraged to continue to grow. We naturally are wired that way. Most of the people are— you are going to be that way. People listen to me. So I'm not saying everybody's that way, but certainly entrepreneurs, certainly investors. That listen to us, they're gonna be that kind of person. So your foot's on the gas all the time, and that's where the frustration lies, right? 'Cause you're like, I'm doing, I'm do, like, I'm, I'm doing all the right things to get this breakthrough, to get to the next level, to move, right? Why isn't it happening quite for me? But it's like you've put the foot on the gas, but yet at the same time, there are these automations running about what is a safe number of, of money. Right? What is a safe number of profit? What is a safe number, or what is a safe amount to put yourself out there and take risks? That's running autopilot. And if I can give you an imagery, it's not that you're not putting the right things, doing the right things, pulling the right levers, foot's on the gas, but your foot with those stories are on the brake at the same time. And that's exac— I don't know if you like that resonates so much with me, 'cause that's exactly what it feels like. Like you can see where you wanna go, You can touch it, you can taste it because that's how we are. But yet still it just feels like there's this massive tension. Or like, you imagine if you were full speed ahead in a Ferrari and you put your foot on the brake at the same time, it's not going to be good, right? Yet we invest more in putting more, more gas, right? Instead of saying, wait a minute, sometimes we've got to slow down to speed up, slow down a little bit to speed up super fast. And it's like getting that foot off the brake Removing the limitations, which is the great news, is, is such a brain-based, simple step-by-step process that once you're able to do that, then there's nothing that stands in your way. There's no conversation about what do I need to get to the next level. You just get to the next level because the things tethering you back are cut, and so you fly.

Yeah. Okay, well, what would you say are, are some of the most common limiting beliefs, or what are some of the biggest things? Like, for me, I feel like I've struggled with, if I'm busy, then I'm being productive, right? You know, busyness equals productivity, and that's definitely not always the case. And it's, you know, as time fills up, that's part of the challenge, is like, I need to cut some things to make more room for the things that actually work. But what are some other things you'd find? Like, obviously you had this one, like a certain number of like, this is a number that is just if I go beyond this and there's maybe moral, ethical problems with who I am, my core identity issues, what are some other kind of key ones that you find with people?

You know, you just hit it. Ironically, we hate these things as business owners because they're not tactical, but they are identities, right? So it's where things hit our identities and where the core three— and again, I talk to entrepreneurs and people that you talk to. So these aren't like your everyday folks, but these are us. The big 3 for us is how are we feeling valued as a human being? So a lot of us, what we do and our identity is mixed up, right? The more we do, the more valuable we feel. And so obviously that keeps us in this hustle, do more, do more, do more, do more. Yet it's never getting us— it's keeping us safe because I'm doing, so therefore I'm feeling valued. But it's not— it's putting you in opposition to where you want to go. And the other one is, for a lot of people, especially if you're a newer entrepreneur or newer investor, it's, um, you're scared to be like judged or seen as faulty or seen as not enough. And that, that kind of comes down to that place of we all need to be loved. So these stories always get created around our basic identity human needs, which is to be loved, to be enough or valued. And then for us, we have the extra layer of the temperature barometer around money. So you'll probably— and I'm just curious from your experience with your clients, like, we all have a level. Like, I had that $200,000 level that up to that point is fine. Anything beyond it has a different identity attached to it. And as long as you didn't hear any negative identities attached with those next levels of income investing or income generation, it's okay. But if you did, if the moment you, like, I'm good with a million in profit, but $10 million in profit, like, I want it. And I'm not saying that for myself, but I'm just saying, like, I want it, but what it makes me think about the person that creates that. And you can, you know, just by thinking that one question, what do I think about a person that's at insert number here? Or what do I think about somebody who can invest insert number here? And when you start to feel some of those negative identity associations with whatever level that is, that's your cap. You cannot go past it unless you move that identity on purpose.

