SSP 045: Sarah Reilly - Investing in You

What's going on, guys? It's Jordan Kanlish here, back for another episode of the State Shifters podcast. And I'm recording this intro from Bali. We're in Canggu right now. I've just had the last couple of weeks out here. It's been a beautiful little change of pace, and I'm excited to bring another episode to you guys. And this one's one from the archives. I've pulled this one out from. It's about a year old, this interview, but it was an absolute pearl, meaning there was a lot of wisdom, a ton of information, insightful information. This one, because I've interviewed an amazing life coach by the name of Sarah Riley. And basically this happened again, like I said, a year ago when I was in Toronto. I connected with Sarah on LinkedIn and was really loving some of the stuff she was sharing. So, as I always do, I reach out to people and get them on and really dig into how she came to some of the insights that she had. And really, this is an opportunity for you to really start to understand how to start to shift your own mindset when it comes to seeing what's getting in the way.

So, without further ado, and before we.

Get into things, I just wanted to make a little announcement, little plug. I have two extra spots left in a group coaching program that I started, and this is really for someone who's looking to discover inner freedom. They're looking. You're looking to discover life outside of your current situation, meaning you want to be somewhere that's more aligned, more connected, more balanced. Maybe you're not happy with your job and you want to discover more passion and purpose in your work. Well, this program is for people looking to change their life from the inside out, people who want freedom. And the steps are really discovering what it takes to have inner freedom. Because once you discover inner freedom, out of freedom is not too far behind. So I just want to extend that invitation to anyone who's listening. If you want to be a part of that, then reach out to me on Instagram 8shifter. Just send me a DM and we'll take it from there. So enjoy the episode, guys, and we'll.

Talk to you soon. Welcome to the State Shifters Podcast, a show dedicated to helping you discover your true potential through connecting the mind, body and soul.

Okay, Sarah Riley, welcome to the State Shifters Podcast. How are you?

I am awesome. Thanks for having me.

It's an absolute pleasure. We connected on LinkedIn and, you know, we jumped on a call and I really was vibing off some of the things you were saying, and I really set the intention that I wanted to bring you onto the show. And we finally made it work. You're actually in Vancouver right now?

I'm in bc. I'm in BC for snowboard season. So I'm in Fernie, a little bit closer to the Alberta border.

Yep. And I'm out here in Toronto, so we're both in Canada. You've got a New Zealand accent. So you're from New Zealand originally and now you're just kind of traveling around.

I'm half and half. I'm half Australian, half Kiwi. I was born in Sydney, raised in New Zealand. That's what the accent's about. I got one parent from each and two passports. So I'm as 50, 50 as you can possibly be.

Beautiful. Love it. So, mate, tell the listeners and viewers. Give people a bit of a background what you do, because you do life coaching, but it's. It's sort of, I would say it's a unique form of life coaching because when I had the conversation with you, it was very direct and you got straight to the point, which I absolutely loved. Give people like a background, a synopsis of like what type of coaching it is you do and then how you kind of stumbled into this path that you're on now.

Yeah, absolutely. So the nutshell version is that I help awesome people get, do or be anything they want. That sounds a little bit like an oversimplification, but that's effectively it. I help everyone from execs to entrepreneurs to creatives. Most of my creators are actors and authors. And the goal is basically, if you're not living all your dreams, then your programming is probably out of date.

Right.

The human nervous system doesn't self audit and self update. So if anything in your life isn't working, it's probably because your programming, your conditioning, whatever data your nervous system is operating off is out of date. So I get in there and I up level people's identities because that's basically what's necessary to change your world. Everybody's reality is a projection of their identity and their beliefs. So it's kind of like going into a cinema. If you don't like the movie that's playing on the screen, you don't get out your paint and try to paint roller over the big fabric screen at the front of the room.

Right.

Because that's not the source of the image.

Right.

You got to go into the back room and you got to change the real. So I guess changing the real is pretty much What I do for people, does that sort of summarize it? Does that make sense?

It does, yeah. And I found it super fascinating when we first chatted because you told, you mentioned the story that you went over to Bali, you left your. It was, it was a corporate job at the time, wasn't it? When you left, what sparked that kind of urge to leave? Was it, when did you start having these questions? Was it an awakening that you had? Was it a sudden thing or a gradual thing?