And you're saying before, like with the $200,000 number, you would— you'd get close, but then you would start self-sabotaging, right? So without even knowing it, but it's just like you're saying, he's not going to go past. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, like, as you can probably tell, I'm a little bit of a Type A person. And so, like, I'm a doer. And all of a sudden I wanted nothing more than to sit on the couch. Like, if you talk to any of my friends, that's not something I generally spend a lot of time doing. But all of a sudden I do that, or I would do what I call entrepreneur procrastination. We're so different than the rest of the world. We don't just like sit down and chill. We're like, I'll go work on this other thing that's not really creating any income. Oh, I'll go help my kids with X, Y, Z. Or like, we're doing this interesting diversion kind of procrastination. That's what I was doing. Busy, felt like I was doing a lot of things. But yet the one thing I knew would move the needle over $200,000, I was— my brain was throwing all the neurochemicals at me to not do it.

Okay. All right, let's, let's shift gears here. Everyone's dying like, Ben, stop asking questions, let her tell us what the steps are. But okay, so let's break it down here. Um, so what was kind of, you know, your journey in discovering this, and then what are the kind practical things that you've discovered with kind of the brain science?

Yeah, absolutely. So as I said, they couldn't wait to get me out of that PhD because I was trying to solve me. And so I kept combining different modalities, and I, I will always say I am not a snowflake or a special unicorn. I'm not. And so when I noticed like limitations were starting to fall off of me, I knew like, okay, This is pretty incredible. Like, this is how God wired our brains. And when we know it, and, and I'll give you the steps, like, how amazing. Because then we remove limitations by keeping us from anything that we want. But being an entrepreneur, I'm like, I gotta prove this out. So I had about 10 one-on-one clients at the time, and I said, business coaching them. And I'm, you know, my, my promise at that time was to help them get to six figures and beyond. And I said, listen, I'm just going to add this on top. And this is what I want you to hear as investors, as entrepreneurs. This isn't an either or. This is a— if you add this layer on top of what you're doing, this is the secret sauce that changes it all, right? That missing thing or that hidden thing that you've been looking for. So I did that. I said, let's keep business coaching, but I want to take you through this model, which we call in our world the NeuroCoach model. And I have one guy that I was coaching that had one limitation. And by the way, you don't have thousands, so don't worry. This— we really only have one or two core ones. They all kind of are tentacles, all lead back to one or two. He had one. We moved him through this process, which I'll tell you the simple steps that we took him through. His business within 30 days went from six figures to eight. It was the only thing in the way. It was just this one thing. He couldn't see, let's call it a blind spot, but he couldn't, he didn't know why. And how frustrating that is when you don't know why and you want it so much. And then I saw this, you know, on and on and on with all my clients, and I'm like, okay, that's when I took it online and really started coaching people and certifying coaches with it. But the, the—

was this something that to you is like an obvious flaw or thing that you could see, or was it kind of through the process of dialoguing, or I mean, to me it seems like if there's something that's that big of a roadblock, you know, certainly you'd think you'd be self-aware enough to understand that. But Webimboa is out here.

Our blind spots are just that, like, they're not huge. If they're huge, we can see them and sense them. Our blind spots usually— I always love that story about like the Gold Rush. Have you ever heard that story where the guy that originally bought all the mining equipment and mined for the first time in California, Have you heard this story?

No, no, tell, tell me.

He bought like all the equipment, like leveraged all his relationships, bought all the equipment, and he drilled to find gold. And he was drilling this way and that way, this way and that way. Has lots of applications for what we do in investing and in entrepreneurship. And he, and he finally just was so busy drilling, he, he said, I can't keep going, I just, I have to sell it. So he sold it. And the gentleman who bought it saw all of the paths that he was trying to take to get there. And he said, I just told the people he hired to drill, I just want you to stay in the same line and keep drilling. And the guy was 2 inches from the biggest gold rush that has ever been recorded in the name of history of the state of California. And why that's important is sometimes we're just the smallest bit that is literally pumping the brakes of the biggest breakthrough that we could possibly imagine. But because we're doing what's only familiar for us, we just can't see it. We can't experience it as a blind spot. So long story to say, usually you're so close to it you can't see it, and that's when The steps that we take you through really allow it to break wide open. And here's the great news. If you're investing or you're an entrepreneur, we are people that we put ourselves in resistance kind of opportunities all the time, and either we take them or we play smaller. But that's— remember when I was telling the story about me? It wasn't until I put myself in that, that position where I was shaking the person's hand, maybe for an investor, it's making that next investment that you know you've been wanting to do forever, but you haven't. So you start, you know, acting like you're gonna go do it. As an entrepreneur, it's like putting an offer out there, whatever it is. As you lean into the version of yourself you want to be versus the safe version, your brain naturally— this is just a natural occurrence— the part of your brain that is running subconsciously right now, that she's running 90% of the show, when you start moving like into the unsafe territory, it gets louder and louder and louder and louder. So it throws a lot of neurochemicals at you to get you to stop. If that doesn't work, then it start— you start to hear the story. And like I said, on the backs of good people that make $200,000 or more, I heard the story. So we just— I just started working with him around, okay, but what is the next thing you know you want to go do but you haven't done it because you're playing safe? And he told me, I said, okay, today. And we made a plan for him to do it and then get on a call with me because I knew it would come to the surface. And that's why having a coach in your corner like Ben or like myself, it really, really helps. But as that statement came forward for him, which was interesting because he was a very powerful guy, but he had this thing like No one will listen to me because he, his childhood, no one listened to him. He was like the last child of 7. No one would listen to him. So it's like, see how little that is? It's so little.

Oh yeah.

But yet like, he's like, okay, I did it, but I don't know if he's gonna listen to me. I'm like, there it is. So the 4 simple steps, cuz that is the question you asked, is first you gotta recognize it. And the only way to do that is to lean into resistance. If you do what is safe and familiar, you, your subconscious will protect the story, protect the pattern. But if you lean in—

And how do you lean into that? I mean, for you, in your story, you said you took the step of going and looking at the bigger houses that you couldn't afford at that point yet, right? Yeah. So what is that kind of like a practical way to just go put yourself in a position that you're gonna be uncomfortable in and—

You're gonna be uncomfortable. I see. Our brain is keeping us— think about everything that's in your subconscious is aligned and repeating what you've already created. It's not creating what you want to create at all. Like, its job is to keep you safe, not eaten by tigers, not, you know, attacked. That's its job. And so for me, it was meeting the real estate agent. I was good driving around the neighborhoods all day long, but it was when I had to get out and say my name and have the conversation like I was going to potentially buy this house. So for somebody else, it might be actually calling. I— and you would know the steps for an investor or for an entrepreneur. It might be if you're just getting started, it's, you know, putting yourself out there, speaking or putting yourself out. It's actually going to do the thing that is scaring you. Doesn't mean you actually are completing it all the way, but it's It's— you're taking all the necessary steps. You're making the phone call to get on the stage. You're, you're doing the, the work behind the big thing that you're— you honestly have stopped yourself from, right? And it's beautiful. It's just the way God created our minds. It just comes to the surface because that's actually how your brain is wired. It's wired to get louder and louder to protect you. So we're kind of hacking that system by leaning like you think, like, here's your automations, here's where you want to go. If you put a rubber band between there, that creates all this tension, right? So your brain is like throwing neurochemicals your way to get you to collapse back down. But instead you're saying, okay, I'm going to lean toward this, and then my, my subconscious mind is going to give me what it is that's keeping me in fear or keeping me separated from it. So it's just the first thing is recognize and, and, uh, Then it's as simple, and this is gonna seem so rudimentary, you're gonna be like, really? That's not that exciting. It's not. I told you it was 4 steps. It's simple. It's not easy. It's simple though. So recognize, number 1. Number 2, you gotta physically write it down. Why does it say record it? You've gotta physically write down what you heard. No one ever says, I have imposter syndrome, or I'm overwhelmed. They say things like, my clients, who the heck is going to listen to me, right? It's very specific words. That's why it's— it isn't cookie cutter. It's, it's based on your background, your environment, your environment of origin, your family of origin. So what the words that you hear in that block, you actually physically write them down. The why behind that is if you think about everything that makes up your subconscious mind, it's It's visual stuff that you see. It's kinesthetic. It's using, you know, all of the things like your writing and your vision and your hearing. It's, it's using those systems because those things are what create memories and repetition. So what we want to do is really pull it out to your thinking mind. So when we physically write it down, we're just really pulling that statement all the way out of your subconscious to, to, for you to look at. And at that point you make a call. Hey, this works for me. I'm going to keep it. Cool. Do nothing. Keep going. That's usually not what it is though, because usually we— but if you don't like, this is going to stop me from everything that I want. So now I've recognized what it is, I've written it down. And the third step is— and we take people through a specific process around it— but is to actually put it on trial because As you know, if it's not something that's going to serve you, it's a lie, right? It no longer serves you. It's a lie. You do not want that. It's not serving you. So we put it on trial like a lawyer would put a defendant on trial, and we do that in a logical way, come up with all the evidence against it, right? So in my $200,000 story, I came up with all the evidence that the more money I made, the more impact I can have. At that time, I'd already started our charity and we were 3 years into helping AIDS orphans in Uganda. And so the more money I made, the more money I can give to these kids that we were serving in our, in our ministry, right? So I came up with as much evidence that that statement was false, a lie, right? Direct evidence. Indirect evidence, you know, in that example, how many people do I know that make over $200,000 that are incredible human beings doing incredible things, right? So I was really building a case for my, remember, this isn't just building a case for me, Shannon, or you, Ben, it's building a case that what's in automation is faulty. 'Cause we were doing a brain-based process. We've repeated it so much family of origin, environment of origin, it's seen as a belief, and your brain's protecting that belief. So now you're bringing it out and you're saying it's not a belief, it's not a belief, it's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong. And so what's happening neurochemically is kind of like a jackhammer to a freeway. Your, your subconscious is like, wait a minute, I thought this was— to put a voice behind your subconscious— I thought this was 100% belief. Well, I guess it's not, because look at all this evidence they're coming up with against it. And you also have to do an emotional process too, which I won't go in depth with, but you do need to handle the logical and the emotional because that's how we store things. But the great news is, once you have that and you feel like it's solid, like there's no more proof you need to come up with, then we literally create what I call a truth prime, and you just listen to it. You just literally retrain your brain, build a freeway toward the truth, which completely eradicates, or in a fancier term, synaptically prunes away this automation that's running that is literally blocking you from everything you want. So it seems so simple, like, really? Like, I could do that in half hour. Yeah, you really could.