It was what I call pebble brick truck, which most people can relate to. There's a blog post to that effect on my site and on my Facebook, which is basically, you know when you know when you know. But because we live in our own particular matrix and that is colored by our own beliefs and our own conditioning and stuff like that, we tend to do what looks safe, right? So basically, yeah, you're right. I had a 10 year corporate career in risk management and I pretty much pushed that as far as I could go. It got to the point where it was the stress of that and the misdirection of it was making me physically sick. I had, I got my thyroid shut down, my skin was in pieces, I got a tumor. Like, the stress was just out of control. I'd been heavy dosing cortisol for so long that everything was shutting down. So basically I didn't jump. I got pushed, as it were. And it just got to the point where it got so bad that I stopped feeling bad about it altogether and I just numbed out. And I realized that was the point at which the huge executive salary just wasn't worth the illness anymore. So pretty much what happened in a nutshell was I quit my life. I sold my houses, I quit my career, I sold all my belongings. I packed a backpack and yeah, I went to Bali for a month and hung out with Mastin Kipp, who's a life coach from the US and initially when I left, like, I've been studying strategic intervention for about 14 years as a hobby and sort of coaching on the side. But I still had all those stories in my head about why it wasn't realistic to just travel the world, living your dreams, you know, making a ton of money, only doing what you want, and being a life coach who works exclusively on Skype, Right. It doesn't sound very realistic. Depends on who you're talking to, I guess. When people say that sort of stuff to me, I'm like, yes, obviously now that sounds very realistic. Right. I've been doing it for a couple of Years. But at the time, I had been training in life coaches coaching for many years. But all the stories in my head were about, don't know how to monetize it, never run a business before, don't know how to do this, don't know how to do that. You know, all the shit that the voice in our head says about why it's not going to work, why it's not realistic, why you'd never do it, you'd never make enough, et cetera, et cetera. So when I first met Mastin, that was in Bali, and he's the creator of Functional Life Coaching, and he's an absolute legend when it comes to digging out bullets and updating programming. And I went there. It was actually a writer's retreat. He was writing his book, Claim youm Power, which has been an Amazon bestseller for a long time now. And he was taking 30 to 35 people, I think, with him. And the goal was they provide professional writing teachers and Masten, obviously, to do the life coaching portion. And in 30 days, you write the first draft of your book or your screenplay. And I'd been trying to write my book. I'd had this idea in my head for about six years, and I just hadn't been able to get the whole thing down on paper. Takes a reasonable amount of, you know, environmental support and discipline to get a whole novel out in a short space of time. And I hadn't been able to do it. So I thought, well, screw it, I'll go and do that. Because I didn't know if I could be a life coach all of my dreams, but I had realized that you can't get to a happy destination on an unhappy journey. So I was like, I don't know how this is going to end. It could end with me under a bridge, but my situation right now is so much worse than that that I'm prepared to take the leap and just build the plane on the way down. So I went to this retreat, and, I mean, it was phenomenal. We got everything we needed. And I did. I wrote my novel in 12 days flat. And it was amazing. It was the best trip I've ever been on. His retreats are epic. But what I really got out of it, outside of that novel, was in one of the meditations, I actually accessed the key bullet that was stopping me being a life coach. So when I refer to bullets, this is my personal terminology.

I love that. Yeah, I love that analogy. Yeah.

Yeah. It's. They refer to survival meanings is the correct terminology. Basically something you learned as a child and because of the nature of my childhood, what I learned growing up was when you try to help people, they don't get better, they hurt themselves, and they blame you. So my programming that was buried deep in the subconscious in a scotoma and psychological blind spot, was that helping people caused me great pain and was a huge threat to me. So makes total sense once you understand that that's the data that your nervous system is working off of, right? So the minute I dug that out, I literally got up after that meditation, went straight back to my hotel room, logged on to get my North American coaching certification. Finally, I'd only been studying it for 14 years, right? So I, yeah, I knew all the answers. So I powered through it and then I went and did another of Madsen Kip's retreats. He was doing online entrepreneurship training in Hawaii. So I went to that one as well, got all the information that I needed about launching an online business in a week flat, launched it, and I've been pretty much sold out ever since.

Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. Just to rewind a second, the bullet, that key bullet, when you pull that bullet out, like, you know, whether it's a limiting belief, for a lot of people, it's limiting beliefs coming from past traumas. For you. You said you figured it out. You figured out what that bullet was there practices that you then had to put into place each day to ensure that the same bullet didn't keep reappearing.

Not really. Functional life coaching and strategic intervention, which are all an nlp, which are all incorporated in this process, are incredibly effective. It's not that you have to keep re digging out the same bullet. It's more a case of once you've dug out a bullet, right, you have to commit to a new way of being. And what you'll find is that without long term accountability and support, and when I say long term, I mean two to three months, right, without ongoing is probably a better word. Accountability and support. It's comfortable to slip back to what you know, because human beings are wired for survival, not fulfillment. Which means, and, you know, if there's any difficulties or any stress or whatever, we tend to go back to our emotional home. So just because you've dug the bullet out, it doesn't mean that, you know, a couple of weeks from then you won't have sort of like a crisis of confidence and need a little bit of a boost. But you'll never be operating that programming again. So it's immensely effective. You just got to get used to who you are once you let go of who you thought you were. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. So, like, were you tackling it from an emotional level? So you had like an emotional block that was coming from this bullet and then you shifted your emotional state or was it changing the meaning behind whatever the trauma was?

So there's five levels to this. Basically. Level five is the manifested behavior that you're trying to change.

Right.

You know how you can't just tell an alcoholic to stop drinking because you're working five levels too high.

Right.

You haven't, you know, disempowered the engine that is fueling it. So the behavior, me not being a life coach and staying in this career that I didn't like, was just a manifestation of an underlying belief system. So level four is the belief that's powering it. Level three is the coping mechanisms and the scab where it is in your body. For me, most of my trauma is up under the sternum for different people, it's in different places. I know some of my clients, you know, actual limbs will shake when we're going through catharsis, so it's not always even in the torso. Level two is the survival meaning, which I've just referred to. Mine was obviously that when you help people, you get hurt beyond measure. And then below that is the oi, the original incident, which is the event that caused that survival meaning to be made. And I think a really important distinction here is that not all OIs are objectively traumatic events.

Right.

It doesn't have to have been a beating or a car accident or something horrific. Human beings create survival meanings in the first seven to 10 years of their life after pretty much any event where a hit is perceived. So it doesn't, like, a lot of people will say to me, oh, I don't need to do this work because I didn't have a bad childhood. It's like the fact that your childhood wasn't bad doesn't mean your data is an out of date. I mean, if you made a lot of meanings about how to survive in the world back before you had a fully functioning frontal lobe, fully functioning empathy, no ability to intellectually reason the, you know, the behavior of the adults around you, Everything was, you know, through within theta brainwaves and you're processing emotionally like, there's just no way what you learned about the world in those years is still relevant to what you're trying to do as a 20, 30, 40 year old in 2018. Right?

Totally, totally agree. Yeah, it's Quite amazing work to see it in action. Like for you, when clients come to you, what do you find is the main bullet that keeps coming up for people? Is it like, yeah, it's a past trauma, but like, is it resurfacing as the same thing? For a lot of people it's like anxiety. A lot of people, it's like self doubt. Like, what are the correlations you're starting to notice with your clients?

Interestingly, many people perceive anxiety as just like a problem or something to be fixed, right? But I think they Forget we have 2 million years worth of evolution in this nervous system. If it's going mental, there's a reason, right? Like it's not just about, well, my system is sabotaging me or something's going wrong or whatever, or I'm broken or I'm lazy, or I procrastinate, right? Procrastination, perfectionism, overwhelm. These are all just survival paths. They don't make you a bad person, or they don't mean that you're broken or you have anything to be fixed. They just tell me that your nervous system's been triggered. So if you're running survival patterns, imposter syndrome, fatigue, aha moment addiction, you know, we buy a lot of self help books and you read the thing and then you're like, oh my God, this is the thing. Now I understand it all. And then nothing changes, right? Exactly. Like all these are just survival patterns. All they tell me is that your nervous system has been triggered, which means whatever you're trying to create in the world is contravening an existing model of reality. But to be fair, I could have told you that before you even told me what your survival patterns were based on what I've already said. So the fact that like, you'll get different iterations and manifestations of the same bullet. Absolutely. But you, like, you could not believe the power of extracting that programming. Like, I had literally been turning down emails to sign up for that certification for nearly a decade, right? My, the archive folder in my hotmail must look like an absolute war zone for the volume of Tony Robbins emails that are in there that I have just not responded to but inexplicably been unable to delete.

Right?

And then the minute we got that bullet out, I was like, oh, because you like, you hear your subconscious like, throw it up once you're in a safe situation with a coach and a guided process and you're able to like put it out there. I'm not saying it won't be nauseating I'm not saying you won't be crying. I mean, the system will throw up a lot of resistance. It doesn't want you to mess with your survival programming. But once it's out, oh my God, like it's out out. Like I literally went from 10 years in a corporate career I hated to launching a business and being really successful. Like the minute I quit my job, I did all this, I launched the business. I've never had to have had like a side job to fund this hustle. And then like that would be my message to anyone who's in the same position looking at starting something new. Number one rule, don't cheap out on what you need at the start.

Right?

Don't cheap out on just doing the work, getting the mentorship, buying what you need, right? Because you can like battle away in your basement for, for years. And the biggest cost to any business is not investment, it's not mentorship, it's not support, it's not structure, it's not programs, it's not strategy, it's procrastination. Because every month you let tech by without doing what you love. Your business could have been churning 20, 30, 40, $50,000. Which means the cost of your procrastination runs into six figures within a mere matter of months.

Right?

We live in 2018. The world is small and we're trading value for money. We're not trading time anymore. So your income possibilities are so massive that if you don't do your deep work and you know, get your identity up with where you need it to be to create this new reality, you're costing yourself six figures in under a year.

Right? So you're saying do the inner work first before your whole world is just a reflection.

Yeah, it's like there isn't any point in buying all the paint to roller over the cinema screen.

Right?