Right. I mean, starting with the recognition, I mean, that's probably half the challenge, right? Is if it's a blind spot, how do you, you know, like you say, lean into the resistance? And so you have to take account of where do I feel the resistance and what, you know, what does that mean, right? Because naturally your body, maybe you, you know, get short of breath or palms get sweaty or you have a physical reaction, but it's just your body and your brain trying to protect, right? And And then going through that and you talk about, I mean, because I do love the science side of this, you know, selfishly I love to understand because, you know, as I've said, a little bit of psychology, not a massive amount, but like old frameworks of psychology was that the brain was kind of this, once you kind of hit a certain age, your neural pathways are, you know, pretty deep, they're formed, it's hard to change. But the idea of neuroplasticity has kind of revolutionize a lot of things that we can do and allow for these changes, right? Instead of, oh man, I had this trauma that happened to me when I was, you know, 12 years old or whatever it is, I— that's just who I am, that's just what I, you know, that's my lot in life, and so I have to accept this. But so talk about just the actual science, the brain side of this, because like you're saying, you know, you can actually rebuild these, these new neural pathways. And I'm— might be using the wrong terminology here.

Exactly what it is. These are, these are automated neural pathways that when the repetitions happened when you were growing up, childhood origin, it's— there's a certain amount of repetitions that build an automated pathway that goes to the subconscious. Really, there's— if, if there's two sides of the fence, there's a normal thought, which is thoughts are just energy, it's just glucose. And you've probably heard there's this synaptic gap that a thought has to jump over. So as we're thinking, planning, all the stuff we're doing with our prefrontal cortex, if I scanned your brain there would be a thought and it would be jumping a synaptic gap. That's a healthy brain with new information, new processing, that kind of thing. And then when it— when repetition happens, that gap closes and it gets closer and closer and closer and closer. And then there's a moment where we can see the actual bond happen, which I— this is the part that I love, because then you're like, that's now in the subconscious. We can see—

yeah, that's cool.