You can, I mean, here's the thing, people can make money doing hustle and grind non stop, but it's not sustainable because you can't hustle and grind yourself into the floor for the next 20 years. What would be smarter is the truth is everything has already been figured out. Just go and find the people who are doing it well and learn how to do it. Like, don't battle away in your basement on your own. Just get your programming up to date, get the data that your nervous system is operating from up to date so that your own physiology is not working against you because otherwise you're just battling survival patterns all day. And it's procrastination overwhelm perfectionism. Can't launch a business from those and you certainly can't lead. So if your field is coaching, you've got to set the standard. But it's all been done and it's all freely available. Just get what you need and like, get what you need to be able to solve problems, provide value and help people. Because the minute you start doing that, money is a natural byproduct.

Yeah, it's. This is why I love the podcast. Because, you know, I'm so. I would say I'm in the trenches right now because I left my corporate job just, just over a year ago and I'm starting to build my own business and I'm noticing these things coming up and I'm like, shit. Like here is the overwhelm, the self doubt. Like, it's all coming up because I've taken that leap. Like my nervous system is under threat. And you know, when I had that conversation with you a few weeks ago, it was like, yeah, shit, that was like a bit of a light bulb moment for me. And when you had that light bulb moment, like you still felt the self doubt and the overwhelm, but you just chose to see it in a different way and then work is that, you know, you said you make the decision to commit to coaching, like that fear was still there, right?

Or was it gone fully to a certain extent. But I think when you dig a bullet out, you got to understand that when you don't know what's hidden in your subconscious, it's in there pulling buttons, pushing levers, and steering you, and you're not even aware that it's there, right? So you can't combat something you don't know is in control. So it's not so much that I never felt fear or overwhelm or anything again. It's more just that once I learned to understand how my nervous system was communicating with me, once I learned about getting these bullets out, then what I would do is instead of getting upset that I was overwhelmed or procrastinating or even worse, like succumbing to this problem, I would be like, oh, that's weird. I wonder what else has to come out? And I would get back into the process and more bullets would come out. Like dozens come out, right? Dozens of the shit. It's not just that one thing I learned. I also learned that about how much of my childhood was spent learning that I'm not safe, that I am alone, that I ruin everything.

Right?

It's amazing how many really terrible things like children pick up from. I mean, and it's not always from bad parents, sometimes it's from well meaning parents.

Right.

Many of our parents will say to us stuff like, well, you can't just have everything you want and you don't want to be spoiled and you know, money doesn't grow on trees. And it's like most of this shit they tell us for the right reason, you know, like their hearts in the right place, they don't want us to get their hopes up, or if we're asking for something they can't provide, then they're trying to sort of buffer the disappointment. But in 2018, we have a good working knowledge of quantum physics and the world is freely available to you via your laptop. So the idea that you can't just have everything you want and make tons of money doing whatever you want, that's actually not true anymore.

Right.

And it's deeply confronting for people to have this question. I mean, if like, for whoever's listening to this podcast, if the idea that you can just have everything you want makes you feel kind of like pissed off or angry or like I'm being unrealistic, the mere fact that you are feeling that resistance in your body tells you that you have programming that contravened right now.

Right.

It's a survival system to feel cognitive dissonance. It's a psychological pain that you are meant to feel when new data comes in because your system is like, hey, we learned to survive and we did survive off the back of this data. Who's this weirdo coming in and telling us it's wrong? This is a threat to our survival. Now again, it's not like it's 2018, but you're operating 2 million year old survival software and if you don't know how to work it, you don't know how to speak to it, you don't know how to communicate it, you don't know how to speak its language. You're going to keep getting stymied by all the ways that it communicates, like procrastination, etc, etc. So it's not that I never felt those again, it's that they no longer disable me.

Right. Yeah, gotcha. So you spoke about doing the process or doing the work and like you obviously had a coach. You had a coach that worked you through it. Yeah. How important is it to have a coach? And like if someone's listening and they feel stuck at right now because they're going through these, these past traumas and they're appearing in various forms, can they do the work themselves or they can begin to do the work themselves. And what form does that come in? Is it meditation, is it journaling? Or do you recommend.

Meditation is obviously always good, right? So I would never not recommend that. Phenomenal. Get into meditation. Journaling. Yes, absolutely. The benefit of having a coach is that most of the stuff that's tripping you up will be in scotomas. It will be in psychological blind spots. If human beings could see their own blind spots, we wouldn't call them blind. Blind spots, Right. The clue is in the title, right? So the benefit of a coach cannot be understated. And the reason I say this is not just because I am one.

Right?

There's no selling podcast. I'm doing fine. But it's more a case of if you consider that the world's best executives, the most advanced people in the world in terms of human functional psychology, the people who are making billions and living incredible lives, all have coaches, right? What do they know that we don't know? Well, what they know is that it's not worth letting any unseen crap get in your way. What you spend on a coach is nothing compared to what you lose if you continue to be controlled by out of date data.

Right?

So the bottom line is I know for me personally, I'd never be without a coach because I have to embody a leadership role because of my. Because of where I am and also because of the fact that the whole reason I am where I am is because of coaches.

Right?

I would still be back doing a 9 to 5 that was killing me if I hadn't had someone update my model of reality and show me what it was I wasn't seeing. So personally, I'd never be without one. Because you find your trajectory, including your income, tends to taper off if you let your patterns get back control.

Right?

I would never be without that resource. And also, you have to understand, if you're in a service industry like, if you want people to pay you, if you want people to invest in you, you must invest in yourself. Otherwise you're just radiating this energy of I'm not worth investing in, and you will naturally end up with people in your orbit who are not prepared to invest in you.

Right?

If you're saying, well, I won't get a coach because I'm going to wait until after I get clients, you'll just see that reflected in all your discovery calls, right? Everyone's going to be like, oh, I can't afford it right now, or I'm going to pay off this credit Card debt first. And it's like, right, but your programming is the only reason you have the debt. If you don't change the programming, the debt will stay. And I've tested this theory. I've called them back after six months and said, are you ready to get started? And they're like, no, well, you know, I have more debt now.

Yeah, it's powerful stuff. Like, yeah, I've been working. Like when I first had my coach here in Toronto, when I moved out to Toronto earlier this year and I got my first coach, it was that same thing. It was like, could not believe how quickly shifts was happening and I couldn't like, you know, if someone was trying to convince me how important coaching was, I wouldn't have realized until after I'd done it. So that's why I wanted to like emphasize that fact. People listening and they're contemplating it. Getting a coach, it's just give it a try. It's one of the things you have to try. And for me it was more, it's like someone like you said, the blind spots, your coach is able to pull your awareness out a little bit more. And the minute you become aware of something like a pattern or a trauma or something, you then have that ability to choose. Through awareness comes change. And if you're not aware of something, nothing's gonna change. And for me that's. You can do all the inner work yourself. But I feel like just having a coach there just, yeah, brings your awareness to more things. So you can only get so far on your own. And that's how it felt for me. I was doing the inner work, but having a coach there was just like accelerated everything.

Yeah, exactly. One of my coaches has a similar story. Basically, she initially, when she quit her job, she kind of putted along, barely making enough to live. You know, she had to pull her retirement fund in order to eat while she was building the business. Right. And she was making like nothing. And in the end she decided to get a coach. And when you're already 60,000 deep in debt, you have no income source and no home and not no idea what to do. Getting another credit card to throw 10 grand on it for a business coach was a pretty scary move. But the very following month she made $8,000 in her business. And now her business makes over 80amonth plus a couple of six figure launches a year. So it's like you can, it's not that you can't afford to get a coach, it's that you must do whatever it takes because you can't afford not to.

Right?

If you like. The thing I want to tell people is you. If you've been operating a certain way up until now and you're not a millionaire, then what you do on the Daily does not make a millionaire. We've proven it over and over and over again, right? If your business isn't thriving, your health isn't amazing, your relationships aren't healthy, then whatever you're doing, you can love it as much as you like and you can feel as right as you like, but it's not working, right? So if you don't change what you're doing, then it's not going to change. Everything in your world is just a reflection. The whole world is mirroring back to you what you believe. And if you're not able to change your beliefs because your nervous system is too, like, linked on, then, yeah, someone's going to have to come in and guide you through that process. 100%. And there is nothing more valuable in the world.

100%. Yeah. And at what point did you realize you wanted to be a coach? Because, you know, you said you had. It was on your radar for a while. Like, for a lot of people that are listening to these types of podcasts and they consume my content, for me, it's the people who are doing the work. Like, they're willing to go deep and transform themselves. And I believe these are the people that are the next coaches. Like, that's. I never considered myself. I never even thought about being a coach until I started doing the work. And now I'm realizing, wait a second, I want to help other people do this as well. Was that how it worked for you? Like, was it during your corporate job, you started doing this work and you realized you want to be a coach?

Incidentally, it was long before I honestly, I got introduced to personal development. My mom's cousin's ex's brother came around to the house I was living in, and I was like, 18. I just moved out of home and I was renting a room so that I could go to makeup school. Hilarious. And he was like, oh, hey, you should read this. And it was a Dale Carnegie book, how to Win friends and Influence People. And I came from a pretty sketch background. And so I had a lot of understandings about the world that were very negative. And I was very much like, I had, like, raging depression and CPTSD and a bunch of other stuff going on for a long time.

Right?

So I was. I was very messed up at that stage. And I read this book, but like, even though I was very messed up from a lot of what happened in my childhood, I was born a very happy, excitable, energetic person.

Right.