Like, it's automated now. And so, and again, remember, it doesn't see the vision board, it just does automates what you repeat. That's good news. Like, that's great news. And, and then the newer science of synaptic pruning, we think of that side of things as the bad thing as you get older, like, you know, like parts of your brain kind of disappear. No, no, no. Like, you can on purpose go in and prune away the thoughts that aren't serving you. And that's exactly what we're doing with what I just told you, which we call the Mind Matrix, is we can see an automated glued-together neuropathway start to pull apart in what we call prune, where the, the two sides of that neuropathway literally fall so far apart that that thought can't fire again, not on that pathway. Now, if you built it again, of course it would create again, but that's when you see it like that, you realize Wow, I didn't know I had this Ferrari operating system sitting on the top of my shoulders, that I have the capacity to decide what stays and what goes. And so when you build in this automation on top of this, and we call this brain priming, but when you build a vision prime in to where you want to go, now that has a freeway. And that's when you really flip that success switch on in your brain, is when you're when you're not just affirming or doing affirmations and some of these kind of half measures, but you're building a brain-based pathway toward where you want to go as if it's happening right now. Your brain takes it as safe and it starts automating those things. And that's when you see people speed up, when you see people like go super fast toward their goals. It's because that's— that process is happening whether they realize they're doing it. Or not.

Yeah.

Wow.

Very interesting. Another thing that you said just on the third step of putting it on trial, to me, was interesting. Like, I think about my own kind of limiting beliefs, or like what you're saying, just connecting to, well, if I make more money, then that just means I might be, you know, a selfish person, or, you know, not whatever. But, you know, for me, as I think about wanting to invest well and grow wealth and you know, there's certain numbers in my head, you know, says it again, type A person like you, like I want to go achieve, but then take a step back. I'm like, well, what's the purpose, right? What's the point? And that could almost be like a limiter as well because I'm conflicted with— I have this inner, inner drive, but is it connected to something that's bigger than just, you know, in this case, accumulation, right? That's, you know, not something that I'm— you know, there's a certain— at a certain point you're going to be fine, but you know, for you is connecting it to this, this ministry that you have, this nonprofit that is serving a higher purpose. And now it actually becomes a motivator, right, to where, you know, the more money you make, the more you can, can do. Right. I think for a lot of investors and people and entrepreneurs where you have an inner drive and sometimes you think, you know, the initial goal is just a certain number, whatever that number is, right? If I just hit this number, then I'll be happy. But we all know because we've heard so many stories that You know, once you hit that, nothing really changes. Like the, the gap that you're in, your soul is— yeah, it's just, you know, bigger problems, different problems that you have. But it's, you're tying it to a why, tying it to a bigger purpose. Um, if you talk about that a little bit, because I feel like that's a little bit of a nuance that could be pretty powerful in this, in this process.

Super powerful. And honestly, both parts are, are incredible, but this is the part that I love to do, and this is why we call it brain priming. It's You've got to— you don't want to put your brain in a bind. So what we were talking about is doing just that. I want, but the outcome of that want causes me pain, right? And so when, when we do that, when we, when we set goals or create vision and we don't have like the deep why behind I want to do it— and the, the simple way to kind of go through that exercise is just to ask yourself So that what? Like, I want to make $10 million. Why? Well, so that I can be safe in my family. Great. Why? Right? And just keep asking yourself that question because as you keep answering that question, the top line is going to sound very superficial. It's all who you are, so don't look at it that way. But it might be like something like, because I want to help, you know, a ton of people and I want to make an impact and I want to, right? And that's true. But as you get deeper, keep asking yourself why. You know what, where I got for me was because I never want my child to feel the way I feel, as desperate as I felt not knowing where my next meal was going to come from. I'm not— I don't ever want my children to think they don't have a purpose, right? So it started with, I want to make money, I want to do purpose. But as you drill down personal to you, Now you've attached for your brain this powerful fuel behind every action you take toward the result that you want to get. And, uh, this is a big part of brain priming. So we're always in our world with our clients, we're always working on two, well, three big scales. We're always building this brain-based belief and never putting our brain in a bind. I want to make more money, but money makes me evil, right? That, that's going to keep you sabotaging. So we've got to make sure that where you're headed really is developed out to where you know everything that's going to happen as if it's already happened. And that's the key. Your brain doesn't need to see it to believe it, but it absolutely needs to believe it to see it, for you to see it. And I'll, I'll kind of illustrate that point. Um, prior to leaving my PhD, I did a lot of work with research. I found— I find research really, really interesting, and, uh, I continue to do it with entrepreneurs. It was— it's very intriguing how our particular subset of brains work very differently than the rest of the world. And I'm going to be writing a book on that at some point. But, uh, what I did get to be participating with was this research. And there's lots of the research that we did, but this one stands out for high performers like us. We worked with an athlete, and this athlete was an Olympic-level athlete that kept, like, missing— he was a swimmer, and he kept missing like 0.002 from the first place. And they agreed, he and his coach agreed to work in the lab with us, kind of working through this idea of brain priming. So the deal was, you work with us for 60 days. There's a key 67-day metric. That's why we call our program the 67 Day Year. You take— that's about the time it takes to create an automation all the way through to where it's automated in your subconscious. So we worked with him for 67 days. We measured his knowledge of a stroke initiation So if you're a swimmer, this makes a lot of sense. If you're not like me, it did not. But evidently there's more than one way to initiate a stroke, and that takes small twitch muscles, which are usually not very developed. So we measured his learned knowledge of this, this new stroke initiation. There was none. That's very simple science. It's gone on for a long time. We also measured the muscle connectivity, the growth in that muscle. That small twitch muscle, which I think at the time was like 3.5% or 4%. It's just not a muscle that he needed to use in his craft or in his, in his sport. So we worked with him training his brain to believe it. He never got in the pool for those 67 days. All the other swimming, but he never did this stroke initiation. At the end of it, 67 days later, we measured his brain again, 100% learned knowledge. We see that a lot, so that wasn't— we weren't surprised by that outcome because it's something a lot like people doing this kind of thing, learning the piano, never touching the keys. We've done a lot of that, but the muscle grew by 98%. What? Yeah. And that's, that's wild. They went on to, to, to close that gap on the time. And so that's the power that's available to us when we align our brain to believe it first so that we can see it. And that connection to why I want it in the first place is super powerful piece of the puzzle, so that when you automate that future place as if it's existing right now, your brain just sees it as this place that is inevitable, right? And then by nature, we have a part of our brain called the reticular activating system that starts to allow things in to draw that to us. It's crazy, right?