And so when these, like the books, Tony Robbins, Dale Carnegie, all the rest of felt familiar, it was like coming home. Even though, you know, I had a lot of programming that was very negative, it was, you know, when I saw this stuff, I was like, there was a part of me that was like, I knew it. I knew there was more. I knew that after being told for a couple of decades that you can't do anything and everything's super expensive and the world is dangerous and this and that, all the rest of it, I was like, no, there's more. Other people are doing more. And even though I've been programmed to, you know, be very derisive of wealthy people, it's. That's not right. There's, you know, there's more. I know there's more. And every time, every time I found another Tony Robbins book or another course or another seminar or another webpage or anything, I was just like, see more of this. So I actually started, like, I've been pretty much binge watching Tony Robbins strategic intervention instructional videos for about 14 years before I even quit my corporate career. I started when I was 18. I'm almost 35 now. Yeah, I had been. I was 14 years deep in the content before I even set the certificate. So I knew I wanted to be a coach before coach was even a widely known job. And obviously, like, you're from the same part of the world as me.

Right.

We're down in Australia and New Zealand. Coaches are not as well known. I do have clients down, but it's not like in America where everyone has a coach. Like, I don't really have to explain my job a lot. In North America, almost everybody has one at this point, or they're excited to hear that I am one and they've been thinking about it and can I tell them what it involves?

Right.

Whereas down where I'm from, it's a little bit more, you know, the New Zealand culture is very number eight wire.

Right.

Like what I found growing up across the board. And I don't like making generalizations, but I'm sure they'll find this one funny, is that they're not really into hiring consultants. We take a lot of pride in doing stuff ourselves. Right. We take a lot of pride and just sort of like manning up and handling stuff. But the way I look at it is it's like if you break your leg, you're not just gonna limp around on a broken leg for five or six weeks, you know, being in terrible pain because you just gotta harden up, right? Like you would just go to the ER and get it set and get some painkillers and stay off it for a few weeks. You can get that same service for your procrastination. You can get that same service for any part of your life that it sucks, right? So it's like, why would you tolerate it under this, you know, guise of all, Be all right, don't be alright, be phenomenal, be fucking amazing, be a millionaire, be an author, speak six languages. Like lose all the weight. Like, what else about how people do start businesses, grow your business across the country. Like do anything. You can literally do anything. It's 2018, we know how quantum physics works. We have the Internet. There's no such thing as I'll be alright. Why would you be alright?

We've got to swallow the pride really, don't we, a little bit.

Although to be fair, I think maybe it's because Australia has a bigger population but you guys are exposed to more stuff quicker. I find you get things a little earlier. So to be honest, it doesn't take as much explaining for there. But yeah, depends where you go back home.

So how does someone go about finding the right coach? Do you just say go with the feeling? If it feels right, you feel like this is the person, then it's funny.

You should say that because I kind of realized that this was a problem as well a little while ago. And one of the courses I'm launching next year is actually called Introduction to Life Coaching and it's for people who either want to hire one or thinking about being one. And it gives you all the base information about what it is, what the different areas are, what the key things to look for, pitfalls, the nature of the relationship, what's going to happen, et cetera teaches you all about the cathartic process and it's basically an intro to this. So when I launched that next year, if anyone is interested, just reach out for that. But what I would say right now is discovery calls are free with coaches. I've met a few who charge and I don't really understand that because the discovery call is a time for the coach to understand where you are in your life, where you want to be, what it's going to take to get there, do a bit of digging to see like how many of your onion layers are loose, as it were. That's usually what I'm looking for. I'm Looking for, have they moved from the victim loop to the accountability loop yet? Are they committed to doing the work? Because, you know, I show up 100% and if the person isn't just as invested in their own progress as I am, then you'll have, you know, there'll be a limited effect. So the discovery call should be free. They should be spending 30 minutes to an hour. I spend an hour. It's not widely recommended because I think a lot of people confuse the discovery call with the sales call. But on a discovery call, I'm not looking to sell someone. I'm looking to go digging and I want to find out why are you where you are and how do we get you where you want to be? What will it take? Are you ready? And if I produce a few, you know, internal situations there, what's your reaction? Because if you go from zero to puke in the first 10 minutes, I know I got to be more gentle with you. Right. So my answer to your question is do the discovery calls with the people who are in the area that you want to be successful and find people that have obviously, you know, achieved what you want to achieve.

Right.

If you, if it's purely business, you can hire a business coach. But be aware, if your business isn't working, the problem is you. So a good business coach is still going to be digging into your personal shit. Like you can't just hire a business coach and rearrange your emails and then everything will start making money. It's like, no, they're gonna, they're gonna dig into your personal shit. But just do discovery calls with as many coaches as you need to until you find one who you feel understands the problem and who you vibe with. And for the love of God, always ask them if they have a coach because there's a huge ethical concern with someone who says that you should go out of your way to afford a coach, but they wouldn't do the same thing. The bottom line is they either believe in the process or they don't. And if they're not investing in themselves, then that should be a red flag.