It's crazy. That is really wild.

Go, Council. I'm like, this is way too exciting to, um, yeah, I'll need to know it because we're entrepreneurs. I believe investors and entrepreneurs, I would say, are the same. We were put on the earth, I believe, to change people's lives and to make the world a better place, right? And, um, the more we can train our brain to prime our brain so that our brain sees where we need to go, the faster we get there. And the more we remove these limitations, the faster we get there. So these are two, like, hacks. And the third is just aligning with your brain in terms of how you accomplish things. And we probably need a different podcast for that, but that a lot of the current goal setting is kind of in opposition to how we work, our brains work.

So, man, well, yeah, I think we gotta have you back on because this— I feel like we're just getting going. I might get in a free counseling session here.

So awesome stuff.

This is great. So what's, um, what's the best way for folks to kind of get into what you're doing? I think you have an event coming up. And, and is, is what your role may offer is like you have coaches that kind of walk people through this process? Give a little bit of sense of kind of what you do, um, and what how you can help people and where to find you.

You, you're so sweet. So we have a coaching program called the 67 Day Year and create a year's worth of business growth in 67 days. And we're doing a free live event coming up called the Unleashed Entrepreneur, where we're going to walk through and teach you the main entrepreneurial strategic levers and how to train your brain at each point so that you can have income acceleration and grow. and we're gonna do that for free. And yeah, we do have a program called 67 A Year where we take you through and coach you through this process. And, uh, it's not a long drawn out process. It's a 67-day process. You can keep doing it over and over again. And we also teach you how to align with your brain to accomplish more. And it's so much fun. We deliver the entire communication on like what you need to know in 3 days. And then you coach through the 67 days and get unleashed to next levels and next levels and next levels. And then we also certify coaches. That's a different program, but they can go to unleashedentrepreneur.com if they'd like to come for the live event and start to learn how to train their brain to transform everything in their life.

Okay, you guys heard it. Go to unleashedentrepreneur.com. Is that right?

Yeah.

Okay. And sign up for this event. And Dr. Shannon, thank you so much. This was really, really fun and very, very insightful. So thank you so much for sharing.

Well, thanks for having me on. I love, love getting to share the hacks to get people to grow.

It's awesome. And you have a podcast too, so that's— tell us the name of that again. Epic Success, right?

The Epic Success Podcast. And yeah, you can we talk, we deep dive on all these topics. So you can jump over there and learn more.

Great. All right. Well, thanks again for coming on.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.