Yeah, okay. Really good advice there. And again, yeah, if someone wants to connect with you, they. I'll put the links in the show notes. No worries. For a lot of people like me back, you know, over a year ago when I was at my corporate job, people get stuck in soul sucking jobs because they're afraid to take that leap of faith. Like maybe they've just, they know what it is. Maybe it's coaching. They have a Passion for health and well, or whatever it may be, but they're scared to take that next step. And it's a big step because for me, I left Australia, came out to Canada. My girlfriend's from Canada. So I had a reason for traveling, but it was still a big step nonetheless. But it doesn't mean you have to travel or do something that's overly risky. But for a lot of people, they create scenarios in their head that keep them the way they are. They'll say, like, you know, get a comfortable pay here. They'll create excuses to keep them where they are. Like, what. What would you say to those people who, you know, they're on the edge, they're thinking about taking a leap, but they're just. Their nervous system is keeping them trapped or stuck.

Yeah. So what they're experiencing is what I call soul versus biology.

Right?

Your soul wants to do everything. Your soul wants to travel the world. It wants to help people. It wants to learn languages, publish books, live dreams, go snorkeling in the Galapagos, jump out of planes. Your soul is like. Your soul is here for the full human experience, good and bad.

Right.

Your biology is just wired for survival. So the first thing to understand is one, the voice in your head isn't you.

Right.

You are the space in which that voice lives. Or I like to say that I'm sitting in an armchair behind the voice, drinking Starbucks and being amused.

Right?

Like, you're not the voice. And the voice, your ego, is designed for survival. Like, that's what it's there for. It's a protective shell. So it's designed to get you back to whatever it thinks is mere survival, which for a human being is, don't burn any excess fuel. Stay near a heat source and eat.

Right.

So that's why it's so comfortable to be sat on the couch with the heat of going Netflix on your TV and dinner on your lap.

Right.

You don't experience a lot of survival patterns during that period of time because your system is like, yes, this is key to survival. So if you, like, everybody has that voice in their head. But I think a lot of people assume that because it's in there that you have to follow what it says. And that's just blatantly wrong.

Right.

If you've been listening to it for a long time, it will be loud and it'll be right at the front of your head because you've given it pride of place. Your soul's voice, your intuitive voice, is, in my experience, quieter, calmer. It's not so defensive or insistent, it's not so freaked out. It's a different tone, it comes from a different part. But if you're used to listening to the ego rather than your soul, then yeah, it will be frustrating. But what I would say is with regard to the fear, fear and excitement are biochemically the same situation. Whether you interpret it, interpret the signals as fear or excitement is down to you anticipating a negative or positive outcome, right? If you feel a little bit butterflies and you're, you know, you're a little bit clammy and your hands are a little bit shaky, but you think something amazing is about to happen, you perceive that what you're feeling is super hyper excited, right? Whereas if you're attaching a negative anticipation to this, then you're going to interpret all those signals as I'm afraid. And then you'll be like, well, this is my intuition, it's telling me I'm afraid. No, basically human beings have like the largest percentage of frontal lobe and that's great, it separates us from the animals, but it also makes us the only species that is able to set off our threat senses with a thought, right? We can go into panic mode and be dosing heinous amounts of cortisol from a poorly worded email, right? Our 2 million year old survival software is not really set up for corporate America, as it were, right? So it's not I want to do all this crazy shit, but I'm afraid it's I want to do all this crazy shit and I'm afraid fear is not a barrier, it's an annoyance. It's frustrating. Sure. It's an indicator from your nervous system that you're getting an error. 404 file not found. Your system is saying, hey listen, we haven't done this before, so I don't have any files that prove we're going to survive it, right? So I can't tell you where the pitfalls, the potholes and the tigers are. So if you choose to keep going down this path, you're gonna have to keep your eyes wide open because I got nothing for you. Now when the voice freaks out and tells us all the shit, it's then up to you to decide whether you will do it anyway. And you will. If it's important to you. If you want to coach more than you want to stay in your soul sucking job, you take the risk. If you don't really want what you say you want, you'll go to excuses before you go to the how.

Yeah, I love that yeah, for me it was just like faith and trust. Like I knew if you tune into the soul, you know, and you know that you're taking this leap, even though you don't know how it's gonna go, but you have faith and trust that you're stepping into the feeling, then it's, it's putting trust in something higher than yourself. Like even though the minds gone crazy, if you stay connected with that deep down place, then you're always gonna have that courage there. And for me, for me just took me time to build courage. So to people who are listening, who are at corporate jobs and, and thinking about taking the leap, just keep building that courage muscle, whatever that requires you to do. For me, building the courage muscle for me came in small little leaps that I would take. Whether it's standing up and speaking in public or doing little things in the morning that my mind didn't want to do, but I did it anyway.

Getting outside the program.

Yeah, that's right. So for you right now, in your day, obviously you're a successful coach. What does the day in the life of a successful coach look like? Do you meditate? Yoga, like obviously eating healthy, maybe it's all the above. Like give us an insight.

Yeah, it's all of the above. Although on the eating healthy, I have no intention of scaling back my coffee intake. That's my one little vice.

I'm not from Australia, mate. It's standard.

You gotta have to, right.

Come from the place where the coffee is really good. Can't just not right. That's my vice for sure. So yeah, I eat pretty clean. Obviously you can't maintain the kind of schedule that I maintain if you're eating shed all the time. Time just bottom line is because you can't be tired, sluggish, have poor focus and poor motivation when you're supposed to be setting an example for your clients.

Right.

So yeah, absolutely. I eat clean, I get up reasonably early. It's funny you should say what's a day in the life like now? Because like I move around the world all the time and so time zone, time zones are constantly messing me up. And I just spent five months in Montreal in the summer just hanging out with friends and just coaching and having a good time. And then of course when I moved back to the west to go snowboarding, it just shunted my whole calendar two hours earlier. So what my day looks like right now is taking most of my CL at stupid o' clock in the morning because they were all mid morning beforehand. So basically it's get out of bed, I do a bit of journaling. I have coffee and I get up early enough that I can move slow in the morning. I find that you get a lot from having been asleep, which sounds really idiotic. But what I mean is when I sit down to my journal, there's a fair amount swirling that has yet to be affected by the day. So, yeah, I like to journal. And when I journal, what I do with it is sometimes I'll let out some feelings and do some processing, which is usually just a lot of arrows making connections in my subconscious. But then what I really like to do is write to my reality. Right, because everything in your world starts up here. Everybody has a different lag time on their manifestation. So stuff could appear in a couple of weeks, might take a couple months. If you're imposing a lot of rules, it might take six months, but you can literally decide how your life's going to be and then connect to it and align with it and it'll happen. So I write my reality in the morning and then I coach for a few hours. And then if I've got any time during the day, if the snow's good, I go snowboarding. If it's not, I usually work on course content and stuff for next year's launches. Try to get a workout in if I can. If I didn't already go snowboarding, smash myself up, obviously coach a little more. I have a few evening clients at the moment. I wouldn't normally be coaching, you know, four to five sessions a day, five to six days a week, but the summer load I have, majority of my clients don't stop after one contract. Most of them are like, oh my God, I can't believe we changed so much in such a short space of time. Now what can I do? It's like, I honestly thought we would spend the next year working on this and we smashed it all out in 12 weeks. So now what can I do? And I'm like, anything you want. I remember one of them was like, can I be an actress? And I was like, course you can. Let's just do one of those. So then they just roll over the contract, which I hadn't really factored in. So my, my light coaching winter has not really panned out. So, yeah, how it goes is a little bit more coaching in the evening. Different time zones are a bit difficult now. Clients in Thailand and Dubai are the worst. If you're working out of North America. Yeah, 11, 12, 14 hour difference doesn't work very well. So, yeah, after dinner coaching and then try to get to bed reasonably early.

For sure. Yeah, Amazing. Like, if that's a lifestyle that appeals to anyone that's watching or listening, then time to get a coach.

So what could be worse, right?

Yeah, mate, tell you what. Yeah. So, Sarah, just before we wrap things up, I like just ending the podcast with number one actionable takeaway for someone who's listening or watching for you. What has been probably, you know, it can be more than one. But what was, like, the biggest actionable things that you started applying in your day that you started noticing? The biggest result, like, aside from getting a coach?

The biggest thing for me is starting to get very aware and very comfortable with the fact that your reality is a reflection of you. Your identity and your beliefs are determining literally how the atoms come together and construct your world. Because when you get comfortable with the fact that you are actually in control, you can do so much more.

Right?

A lot of people, like, everybody's in the driver's seat, but many of us have our hands off the wheel. And so most of what we're creating is unconscious. And that's why we're very frustrated with the concept of manifestation, for example, because we're like, well, I would never choose this, but actually, if you're still operating from old patterns, then your patterns are choosing what is safe and familiar, not what you want. We're not built for fulfillment or happiness. So if you want to get back in the driver's seat and change your world, you've got to put your hands on the wheel and take responsibility. So starting to get comfortable with the fact that how things are is not how they have to be. Everything in your world is absolutely changeable. You do have the power. As soon as you're ready to take it back. And absolute key point, you must invest in yourself. Because if you're not, your biggest question will be, why do I not think I'm worth that level of support and guidance? Why do I think my dreams are not big enough, that they warrant some level of commitment and investment? Why do I think that what I'm here for is not very important and therefore I shouldn't do my utmost to bring it forth?

Powerful stuff, mate. Can't thank you enough for taking the time out and jumping on the call. Share so much valuable insights here. And, you know, I'm excited to share this, people, because you're an amazing person doing amazing things. So thank you so much for being on the podcast.

It has been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Thanks, mate.

There we have it. Another episode. Stay Shifters Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. It really, really means a lot to have someone like yourself listening to this kind of content because that's an indication that you're evolving, you're shifting into a new place of being. And, you know, I'm so grateful that you're allowing my content to be a part of that evolution. So I just want to express my gratitude, gratitude to you for listening. And I've got a bunch more amazing episodes and interviews and insightful information to come.

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You feel up for it.

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